Oh God, not this again!

Prepare yourself for some Fresh! Manly! Wisdom!

The very idea of devoting one’s life to the enhancement of a particular genders welfare, obviously at the expense of the other gender or genders, is sexist. Why obviously? Because as human beings we ought to be concerned with universal suffrage, not merely with the plight of women.

When Susan Anthony decided to give up the support for black emancipation merely because she wasn’t convinced that the newly liberated slaves would support women’s voting rights, she embraced a sexist & a racist archetype.

Susan B. Anthony had it partly right, it ought to have been: “people, their rights and nothing more”.

Unfortunately, for so many feminist women, their idea of what it means to be female is intrinsically linked to being misandrist — their very identity is so bound up with the notion that they must view men as oppressors. Pity.

This comment was initially trashed, but it does such a good job of displaying a common misconception that I decided to publish it (with the guilty party remaining nameless, because I’m feeling unusually nice).

I’m not going to equivocate here, men ARE oppressors. I’m not going to sugarcoat that one for you, and I’m not even going to go into providing the long list of evidence in support of that because if you’re reading this post, you probably have access to a search engine. Fighting for women’s equality is a noble cause on that basis alone, even if it did mean that men somehow “lost” in the final OMGWe’veFINALLYachievedEquality scenario.  Fortunately, there is no evidence that the fight for justice and equality is a zero-sum game with winners and losers. Women represent a huge amount of untapped potential, and as soon as that potential is unleashed, the entire community benefits (a good example of this can be found in Banker to the Poor by Mohammad Yunus).

So, as far as I can tell, unless your version of men’s rights involves men being able to oppress and abuse women with impunity you have absolutely no reason to be wasting my time with blog comments about misandry.