I was replying to a comment over at Is equality a scam, but then it got too long, so I decided to turn it into its own blog post. Here we go…!
The commenter, Tereza, said “I’d rather aim for kindness & empathy than “equality”.” From this, I was inspired to write the following.
While I appreciate the value of kindness and empathy, I don’t think it’s a suitable answer to the big issues in the world that concern my own interest in pointing out discrimination when I see it. I think kindness and empathy is mostly helpful with friends, family and random strangers, but it does nothing to change or create laws with the intention of treating people with kindness and empathy.
There’s a system in place, and millions of people are affected by it daily. Kindness and empathy has no place in it, and any attempt to try and change the system with kindness and empathy is destroyed by the inhumanity of the system.
The biggest reason for me being so vocal about equality is that I’ve seen is that when people start talking about treating people fairly, feminists come along and start screaming about how only women should be treated fairly. I’ve seen plenty of stories about how feminists have managed to get the system changed to support feminist interests, but at the exclusion of men’s interest.
As a very strong believer in human rights and individual freedom (being the Libertarian that I am), I get pissed off every time I see people wanting to invalidate human rights and only focus on women’s rights at the exclusion of men’s rights. This is what modern feminism is about, treating men as second class citizens instead of as equal partners in this world.
You can see it in the fact that it’s essentially a crime to have solely mens’s groups these days, or men-only establishments, but women can have women’s groups and women-only establishments. Why? Because women are weak victims, feminists would have you believe, living in fear of men gathering together and the theat they would pose to women’s interests.
Talking about men’s issues results in objections and anger from many women, but if they were truly interested in equality, equal rights or even human rights, there would be no objections to discussion on men’s issues. There would be agreement and support.
But instead there is outright hostility, violence and death threats from feminists.
What encourages me is that I have had support from women who have encouraged me to continue my conversations about this, and who have added their own support to stuff I’ve shared. I know I’m not the only person out there who feels the way I do about this injustice that’s gathering steam.
Discrimination against men is becoming part of the system as more and more feminist women gain positions of power. For example, in 1998 Hilary Clinton gave a speech at the First Ladies’ Conference on Domestic Violence in San Salvadore that included these words:
The experience that you have gone through is in many ways comparable to what happens with domestic violence. Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. Women often have to flee from the only homes they have ever known. Women are often the refugees from conflict and sometimes, more frequently in today’s warfare, victims. Women are often left with the responsibility, alone, of raising the children. Women are again the victims in crime and domestic violence as well.
I thought that the primary victims of war are the people that die in the war, and most of them are the men that do the fighting!
But in one fell swoop, Hilary Clinton declared that the men who die in war aren’t really victims at all, and the real victims are the women left behind. And this woman has a reasonable chance of becoming the next US President.
Feminist discrimination against men is beoming part of the system. There’s no kindness or empathy in it. Women can get men fired from their jobs for remotely upsetting them. Where’s the kindness and empathy in that?
A feminist woman at a place of work many years ago tried to get a workmate fired because she didn’t like how he smiled at her. That was it. “He needs to be fired because I find his smile offensive.” There was an investigation, her distress was heard. He was told not to smile at her any more, and she was told his smile was not something he could be fired for. She got pissed off and left the company soon after.
Things have changed since then. Today he would have been fired so that the company could avoid feminist backlash.
If men are going to try and change the system to bring about some kind of equal treatment of both men and women, then more men need to be more vocal about what’s going on. More men need to get angry and decide they need to do something about the injustice that’s going on that’s turning men into people with no rights.
In my post last year, Be angry!, I said this:
We’re all human beings. We’re all equal. There should be no such thing as Aboriginal rights, or women’s rights, or gay rights. We should all be focusing on human rights!
I’m going to continue down this path.
I know I might lose some of my readers who think that my desire for equal rights for men and women is not what they want to read about. I’ll be very sorry about that, as I’ve developed some very good relationships with some of my readers.
But this blog and what I write has always been about my journey. At every stage, there will be people that will join me in my journey, because they’re walking the same path as I am. But then, as my journey continues, I’ll take a turn onto a new path that will be different to where they want to travel, and so we’ll say our sad farewells and continue on our separate ways.
This has become increasingly important to me, and the resistance I’ve had from some people, along with the support I’ve had from others, has only convinced me that I need to continue talking about this.
Do you think that back in the 60’s there were people that were talking about how bad things were for black people in the US? Do you think they had people telling them they should keep quiet, stop wasting their energy on it, and just allow things to continue the way they have done for centuries?
I had someone tell me recently that I was wasting my energy on this because I wasn’t even affected by it. Essentially, shut up and stop complaining because I’m not affected by it.
Gee, I guess that’s a good enough reason to stay quiet, right?
I don’t know where this will take me. I have no grand plan in mind. But pointing out how how feminism wants to introduce inequality and violations of human rights is something that I need to do right now.
Update: thinking about this after having published it, I’m also aware this could be just another ‘fad’, a passion that’s come along and may fade away with time. Such is the lot of a Scanner.
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