Sympathy for Moderate Men's Rights Groups

Before I watched <The Red Pill>, I had a negative view of men's rights. My impression was that they accepted with relish the framework of "men versus women", highlighted the various ways that men suffer (many not particularly serious), ignored and downplayed all of the ways that women suffer, and argued that men were the oppressed sex, not women.

I watched that 120-minute movie a year ago, and more recently watched a 15-minute <Ted-X> talk by the filmmaker Cassie Jaye.

She set out to do a documentary exposing how horrible the men's rights activists (MRAs) were, but as she listened she found that their positions were reasonable and that despite her initial skepticism she ended up agreeing with them. She portrayed them as not dismissing women's concerns, but just arguing that men had legitimate concerns too and that both should be considered. That I can readily agree with.

I can still wonder if she talked with only moderate elements and ignored more radical ones. The disturbing Incel movement seems to overlap and is associated with many <acts of violence> . But most reasonable causes have moderate factions and also extreme ones that give the moderates a bad name. Surely many feminists would prefer to dissociate themselves from the radical opinion that all heterosexual intercourse is inherently a form of violence against women.

At 8:39 of the TedX talk, Jaye gives a thought-provoking list of men's issues:

paternity fraud

Selective Service draft

workplace deaths

war deaths

suicide

sentencing disparities

life expectancy

child custody

child support

false rape allegations

criminal court bias

misandry

failure launched (?)

boys falling behind in schooling

homelessness

veterans issues

infant genital male mutilation

lack of parental choice once a child is conceived

lack of resources for male victims of domestic violence

It's a longer list than I used in arguing that <there is no patriarchy in the US>. It's hard to identify any of these and say that they are the result of some policy that unjustly benefits women at the expense of men. Even fewer could be easily remedied by legislation (drafting women for the military would be one exception). But then that's also true of the complaints that women have in the US.

We have a feminist movement that portrays women as victims and men as the enemy -- despite the fine print, "men suck" is the underlying emotional message. As long as we do, it is appropriate to have a moderate men's rights movement to counter it. But I would much rather dispense with both movements and focus on problems faced by people, and reduce the suffering of people, whatever their sex or gender.

One example is medical research. Before the 20th century, women's expected lifespan was shorter than men's, since so many died in pregnancy or childbirth. Medicine was able to reduce that dramatically, and now women live longer than men. I don't believe thinking of it as women's rights had anything significant to do with it. Today, if you imagine you had only enough money to perfect some treatment for breast cancer or prostate cancer but not both, the decision ought to be based on the chances of success and the overall human suffering to be eased, not the sex of the people whose lives would be improved.

Sometimes the end result would just be more compassion. Consider "lack of parental choice once a child is conceived" above. I think almost everyone would agree that if anyone gets a choice in the matter (pro-lifers would argue no one should get a choice) the ultimate decision about what to do about a pregnancy is rightly the woman's. If she wants to keep it and the father does not, she can keep it. If she wants to end it but the father does not, she can end it. You can agree with that but still recognize that these situations can cause pain for men. If a potential father extrapolates from a fetus to the child it could become, he can grieve if a woman decides to kill it. If on the other hand he does not want a child, he can be upset if he will have to become a father when there was the alternative of abortion. No alternative policy would be better. But we can and should still have compassion for men whose opinion about the future of a pregnancy will be overruled. That doesn't prevent us from also having compassion for the competing pressures that a woman in that situation may face. There is no need to have a competition about who deserves more compassion. It is not a scarce resource.