MRA's (Mens Rights Activists) are extremely critical of feminism.

[mntleo2]

189. Maybe some of these commenters haven't taken a women's study course

...so perhaps they should listen to some of the MRA criticisms. I am a woman and one of the first in my community to have become a feminist and then rejected it. I now call myself a "humanist" because I as a woman have seen the damage that feminism has done to men and boys.

If all the things these feminists say they support are true that would be a miracle.

In the early 1990s I worked with a young man who became famous for a case he brought against the University of Washington. I was in full support of him, because he fought the requirements he take Women's Studies as part of getting his degree. All was fine with him until the professor presented a test where the "right" answer was "yes" to, "All men are rapists..." Because the professor insisted this student's answer was "wrong", he refused to take any more of the course and thus was prevented from getting his degree in the discipline he wanted to complete.

It is much like communism, where the ideals are great but the truth on the ground sucks for men and feminism. I watched a female co-worker grab a man's crotch and tried to pinch his penis in front of a group of laughing other workers ~ including a female supervisor. It was beyond humiliating for that man. When I told him I would support his filing a complaint about it he knew and I knew nothing would be done about it. Because if he had been a woman, well they would have been on it like a duck on a junebug. But as a man, well he would be a "crybaby" and "could not take a joke" and would have been pariahed by the women he worked with from then on.

Besides raising three sons, I have worked in both traditional and non-traditional work and I can tell you the way men and women communicate is quite different. They will often have "fly bys" because of these differences. I have seen it where two men are nose to nose and ready to punch it out in a work situation and then at the end of the day they throw their arms around each other and say, "Let's go have a beer ..." If women ever get into a situation like that you can be assured it is WAR from then on between the two of them, even after they have a "boo-hoo" session to work it out. No there will not be raised voices or physical contact, BUT you can count on there being a lot of underground undermining of each other from then on and it can take YEARS or the leaving of one of them before it is over. Now take a man who deals with frustrations with his male coworkers this way where it is understood that is the way they sometimes work things out and then put that man's behavior with a woman. Or take a woman who cannot be angry that way and uses her anger in a more passive way, and put her with a man who thinks she is being straight with him when she is not. The man will call the woman "dishonest" and the woman will view the man as "too aggressive". Neither can win.

They wonder why boys are falling behind in school. I know why. Whenever a classroom has a group of gregarious kids, you can bet your sweet bippy that the boys will get the blame, never the girls who may be doing the same thing. Both in city programs and within the schools there are lots of programs for girls and few for boys especially when they reach puberty and begin to fall behind. Middle and high schools have sports for boys, but not all boys are into sports, for them there are not things like mentoring, teaching social interactions, or having "girl bonding" meetings, where are those things for boys? The few that are out there for boys like Big Brother have YEARS of waiting lists for boys who are forced to wait while they continue to grow up without any male influences in their lives. Boys are just supposed to just "know" what boundaries mean, etc.

And tell a man who has been falsely accused of molesting his child because the woman now hates him and wants to use that child to hurt him as to what the courts will do. HE becomes instantly guilty with few questions as to who did what to whom. A woman can beat the crap out of a man and never have to face a thing. Where is the programs for men when they endure these abuses? Even elderly men are left to the curb with abusive women who not only physically hurt them deny their medications they can then legally take every cent they have. If feminists want true equality they have a funny way of showing it when it comes to the law.

Notice that the latest act to be passed was the "Violence Against Women Act it says nothing about men and boys who endure the same kinds of torture. There are few studies on the impact of child sex abuse that have been done with boys against the millions of papers for girls. We know a vast majority of men in prison were child sex abuse victims, but what we do not know as general knowledge is another finding that is rather disturbing: Now it is coming out that of the men in prison who have been sexually abused as children, 43.3% of these men were violated by women, almost half of them. Nobody does a thing, especially for adolescent boys. These "feminists" won't even study this phenomena while then blaming men for all the violence that occurs. They have created all kinds of "girl power" stuff but *never* anything for boys. If they are so concerned about the patriarchy, this is a good thing because it does damage many but, why are they not doing anything much to change the matriarchy that can and does damage boys?

While I WISH that these feminist ideals were true, to be honest I have seen little of it in practice for men.

Cat in Seattle