Currently reading ‘The Second Sexism‘, the important new men’s rights book that uses philosophical analysis to argue that males are experiencing disadvantages in society that are the result of sexism. I’ll write a review sometime soon, but the couple of chapters I’ve read thus far have left me impressed. Here, the author David Benatar is discussing the discriminatory pressure on males to enlist and fight in war :
One particularly graphic example of this is the campaign, during the First World War, of British women distributing white feathers – a symbol of cowardice – to young men who were not in uniform. These were distributed even to adolescent boys who were technically too young to register. One boy, Frederick Broome, who had succeeded in enlisting at age 15, fought in battle, was returned to England in a febrile state and then discharged at the insistence of his father, who produced his birth certificate to convince the authorities. Then, while walking over a bridge in town, then age 16, young Frederick was accosted by four girls who gave him three white feathers. He later recalled as follows :
“I felt very humiliated. I finished the walk over the bridge and there on the other side was the Thirty-seventh London Territorial Association of the Royal Field Artillery. I walked straight in and re-joined the army.”
Note that I have not sought the author’s permission to quote the above passage – I assume he will have no objections to me highlighting a small sample of his work on a men’s rights advocacy site.
The quoted quote from the boy soldier is taken from (according to the author’s notes) ‘We Will Not Fight‘, by Will Ellsworth-Jones.
In the notes section, David Benatar also reveals that the feminist icon Virginia Wooff dismissed, against all the evidence, the claim that white feathers were handed out during World War I in any great numbers. She apparently attributed the belief to ‘male hysteria’.
You can read an interview with David Benatar on the subject of his book here in the Pink Paper.
**UPDATE : I have added a follow-up to this article which deals with the historical relationship between feminism and the white feather campaigns, something which redditors seem to be having a hard time believing :
Ministers have vowed to press ahead with plans to give anonymity to men accused of rape despite a cross-party campaign led by a new Tory MP.
Members from all sides of the House said the Coalition’s plans not to name men until they are charged would deter victims from coming forward to the police.
But junior justice minister Crispin Blunt yesterday confirmed he was pressing ahead with the controversial proposals, which were imposed on the Tories by the Lib Dems as part of the coalition agreement.
Louise Bagshawe, a successful chick-lit author who became a Tory MP at the last election, told the Commons that by ‘ singling out rape in this way ministers are sending a negative signal about women and those who accuse men of rape’.
The attempts by the Liberal Democrats to give men accused of rape anonymity are looking increasingly fragile. The rebellion, led by a CONSERVATIVE female MP tells us a lot about female politics…as well as confirming Arthur Schopenhauer’s ‘misogynistic’ observation that ‘the fundamental defect of a woman is a lack of a sense of justice’.
Whether they are representatives of ‘the left’ or ‘the right’, female politicians invariably speak for the interests of women. On this issue, only one question is relevant for them. Will granting anonymity to men accused of rape increase female sexual power, or decrease it? No brainer. It will decrease it, and therefore every woman MP, no matter what supposed party political allegiance, will fight against it. Men’s rights? Human rights?…pffffff.
And again, to the deluded majority of the men’s rights movement who assume that our cause is synonymous with conservatism – this bill (to grant men anonymity) is being re-introduced by the liberals. When British women were granted anonymity in rape trials several decades ago, the accused men were given the same protection. It was the CONSERVATIVE party who changed this in 1982, allowing hundreds of men’s lives to be ruined by false allegations in the years since.
As you would expect, the False Rape Society is doing an excellent job in covering developments in what might turn out to be a defining moment for the future of men’s rights.
If you live in the UK, please write to (e-mail) your MP stating the case for anonymity for accused men : Write to Them
I’ve read a few anti-feminist books, and I think I’m aware of the existance of most of the few that I haven’t yet got round to, but this one has somehow slipped under my radar. Until, that is, a loyal reader by the name of ‘Highwayman’ informed me of it in a comment left here a few days ago. I can only think that the reasons it doesn’t get mentioned a lot in the MRM community are similar to the relative neglect of Neil Lyndon’s classic ‘No More Sex War’ :
It’s by a British author.
It’s pro sex (or at least against the feminist rape of male sexuality).
The author has probably never had a wet dream involving Sarah Palin.
Anyway, here’s the Highlander’s excellent comments on the book – comments that prompted me to order it from Amazon the same night and have left me drooling in anticipation at reading one of those rare books that might affect my entire intellectual landscape. Hopefully it lives up to my expectations and I’ll try to put up a review here very soon.
I highly recommend reading the chapter on prostitution in Steve Moxon’s book The Woman Racket. He really tears into the arguments that feminists and others try to use to suppress prostitution and to punish the men who patron sex care workers.
His theory as to what motivates people to oppose men patroning prostitutes is interesting. He belives it is caused by the “cheater detection mechanism” whereby people become outraged by what they PERCEIVE is a lower status male having access to females that his position in the dominance hierachy would not allow him to if he were not to patron prostitutes. This could explain why some men are also opposed to men seeing sex care workers because they might fear that if lower status males can “cheat the system” then perhaps the entire dominance heirarchy could be undermined. Of course it could also be that some men oppose the patronage of sex care workers because they believe that a deity commands them to or because they are trying to suck it up to women too.
BTW according to research men who patron sex care workers come from all varieties of socio-economic backgrounds and even if some unattractive or “lower status” men are able to find some sexual fulfillment through patroning sex care workers…good for them I say!
Bernard Chapin, author of one of the classic anti-feminist works himself, has compiled this excellent Men’s Rights Book List
Also check out this classic old skool Chapin’s Inferno :
Brock Lesnar and Kurt Angle Fight Over Emma Watson
You see old femiwhores – you could introduce the death penalty for glancing in the street at a girl under 21 and castrated bitch MRAs might be the first to applaud you. But you know what? Ultra alpha males like Brock and Kurt would still fight over who caught the pretty jailbait’s eye.
The personal has become political – A 21st century Male’s survival guide
According to Kant, writing over 200 years ago, to marry was to halve one’s rights and to double one’s duties. For Kant’s great successor, Arthur Schopenhauer, marriage was only possible as the outcome of a conjuring trick played by nature upon men. The short lived beauty and charm of female youthfulness acting to lure lovestruck men into irrationally signing away their independence for a lifelong contract of devotion and commitment. The result of nature’s sorcery perhaps, yet Schopenhauer had no doubt that marriage was essential to civilisation, even if he, like Kant, was always too wise to fall through its heavily scented trap door. For (writing three decades before Darwin spelled it out scientifically) sexual attraction and the bonds that result from it, are nothing less than vital to the reproduction of the species itself, even if in the light of the 21stcentury this essential truth has incredibly been lost behind the deceitful fog of feminist mythmaking.
Such is the setting for Bernard Chapin’s quite brilliant treatise on what it means for society, as well as for the personal dignity of men and women, to lose sight of this politically incorrect truth and for nature’s fundamental balance between male desire and female desirability to be disturbed and broken. In a world in which feminists have achieved their oft-quoted aim of making the ‘personal political’, the book is an earnest plea for a rational reappraisal of the relationship between the sexes. The author shows how making the personal political has been achieved by a manipulation and perversion of the hardwired male chivalric disposition to express devotion to the female into a sad male acquiescence to the emergence of a political gynocracy . A New Womb Order in which decisions are made almost wholly for the apparent benefit of women, yet which not only leads to yet more suffering for the disposable male, actually fails to give a sense of personal happiness to the majority of women and that furthermore will be disastrous in the long term for both men and women and the civilisation to which they both belong. Feminism is reducing politics to the level of an ancient pagan mother goddess cult but men have forgotten that the reason our ancestors worshiped these fertility idols in the first place, was because they intuitively felt that the future of what they and their own forefathers had built depended upon it. The ultimate irony of feminism as womb deification is that, as Mark Steyn said to Chapin in an interview, ‘the future belongs to those who will be around to see it’. Feminism is leading to such a disastrous drop in Western birth rates that the likelihood is that ‘we’ won’t be around to see the results of our misguided devotion to the mother goddess who chooses to abort rather than concieve, and seeks re-election rather than reproduction.
I came to this book after becoming a devotee of the author’s brilliant and entertaining video blogs on youtube (‘Chapin’s Inferno‘). There, Chapin demonstrates a wonderfully educated and devastatingly rapier intellect which, every week, is unleashed upon some madness of the political left. I therefore had high expectations and I can honestly say that they have been quite exceeded. Not only is the argument of the book presented logically and clearly, it is also expressed at times quite beautifully. The guy is simply a very talented writer with a brilliant turn of phrase. This is demonstrated nowhere better than in his ruthless critique of the feminist position on porn and sexual objectification. He demolishes various arguments such as the idea that porn leads to sexual attacks on women ( ‘it simply enables men to get to sleep a little earlier’) and debunks the notion of the sexually objectifying ‘male gaze’ altogether – ‘(if the female sex are treated as objects then..) the female sex are treated with an awe generally reserved for religious relics’.
I couldn’t find many faults with the book. Chapin’s humanity and general ‘niceness’ are transparent throughout. If I was to make a criticism, it would be that the author is rather more charitable to the distinction between radical feminism and mainstream feminism than I and many others would be, and a lot more optimistic as to the ability of women to share legislative power with men in a just and equitable way. But perhaps it is better that Chapin doesn‘t quite share our pessimistic outlook, as it means that ‘Women : Theory and Practice’ can’t be pidgeon-holed by its opponents as simply an ‘anti-feminist’ work. Destined to become a classic of the Men’s Movement that it entirely deserves to be, this is also a book that every man should read simply as a guidebook to life in a brave new world.
