One of the considerations that made me think of "openly affiliating with MRA" as being quite an important issue in these times (apart from the straightforward thought, "wtf, my reluctance is just the last trace of SJW bamboozlement in my system, why am I even heeding its promptings? I long ago ceased to care about being called names!"), was the reflection that if male rape is soooo sooooo heinous, why isn't female rape also considered heinous? Let's set aside rape with violence (which is of course likely to be largely a male thing) and consider the type of rape that's like the "grooming" of young offenders by female prison guards. Isn't that just as heinous as the male-to-female version?Clarence wrote:Kirbmarc wrote:
So he's right. And if rape wasn't such an abhorrent crime (not as bad as murder, but STILL) and perhaps if I didn't have a family member who was raped I might agree with him about the Jury Nullfication thing. But it really is the only big thing that I"m aware of that I disagree with his stance on (as do OTHERS at A Voice for Men, they are not a freaking hive mind), so calling him a male radfem is a bit much.
But it's considerations like this that lead to the Honey Badger speculations about gynocentrism - you don't have to go all the way with Alison Tieman's psychosocial history of the world, to notice that there's a peculiar imbalance in the way we view women vs. men in society, and that it "covers up" female agency, and female malicious intent, with a sort of waft of gauze such that the thought that women can be just as nasty as men, and just as emotionally cold, sort of slides off the mind.
Which is just the same old: "sugar and spice and all things nice."
And the thing is, while it's possible to say that the HB matriarchy theory is an ideology, and while I would agree that there's always a danger it could go that way, actually its basis is just evolutionary biology (things like sexual dimorphism, neoteny, etc., leading to high value female and expendable male, etc., etc.), which is straightforward falsifiable science. The psychosocial side (e.g. how male and female infants, respectively are likely to view and react to big momma, "Das Ewigweibliche", how She is the first and most important child trainer of both boys and girls) is naturally more dubious, but as I said in a previous post, it's not like those sorts of ideas have no validity whatsoever. Patriarchy theory has always had a grain of truth to it, and if the HB theory goes deeper than patriarchy theory (which it does, or at least purports to do) that shouldn't necessarily be a strike against it. All these kinds of informed speculation are worth taking into consideration, it's just that it's not wise to formulate any political policy as a direct logical consequence of taking them to be true.
Really it's the "political use made of ideas that are essentially merely speculative" that's problematic, not "speculative ideas simply being a part of a political movement". The bad thing is when the movement loses sight of specificity and falsifiability, and the speculative theory starts to drift off, untethered to reality testing.
Anyway, the upshot of it is that one ought to openly affiliate loosely with MRA, for the very same reason that feminists home in on their biggest enemy as being MRA - because it exposes the hypocrisy of feminists thrusting the dictionary definition in peoples' faces. MRA is an arrow straight to the heart of feminist quasi-religious ideology because it exposes that "equality before the law" is a "Motte" term for feminism, and that they mean by "equality" something entirely different from "equality" as that's ordinarily understood by most people (which is something like "equal treatment by any treating agent or agency").
