3 Reasons The Mens Rights Movement Needs To Kill Itself (Like, Right Now)

1. Because they’re trying to make “fathers rights” a thing (really?)

First of I want to tell you about my experience with fathers.

I personally grew up the child of a single mother. She taught me to be strong and independent, to criticize the norm and to be fun and adventurous. I think I have my mother to thank for the fact that I am, at the risk of sounding a little full of myself, the awesome girl that I am today.

Ever since she passed away in 2009, as a result of a tragic fishing accident, I feel myself having to fend for myself without her love, support and the inheritance money she and I had lived on since her father, my grandfather, died. And even though, she did, as per her will’s wishes, donate whatever money she had left to the makeup company, ‘Maybelline New York’ , I still cannot blame her in the slightest for being a bad parent. This however, is not true of my father.

My father was never in the picture. My mother told me that after their divorce, she had issued a restraining order against him. She told me that my father had still tried time and time again to see me in spite of this, but that she had never allowed it and legal action had been taken against my him as a result. At the time I really wanted to see him and it seemed to my childish and uncritical eyes, like he wanted to see me too.

In hindsight, however, I am glad he never was a part of my life. I have come to realize now, after discussing my childhood with fearless and smart women’s studies professors, that my father left us out of selfishness. He had never tried to see me and there had been no restraining order. What my mother had told me was just a white lie, a strong feminist way to protect me.

That’s just my story, but this seems to be the pattern throughout our society. Fathers taking a hike and never returning, fathers beating their children and fathers shunning LGBTQ individuals or calling them ‘weird’. It’s all over television shows and commercials.

Still, mansplainers, anti-abortionists and single-mother shamers turn around, trying to say that Fathers should have rights when it comes their offspring. Oh yeah you mean so they can give their children a right hook? I can’t for the life of me begin to understand this male entitlement. Children are a product of women’s bodies, therefore they belong to women.

You know what, to even out the fact that women are treated like second class citizens in society, I believe it’s only right that Fathers should be treated as second class parents. I mean they don’t even have to face the struggle of carrying a kid for nine tough months and at the same time keeping their empowerment at a nice and stable level, so how much is it really theirs anyway? 25%? 20%? I’m going to say 17%. Sorry fathers, you’re just not that important. Deal with it.

2. Because women do deserve all they can get following a divorce

Being a straight, young, 20-something woman, I’ve had the displeasure of being under the same roof as countless cisgendered men (even if it’s mostly for the one night).

Most of them have been totally unaware of, or even frustratingly disinterested in, the most basic essences of structural oppression in modern society, such as the influence of the Patriarchy, the social network spread of slut-shaming and the medias fortification of fat-shaming. I cringe when I think about all the wrong-thinking attitudes and unapproved opinions, that I as a 20-something woman have had to encountered when interacting with men and I’m still only a young woman in her 20’s.

For example, there was this one boy (who I dated for about a week last year when I needed money for Spring Break in Cancun), who called a girl who had been raped a *trigger-warning* “rape-victim”. Needless to say I told him to check his privilege, dumped him and firmly let him know that they are to be called “rape-survivors”. Nothing else. Got it?

Does it come as such a surprise that SIWs (strong independent women) are instigating 70% of all divorces, when these are the kind of people they have to deal with on a daily basis?

The institution of marriage is in itself a dangerous patriarchal custom that dates back thousands of terrible years, like even before the middle ages and the Victorians and all that. It has been nothing but a vessel for heteronormativity, nuclear-family worship and spinster-shaming. I am so glad that women as a group are finally realizing that marriage is but a phallus-powered prison and that divorce is a liberation without compare. Divorce is also full of benefits, that women can now, thanks to the work of feminists like myself, unabashedly take advantage of.

Men’s rights activists complain and whine endlessly about women gaining assets and money from the men that they divorce. Do they not realize that the these women are not just everyday people? Do they not see that they SIWs who’ve gone through, in most cases, infernal periods of wedlock with undesirable, boring men?

In the worst case scenarios their husbands have been soft, icky “nice-guy” chumps, whose wallets were hefty, but who might have been hittin’ it bigger in the boardroom than in the bedroom.

Who are you, to deny, these women, who have been fierce and vibrant enough and managed getting out reasonably unscathed, their fair share of dough?

How can anyone, in a world where Jack makes a dollar for each seventy cents that Jill makes, have any whatsoever objection to marriage-survivors getting at least half of their husband’s wealth? Like, hello, the fifties called, they want their sexist view of women being nothing but the helpless property of men back.

One particular, high-profile divorce that you cretins love to bring up is that of Cesar Millan. In 2010 Cesar Millan, the Hollywood dog-whisperer, found himself broke as a result of a series of dumb financial choices. Like any strong woman, his wife decided that a man who let himself fall from grace to loserhood so quickly was not worthy of her time and so she filed for divorce.

Millan was ordered to provide monthly payments and alimony to his ex-wife. What happened next is what men’s rights activist tout like its some kind of big deal and in anyway relevant to the work of divorce court settlements. Millan attempted suicide. Ok. So what? He was being weak. He overdosed on pills. Boo-hoo. How does this warrant him getting out of providing basic livelihood money to the woman who has enriched his life so much over several years of marriage? It seems like men’s rights activists often drag these sob stories into the light to try and prove a point. It is truly playing the victim card. Guess what. It’s not working. At all.

3. Because they claim that that women who falsely accuse men of rape are a problem worthy of mention

Men’s rights activists absolutely, loooove to whinge like little boys who’ve had their nintendo yanked from their sticky little hands.

I mean come on, just come on. According to statistics by Swedish Gender Studies Majors coupled with my own guesstimations, 1 in 2 women are raped during their lifetime. Rape is, without a doubt, the most prevalent and common problem in our society, the existence of rape-apologists coming in at a close second.

As a 20-something feminist, I am very excited about some of the big strides my movement has made in expanding the definition of rape. It may shock you that as recently as ten years ago many people online, and maybe elsewhere, saw rape as narrowly as a physical and sexual attack on a woman in a dark alleyway or something of that ilk.

I am happy to have been a part of the broadening perspective of what rape is. Society, or at least its most important echelons such as social media and College culture, is becoming more open to the fact that rape doesn’t have to be physical or intentional. Concepts such as emotional rape and spiritual rape are becoming more accepted concepts that many social justice advocates are not averse to advocate.

I hope for and foresee a future where this development will help us women get back at those that make us feel uncomfortable without having to show too much physical evidence of having been wronged. We might soon live in a safe and free society where we can easily–and without much thought, put away creeps who bother us, maybe not for that long a time, but it will still feel empowering to have that power.

With all this progress, men’s rights activists seem to want to rewind about 150 years. How do they do this you ask? Well, instead of focusing on celebrating the survivors of rape and making the punishment for rape harder, they focus on some few and far between cases of “false rape accusations”. First of all this is like, a totally flawed term to begin with. A rape accusation cannot, by definition be false.

If a woman feels that she has been raped in whatever way, she has been raped. End of story. Nobody can take that away from her, and legal actions should be taken accordingly.

Now some may argue that a woman would accuse a man of rape out of spite, even though no rape has occurred. This is of course a bizarre accusation of an accusation and is very damaging to women everywhere. It puts women in a bad light, I don’t know any woman who could do this.

However, In the event that such an outlandish thing would ever occur, society must view it as a preemptive action. The woman probably felt angry and threatened, probably as a result of a hunch that she was going to be raped in the future, and since all men are capable of rape, her accusation must be regarded as very valid and serious. Rape would probably have occurred anyway.

There. In a few mere lines I have completely destroyed the legitimacy in the men’s rights movement’s lament over false rape accusations. Reload your cannons bros.

There you have it, the new wave of backlash against feminism is a joke . It rests upon a misogynistic and troublesome pile of teeming testosterone. It despises women and it advocates rape-apology, victim-blaming and anti-abortionism.

So from all us SIWs, do us all a favor, Men’s Rights Movement, and just kill yourself.

Oh and #banbossy.