Paul Elam: Adios, c-ya, good-bye man-o-sphere

"The man-o-sphere is worthless to men’s rights activism."

Recently Roosh wrote an article proclaiming that the MRM was dead. It was the kind of piece that even 6 months ago I would have likely allowed to immediately bait me into a response article. And it was so full of fallacy and self-promoting claptrap that I would have had some fun doing it.

But that was 6 months and about a million years ago.

It was at a time when I still felt connected in some way to the phenomena we sometimes call the man-o-sphere. We were, in days past, a loosely associated collection of thinkers and writers, who at times shared some mutual ambitions to improve the state of men and boys, and often tore at each other like siblings reared in a whore house. It was stimulating and often messy, but it helped pass time in a world where waiting on progress for men was like waiting for a raise from a cheap boss.

But in case anyone hasn’t noticed, things in the sphere have changed a lot in recent times. Ferdinand Bardamu, after letting In Mala Fide devolve from a rigorously thoughtful source of counter-theory into a cesspool of white supremacy and anti-Semitism, mercifully checked out for good.

What remains, with some few exceptions, are not worth mentioning by name. There are some collections of decent writing, squandered by rudderless, self-serving management with no interest in activism. They serve a purpose, but not a cause.

And then there are the PUAs and Gamers, about whom this will be the last time I write, or that will ever again appear in an article on this site. They are comprised mostly of men who bear the deepest afflictions of a fatherless culture. Abandoned to feminist governance by their male elders and bereft of masculine guidance, they have been dropped into the solipsistic void that was the only existence feminism ever could have offered them outside direct servitude. Stripped of values and consciousness and the ability to be circumspect, they have turned feral; so unable to form community or embrace brotherhood that they have shrugged off the desire for either.

I don’t blame them, given the way they were fucked out of relevance. They never had a chance. They are the walking wounded; the children left behind from a sexual war in which their fathers refused to fight. I have been personally wrong to have engaged in conflict with them when I could have, should have, been working harder to provide them an alternative.

I aim to remedy that mistake.

The very expression, man-o-sphere, implicitly paints an image of connectivity; of shared purpose and identity. Aside from distaste for feminism, which anyone capable of critical thought will share, there is no real or abiding connection; no universality or even commonality, and that lacking manifests in how we tear ourselves, and each other, down, and always have.

In the comments of the Roosh piece I mentioned at the start of this article, there came a summation from zed, who has studied this society longer than most all of us, and longer than some of us have been alive. It is most sobering and well worth posting here.

I see this same argument raging a couple of dozen places around the net right now. It appears that men are Balkanizing into half a dozen “tribes” of mutually hostile social, cultural, and political values.

It is that phenomenon alone which accounts for the fact that no coherent Men’s Rights Movement has ever gelled. Terms get flung around with no agreed-upon definition behind them. If MRAs were a political party, we have spent the last 40 years arguing over what our platform should be.

For someone who understands politics, that should not be surprising. The favored method of the human race throughout history for resolving such conflicts over what people believe is to reach for the guns – and before guns were invented, spears, knives, swords, and clubs.

In the US, slavery existed for 300 years before it got ended by the bloodiest war in US history. It took a lot of Abolitionist Activists dying to even reach the point where the war broke out.

Pointing out that MRAs have not made much progress because they have not already solved the problem politically without having to resort to the ultimate form of activism – war – is silly.

There have been tons of good MRAs over the years doing what they could to make a difference – without guns. Every last one of them got taken down by the very men whose rights those MRAs thought that were fighting for.

A guy like Paul Elam stands up, tries to do something, and “men” from all over the place attack him because 1) he is not doing things exactly like they would do them, if they had done anything, which they never do, and 2) he hasn’t already solved the problem so they wouldn’t have to be bothered with it.

I quit being any sort of MRA because I got so sick to death of having to argue with men over how to split a hair 10,000 different ways. I got so sick of listening to armchair quarterbacks bitching that the free beer wasn’t cold enough, that I quit serving it at all.

With a handful of people and a little spare change, Paul Elam has launched the most successful Men’s Rights initiative to date. Do “men” appreciate that? Hell no!

Instead of pitching in and adding their own “activism” to his effort, men just pick at him and piss him off enough that he feels the need to come over here and defend what he is doing to the very group he is doing it for.

If “men” were a football team, the opposing team would not even have to put anyone on the field because they spend all their time and energy tripping their own ball carriers instead of blocking for him.

What I don’t get about “men” is why – if they are so certain that their way is the right way – they don’t just go do it and leave everyone else alone. Instead of spending their time doing what they claim they believe in, they spend it attacking every man who is not a clone of them.

There are lots of good MRAs, but there is no MRM. Men won’t allow one to get formed, because every time some MRA starts to get some traction, other men take him down.

While I appreciate zed’s very kind words about me, that isn’t why I reposted his thoughts. I did it because reading them was a personal turning point. It was the point that just accepted the fact that a handful non activist, essentially blue pill bloggers, and their blue pill acolytes, are as useful to the idea of an MRM as eggshells in an omelet.

The man-o-sphere is worthless to men’s rights activism.

The man-o-sphere itself is a misnomer, a façade hidden behind an illusion. Looking for unity or support or action in that non entity is nothing more than looking for water in an empty bucket. Similarly futile is the idea that friction or conflict with those ghosts is detrimental to the cause. It isn’t detrimental because these men have nothing more to do with the cause of men’s rights than feminist bloggers or volleyball coaches. Pearl clutching over a badly needed division between them and activists is foolish. They are just another, and a comparatively minor, source of attempts to bring us down. We do not have to be bothered with them, even if we are advocating on their behalf.

If there is a real men’s movement that will spring from the online world, it is here and nowhere else.

In fact, we already see it happening. But continuing to buy into the false unity of a non-existent entity will only slow us down.

I have always taken care, and still to, to point out that AVfM is not synonymous with the men’s movement. And after mulling this over one more time of thousands, I am really glad that I have taken this approach.

I don’t know what the men’s movement is, in all honesty. I don’t even know that it exists. But I do know what AVfM is. And I know we have created a culture here that is moving toward a bona fide movement. I know we are prone to occasional squabbles, but the circular diatribes outlining 10,000 ways to split a hair, the ones that drove men like zed to wash their hands of other MRAs, are not part of the program here.

We have succeeded here because we do not allow other men to come in and drag us down with whatever they imagine their justification or “better way” to be.

We don’t allow our writers or supporters or other activists to be personally insulted. We invite everyone with better ideas than ours to prove it by doing them, or to find the donation button so we can do it, or hold their silly tongues. We systematically ban people who are not here to support our growth because that is the only way among men it can be done.

We recognize, as zed surely does, that the majority of men will always be their own worst enemy, so we let the minority of men (and women) who are cognizant enough to overcome that stupidity to carry the leverage of authority here.

And it is working. We now have a robust community of men and women who are starting to make it happen on the ground.

Now we can move ahead with that, the few with a fighting chance at changing the world in spite of the many, by refusing to try to drag dead wood with us as we go.

Source

White males now classed as a 'minority group' at university

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/9484597/White-males-now-classed-as-a-minority-group-at-university.html

Women now dominate Britain’s universities and professions to such an extent that a leading institution has launched a campaign to recruit more “white males”.

The move by the Royal Veterinary College, where more than three-quarters of the intake are female, marks the first time that white men have been included in a strategy to help under-represented groups.

While the college is an extreme case, it reflects a wider trend of women overtaking men in education. Of the 24 leading universities in the Russell Group, only three have a majority of male students.

Across UK universities, 984,000 female undergraduates are studying for degrees, compared to 713,000 male. The gap is expected to widen in future years as new government rules make it easier for universities to recruit students with A-level grades of AAB or better, more of whom are female.

While last week’s A-level results showed boys narrowly outperforming girls at the A* grade for the first time, girls remained significantly more likely than boys to achieve grades in the upper range of A* to B.

According to Mary Curnock Cook, the chief executive of the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, the “very worrying gap” between male and female performance at school and university is leading to “fundamental shifts” in society.


Figures from professions which were traditionally male bastions reveal the workplace gender revolution.

In law, women made up 60 per cent of individuals qualifying to practise and admitted on to the roll of solicitors in 2010.

In the same year, 56 per cent of places in UK medical schools went to women, compared to less than a quarter in the 1960s, and it is predicted that by 2017 female doctors will be in a majority.

Yet while women account for 62 per cent of trainee GPs they make up less than a third of hospital consultants. A reluctance among female doctors to take on more demanding specialties, such as cardiology, has led to fears of shortages in key areas.

Women’s domination in veterinary science is also causing concern. About three-quarters of newly qualified vets are now female. By 2015, it is estimated that 90 per cent of those qualifying will be women.

The huge imbalance has prompted the Royal Veterinary College, with campuses in north London and Hertfordshire, to launch a campaign, outlined in its annual report to the admissions regulator Offa, to attract “white males”, among other under-represented groups such as pupils from poor backgrounds and ethnic minorities.

White males are defined as under-represented because while they make up about 45 per cent of the UK population, according to the last census, they account for only 20 per cent of the college’s intake.

Prospectuses and publicity materials have been redesigned to feature photographs and quotes from white male students. Visits to schools and college roadshows specifically target boys.

The college also targets other under-represented groups including ethnic minorities of both genders, who together make up about 10 per cent of the UK population but only 6 per cent of the students at the college.

They are sought out through schemes such as a science Saturday school for pupils from inner London.

By contrast, white women are overrepresented among the students, and are not being targeted for recruitment.

Professor Stephen May, vice-principal for teaching at the college, said: “Our concern is that just in terms of the professional community, having a good gender mix is healthy.

“It may be that in recent years, good quality male candidates have been attracted to more lucrative careers, such as banking.

"The decline in agriculture versus small animal practise could also be a factor. We are not in the business of quotas, that would be discriminatory, but we hope in the long term we will see progress with white males.”

This year, 84,000 more women applied to higher education than men. The only Russell Group universities where male students are in a majority are Cambridge, the London School of Economics and Imperial College, London.

Women outnumber men in the vast majority, including King’s College, London, where 67 per cent of students are female, and Cardiff University, where the figure is 60 per cent.

Mrs Curnock Cook said: “If you look at educational achievement through primary and secondary school and then university outcomes there is a very worrying gap between males and females.

“Somebody needs to address what it is about our education system that is allowing females to perform overall so much better than males. If this trend continues it will start to underpin quite a fundamental sociological change.”

While women are forging successful careers on the back of superior performances in school and university exams, some fear boys are being left on the scrap heap by an education system which disadvantages them.

Coursework and modular exams, less emphasis on the physical, outdoor curriculum and the lack of male teachers have all been blamed for boys’ underachievement. White working class boys now do worse at school than any other group.

Diane Houston, a psychology professor and graduate school dean at Kent University, said that whilst boys may be disadvantaged at school, women still faced a glass ceiling in the workplace.

“There are issues about the way in which schools have become feminised,” she said. “There is a culture in some schools which can be quite difficult for boys, the sitting still and being neat and organised.

"Some can be put off education at a critical point.

“But I’m not sure that at this point we should be screaming about percentage differences in attainment given the way in which women’s careers atrophy through their reproductive lives. There may be more women training to be solicitors, but the judges are men.”