The Men's Movement will not mature into a fully-fledged
political movement until it stops being shackled by taking Feminist
propaganda at face value. Feminist propaganda has it that women were
once oppressed, and that Feminism liberated them. We have all been taught
this -- but it is high time we un-learned this version of history.
Gerald Nicholas' Hunger-Striker's Manifesto
(nicholas.html & nicholae.html)
is an outstanding piece of writing (except for the grammar of the French
version). However, its view of history has been uplifted wholesale from
Feminist propaganda. I will comment on this text, since it is typical
of what people in the West have been taught to think.
Nicholas wrote:
"Some time
ago, women of our mothers' generation were unjustly treated by our society,
which was in the grip of a ludicrous and unreasonable form of machismo
-- women weren't people -- and they fought tooth and nail and with the
greatest courage to assert their rights and their fully-human status.
Their struggle at that time was just and honourable, like our men's
and fathers' struggle today."
The main claim in this passage is that women were unjustly treated
(the exact time and country is not very important for our purposes here).
Whether this was tied in with a form of machismo is a side-issue, as
is the issue of whether women were (fully) human -- we could draw a
comparison with unborn children which Feminism has explicitly made into
non-people, and they have no way of asserting
their rights !
The conventional wisdom in Western societies is that women fought for
-- and largely won -- equality with men. In fact, however, the word
"equality" soon gave way to "gender equity" (which
could mean almost anything), and even that gave way at times to the
term "girl power". None of these terms were defined clearly
in any international manifesto that was referred to or applied consistently
across all issues. Moreover, Men's/Fathers' Rights activism and manifestos
have shown that there is no consensus that Feminists were even trying
to achieve equality or equity -- girl power, maybe !
So all that has happened is that one form of
apparent inequality has changed into another form of apparent inequality.
In fact, though, it has not been proved that women actually were treated
unjustly at any point in history in any society. By claiming this you
would have to mean that women were treated more unjustly than men, because
it would be an empty claim if women were treated unjustly, but men were
treated even more unjustly !
And that was probably the true state of affairs
! Even though men ran the Western World (which
I am not denying), they ran it for the benefit of families, not for
the benefit of other men. So there were a lot of laws that discriminated
against men, such as conscription, sexual assault laws that did not
allow for the possibility of female offenders, laws that outlawed male
homosexuality but not lesbianism, assault laws with heavier penalties
for men than for women, and so on. In fact, in some countries and at
some times women were not even legal persons in the sense of being responsible
for their own actions ! That is surely a privileged status, not a subordinate
status !
Feminism concentrated on certain issues, such
as the right to vote, equal pay, and so on, but it spread a distorted
picture of the society it was fighting to change, and it ignored most
issues where men were discriminated against.
Pre-Feminist, patriarchal society was based on
a different model. It was not based on adult individuals as the basic
unit -- it was based on the family. Each family had a head, and that
head was male. The male had the power, but he also had the responsibility.
When comparing modern Western societies with
the patriarchal model, we need to see to what extent our societies are
now actually achieving the equality that most people think Feminism
has brought about. If they are falling short, we then need to ask if
they are capable of achieving that equality -- and if they are even
trying to achieve it ? If the answer to one or both of these questions
is no, then maybe we need to change the model.
