[Dean's World] Trudy W. Schuett: So, what's this men's movement thing?

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Posted by Trudy W. Schuett:
So, what's this men's movement thing?
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1172929295.shtml


   I've got a lot of things I could/should/would write about right now,
   after emerging from the cold/flu from hell and a trip to L.A. that was
   close to same place. ;>)

   Thing that's caught my attention these days tho is the surprise that
   some in the advertising world are apparently feeling that anybody is
   deciding to fight back against an agency that does consistently
   anti-male ads. The main rabble-rouser of the moment,
   [1]Glenn Sacks, has been doing this kind of thing for several years,
   and there have been others fighting back against ad agencies and
   companies from Abercrombie & Fitch, which was selling t-shirts
   promoting assault on boys, to Mary Kay cosmetics, which financed a
   hysterical PBS documentary that ultimately proved to be lacking
   factual content.

   Right now, a cell phone company is running an ad where a woman beats
   up two guys, putting them in the hospital, for hiding her Blackberry.
   This is supposed to be funny. Had the woman beat up two other women,
   it would not be considered to be funny at all. Had the situation been
   a man beating up two women, somebody would've been fired the instant
   the thing aired.

   You'd think the ad world would've gotten over the "stupid guy" ads
   long ago. Trends in advertising don't generally persist for years, but
   this one certainly has. Now, ad agencies don't tend to have much
   respect for anything other than the almighty dollar, and I don't
   really expect that to change, but ads can in some small way be a
   reflection of society. That's the troubling thing.

   The "stupid guy" commercials are just an outward manifestation of a
   much deeper, and quite serious problem of the 21st Century.

   We seem to have lost our respect for men.

   Seems there are those in the advertising world who aren't quite up on
   their men's movement education, so I thought I'd provide a bit of that
   for them, free of charge.

   It's been a small and disorganized bunch of people from the beginning,
   back in the 1960s, when a guy by the name of Richard Doyle began a
   publication called The Liberator. (Now a publication of the
   [2]American Coalition for Fathers and Children.) There may well have
   been others at the time, but he's the one I know about.

   Since the advent of the internet, it's been gaining steam, and people.
   Note I say people, not men. That's because the movement includes a lot
   of women who are unhappy with the way men are treated in a variety of
   areas. Divorce and domestic violence are the most obvious, but there
   are also problems in education, the workforce, medicine and other
   areas.

   Even these days, it's not the behemoth that NOW was in the 1970s, but
   it continues to grow. As more high-profile men such as Paul McCartney
   and Alan Baldwin become embroiled in contentious divorces, and more
   well-known men admit to being abuse victims, this encourages more
   people to speak and act against the general anti-male climate of the
   times.

   There are dozens of small organizations throughout the
   English-speaking world. As ugly, anti-male laws (patterned after the
   US [3]VAWA) take effect in other countries, such as India and
   Pakistan, organizations purposed to combat these clear violations of
   human rights will be established, and probably have done already.

   This is a quite different movement from those of the past, where there
   were formal groups with physical meetings and dues-paying members.
   This movement is fluid, with a variety of people taking action on a
   specific cause led by different people all the time. Today, Glenn's
   listeners are working on the Volvo issue. Tomorrow, it might be the
   readers of [4]Men's News Daily, or [5]Mensactivism dealing with
   something else. That's just here in the US.

   When I was focused on publishing the [6]DesertLight Journal full time,
   I reported on the activities of groups all over the world, and hardly
   a day would go by when I didn't hear of some group doing a
   demonstration, or an e-mail campaign, or something. I can well imagine
   if there was any way to take a census of all these people, they'd
   number in the millions. Just because there isn't any big building in a
   major city that says "Men's Movement" on the sign out front doesn't
   mean there aren't plenty of concerned, and committed people doing
   whatever they can to effect change.

   If you think the men's movement consists of a handful of men,
   disgruntled about child support payments, then you couldn't be more
   wrong. Of course the opposition is content to describe us that way,
   but that only demonstrates their ignorance. Thing is, the public,
   which includes both men and women, has been lied to and deliberately
   misled for several decades, which is not an easy block of
   disinformation to invalidate.

   Yet we persist. One day, we will reach the tipping point, when the
   anti-male hate groups that present such a darling, and reasonable
   image of themselves will be revealed for what they are.

References

   1. http://www.glennsacks.com/volvo.php
   2. http://www.acfc.org/
   3. http://www.mediaradar.org/
   4. http://www.mensnewsdaily.com/
   5. http://www.mensactivism.org/
   6. http://desertlightjournal.blog-city.com/