Mad Men & the Pedestal Elite: Inside the Men’s Rights Movement
For some, the “manosphere” offers a place to air real grievances about issues such as bias in family courts or sexual abuse suffered by men. But it also has spawned a network of activists and sites that take Farrell’s ideology in a disturbing direction. Men’s rights forums on sites like 4chan and Reddit are awash in misogyny and anti-feminist vitriol. Participants argue that false allegations of rape and domestic abuse are rampant, or that shelters for battered women are a financial scam. Others rail against women for being independent or sexually promiscuous.
Many devotees say they had their “red pill” moment when they discovered Farrell’s ideas, among them that domestic violence is a two-way street.
These ideas have given rise to aggressive tactics and rhetoric. The National Coalition for Men—whose board of advisers includes Farrell—has fought to cut off state funding for domestic-violence programs if men aren’t included. A Voice for Men’s founder, Paul Elam, who is a friend and protégé of Farrell’s, has justified violence against women and written that some of them “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.” Other activists have published names of women they consider enemies and have praised online stalkers, such as the “Gamergate” mobs who bombard feminist critics with rape and death threats.
…In the late 1990s, Angelucci joined the National Coalition for Men; he later founded the Los Angeles chapter and began filing lawsuits to force battered women’s shelters to take men in too, alleging they were discriminatory. (One case ended in a ruling requiring state-funded shelters to do so.) Angelucci has also fought to make the draft compulsory for women, and he has worked to water down the Violence Against Women Act.
…Elam, who had been working as a drug and alcohol counselor, became convinced that his field was rife with anti-male bias. “We began to identify and treat masculinity as the disease and the cure for it was misandry—the hatred of men and boys,” he would later write. “Men’s groups devolved into sessions of shame, clinically applied and charged for by the hour.” Elam began raising unsettling questions, such as why women checking into the clinic were routinely asked whether they’d been battered while men were asked whether they’d hit their wives. . .
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“I felt that it was a tasteful message that had not been communicated effectively to women about how powerless men feel around the beautiful woman’s body,” Farrell told me. Cupping a hand over his crotch, he added, “Our upper brains stop working and the lower brain starts working.”
More: Mad Men: Inside the Men’s Rights Movement—and the Army of Misogynists and Trolls It Spawned
Suzanne Venker: The Traditionalist
For much of her career, Venker followed the path blazed by her aunt, the anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly. In 2011, the pair even cowrote a book, The Flipside of Feminism, arguing that freedom and power have only made women unhappy. But their paths began to diverge the following year when Venker, who in addition to authoring books is a frequent Fox News commentator, published a column on foxnews.com called “The War on Men.”…
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…Venker argues that white men face oppression “unlike anything American women have faced,” …
I’ve often thought that our Patriarchal system is devised and maintained by Powerful Men to control Less Powerful Men by limiting their access to women.
Those that do get women have children and are committed to a form of wage slavery for the rest of their lives. Thus they are no longer competition for Powerful Men, but their pawns.
The sad thing in all this is that the women and children aren’t considered to be people in the eyes of the Powerful Men. They aren’t a threat and therefore only count as pawns —things to be used to manipulate any potential competition.
Those who behave well are rewarded with higher wages and occasional notice by the Powerful to stroke their egos. They earn enough to buy luxury cars and nice sparkly things for their females. Females like the nice sparkly things and being free of the adult responsiblities of providing for the family.
I call these women the Pedestal Elite. They are often the most vocal and fight the hardest to maintain the status quo. They revel in their role of non-human pampered pet and demand their status as if it is a divine mandate.
The system serves the Powerful Men well.
just my .02
UPDATE: Another Way Powerful Men remove possible competition: How Some of America’s Most Gifted Kids Wind Up in Prison - Quartz