The Men’s Hour Programme Aug 2002
(Transcript page)
News about a Wiltshire, England protest in July and fuether protests
Complete soundtrack from the video of the NCFM, National Coalition
of Free Men, anti-NOW, National Organisation of Women event on June 21st
in St. Paul, Minnesota. The event called "Gender Feminism and the
Voice Not Heard: Has America Gone Deaf In One Ear?" includes Warren Farrell,
Trudy W. Schuett, Wendy McElroy, Dianna Thompson and Deborah Watkins.
The transcript - website addresses further down the page
Introduction
Hello and welcome to The Men’s Hour, coming to you on the third Sunday
of every month. The next programme by the way is Sunday 15th September.
This is Raymond Cuttill.
Firstly the Men's Hour is now trying out MP3 files as an alternative
to WMA and RM files. Let me know how you find the change. If you don't
know what those files are, don't worry. It shouldn't make any difference
to your Windows Media Player or RealPlayer. This is to make it easier
to have the Men's Hour on www.live365.com, but more news on that on the Men's
Hour website later on.
The Men's Hour is incredibly long today, about 3 hours. Firstly, there's
news of an events in England on the 21st of July and further protest events.
Secondly, there's NCFM, the National Coalition of Free Men, anti-NOW, National
Organisation of Women event on June 21st in St. Paul, Minnesota. The
event called "Gender Feminism and the Voice Not Heard: Has America Gone
Deaf In One Ear?" includes Warren Farrell, Trudy W. Schuett, Wendy McElroy,
Dianna Thompson and Deborah Watkins. We have the complete soundtrack of
the video NCFM have created. If you donate more than $25 to NCFM they
will send you a copy of the video. All websites and references are listed
on the programme webpage.
The Men’s Hour is associated with cyberManbooks.com, the world’s first
men’s publishers, bringing you ebooks, fact and fiction, written by men
and women, that is by, about or relates to men. cyberManbooks.com has men’s
movement books and links including some items that are free, and is on
the lookout for additional material. CyberManbooks.com is a royalty paying
epublisher for the right material. If you have a story or book idea, let
us know.
TO BE DONE LATER
Events
Pradeep Ramanathan
Will Hageman
Wendy McElroy
Dr. Warren Farrell
Deborah Watkins
Dianna Thompson
Trudy W. Schuett
I hear a lot of stories. Hundreds, probably, over the past two years.
I hear from men and women, married, divorced, single. There are lot of second
wives and grandmothers in there, dealing with the fallout of divorce. If
there are amicable divorces these days, I don't hear about them. It seems
more likely that if there are children, the whole thing is going to go bad,
and quick, because that's the way things are set up to work.
I also hear from men suffering from domestic abuse, that constant, daily
anxiety that sometimes escalates into full-blown attack.
No matter which situation it is, the thing that is the same is their level
of frustration, of weariness, and often there's a very clear thread of fear
running in the background. Their worlds have been shattered, or their lives
are continuing battles they never signed up to fight. For whatever reason,
they are trying any way they can to find a place of peace for themselves.
They come to me because they've heard somewhere I might have some answers
or directions to that safe place they figure has to be there somewhere.
Almost always, I have to tell them no. No, there's nothing there for them.
The best they can do for themselves is keep themselves out of jail if possible,
or if they've got sympathetic friends in other states or other countries
maybe they can just disappear. Sometimes the men I talk to are so angry and
in such pain they really can't hear any suggestions, if there were any to
make, anyway.
They've already had their basic choices of where and with whom and how they're
going to live arbitrarily made for them by strangers, so sometimes it's a
real surprise to them to find they have nothing and nobody left to depend
on but themselves. They want that lady in the desert to have a magic wand,
some arcane secret that will save them from the abyss that their future has
become. But I have nothing. All I've got is a website and a listening ear.
By the time they get to me maybe an act of God is the only thing that might
help.
When I first got into the movement, there would be times when my husband
would come home from work and he could tell by one look I'd had another one
of 'those days.' I used to cry a lot, and he'd wonder why on earth I'd let
myself get involved with those people. I really wasn't sure myself a lot
of times. Then he changed jobs and started working in a place where there
was time to listen, and now he knows. He sees lots of men every day now,
and he's hearing their stories, too.
There probably won't be much I can do for the guys who are right 'in it,'
right now, but I do know there will be something more in days to come. Don't
ask me how I know this, I just know. We'll just call it feminine intuition
and leave it at that.
Right now we've got people in several countries working hard for legislation
that will help even things out. But writing bills and passing laws is only
one small portion of the thing. What we need to do in addition to fixing
some badly skewed legal issues is fix the ideas. We need to disprove the
lies and clear up the misconceptions. We've got an entire societal dynamic
to deal with.
The personal is NOT political. Gloria Steinem and company somehow managed
to assign their own individual neuroses to an entire generation of women,
who accepted these things as not only truth, but as an agreeable truth, because
it made them feel special. It also gave these women permission, of a sort,
to blame all their problems on somebody else, and expect that somebody else
would take care of their dysfunctions, their malaisetheir ever-present needs..
And because Gloria, Betty, Andrea, and the rest of the girls blamed men,
so did many other women. So much of what was being said by these women seemed
reasonable, and possible that it was accepted. Women swallowed it whole without
realizing that there behind those reasonable ideas of equality lurked a vicious
agenda of hate.
I remember feeling uncomfortable, and vaguely unnerved with some of what
was being said in the pages of MS Magazine in the 70s. I'd read the 'zine
and toss it away. Often I thought they were kidding. But what they were doing
back then was planting seeds. Seeds of suspicion and division. No longer
were women going to look at their husbands, their fathers, their brothers
and sons, in the same way, if they had anything to do with it.
Today those seeds have emerged full bloom, into the outright fear and hatred
for men so often projected now as correct and proper. Women who want to manage
their homes and take care of their children are derided as lazy, or somehow
deficient . Or else the feminists say women should be paid for their 'valuable'
work as mothers and homemakers. I dunno. There's a lot of discrepancy in
this malicious form of neofeminism. They keep talking about oppression, when
in fact most of those girls wouldn't recognize actual oppression if they
stumbled over it at high noon coming out of Bloomingdale's. They whine nearly
constantly about their 'struggles,' and when you get right down to it, you
discover their 'struggles' consist of not being given -- being handed-- something
they want by somebody else. They don't want to work to earn anything like
respect or success in business, they want it presented to them, and they
will continue to whine and stomp their feet until they get it, no matter
how often they change their minds. They've created a cult of the worship
of the trivial. Even that's a big smokescreen
They work with a fanatic, obsessive zeal to cause as much damage and actual
oppression to men as they possibly can. (I do consider things like indentured
servitude and false imprisonment to be oppression.) But, really anyone who
disagrees with them is fair game. Their public behaviour so often resembles
that of an abusive personality I'm amazed anyone listens to them at
all. There's one group in New York now that goes out and attacks men who
look at them wrong. They gang up and start shrieking at some poor unsuspecting
dude, spray him with spray paint, and think they're entirely justified in
doing it. Though they don't run their gang business in the upscale neighborhoods,
but the low-rent district, where maybe they think they're immune from lawsuits.
These days, it's like any WOMAN has carte blanche to do any damn thing she
well pleases anyway.
These girls -- these feminists -- are so self-absorbed and conceited
they don't realize they've set themselves up with a heartless, soulless ideology
that will eventually get them nowhere.
When you live outside of a small town in AZ as I do, you can't help but be
up to your eyeballs in nature on a constant basis. In the mornings before
it gets too hot, I spend an hour or so outside with my two dogs before settling
down with the computer. I like to watch the sun rise because if I get outside
at the right time there's an instant where it's daytime on my right and it's
still night on my left. On the right you have the sun, blue sky, clouds,
and on the left the stars are still out, and sometimes the moon, too. So
right there you have an unmistakable demonstration of the balance of nature.
It's quite lovely to see. Then it's repeated while we watch the birds, building
their nests, taking care of their families. We've got bees around
the Mexican bird of paradise bushes, doing their cross-pollinating and taking
nectar back to the hive. Everything has a balance and is all part of a larger
balance, and if the balance is upset things stop working as they should.
People are far more complicated than the birds and the flowers, but if you
believe we can overcome the forces of nature you are either very arrogant
or very much uninformed. In 1993, people all over the United States were
reminded of the sheer power of nature when the Mississippi River rebelled
against 100 years of human engineering and tinkering. We had the same in
AZ, when the Gila River flooded at the confluence with the Colorado. They're
both big rivers, when they've got water in them. In both places crops were
ruined, people left homeless. It's taken years to recover from an event that
only took hours and days to happen, and some places will never be the same.
Feminism today is like a slow leak in a badly-engineered dam. The leak started
in the 60s when the principles of equality that had already been established
earlier were corrupted and forced on society again as new ideas. We didn't
see it then, because we were confident in the abilities of our social engineers.
Hey -- how much trouble can a
girl cause, after all? That was the attitude. We didn't realize the goals
of sex equality had already been attained, but it takes time, sometimes decades
and centuries for a whole society to alter its perceptions.
The basic goals had been attained, they were there in the form of laws and
government policies, but the girls didn't think it was fast enough, or far
enough for them.
We didn't realize that feminism, by its own nature, cannot be about equity.
It's right there in the word. The word isn't equalitarianism, it's feminism.
The word itself suggests concentrating on women -- that they should be elevated
in recognition, somehow. That can only be lopsided and unnatural.
What needs to be done is to restore the balance. Women who felt uncomfortable
with feminist ideals have been browbeaten and bullied by the girls with the
nasty attitudes so long a lot of us are beginning to get sick of it. We recognize
there can be no future for a society that values half its population so little
we allow them to be humiliated, physically and emotionally tortured, even
incarcerated for no crime beyond being themselves. We need a return to ideals
of self-reliance, where nobody else is responsible for your personal life,
we need a return to honoring our men for their irreplaceable value in society.
Most of all, we need a return to the natural roles men and women play in
the world, so we can all stop fighting each other and learn to love each
other again. Then I'll start hearing stories with a happy ending and they're
so much more satisfying.
Will Hageman introduces the questions
Question 1
Question 2
Question 3
Question 4
Question 5
Question 6
Question 7
Question 8
Question 9
Question 10
Question 11
Will Hageman concludes the meeting
End
That concludes the Men’s Hour for now. The next programme will be
Sunday 15th September. You can email us at menshour@menshour.com. If
you want men’s books please have a look at cyberManbooks.com. The Men’s
Hour is copyright 2002.
Events
Protests in England
Protest outside
a family court judge's house
MensMovement.org Events
Websites
National Coaltion of Free Men
Wendy McElroy - iFeminists.com
Dr. Warren Farrell - www.warrenfarrell.com
Deborah Watkins - NCFM
Dianna Thompson - www.secondwives.org
Dianna Thompson - www.acfc.org
Trudy W. Schuett
- DesertLightJournal
Trudy W. Schuett - cyberManbooks.com
Email
menshour@menshour.com
If you like this service, we would appreciate it if you were to
A dollar or two would do
(Facility provided by cyberManbooks.com. All donations go to MensHour.com)
