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	Empowering Men: fighting feminist lies
A Revisionist History of Feminism © Peter Zohrab 2006

 

The Men's Movement will not mature into a fully-fledged political movement until it stops being shackled by taking Feminist propaganda at face value. Feminist propaganda has it that women were once oppressed, and that Feminism liberated them. We have all been taught this -- but it is high time we un-learned this version of history.

Gerald Nicholas' Hunger-Striker's Manifesto (nicholas.html & nicholae.html) is an outstanding piece of writing (except for the grammar of the French version). However, its view of history has been uplifted wholesale from Feminist propaganda. I will comment on this text, since it is typical of what people in the West have been taught to think.

Nicholas wrote:

"Some time ago, women of our mothers' generation were unjustly treated by our society, which was in the grip of a ludicrous and unreasonable form of machismo -- women weren't people -- and they fought tooth and nail and with the greatest courage to assert their rights and their fully-human status. Their struggle at that time was just and honourable, like our men's and fathers' struggle today."

The main claim in this passage is that women were unjustly treated (the exact time and country is not very important for our purposes here). Whether this was tied in with a form of machismo is a side-issue, as is the issue of whether women were (fully) human -- we could draw a comparison with unborn children which Feminism has explicitly made into non-people, and they have no way of asserting their rights !

The conventional wisdom in Western societies is that women fought for -- and largely won -- equality with men. In fact, however, the word "equality" soon gave way to "gender equity" (which could mean almost anything), and even that gave way at times to the term "girl power". None of these terms were defined clearly in any international manifesto that was referred to or applied consistently across all issues. Moreover, Men's/Fathers' Rights activism and manifestos have shown that there is no consensus that Feminists were even trying to achieve equality or equity -- girl power, maybe !

So all that has happened is that one form of apparent inequality has changed into another form of apparent inequality.

In fact, though, it has not been proved that women actually were treated unjustly at any point in history in any society. By claiming this you would have to mean that women were treated more unjustly than men, because it would be an empty claim if women were treated unjustly, but men were treated even more unjustly !

And that was probably the true state of affairs ! Even though men ran the Western World (which I am not denying), they ran it for the benefit of families, not for the benefit of other men. So there were a lot of laws that discriminated against men, such as conscription, sexual assault laws that did not allow for the possibility of female offenders, laws that outlawed male homosexuality but not lesbianism, assault laws with heavier penalties for men than for women, and so on. In fact, in some countries and at some times women were not even legal persons in the sense of being responsible for their own actions ! That is surely a privileged status, not a subordinate status !

Feminism concentrated on certain issues, such as the right to vote, equal pay, and so on, but it spread a distorted picture of the society it was fighting to change, and it ignored most issues where men were discriminated against.

Pre-Feminist, patriarchal society was based on a different model. It was not based on adult individuals as the basic unit -- it was based on the family. Each family had a head, and that head was male. The male had the power, but he also had the responsibility.

When comparing modern Western societies with the patriarchal model, we need to see to what extent our societies are now actually achieving the equality that most people think Feminism has brought about. If they are falling short, we then need to ask if they are capable of achieving that equality -- and if they are even trying to achieve it ? If the answer to one or both of these questions is no, then maybe we need to change the model.

 

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Webmaster Peter Douglas Zohrab Latest Update 23 July 2015

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