Friday, May 6, 2011

Men's Rights Activists Hate the "Conscious Men"

http://quest4nexus.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/medium_consciousmen.jpg

Over at Paul Elam's MRA blog, A Voice for Men, there is a poll on the sidebar asking readers what they think of the "Conscious Men" (Gay Hendricks and Arjuna Ardagh and their fan club), they of The Conscious Man's Manifesto.

I posted my response back when it first came up (I was not a fan). For the sake of clarity, here is part of my response to the original posting of the Manifesto:

OK, seriously, all I hear in reading this is "worship" blah blah blah "goddess" blah blah blah "divine" blah blah blah "feminine" blah blah blah. The second part is better - we need to show our affection for our women, with words, but also with touch, our eyes, and every other way we can.

But the first part, the worship stuff? Been there, done that - had the painful break-up to show for it (to each woman I did this to, my sincerest apologies).

When we treat women as the goddess or divine feminine, more often than not we are projecting our sense of our own feminine, the anima in Jung's terminology (literally, Latin for soul), onto the human woman in front of us.

It's been my experience (and so if you are a woman reading this please correct me if I am wrong), that most women do not want to be idolized as goddesses or the divine feminine or any other pre/trans New Age object of devotion. Well, OK, maybe once in a while, but not as a standard part of the relationship.

In my experience, most women would love it if we could simply see them and appreciate them exactly as they are - beautiful, female, sexy, smart, funny, sensitive, wounded, insecure, strong, growing, anxious - the whole human mix. When we can see them and hold them when they are hurting and needing our strength as a container, and yet KNOW and SHOW that we do not see them as weak or broken, but as WHOLE human beings, the woman will feel safe to be open and vulnerable, and there is no better way to create intimacy than to be open with each other, fully and humanly open.
Clearly, I have issues with their idealizing approach, but my feelings are apparently nothing compared to the readers at Elam's blog (no specific link to the poll - it's on the main page). They seem to feel VERY strongly about this topic:

AVfM Reader Poll

The "Conscious Men" are:

  • Mangina Sycophants Elevated to Art Form (47%, 58 Votes)
  • Some Variation of Pig Shit (21%, 26 Votes)
  • Intellectualized Submissive Masochists (15%, 18 Votes)
  • Poster Boys for Assisted Suicide (14%, 17 Votes)
  • Enlightened Worshipers of Women We Should All Follow (4%, 5 Votes)

Total Voters: 124

Vote

For those who not versed in the hatred of men who do not hate feminists, a mangina is (aside from the traditional definition of a man who tucks his genitals, usually a drag queen) a man who supports feminism, is a feminist, has feminine qualities, or otherwise does not think that most women (and all feminists) are somehow evil.

So, we can simply add "mangina" to the list of words that gender tyrants use (alongside words such as sissy, pussy, bitch, fag, queer, homo, and so on) to make other men feel ashamed, defective, or not masculine.

One last note on this - Elam penned his own parody of the Manifesto - much of which reveals the MRA perspective in sad, bitter detail. I am only offering a couple of representative quotes - you can go read the whole thing if you'd like:

A Letter to Women from the Conscious Men

We have felled forests, destroying entire ecosystems so that we could trap you in houses, away from the natural world, all while feigning that it was for your protection. Worse yet, we have competed with each other; building ever more extravagant and opulent homes, fitted with larger and larger closets to be filled with endless rows of clothing made from the animals sacrificed, and then saddled you with the burden of shopping for and owning all of it.

How can we ever apologize enough?

We have created a vast and vibrant consumer culture; erecting expansive, unholy malls, and forced you to flock to them with the money we have earned. These are the evil instruments of your subjugation and humiliation.

And then we poured salt in the wounds we inflicted, by blaming you for all of it! Some men, mostly those awful, insufferable MRA’s are saying that all of this was the result of a shallow, female-centric culture.

These unfortunates must be deluded.

And . . . In this passage he is still referring to MRAs at the beginning.

They claim that while men were making history, women of recent modern times were on the sidelines, preoccupied with the inanities like celebrity marriages and Sex in the City, obsessed with maximizing their sexual power over men and complaining about how they were not regarded as equals.

They claim that even when handed equality and more under the law that you women, given all the choices in the world, chose the easy way out; that you avoided the hardships and sacrifices that come with earned accomplishment and instead elected to leech off men directly or get the government to do it for you.

Please don’t listen to them. They are just mortals and beneath you; you are the Goddesses and they are your lessers.

Everything they say that is uncomfortable for you to hear is a lie. I know, you already knew that, but we feel compelled you let you know that we know it, too.

It is way past time that men like us, good men, rip through all these lies about female self-aggrandizement, narcissism and childishness in order to expose the hidden wisdsom of your Eternal Feminine Soul.

So hidden has been your Divine Nature that we have had to use shovels to get through to it. Yes, we needed big, massive, monstrously huge shovels with diesel motor power attachments and crews of men who didn’t speak English.

Even then we had to dig, and dig, and dig, and dig. But then, somewhere deep in the inner chambers of our own imagination, between the intuitive, more or less spontaneous ramblings of women’s studies professors - and our own masochistic oedipal fantasies, we found your real essence; that of the Holy Goddess - and we have vowed to lay ourselves prostrate in your presence, and to help other men, by force if necessary, to do the same.

I'm sure that Elam means all of this in good fun, right? Yeah, that's what I thought, too.

I'm guessing I'll get some accusations that my own mangina is hanging out for all the world to see. But that's cool - gender tyrants don't bother me much these days.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

These two "men" as well as profeminist males, such as Hugo Schwyzer allways strike me has men who have embraced their mother complex. Hence the reaction from other men who are struggling to separate themselves from their own complexes.

Porky D said...

I recommend Will Ferrel's send up of these craven worms. It's at Funny or Die, which is usually the latter but this time slips over into the former.