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Template:Discrimination2 Men's Rights involves the promotion of male equality, rights, and freedoms in society. Its aim is to promote the physical, economic and emotional well-being of all men and boys, as part of a general human rights, civil rights, or equal rights agenda. It is frequently concerned with family law, paternity fraud, and domestic violence. There is no single unifying manifesto or organization which can claim to speak for the entire movement and the term is used in various ways.

Related areas of the men's movement include:

• Fathers' rights focus on the relationship between fathers and their children and in particular family law.
• Masculism provides a counterpart to feminism and argues against legal constructs, reforms, or entitlements which deny men equal rights under the law on the basis of gender; there are conservative "traditionalist", "liberal", and libertarian strands.

Men's Rights Movement

The Men's Rights Movement is concerned with the promotion of male rights and freedoms in society. The development of the modern men's movement, with its own Community and philosophy, is a recent development.

In the 2000s men began to share their concerns on the Internet, often bringing forward unheard statistics or viewpoints. Its supporters are considered part of the Men's Movement, and often call themselves Men's Rights Activists, or MRAs. Father's rights and Domestic violence are areas central to the men's rights movement. It is primarily concerned with legal equality and representation, health, education, employment, civil rights and Constitutional rights. Many supporters are particularly concerned with the effect that Divorce, Custody, Rape and Violence Against Women Act-type laws have on men's rights and freedoms. It is argued that these laws cause violation of Constitutional rights such as the right to a fair trial and the right to due process.

Affirmative Action programmes, and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 are also areas of prime concern. One group, S.P.A.R.C., argues that these policies have a far more discriminatory effect than is widely reported or acknowledged. MRAs believe that Title IX is responsible not only for adverse college enrollment trends, but also for damaging male participation and opportunity in sports. It is argued that Title IX has become a "quota system" and, in seeking to fulfil those quotas, regularly discriminates against male needs and participation levels.

Men's Rights Advocacy and Masculinism also promote the concept of "defending male identity". Typically MRAs would subscribe to masculinity as strength, honour and honesty.

History

Prior to 1995 the men's movement was predominantly a reactive and disorganized movement that received little attention or recognition. The American Coalition for Fathers and Children was founded in 1995 by mature activists such as Stuart A. Miller, and Dianna Thompson. ACFC founded the shared parenting movement and organized the largest protests in the history of the men's movement, the largest held in over 225 cities around the world on father's day, 2001 in the "Bridges for Children" campaign.

Structure

Like most social movements, those concerned with men's rights comprise a wide variety of individuals and organizations, both united and divided in various ways on specific issues including the mistreatment of men in the media, gay rights, the abortion debate, family law and false rape allegations. Some groups are formally organized or incorporated, while others are casual alliances or the work of a few individuals.

Most Men's Rights advocates do not align themselves with "pro-feminist" men or their organisations. These men are commonly referred to within the movement as "collaborationists" or "manginas". Certain advocacy groups tend to support and embrace feminism and its supporters. The Mankind Project, for example has a sub-group called Rainbow Warriors, for its gay, transgendered, bisexual and questioning members. The organization provides a specialized training course called "Issues and Isms", or I&I, which teaches tolerance of men of differring sexual orientations, racial backgrounds, religious affiliations, et cetera.

Although the vast majority of men's rights leaders and activists are men, there are many women, including those in significant positions within the movement. For example, Sue Price in the Australian Men's Rights Agency has been at the forefront of activism there. Naomi Penner was a women's rights activist in the 1960s who later helped to create the National Coalition of Free Men in America in 1981. B.N. Saraswati founded one of the earliest Men's right group in India. Dianna Thompson, the first Executive Director of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children founded the Second Wives Crusade, which gained popularity very quickly, and later became part of the True Equality Network operated by Terri Lynn Tersak. Self-labeled feminists, such as Wendy McElroy, regularly advocate for men's rights.

Although most men's rights advocates are from the developed world, they form a diverse group, which include both singularly religious and atheistic individuals, as well as those from the left, right, and center of politics and every echelon of society. Significantly, however, the Men's right movement caught strength in India with Purush Hakka Sanraskhshan Samsta, of "Save Indian Family".

Issues

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Within the larger context of human rights, men's rights advocates are concerned with many of the same general issues as proponents of women's rights, only with special attention and consideration to the role of men and boys.

Education

In recent years, girls in the United States have tended to perform better at some educational levels. However most successful scientists and businesspeople were men.

Employment

Employment law is another area of concern, with such problems as unequal treatment around parental leave retirement age, and pension entitlements. They also assert sexual harassment policies are de facto directed against the male style of inappropriate sexual behaviour in the workplace, while ignoring the female style of inappropriate behaviour in the workplace. Others assert that many sexual harassment laws restrict men's basic freedoms, and cause men to be constantly on edge. They express anger towards the fact that a man telling a joke or simply referring to a co-worker by a nickname is grounds for dismissal or lawsuits. Spain's recent 40% requirement on boardroom members has come under harsh criticism from the movement, in paricular as it violates EU law which would make working for a company with 65% male board members illegal, while a company with 100% female board members would be acceptable under Zapatero's new law.

Family

Family law is one area of keen interest among men's groups. Fathers' rights advocates say there is a systematic bias against men in child custody matters. The treatment of husbands in divorce cases, whether or not there are children, is another issue.

Health

Health areas addressed by the men's rights movement include:

• Male-only military conscription
• Male circumcision
• The disparity in the spending on men and women in the healthcare system. As another example, in the United Kingdom more money is spent on breast cancer research than prostate cancer research ; however, breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in the UK 40,000 cases of breast cancer were detected in the UK in 2000 and claimed the lives of 13,000 women in 2002. In 2000, about 27,200 cases of prostate cancer were detected and claimed nearly 10,000 lives in 2002 in the UK .
• Increasing suicide rate amongst young men, four times higher than amongst young women in the United Kingdom; (73% of all suicide deaths are white males in the United States; In the United States, more women than men report a history of attempted suicide, with a gender ratio of 3:1)
• Workplace deaths and injuries occurs at a higher rate for men in the United Kingdom
• For domestic violence, advocates cite government statistics that show that in 15% to 38% of the cases of intimate partner violence the victim is male. They argue that the real number is likely to be higher, since male victims may be less likely to report abuse than female victims due to social stigmatisation . They also assert that the percentage of shelters for battered men should make up a respective percentage of all shelters. The National Coalition of Free Men has sued several women's shelters with the goal of allowing battered men and their children to be admitted and to receive assistance from shelters.(see Violence against men)

Media portrayal

Another issue of concern is the perceived anti-male bias in the media. Men's rights activists claim that men are portrayed unfairly on television, radio and in newspapers and magazines. They claim that not only does the media not pay serious attention to men's rights issues but that men are portrayed in a negative light compared to women, particularly in advertising, with archetypes such as the "dumb dad" (especially when advertising to children). The lack of concern over male issues such as suicide, boys of education, and a willingness of the press to re-print feminist statistics such as the "wage gap" has led to the term "Lace Curtain" being used. The term was coined by MRA Warren Farrell.

Refugees

In Australian immigration policy a distinction is regularly made between women and children (often treated erroneously as equivalent to "family groups") and single men. The details are subject to current debate and recently failed legislation (August 2006) in the Australian Parliament. But for example in one famous recent case, the Minister for Immigration, Senator Amanda Vanstone, determined as follows concerning Papuan asylum seekers (all forty-three of whom have since been accorded status as refugees): "The single men on the boat would be sent to an immigration detention centre, but families would not be split up and would be housed in facilities in the community". The discriminatory treatment of single women (routinely assumed to be members of some family) and single men evident in such a practice is rarely examined in the Australian media.

Social security and Retirement

In some societies there is legislated discrimination against males in provision of social security. In Australia, for example, a woman over 50 years of age may obtain a Widow Allowance approximately equal to a pension if, after turning 40, she becomes widowed, divorced, or merely separated from a spouse (who may be a de facto spouse). She must have "no recent workforce experience", but she can easily qualify for this well after the loss of her partner by going through a period of underemployment. There is no similar allowance for men. In Australia and the UK, some of these discriminatory arrangements (including also women's earlier qualification for Age Pension, etc.) are being legally phased out. The policy of "age 65 for men, age 60 for women" remains in place in most Western countries, however.

Criticism

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As with many social movements, some of the strongest criticisms of men's groups comes from other groups and activists. There is general hostility from feminists both male and female towards the Men's Movement. It is not uncommon for MRAs to be singled out and given labels by feminist supporters. Sometimes and argument is entered into in which statistics used by the Movement are called into question, and often this will lead to a positive revision of said statistics by the Movement. More often, however, the Movement is charged with misogyny and sexism by its critics. As yet, no top-level feminists, either in Governments or in women's groups, have sought to negotiate with Men's Rights Activists on their various inter-related issues.

Some commentators assert that most men's rights advocates have joined the movement as the result of negative personal experience during a divorce or custody battle. Many advocates do not dispute this claim and would indeed see it as a justified response, but critics argue many men do not realize legal discrimination until after they have experienced it themselves. The same could be said of a certain amount of women in women's groups. The Men's Movement would regard this logic as flawed, however, and an attempt to "shame" men out of asserting and defending their rights.

In general, all movements claim to address issues of concern to men and to remove institutional and societal discrimination against males. Some argue that feminism was originally an egalitarian ideology and that it has strayed from the goal of gender equality and begun to support the discrimination and abuse of males. Some, like Darren Blacksmith and Chris Key, however, condemn the entire history of the women's rights movement. The men's movement, as a whole, seeks equal rights for all people. The men's rights movement is often equated with the masculist movement, but these terms have never been homogeneous, well-defined, or stable over time, so the relationship or synonymy remains unclear. The culture of "MGTOW" (Men Going Their Own Way) is a recent type of "masculinism" that has come about.

Wages

A classic example is equal pay for women and the "wage gap." Research and statistics are used to argue that this is not sexism, but reflect that men are either required, or are more willing and/or able, to work in dangerous conditions, staying in a field longer (thus becoming more experienced employees), being more likely to relocate for higher pay, and numerous other factors. Critics of feminism point out that the methodology used by feminists to gather their wage gap information was flawed. Lenore Wietzman's study, (the one most often cited by feminist books for wage gap information), simply compared the aggregate reported earnings of men in the US to that of women. This ignores the professions chosen and the number of hours worked, as well as unclaimed income such as unclaimed day care and tips from jobs like waiting on tables. Warren Farrell's book Why Men Earn More identified many reasons why he believes men earn more money than women. When accounting for all of these factors using the same data Weitzman used in her report, the wage gap was less than 2 cents on the dollar.

Feminists and other critics, however, point to statistics that demonstrate dangerous and physically demanding attributes do not amount to higher pay and therefore the hypothesis does not have enough data to support the reason for the pay gap. Feminists, like social-psychologist Carol Tavris, labels the "solutions" put forth as sexist since the suggestions to close the gap falls entirely at the feet of women, that it ignores what her research argues is a societal tendency to devalue "women's work", and that it forces women to live their lives on the terms of men.

Violence

Critics also accuse men's right advocates of ignoring, trivializing, and/or defending male violence. In response, some men's rights advocates say they "don't disagree that some men rape", but state that some figures put out claiming that 1 in 4 or 1 in 3 women are raped are exaggerated or are inherently sexist. They also suggest that women can be as violent as men in intimate partner relations, often citing Dr Martin Fiebert's bibliography and Straus and Gelles findings.

Michael Flood, while acknowledging violence against men by women does take place, accuses men’s rights advocates of deliberately using "free-flowing numbers" without taking into account the contexts in which violence occurs. He says advocates neglect to consider when violence against a man by a woman can be in self-defense or an attempt to leave an abusive, potentially violent situation. He adds that they use the terms ‘violence’ and ‘abuse’ interchangeably without defining either; and that they fail to distinuguish between heterosexual and homosexual couples. Controversially, he states that Men's rights advocates ignore the "unreliability" of the Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS).. Murray Straus (co-creator of the CTS) refers to such claims about the CTS as 'erroneous'.

Richard Gelles (co-creator of the CTS) describes the claim by "the right of center" that: "Women Initiate Violence as Often as do Men" is a "significant distortion of research". One that "conveniently" ignores that "no matter what the rate of violence or who initiates the violence, women are 7 to 10 times more likely to be injured in acts of intimate violence than are men." As found in surveys conducted by himself and Murray Straus as well as the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

America's national media watch group, FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting), agree that violence against men by women takes place, but suggest that 'poor understanding', and the use 'out of context,' of the Straus/Gelles studies accounts for the difference in numbers alleged by some men's rights advocates and those from the American government's Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Critics including Michael Flood cite statistics suggesting that of reported assaults by a partner, men are more likely to call the police, press charges, and keep them than women (Schwartz, 1987; Rouse et.al; 1988; Kincaid; 1982).

Critics accuse men's rights advocates of defending male abuse, often by alleging it is justified due to a perceived "unfairness" men face. For example, a spokesman for The Men’s Confraternity, after a Perth man gassed to death his three children and himself in 1998 after his visitation was shortened by Family Court, voiced (perpetrator was) probably a decent, hard-working man who was pushed too far by the Family Court.

See also

• Antifeminism
• Fathers 4 Justice
• Father's Rights
• List of family separation research articles
• Marriage strike
• Masculinity
• Masculism
• Paternal rights and abortion
• Parental leave
• Pro-feminism
• Feminism
• Radical Feminism
• Feminazi
• Radical Faeries
• Seduction community
• Shared parenting

Significant writers

• Michael Green
• Warren Farrell
• Christina Hoff Sommers
• Glenn Sacks

References

1. http://www.deltabravo.net/custody/waronboys.php
2. Yupin Bae, Susan Choy, Claire Geddes, Jennifer Sable, and Thomas Snyder, "Trends in Educational Equity of Girls and Women", Education Statistics Quarterly, U.S. Department of Education, 2000
3. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/health/663688.stm
4. http://www.scenta.co.uk/Health/829436/conquering-cancer-in-the-uk.htm
5. http://www.policyalmanac.org/health/archive/suicide.shtml
6. http://www.policyalmanac.org/health/archive/suicide.shtml
7. http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/tables/table11e.htm
8. http://www.springerlink.com/content/l0h5l77h16395wpv/
9. "Vanstone refuses to return Papuans", Sydney Morning Herald, 26 January 2006
10. http://www.centrelink.gov.au/internet/internet.nsf/payments/qual_how_wid.htm
11. http://www.thepensionservice.gov.uk/atoz/atozdetailed/retirement.asp#state
12. http://www.cooltools4men.com/
13. http://www.mens-rights.net/commentary/chriskey/index.htm
14. http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/1999/Oct/wk1/art02.htm
15. http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm/
16. http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/CTS21.pdf
17. http://www.xyonline.net/husbandbattering.shtml
18. http://pubpages.unh.edu/~mas2/CTS44G.pdf
19. Richard J. Gelles, "Domestic Violence Factoids" University of Rhode Island Family Violence Research Program, 1995
20. http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1247

Bibliography

• Save the Males by Richard Doyle, 2006, ISBN 978-1411696334
• The Myth of Male Power by Warren Farrell, 1993.
• Women Can’t Hear what Men Don’t Say: The myths that divide couples and poison love by Warren Farrell, 1999.
• The War against Boys: How misguided feminism is harming our young men by Christina Hoff-Sommers, 2000.
• Who Stole Feminism: How women have betrayed women by Christina Hoff-Sommers, 1994.
• Spreading Misandry: The teaching of contempt for men in popular culture by Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young, 2001.
• The Legal Subjection of Men by Ernest Belfort Bax, 1908.
• The Fraud of Feminism by Ernest Belfort Bax, 1914.
• The Hazards of Being Male: Surviving the Myth of Masculine Privilege by Herb Goldberg, 1987.
• Refusing to be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice by John Stoltenberg, 1989.
• Iron John: A Book About Men by Robert Bly, 1990.
• Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man by Susan Faludi, 1999.
• Men Freeing Men: Exploding the myth of the traditional male by Francis Baumli, 1985.
• Flood, Michael: Backlash: Angry men's movements in: Rossi, Staceay E.: The Battle and Backlash rage on. 2004, XLibris Corp., ISBN 1-4134-5934-X, S. 261-287
• Flood, Michael: Men's movements in: XY magazine, vol. 6. 1996
• The Man's No-Nonsense Guide to Women: How to Succeed in Romance on Planet Earth by Marc H. Rudov, 2004.

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