Speaking of Cults

This week, I tackle the Red Pill documentary by Cassie Jaye, a feminist documentarian who claimed she was “deconverted” from feminism after interview Paul Elam and other men’s rights advocates. I examine the claims and ideas of this group and look at what they might be getting right and what they are definitely getting wrong.

Catherine Mayer Guardian article 

Buzzfeed article

Forbes most dangerous jobs

A viewer wrote me not too long ago and asked me to look into and comment on a documentary called The Red Pill. Made by a woman named Cassie Jaye in 2016 using crowdfunded resources, the film looks at what is called the Men’s Rights Movement and the people, men and women, who identify as Men’s Rights Activists.

According to The Urban Dictionary, the top definition of this term states “Civil society associations concerned with combating accepted discrimination against men in contemporary society, especially in the areas of military service, family law, popular culture and other areas when double standards are applied. Often targets of hate speech by radical feminists.”

The most “upvoted” definition on The Urban Dictionary also says this:

“Someone who believes that the honorable cause of providing rights for women has exceeded justice in several areas, with some laws now favoring women instead of being neutral.

“They are often accused by women of being misogynistic.

“MRAs do not approve of how women get lighter sentences in court than men.

“Ultra-Feminists hate any MRA, and will do anything to destroy his credibility.”

Alright, so obviously a contentious and passionate subject and one that has no shortage of black-and-white thinking. It may be a mistake for me to stick my foot into this particular subject, but hey I was in a cult for 27 years so maybe my judgement is worthy of being questioned.

Actually, this topic is a very serious one and worth a critical discussion or two. In researching this, I read and watched a lot of people who are a lot smarter and better educated than I am make good and bad arguments for and against the Men’s Right Movement. Let’s go ahead and start this then with a statement of where I feel I stand on the overall idea of feminism.

I’ve looked into the various “waves” of femnism as they have been called historically, and fully agree that women have historically had it worse than men in many ways. Not allowing women an equal right to vote was pretty ludicrous as are most of the stereotypical roles that women have been forced to play out. As far as I’m concerned, there should be no law or rule or guideline that stops a woman from doing anything she wants to do so long as it is not destructive to herself or others and doesn’t impinge on or violate the human rights of anyone else. That includes not just the laws on the books, but I’m also referring to cultural norms and values and what we consider to be rules of “morality.” I see very few places where someone’s gender needs to play a signficant role in determining their rights or freedoms. There are certain roles women play that men simply can’t, such as giving birth and child rearing. No matter how hard we might try, men are not going to give birth or breast feed. They also won’t have to experience some of the physical suffering women’s biology puts them through, such as having periods or pregnancy or having their backs go out of whack if their breasts are too large.

What’s more, I’m a man, so no matter how hard I try, I will never be able to talk about what it’s like to live life as a woman. There are certain aspects of it that I just will never understand because I haven’t and can’t experience it. That being said, I will point out the opposite is just as true. Some women sometimes get so wrapped up in their own specific problems and issues, that I have gotten the distinct idea that they think men’s issues are gender-neutral and there are no real problems for men when compared to what women have to experience. I’d say that would be just as stupid a statement as me saying “What are women always crying about? They have it easy.” There are distinct physiological, mental and emotional differences between men and women and no amount of talking, thinking or writing is ever going to change that or make those differences go away. We have to learn to live with each other in order to allow the species of homo sapiens to continue.

And so we come to the Red Pill documentary and the MRAs. I’ll use Paul Elam, who is basically one of the founders of the Mens Rights Activists movement, as the focus of what MRAs represent, although I’m well aware that there’s a lot more to this than just what Paul Elam has written or said. As far as I can tell, Elam represents most of the more rational positions the MRAs take and I was interested in some of what he had to say. However, given my background, I can see that Elam treats feminism as a kind of cult and in some ways he is right but only in some very limited and specific ways. As with any extremist, and make no mistake, Elam is an extremist, he takes the bits of truth he preaches and he spins it out to exaggerated and ridiculous proportions.

Before getting into all this, there are a few points of critical thinking I want to talk about.

Freedom of speech means freedom for everyone to speak. No one has a right to a venue, as that is a private matter of those offering the platform or venue. But if you are trying to silence your opposition, it would be a very good idea to make absolutely sure you are justified in doing so. Controversial topics create polarization and the emotions generated by that often become extreme, which then skews one’s views on the topic. If you are not willing for an opposing view to even be heard, my opinion is that you have a very weak, fragile argument that could probably easily be taken apart or challenged and you are afraid that’s what the outcome will be of a debate or forum. We should be better at the exchange of ideas in public forums, rather than trying to shut them down.

What is the difference between a woman’s group, a men’s group, the KKK or the government shutting down a public platform of idea engagement? The only difference is the viewpoint of those involved. The action of censorship is the same no matter who is doing it.

Shouting down opposition, making noise to interfere with an event, pulling fire alarms, rioting and otherwise sabotaging these events are the actions of a 6 year old, akin to putting your hands over your ears and saying “nah nah nah.” It’s childish and frankly uncivilized.

Another logical fallacy that occurs frequently in discussion of controversial groups or issues is to make the most extreme examples or lunatic fringe of a movement represent the entire movement. Everyone has done this, including me. In any large group of individuals united around a common purpose or cause, you are going to get many differing views, opinions and interpretations of what that common purpose actually means. When you then look at those who oppose that group, you find not only the same spectrum of differing understanding and ideas, but also a vested interest in twisting or distorting anything sensible in that group because the whole effort of the opposing group is to demean, discredit or destroy that group. The opportunities for irrational thought increase exponentially as a result, because those distortions or outright lies end up becoming a strawman for the opposing group. Its members end up misrepresenting the original group to be this strawman and ignore anything sensible or reasonable about the original group. Again, we all do this or contribute to it but it seems few of us take the time to recognize when we are doing so because of our own biases and because often we’ve only been given the strawman rather than the real arguments.

Another aspect of this is when all men (or women) are individaully made responsible for all the wrongdoings, errors and crimes of their peers and forefathers. I as a male do not represent all males. Any individual woman listening or watching this podcast does not typify all women. We have to group men and women together into classes for the purpose of statistics and overall tendencies when it comes to sociological or psychological or physical studies, but the truth is that every one of us are individuals who have our own unique experiences, upbringing, education and way of looking at the world. When this is ignored, not only are potential allies cast aside because they have a penis, but enemies are actually created against feminism because individuals are wrongly called out, ostracized or persecuted for nothing they themselves ever did. In researching this podcast, I found plenty of examples of men who support the ideas of equal rights, who want to resist being misogynistic or sexist and who want to do their part to combat abuse and violence against women. Yet it’s the women who push them away because “all men are the enemy” and similar thinking.

Then there is the zero-sum fallacy which says that if you get something, others must be denied that thing. It’s been used in economics or production, but also applies when people of either gender assert “I don’t have this right. You have to lose this right in order for me to have it.” It’s as though there’s a bag of rights or a bag of discriminations and there aren’t enough to go around, so if you as a woman are being discriminated against because of X, then there’s no way a man could ever be discriminated against for the exact same thing. Yet it’s fairly easy to see if you aren’t so emotionally invested in being a victim that there are plenty of rights to go around, and plenty of reasons to also discriminate against one another. The more rational voices in the feminist movement see this fallacy amongst their own members and amongst males and have tried to make the case that when equal rights exist for both genders, then everyone benefits. As Catherine Mayer wrote in the Guardian in an April 2017 article, “[he] represents and magnifies a strain of confused thought that misunderstands equality as a zero-sum game: if women get a slice of the cake, there will be less for men. All the evidence shows the opposite is true: more gender equality means more cake.”

Alright, all that being said, let’s talk about the Red Pill documentary. Why is it called the Red Pill? From the movie, The Matrix, of course.

“You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe,” Morpheus tells Neo. “You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

“The blue pill is the paradigm that most people live by,” Elam tells the documentary-maker, “that men have all the power, that they’ve always had all the power, that domestic violence is a problem that’s only committed by men against women that sexual assaults are only committed by men against women [and] that women don’t make the same money for the same work as men.

“[Feminists say] we need to stop violence against women, instead of just stopping violence. That is feminist training.”

From a Buzzfeed article of Feb 5, 2015 by Adam Serwere and Katie Baker:

“Elam’s takes on gender are often attractive to men dealing with the painful aftermath of divorces, custody battles, and rejection. He preaches the gospel that men’s failures and disappointments are not due to personal shortcomings or lapsed responsibility, but rather institutionalized feminism and a family court system rigged against dutiful fathers, as well as a world gripped by “misandry,” or the hatred of men.”

Valid points of the MRA which should be open for discussion:

– male suicide rates. The claim made by the MRAs is one of the indications that men experience more stress, anxiety and grief than women is gender differences in suicide. There’s even a Wikipedia page on this topic which shows statistically that there is a paradox that women more often have suicidal thoughts but men die by suicide more frequently. In the western world, males die by suicide 3-4X more often than females, yet women try 2-4X more frequently. It’s a little hard to nail down how often people are having suicidal thoughts, though, but the hard numbers of male vs female suicides are clear and easy to find from the World Health Organization and numerous other university and hospital studies. The bottom line is that men die by suicide 3.5x more often than women but women attempt suicide 2x more often than men.

What I could not find in the time I had to research this or in the information available to me (since I can’t get to most academic papers on this stuff since I’m not an academic) is what factor age played in male suicide. I’m referring here to the idea that older men may be killing themselves because their life-long spouse dies or they have reached a point where their quality of life has been impacted to the point they no longer want to carry on. Certainly there’s a percentage of such suicides but what it is I can’t say. I’ll quote here from factors cited on the wikipedia page. These come from studies done by the Australia Institute for Suicide Research, the Scandanavian Journal of Psychology, the Journal of Men’s Health and the European Archives of Psychiatry and Neuroscience.

“A common explanation relies on the social constructions of hegemonic masculinity and femininity. According to literature on gender and suicide, male suicide rates are explained in terms of traditional gender roles. Male gender roles tend to emphasize greater levels of strength, independence, risk-taking behavior, economic status, individualism. Reinforcement of this gender role often prevents males from seeking help for suicidal feelings and depression.

“Numerous other factors have been put forward as the cause of the gender paradox. Part of the gap may be explained by heightened levels of stress that result from traditional gender roles. For example, the death of a spouse and divorce are risk factors for suicide in both genders, but the effect is somewhat mitigated for females. In the Western world, females are more likely to maintain social and familial connections that they can turn to for support after losing their spouse. Another factor closely tied to gender roles is employment status. Males’ vulnerability may be heightened during times of unemployment because of societal expectations that males should provide for themselves and their families.”

– workplace fatalities/high-risk jobs

Another point MRAs make is that men suffer higher workplace fatalities and work in higher-risk professions than women and this is simply ignored because to feminists, men dying at their jobs doesn’t mean anything. It’s not hard to see why there would be some anger over this. While many feminists talk about the pay gap, which is based on very controversial studies and statistics, no one really discusses this workplace death gap. Yet I did not see anyone in my research refuting the pretty common sense validity of the fact that men work in higher-risk professions than women and therefore die more often on the job. Because of the higher physical risk and exertion such jobs require, they tend to be dominated by men. Bureau of Labor statistics show that from 2011 – 2015, men accounted for 92.5% of all workplace deaths.

According to a Forbes article which cited on-the-job fatalities from 2010, the most dangerous professions in America, worst first are:

(1) Fishers and Related Fishing Workers because of extreme weather, heavy equipment and drowning
(2) Logging Workers because of falling trees, cutting equipment and difficult terrain
(3) Aircraft Pilots and Flight Engineers because of testing equipment, emergency response and crashes
(4) Refuse and Recyclable Material Collectors because of heavy equipment, traffic and hazardous materials
(5) Roofers because of heights and summer heat
(6) Structural Iron and Steel Workers because of heights, heavy materials and welding
(7) Farmers, Ranchers and other agricultural managers because of heavy machinery
(8) Drivers/Sales Workers and Truck Drivers because of traffic and fatigue
(9) Electrical Power-Line Installers and Repairers because of heights and electricity
(10) Taxi Drivers and Chauffeurs because of violence, fatigue and roadway dangers

Now in my lifetime, I’ve personally met women who work in every one of these professions. Hell, we did a lot of this kind of work on the RPF and no one ever stopped a project or changed personnel because of gender differences. Women are fully capable of getting trained for and doing any of these jobs.

It’s hard to get accurate numbers on how many women are in each of these professions, at least when I looked. The breakdowns are different. For example, when I was trying to find women doing fishery and related work, I found it combined with forestry occuptions. But with the second most dangerous profession, logging, for example, out of 68,000 workers, 99.1% of them are men. For aircraft pilots and flight engineers, out of 141,000 of them, 94.8% are men. And for garbage workers, out of 101,000 of them, 91.4% are men.

A lot of assumptions could be made about this, but let me just say this. Each of these high-risk and high-paying professions require skill and training and physical stamina. When I heard back in my days in Santa Barbara how much garbage collectors make, I immediately called up to apply. I found out there was a waiting list over a year long! It’s not a matter of sexual discrimination so much as it is numerous other factors that keep women out of these professions at the same rate as men: physical hardship and risk being the main one, and the amount of time an effort required to do the job being another. I don’t mean women can’t do the work or that they can’t invest the time, but how many of them want to? Imagine the consequences on our air travel, food and garbage situations if we tried to enforce a 50/50 quota system in these professions. Do any of you honestly believe there are just as many women lining up to be roofers, iron workers or ranchers as there are men? When you drill down into the details of this, it becomes clear that the more dangerous and physically challenging jobs are dominated by men for a reason. Women don’t want to do them in the same numbers.

Now the pay gap issue is controversial and I know I’m going to upset some people just bringing it up, but hear me out. You can find studies and statistics to back up almost any position on the spectrum from there being no wage gap to there being a gigantic one. Various figures have been thrown out there over the years, depending on who you ask and when. In looking into this, I found claims that the same job being done by people of the same skill set and work experience have discrepancies from 5.4 – 41% difference. Of course, if it were true that women were specifically being discriminated against only because they have a vagina, then why would any business paying attention to its bottom line ever hire a man? If any woman of equal skill, education and ability could be paid substantially less then any man, it would not make sense for any business to ever hire a man. When this question is asked seriously, you get the real factors behind pay gaps between the genders. I’ll quote one self-proclaimed “intersectional feminist” who laid it out pretty clearly, at least in terms of the corporate world:

“…the gender pay gay doesn’t, for the most part, come from corporations making different salary offers to men or to women (although that does happen).

– It comes from men being more likely to apply for the job, even if they don’t have all of the qualifications.
– It comes from women being much more likely to accept the first offer instead of negotiating.
– It comes from the women who do choose to negotiate often caring more about benefits than pay.
– It comes from women not being promoted or offered raises at the same levels as men.
– It comes from women working fewer hours over the course of their careers than men, because they are expected to do so when taking care of their families and raising children.
– It comes from fields that are dominated by women being, on average paid, much less than fields dominated by men.

“The firm I work for has, for the most part, great policies and a good work environment for women. Almost half our office is women, which is very unusual for the field we’re in. But our bonus and promotion systems are still based on how “billable” employees are — i.e., how many hours they put in per week that can be billed to clients, with no weekly cap on hours — which means that employees who choose to make time for their families by only working 40 hours are a week are essentially “choosing” to make less money and advance more slowly than those who are able and willing to work 50-60 hours a week. Since women face much more pressure — both from our society/culture and from their families — to reserve time and energy for “emotional labor” for their families, this means that, over the long run, men will tend to make more money at my firm than women.”

This of course is just one anecdotal example and other anecdotes can be found to support any view you care to have. I believe that the above, though, is a fairly average and good example of the broader corporate picture. The jobs are out there, women can get them if they are willing to do the same volume of work and make the same sacrifices as men do. And for any of you who are saying to yourselves right now “But our culture puts unfair demands on women to raise children and take care of the home and that sort of thing,” let’s just reverse that viewpoint for a second. Look at it from a man’s point of view. Do you automatically assign to all men a callous disregard for their wives and children? Do you think men enjoy working 60-70 hours a week climbing the corporate ladder so they can provide for their families? If so, I think you might have some gender bias of your own interferring with your common sense. Men don’t enjoy making the sacrifices they have to make to survive and succeed in the corporate world any more than women do. And it’s not just the MRAs who think that those sacrifices are more expected of men than women and that for many, men are doing so out of a sense of duty and loyalty to their families. Just think about that a bit before coming to any unwarranted conclusisons that men have it easier than women in the corporate world.

– male disposability

The MRAs make a broad and interesting point about the disposability of males as a whole. The idea is that in any dangerous situation, whether it be combat or a natural disaster or accident, it is always the “women and children” who go first. While some more radical feminists may decry this tradition, for the most part it’s built into the very foundations of our western society. You can imagine what would happen to any man who tried to elbow his way to the front of the line ahead of women and/or their children in a sinking boat or getting out of a burning building. This tendency in our society has actually been tested for by MIT with their “Moral Machine” survey which presents different scenarios of a driverless car killing one group or another and the person taking the test has to decide. According to the results, more people would choose to have the car run over a man rather than a woman and run over older people versus children.

This speaks to an implicit bias, not a conscious one, that adult males are more disposable and less valued than females. We see this all the time in media stories, choosing which kidnapping or missing persons reports to highlight and which victims should gain our sympathy. I think most people would admit that given a choice and all things being equal, a missing female would garner more sympathy and support than a missing male. Most people I know would assume the guy is out gallavanting about or laid up somewhere or just took off for no special reason, while they wouldn’t make such assumptions about the missing female.

When it comes to miltary conscription, or the draft, MRAs point out that men are the ones who have to sign up for selective service and will be the ones who go to prison, not be eligible for student loans or federal job training and get fined out of existence if they don’t. Under current law, no woman would be forced to sign up or go into the miltary for any reason.

Is this disposability of the males in society a gender bias? I think, as with all things, it depends on who you are talking to. But it certainly can be looked at that way, in the same way some feminists feel that there are systemic female biases which disadvantage their survival. It’s more than just a matter of one person’s perspective, though, when you have agreed upon societal norms that way men die first and in western culture, it’s inarguable that such norms exist.

– domestic abuse/rape

Domestic violence happens every day and it’s always ugly. Whether men are beating up on women, women are beating up on men or either of them are beating up on their kids, there is no question we human beings have tempers and they flare up and sometimes people not only get hurt, but they die. The controversy isn’t whether this is a real problem or whether spouses sometimes physically take out their frustrations on each other. It’s how much of a problem this is for women versus men.

The position of the MRAs is that yes, women are beaten and abused and sometimes killed by their partners and this is unacceptable behavior, but that what is wholly ignored in every discussion, legislation and social justice program to address this issue is the men who are assaulted.

Statistics provided by the National Domestic Violence Hotline show that 1 in 4 women and 1 in 7 men aged 18 and older in the US have been the victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner. That doesn’t mean getting slapped or pushed around, that means severe physical violence. 1 in 3 women and 1 in 10 men have experienced rape, physical violence and/or stalking by a partner to the point that it impacted their ability to function in life. Nearly half of all women and men in the US have experienced psychological aggression by an intimate partner in their lifetime, with the percentages of this being nearly equal between men and women.

So it’s not a matter of men not being abused, physically and psychologically, by their intimate partners. While percentages are greater for women, they are not so significantly different as to justify ignoring the experience of men or just chalking it up to the fact that they should shut up and take it, yet if you look at this subject from the point of view of media attention and legislation, you find that women receive the bulk of sympathy, support and treatment. In the US, there are 2,000 domestic violence shelters, but only one of them offers support and treatment for men. I don’t think I really have to belabor this point. If you are a battered male, you will look in vain for sympathy, understanding or government-sponsored treatment in the US. That is just a fact and yet whenever this topic is brought up, radical feminists start shouting about how this is just a backlash against the domestic violence faced by women. It’s the zero-sum fallacy all over again, where there’s this idea that if you support battered men and care for their concerns, you are somehow lessening the issue against women. This is irrational thinking at an extreme and denies not only battered and abused men the treatment and support they need, but also opens the door to more violence against children in such a situation. I don’t think anyone could honestly assert that women who beat on their husbands will universally not touch their own children too.

– social tolerance of misandry, now being built into the language itself. I’ve discussed the effect of language on our thinking many times. It’s a very important topic. If you control the language of a culture, you control how it thinks and acts. Fortunately, no one entity has such powerful control, but the feminist movement has introduced words specific to men, some of them bordering on misandry. such as “mansplaining” “manspreading” etc

As Liz Cookman wrote for The Guardian in Feb 2015:

“Men. If they’re not ‘mansplaining’ things to women they’re ‘manslamming’ us in the street, ‘manspreading’ on the tube or ‘manterrupting’ us during work meetings. Even as a hairy, sensible-shoe-wearing man-hater – otherwise known as a feminist – the rise and rise of the man-shaming portmanteau has left me feeling a little uncomfortable.

“First there was mansplaining, which has just been declared 2014’s Aussie word of the year by Macquarie Dictionary of Australian English. It refers to the very real tendency of some men to explain things to women, whether they need them explaining or not, because of an ingrained assumption that they’re too ignorant – their pretty little heads too full of boys and makeup, no doubt – to understand.

“The term is thought to have been first coined by feminist commentators in 2008 following the publication of Rebecca Solnit’s scathing essay, Men Explain Things to Me. The piece recounted the painful tale of the time an over-confident and clueless man at a party explained her own book to her – an experience that many women can sympathise with to some degree.

“One of the problems with simplistic terms like this, however, is that their ease of use and humour risk diluting any message. They become an easy-to-mouth solution for a more complicated problem, and this one quickly took on more pejorative meanings. It became a go-to phrase for mumbled or garbled explanations and the trump card in arguments, but this sort of overuse just desensitises us to the real issue which is that, yes, some men really do talk down to women.”

There’s no stopping people from coining new words and no stopping societies from making them go viral, so to speak. But I think we should recognize that language shapes attitudes and attitudes shape action. There’s been no shortage of misogynistic language too. This river flows in both directions and I don’t think two wrongs make a right.

There are other issues they bring up which I won’t go into as much detail about but which I believe are just as valid points of discussion.

– child custody/unfair family court biases

– criminal sentencing

– educational inequality

– men’s lack of reproductive rights

There are valid points and hype and nonsense in the MRAs. Our problem is these lunatics get involved and no one can talk rationally about any of it. And that includes the MRA too. Elam’s daughter said: “He does a lot of stuff just to get a rise out of the public. He said there’s no such thing as bad press. He knew in order to get something out in the spotlight, especially something as niche as men’s rights, you have to overblow it.”

Comment from Byenia on YouTube in response to a video posted in 2009 gives an even-handed look at the problem of using exaggerated hyperbole to make a point:

“…I do think you over-inflate men’s innocence, similar to how feminists like to over-inflate women’s innocence. While people like to think exaggerations are useful to even the score, it really just makes it look like both ends of the scale tip too far off-base. Would be nice if we could assess the situation without so many distortions and biases, but I suppose that’s impossible since we each live behind our own eyes. Subjective, emotional, irrational beings striving to be reasonable (or at least create the semblance of such).

“Lots and lots of people are unhappy, both men and women, and material gain doesn’t alleviate that despite some hoping it will. So it seems obvious that we’re living lives out of balance and that something seriously needs to give.

“Feminism has gone too far and is creating more problems than it remedies these days, that’s a given. But it really disturbs me when I read some of what you’ve put out there, like you’re just trying to scare the shit out of women. Acquit all men in rape cases involving women, never mind all the other crimes men are falsely accused of and convicted for, like drug possession and homicides. When you zone in on what will scare and psychically hurt women most, you not only offend feminists and draw attention to your movement and organization, you detract from its value in many of our eyes.”

It’s main spokesman and founder of the A Voice for Men website, Paul Elam, has a rocky and dark past which does not paint him in a flattering light, according to a 2015 Buzzfeed investigation where they spoke directly with his ex-wife and estranged daughter. Not interested in ad hominem. A man of low character, a complete criminal, can still make a valid point or tell the truth about something. However, there certainly is cause to be concerned if someone is outed as having a motivation to lie and hypocrisy does say something about a person’s character and honesty.

Elam quotes:

“Should I be called to sit on a jury for a rape trial, I vow publicly to vote not guilty, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the charges are true,” he once wrote in a blog post explaining the way the criminal justice system is stacked against male defendants. Elam has since defended the post against claims of “rape apologia”, saying he was being deliberately provocative.

In one post, Elam wrote that “all the PC demands to get huffy and point out how nothing justifies or excuses rape won’t change the fact that there are a lot of women who get pummeled and pumped because they are stupid (and often arrogant) enough to walk [through] life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH – PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads.”

The hypocrisy comes in the way he has acted with his own estranged daughter and how, if he is representing and leading a movement about men fighting for their custodial rights and wanting to be part of their own children’s lives, that you would imagine he himself would jump at the chance to have a relationship with his daughter and grandkids. He had that when she reached out to him on her own and then blew it within a few years and is now completely out of touch with them.

Make it clear the incendiary language and trash talk from MRAs is not something to be condoned or agreed with, in the same way that man hating language isn’t good for the arguments made for women.

The bottom line with MRAs is this: individuals have been harmed by various systems in our society which don’t care about them as individuals and operate arbitrarily on rules or guidelines which create injustice. Whether in divorce court or a custody battle, a false legal allegation that destroys a man’s reputation and bank account, or literally being physically beaten and then being arrested for no other reason than you are a man and your assaulter was a women; these instances of injustice create a deep and lasting anger and feeling of victimization. What is someone to do in such a situation? Lie down and take it? Maybe they are supposed to “man up” and just silently deal with those injustices because they are part of a patriarchy which systemically victimizes women, so they have no rights of their own? In certain circles, that is exactly what these men are told and they justifiably react very negatively to that. So they find other men who have experienced similar injustices and they then talk amongst themselves and try to find a causative agent, a reason why their life took a major turn for the worse. These men weren’t victimizing their partners and some of them even considered themselves feminists before their unfortunate circumstances proved to them that men could be victimized just as much as women. Like my experience in Scientology, when you find out the darker and more abusive side of any group, you have a natural desire to fight back against it, to let other people know the dangers that exist in these systems so that they won’t be victims too. Is that such a bad thing to do? No, of course it’s not.

Victims of any gender, color, race or creed don’t deserve what they get. That’s the reason we use the word victim. For men, it’s harder to own up to having been a victim. All the cultural norms in modern society say that the ideal man is a hardened warrior, tough and adversarial, able to take a beating and fight right back and never give up, never surrender. Real life is quite a bit different from that stereotype, in the same way that the old school stereotype of the ideal wife, loving and doting and who always had dinner ready on time and the children under control, was itself a ridiculous stereotype that no woman could ever live up to.

At least within my own lifetime, I feel confident in saying that all the subconscious biases installed in us from before we could even speak make us resist the idea that men are victims. It’s uncomfortable. It rubs us the wrong way. But the truth is that abusers and abuses are equal opportunity and exist in every system and every group people have ever invented. If we are going to listen to women and children when they are victimized, we need to listen to men too. That is what true equal rights are all about.

What we seem to lack at both ends of the radical sexism spectrum is empathy and understanding for the very real problems that both genders face in their day to day life. If I were going to try to offer a solution to all this, I would propose some kind of educational immersive experience for males and females. A virtual reality world, perhaps, where men would be made to experience the everyday world of a woman and women would likewise be made to walk in a man’s shoes for a period of time. I think repeated trips offering a variety of experiences in everyday life would be quite eye-opening for each, from just driving somewhere and going shopping at a mall, to answering questions in a job interview, to going out to the beach or a park, to going online on social media, to working at various kinds of jobs.

And of course, as soon as I thought of it, I googled this idea only to find it’s already being done. I think if you search for “virtual reality gender simulator” yourself you’ll see what I’m talking about yourself. I think this is a good idea and could be exactly the kind of compassion machine we’ve been looking for. There’s still a long way to go before we get fully immersive scenarios like the ones I imagined earlier, but the good news is we are on our way to using this VR technology for more than just gaming. To me, this is much more important to our future, especially as the issues of sex, gender and identity are only going to continue to become more complicated.

Thanks for listening.

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