Letter from the Editor:

"Oh Yeah? How come I haven't heard anything about that?"

That seems to be a constant question asked whenever Mens Issues crop up. There is no evidence, there are no studies.

No one REALLY knows how big these issues are, or how much they are affecting society. It's not politically expedient to find out either, with so many interest groups arrayed against allowing the truth to come out.

Much hay has been made over the expression "Feminazi", and much scorn and ridicule is heaped on those who point to the similar tactics employed by both political groups. There is such a thing as "Godwin's Law", which posits that the veracity and effectiveness of an argument, is inversely proportional to the amount one compares one's opponent to NAZIs. The argument is based on the idea that Holocaust type activities are too barbaric for our "civilized" society, that we have outgrown such impulses, and modern social mores would not allow such depravity to take hold. Those people I would direct to Adam Jones' excellent piece, "Effacing the Male" in which he details not only that such atrocities happened barely 15 years ago in Europe, but that our own Western "modern" media covered the worst of the atrocities up. Because the facts didn't agree with Political Correctness. The same can be said of the Media's treatment of men accused of Rape, with a lynch mob mentality, they mercilessly smear innocent men, causing pain, loss, and even death...all for a few more ratings points. Because that's what the people want. Because "everybody knows" men are all pigs, subhumans not deserving of care and attention on their own merits.

In the Apex Fallacy, Zed hints at the possible reasons why women seem genetically unable to perceive the massive injustice done to men daily. And why the newsmedia seems determined to paint all men as perpetrators, and all women as victims.

In Gynocentrism Theory, Adam Kostasis begins down the path of exploring how we came to hate our men and boys so much.

And in A Modest Proposal, Robert O'Hara points to the ease with which men could have some semblance of balance restored to their lives. All that seems to be missing, is legislative will. The Mens Movement is growing stronger everyday. These injustices, so easily uncovered by amateur writers, so easily analyzed by amateur scientists, cannot POSSIBLY be escaping the attention of the Powers That Be. They know full well what is happening, and why. The question we must all ask ourselves is: "Are we going to let them keep getting away with it?"

Factory

When is it OK to Punch Your Wife?

In This Issue:

4 8 13 14 18 36

Editorial:

Gynocentrism Theory, an Introduction A Modest Proposal

Guilty as Charged
Effacing the Male.

The Apex Fallacy

Contact:

menzmagazine@gmail.com

This magazine exists as a collection of blog posts considered compelling enough for publication here. The articles contained in this magazine are solely the views held by the author, and are written as opinion pieces only. Every effort is made to cite the original source, as all of the articles included in this collection are available in their original form online. All contributions, including the design and editing of this magazine, are provided on a volunteer basis. If you, or someone you know, would like to contribute their talents, please, let us know. MenZ Magazine is edited in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.

When is it O.K. to
by: Paul Elam www.avoiceformen.com
It might be easy to think that the title to this piece is simple provocation, a tool to inspire people, perhaps mislead them, through sparking an angry reaction or just plain morbid curiosity, into taking a look at what this article is about. Even though the thrust here is slightly different than the title would imply, there is no deception here at all. The question is serious, and the answer, to be certain, is so clear it need not take an entire article to address. When is it O.K. to punch your wife? Well, anytime you are defending yourself from her physical attack. You have the right, at that moment, legally and morally, as is explicit in every legal model I know of, to use whatever force is necessary to protect yourself. the power of the pussy pass, or the men who are in fact the underwriters of those passes, will surely bring their wrath down upon you. They will rush in to scream, You NEVER hit a woman! NEVER, NEVER, NEVER! I can just see the bulging veins in their necks, their flushed cheeks, and spittle flying from their mouths.

And of course they are right. A man should never hit a woman. NEVER. Not if he knows what is good for him.

Ah, but you really dont, which is of course the real purpose of this article, and a purpose well worth study and consideration. You see, the surface answer about self defense only applies in the world of legal theory and the land of oughttabe. In the real world, where we actually live, the preponderance of people, from your friendly neighborhood patriarch to his twin sister the Gloria Steinem clone, see this type of dialog as a reason to go nuclear. In fact, I knew that the title would be provocative precisely because we live in a culture where I am not supposed to even ask such a thing. Its like asking when it is OK to hunt an endangered species, or steal a senior citizens social security check, or joke about children with cancer.

Its not because some women dont deserve it. Heck, there is many a woman that righteously deserves a foot being broken off in her ass. You read about them a lot these days; women who beat and abuse their partners, who poison them, who hire paid killers to take them out, who shoot and stab and cut their husbands and boyfriends in their sleep, who run them down and kill them in cars, who get other thugs to torture and abuse them.

There are women, and plenty of them, for which a solid ass kicking would be the least that they deserve; where any justice at all would deliver to them the executioners needle. But hey, we cant even defend ourselves against them, so it makes perfect sense that they wont find themselves on the wrong side of the glass window in a death chamber no matter what they do. The real question here is not whether these women deserve the business end of a right hook, they obviously do, and some of them deserve one hard enough to leave them in an unconscious,

And people, whether it is women gone insane with

o punch your wife?

innocuous pile on the ground if it serves to protect the innocent from imminent harm. The real question is whether men deserve to be able to physically defend themselves from assault when it comes from a woman. Does the concept of self defense even apply to men who are the victims of violent females? Technically, the law says yes. But the people around you, especially the ones with guns, regard the pussy pass as a higher authority. In other words, I have been a part of the problem. I hate those kinds of lookinthemirror moments, but there is only one thing you can do with them freaking fix the problem. And so I am here to start. If you are willing to keep your job as a police officer by taking an abused man to jail for the sake of department policy or convenience, or even for your job, then you lack the integrity to be a public servant. Please take off your badge and resign. I am sure there are openings in the nearest street gang where rule by force, not law, is much more your cup of tea.

You hit a woman, even in self defense; indeed if you even call the cops on one that is beating the crap out you, the beta thugs we have come to call police will come round to your house and deliver some fucking law and order on you. I know, I just crossed another line. This time that thin blue one. Just like asking when it is alright to punch your wife, I am breaking a social gag order to point at police, rather at what police have become, and speak the truth. But of course, that is how the police ended up doing what they are doing by everyone keeping their mouths shut. I respect the idea of police work very much. I have known many in law enforcement, including members of my family. I also know that street cops are obliged to follow department policy, no matter how screwed up it is, or face losing their jobs. For that reason alone I have taken a soft line with the police for a long time.

Or perhaps you like your position as beta male thug enforcer. Perhaps you dont care who you cuff and cage as long as it gives you a hard on. Either way, I am tired of the public overlooking your actions, and worse, patting you on the back for being morally bankrupt and abusing innocent men. Lest you think I am being over reactive about just how far the police have gone. Lets take a look at a case or two.

In Sacramento, California David Woodss wife Ruth took their young daughters outside in 39 degree temperatures, for seven hours, till their lips were blue and they were borderline hypothermic. After she returned, Woods argued with his wife about her actions, till she grabbed a serrated kitchen knife and stabbed at him. The blade passed through the collar of his shirt and actually gave him a small nick in the flesh of his neck. Apparently unsatisfied, she reared back to stab him again, but this time he hit her in the

mouth. She dropped the knife and ran to call 911. Sacramento Sheriffs Deputies arrived at the scene to intervene, drew their guns, and slapped cuffs on Mr. Woods.

They were preparing to take him to jail, over his protests, but it was the daughters, who insisted that the deputies listen to them (they sure as hell were not listening to him), that finally prevented them from taking their father to jail and leaving them alone with the disturbed and violent mother. But, they did not take the mother anywhere either. They released Woods from his handcuffs advised him to get her to counseling.

Consider the recent story out of Orlando, Florida, regarding the false rape accusation epidemic. Even in that situation, as reported by police themselves, they do not want to arrest women simply because they are women. The pussy pass is police issue.

In a recent video posted from you tube, we get such a clear example of how police and women operate, that it is worth using it again for reference.{1} The basic turn of events. Man angers women. Women attack, verbally and physically. Man refuses to comply. Women call police. Women lie. And lie again. And lie again. And lie again. Police officer treats the man as though he is the problem, going as far as to tell him that he cannot disrespect women. Any thoughts on what would have happened if this man were not smart enough to film his actions?

After the incident Woods was quoted as saying, Now, isnt that strange? When she had a fat lip it was a felony and I was going to jail. But when they finally realized she tried to stab me in the neck, it stopped being a crime and became a mental health issue. Woods is not alone. This sham is passing for good police intervention on family violence in every major city in the country. From L.A. to New York City, police are embracing policies for handling domestic calls that can only be described as politically motivated, simple minded and criminal.

Whatever happens, arrest the guy, unless someone beats you over the head hard enough with the truth that you have no choice but to consider arresting whatever aggressor the evidence points to. In doing this, our police, with our absolute complicity, have gone from being public servants to public menaces, trampling on victims, enabling criminals mindlessly obeying department policy to the point that Gestapo references would not be overblown. Their handling of domestic disputes is part of a massive roll back in civil and constitutional rights and they need to be called to task for it. ABC recently ran a segment showing people's reactions to a woman abusing a man.

And this is what we have, people. From rape allegations to domestic disputes, to civil protests, we have police that are badge wearing, gun toting enforcers of feminist governance. They are either too poorly trained, or too brainwashed or too stupid to realize the socially destructive nature of their actions. So when is it Ok to punch your wife? Ask David Woods, hell tell you. Dont defend yourself. Dont expect help. Just run. Forget your property. Forget justice. And get a hotel because there wont be a safe house. Not for you.

If you are a man in this culture and you are unfortunate enough to have an altercation with a woman, you know who is coming to take care of things, dont you? Thats right, the Sacramento Sherriffs Department. Or maybe the Orlando police, or maybe that muscle bound cop in the park who would walk past you getting beaten like he was a fry cook instead of a law enforcement officer.

Predictably, few people cared at all, one even celebrated the guy getting a beating, and most just decided on their own that he had it coming, but most telling is the cop that walked past this scene doing nothing and later told reporters, Yeah, if it had been the other way around I would have definitely done something. Then he excused it by talking about how he was raised, admitted that it was a double standard, but informed us that even being confronted with it was going to change nothing. Hey, it is what it is, he says.

Whoever comes, they are not about any law except her law, and you will find that out as they put the handcuffs on you and haul your ass to jail for having been stupid enough to expect them to do the right thing. Let that sink in. Let it sink in any way you like, but I advise you to get it on your way out of her reach, and theirs. This aint no country for men, any more.

{1} YouTube has since removed the video

roissy.wordpress.com

I suppose I should feel guilty for robbing so many single older women of exciting and fulfilling dating lives and leaving them stranded in favor of dating younger women, but then I squeeze that supple flesh and smell that enticing natural aroma and I remember why I dont. You will too.

1 2 3
Denial Anger

The 5 Stages of Cougar Grief:

Ive still got it, baby! Ive never looked or felt better. These are the best years of my life. 30 is the new 20! My sex drive is higher. I will age gracefully. Ive really grown into my skin.

Wow, I guess its all over. Ill never find a man now. Its just me and you, Fluffy. Come here, mommy needs a kitty cuddle.

No selfrespecting man dates some 20 year old floozy. Men who date younger women cant date women their own age. Its the patriarchal misogynistic culture that devalues older women. Who needs them! Pigs!

Once I apply this new tangerineemu oil antioxidant exfoliating facial cream predigested and squeezed through the anus of a bird of paradise, Ill look ten years younger. Ive got a great personality. [author's note: no, you don't]

Bargaining

4 5

by: Roissy

Depression

Maybe settling isnt so bad. That homeless guy outside Whole Foods has nice hair.

Acceptance

by: Adam Kostasis

Gynocentrism Theory: An Introduction

The Battle of the Sexes has degenerated into a Dirty War, and we are, each of us, being drafted into it by forces who care not a whit for equality or fairness.

Propaganda, as a tool of control, is effective only insofar as the vision of the world that it presents concords with the perception of the world experienced daytoday by its targets. The wider the gap between the perceived world and the propagandistic representation of the world, the less effective and therefore less useful the propaganda will ultimately be. We have reached a juncture at which women are increasingly rejecting feminism as irrelevant or inapplicable to their lives, because the world that feminist orthodoxy describes does not appear to be planet Earth. At the same time, we are approaching a zenith of feminist control over the actual inhabited world, which combines state repression with gender tribalism, both forces intensifying exponentially as they use each other as leverage to climb ever higher.

their positions in government, in academia, in think tanks and in the media to make their violent fantasies a reality, advocating the renunciation of men's basic human rights.

To take one recent example, the Secretary of State of the most powerful nation in the world recently announced that an international mobile prosecution unit shall be established specifically to target men around the world. To take another recent example, a leading feminist [Jessica Valenti] has suggested that certain legal principles designed to protect innocent citizens from persecution and unjust imprisonment, dating back to the signing of the Magna Carta, should be withdrawn from men. Nor is feminism a problem confined to the Western world. Men are subject to the arbitrary rule of women in India, facing severe penalties for inadvertently causing the slightest offense. None of this squares with the 'womenasvictim' clich, which has so usefully served feminists in getting to this point. Nevertheless, feminism is firmly entrenched and in control of the mechanisms which boast the monopoly on physical power, legitimate or otherwise. There is hardly any countervailing force which remains. The West has found its new Imperial Mission to replace Global Christendom: enforced worship of women. As any dissenting voice is immediately and violently stamped out, feminists are free to radicalize their antimale agenda to the point of moral sickness and to unleash unto the world all manner of vindictive atrocities. For you see, when propaganda has ceased to be an effective tool of control, one seeking control will simply find other means. Control of the state the monopoly on physical violence is the means which

I am reminded of an ancient riddle, which asks, 'how high can one climb up a mountain?' The answer is 'to the top,' because once you reach the summit, the only possible way is down. Feminism has no obstacles left; total control is within its grasp, and by total, I do mean in the sense that it shall be totalitarian. The victim card has served as an entry pass through the back door of state and supranational institutions. Now empowered over men, feminists have reestablished the principles of Valerie Solanas' Scum Manifesto, declaring in language clearly evocative of the Final Solution that we shall soon witness The End of Men. The 'sex war' is not cooling down as women approach (or in some cases, surpass) equality with men it is heating up. Feminists are not only publicly inciting male hatred and getting away with it, they are using

feminists have sought. But unlike propaganda, which manipulates the mind, state control only brutalizes the body. The power of the controllers always ultimately rests upon the resilience of the controlled, hence consent must still be manufactured. The Roman Empire did not last for five hundred years by the exercise of brute force, but by mass support; the Emperor was glorified as a mortal deity, and even the smallest townships in his realm voluntarily erected statues and altars in his honor. For too long, men have been worshiping at the altar of the female, and it is tempting to believe that this psychological submission will not yield even in the face of physical oppression or extermination that men will march to their demise like sacrificial lambs, hoping to win women's favor with their last servile actions. But proclamations regarding The End of Men may well turn out to be as empty as those which were made nearly twenty years earlier, concerning The End of History. The socalled Clash of Civilizations which followed led that author to refute his own position. We should be optimistic that a true Clash of the Sexes will soon have feministminded women eating crow. As feminism grows ever more powerful, and begins to realize its radical ambitions, it will simultaneously exhaust its capacity for manufacturing consent. Those chivalric illusions which ensure the consent of men, and which feminism ultimately rests upon 'womenasvictim,' 'womenasprecious,' 'womenas helpless,' and so on will become rather more difficult to maintain in time. The more force is advanced against men to bridle and inhibit their lives, the more discontent shall be nurtured among them. The misandry bubble is due to burst, and with every example of overreach, which sees yet more good men cast into the role of criminal and subjected to humiliating and vicious punishments, another crack appears in the wall, another step we take closer to the day that the whole hateful edifice collapses under

its own weight and, crucially, under ours.

Our task, then, is twofold: first, to prepare the ground, in order to hasten the collapse of feminism. Second (and complementary to the first): to construct the ideological weapons to help prevent a feminist resurgence following its collapse.

Both of these goals require, not force, but some propagandizing of our own. Things being the way they are, this does not require us to distort the truth. On the contrary, we shall, for the most part, be exposing those truths which others have distorted; revealing the facts to a wider audience than has yet received them, diligently and unapologetically. As one notable activist in the field recently put it, he does not need to attack feminists all he needs to do is quote them. Simply exposing feminist hatred to the disinfecting sunlight of the world might well be enough to turn the tide which is why enormous energies are expended on misdirecting, discrediting, neutralizing and obscuring the arguments and advocates of the opposition.

One key strategy for the achievement of our task was announced at an April 2010 conference, in the form of Male Studies, a new discipline already facing hostility from an academic world that has long been a bastion of radical feminism. That this sore thumb, this thorn in the side of scholarly uniformity should provoke such outrage as it has done should not be surprising. Here is a selection of topics which Male Studies is set to cover:

Socioeconomic factors leading to males' over involvement in the criminal justice system, underemployment and limited opportunities as fathers, resulting from changes in child custody law (economics, forensics, law, public policy); Misandric representations of boys and mature

males in the media and advertising (media studies including cinema, television and internet, and advertising);

Accounts of the experience of being male (history, literature, autobiography); Pressing issues related to the emotional wellbeing of boys and older males, most notably depression and suicide (clinical psychology, medicine and psychiatry, social work).

Friedrich Nietzsche, writing in the late 19th century, warned that if one gazes into the abyss for long enough, then one shall find the abyss gazing back into them. It must be deeply troubling for feminists, to wake up one morning and find other people deconstructing them, having made it their mission in life to expose and correct feminist wrongdoing.

This would seem to be the reason for the abusive response, from the feminist sector, to the idea of men discussing issues of sex and sexism without the supervision of women. It matters not what feminists think of Male Studies, because feminists are not the discipline's target audience; its success is not dependent upon their approval, a fact they will no doubt have trouble reconciling themselves to. Regardless, even if they launched a concerted campaign to stop men from discussing their experiences through the fora of academia, they are incapable of preventing this from happening elsewhere. The true sticking point for wouldbe dictators today is that we live in an Information Age. It is rather difficult to control the flow of information when our very epoch is defined by it. So, let's have these discussions right here, right now as long as people can use the internet to congregate and speak their minds, nothing can stop us. Let's have these discussions in a million other places too, out in the real world because if men had never spoken up about their experiences, as men, then we would not be looking forward to the commencement of Male Studies in the near future. There are already a great number of websites devoted to Men's Rights issues; indeed, these seem to have proliferated over the last few years, sprouting up all over the pasture like so many delicious mushrooms! For most of these weblogs, their content needs no greater unifying theme than opposition to feminism. Given the growing and active network of people concerned about the status of men today, it has become possible to push the envelope a little further. This weblog aims to encourage the intellectual crystallization of what we are calling the Men's Rights Movement, by taking a narrow lens across a broad range of topics. This weblog is dedicated to the elucidation of Gynocentrism Theory. What is Gynocentrism Theory? To put it simply, it is a system which explains social relations between the

sexes. It supersedes Patriarchy Theory, the cornerstone of all feminist thought. Now memetic, Patriarchy Theory has proved a remarkable tool in denying men their rights, including their most basic human rights to dignity and bodily integrity, on the pretense that all men are oppressors (or at least, allied with oppressive men from whom they receive benefits) and that all women are victims of male power. Gynocentrism Theory is the articulation of many years of effort by various thinkers in the Men's Rights sphere to describe a vision of the world which more accurately reflects the experiences of men and many women, too. In contrast to the simplistic, blackandwhite tribalism of Patriarchy Theory, Gynocentrism Theory does not equate male fulfillment with the holding of tyrannical power over women. Gynocentrism Theory does not accept that men act as a power bloc. On the contrary, Gynocentrism Theory exposes the divergence between demographics and interests; fundamentally, that while a small number of men may be the ones holding social and political power, this by no means implies that they do so for the benefit of all men; and that in fact, more usually, they do so for the benefit of most women and to the detriment of most men. Gynocentrism Theory advocates that power be understood as multifaceted, and that policy has historically been a matter of appealing to, and protecting, women. The above, no doubt, shall make heads spin among those who assume that power at all levels can be identified according to the shape of the genitals of those who get to make important decisions regardless of what they actually decide.

"I'm not cut from the same mold. I don't read from the same old story." Pennywise
My readers must understand that the concerns which Gynocentrism Theory addresses are not limited to feminism. Feminism is still fairly new on the scene, while Gynocentrism has been around for as long as recorded history. The Men's Rights Movement seeks to address problems associated with feminism, but does not limit its attention to these problems. Many of these problems existed prior to the emergence of feminism proper in the late 19th century, although they have been expanded and exacerbated since. Feminism is only the modern packaging of Gynocentrism, an ancient product, made possible in its present form by the extensive public welfare arrangements of the postwar period.

In spite of its radical rhetoric, the content of feminism, or one could say, its essence, is remarkably traditional; so traditional, in fact, that its core ideas are simply taken for granted, as unquestioned and unquestionable dogma, enjoying uniform assent across the political spectrum.

10

and their identity, to save women that they do not even know is neatly encapsulated in that popular phrase, 'women and children first.' (And if you're paying special attention, you will notice that it is never uttered as 'children and women first.' The very thought is absurd! This is because what is really meant by the phrase is 'women first, children second.')

Feminism is distinguishable only because it takes a certain traditional idea the deference of men to women to an unsustainable extreme. Political extremism, a product of modernity, shall fittingly put an end to the traditional idea itself; that is, in the aftermath of its astounding, allsinging, alldancing final act.

Allow me to clarify. The traditional idea under discussion is male sacrifice for the benefit of women, which we term Gynocentrism. This is the historical norm, and it was the way of the world long before anything called 'feminism' made itself known. There is an enormous amount of continuity between the chivalric class code which arose in the Middle Ages and modern feminism, for instance. That the two are distinguishable is clear enough, but the latter is simply a progressive extension of the former over several centuries, having retained its essence over a long period of transition. One could say that they are the same entity, which now exists in a more mature form certainly, we are not dealing with two separate creatures. Take any of the great Empires that swept the globe the Roman, the Ottoman, the Spanish, the British and you shall find Gynocentrism as the order of the day. Such extensive geopolitical enterprises, historical testaments to man's triumph over the earth and sea, were built and maintained by men perfectly accustomed to the idea of dying for the sake of their women. It is an idea that has outlived nearly every other, and endures to this day in our American Empire. That men should sacrifice themselves utterly their very essence, their being

The endurance of these social and class codes owes nothing to totalitarian control. Even when staging bloody revolts against tyrannous monarchs and landed elites, men aspiring to power left the Gynocentric code well alone. The selfsacrifice of men is a sexual constant which has survived all regime change. Gynocentrism, it seems, was not entirely without benefit to men; in peacetime, a man could be fairly assured of a stable familial structure and of his own paternity for the children he helped to raise. Regardless, what was offered to men was essentially compensatory. For most of history, men apparently considered this compensation to be reasonable enough or perhaps, Gynocentrism was so deeply ingrained that they simply did not consider it at all. Through their actions, they affirmed (and renewed) Gynocentrism, and whether it went by the name honor, nobility, chivalry, or feminism, its essence has gone unchanged. It remains a peculiarly male duty to help the women onto the lifeboats, while the men themselves face a certain and icy death. It is only now, with the political and social developments of the 20th century that have driven a wedge between the sexes, that the kind of thoughts found on this weblog can emerge. Late modernity provides us with new conceptual resources new ways of thinking, which can be traced back to the Enlightenment of the 17th18th centuries. Out of this intellectual meltingpot eventually crawled feminism, a vindictive blend of classic Gynocentrism, victim fetishization, radical utopianism and liberal presuppositions. It would be an oversimplification to say that feminists set out to make gains. On the contrary, they made demands for both gains and losses. They wanted to gain men's rights, but lose their traditional female responsibilities. This, it seemed, would put women in a social position equal to that of men. It was an argument rooted in the liberal tendencies of individualism, civic equality and selfdefinition. In rhetoric if not in reality, feminism asserted its points of concurrence with the most admirable aspects of traditional liberalism: equality before the law, the abnegation of arbitrary rule, and so on. Extending rights to all women appeared, logically enough, to be the successive phase of human liberation following the extension of rights to all men. It was assumed more fool us that once granted equal rights, women would voluntarily adopt the accompanying responsibilities that men had always fulfilled. This did not come to be. Feminists were

happy to gain men's rights, and lose women's responsibilities, but they were horrified by the suggestion that they should adopt men's responsibilities as a corollary. Rather than men and women sharing the burdens of the world, we got the White Feather Campaign.

responsibilities while extending their license to act however they damn well please has met with wild success. And it is precisely this state of affairs which begs certain questions, made possible by the conceptual resources we have inherited from the Enlightenment: what if a man doesn't want to live this way? Why should men continue to fulfill or perform their traditional obligations, when women will not live up to theirs, but neither will they adopt the responsibilities corresponding to their rights at present? The questions arise: were men wrong, all this time, to sacrifice for the sake of women? Should we, in fact, have no obligations to women whatsoever? The reason why the Men's Rights Movement arouses such hostility, from both the left and right, is because it is the first attempt in history for a sex to attempt to break out of its traditional role. Feminism is not this; it is the entrenchment of the power that women already held. The Men's Rights Movement today goes far beyond simple accusations of feminist wrongdoing. Its adherents labor at historical analysis and social criticism, and with the benefit of twoand ahalf centuries of imagination and innovation stemming from the Enlightenment, can easily conceive of a world in which men, for the first time in history, are not required to selfsacrifice for women.

This campaign began in the early days of the First World War in Great Britain, where women were encouraged to pin white feathers on young men who were not in military uniform. The hope was that this mark of cowardice would shame them into doing their bit in the war. The practice soon spread to Canada, where patriotic women, in response to declining voluntary recruitment figures, organized committees to issue white feathers to men in civilian clothes and publicly denounced the slackers and shirkers.

This is surely the future, and it is an inevitable reaction against thus, an unintended consequence of feminism itself. In times past, when men could claim compensation for their selfsacrifice, they accepted that this was simply the way of the world. In the absence of compensation, and with the screws being turned ever tighter on men in every sphere of life, they are provoked into questioning the new arbitrary rule, and into formulating their very own liberation project in response.

It is surely worth remarking that many of these women were suffragettes; and thus, even as they campaigned for equal rights with men, they used shame as a tool for ensuring that men, and only men, fulfilled traditionally male obligations. Particularly, duty to give up their own lives, because they were men, for the sake of women. Whatever disadvantages women may have faced at the time, there is surely no greater coercion than death. Much has changed since the First World War, and the feminist project to slack and shirk on women's

My statement above that political extremism, the product of modernity, shall put an end to the traditional idea should now be clear. Feminism, which is the extreme form of Gynocentrism, shall put an end to Gynocentrism altogether through the reaction which it creates. We are fifty years into the tremendous final act; a grand, orchestral performance, a theatrical display making unprecedented use of sound and light to confuse and cast illusion. But if all the world truly is a stage, then all men and women are actors with roles of our own choosing, now free to toss aside the scripts we have been handed and create a new story in place of the old. And when the curtain finally falls, I do believe that there shall be no encores.

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Adam Kostakis has been carefully reading Men's Rights websites for the past couple of years, and has finally decided to contribute something himself. His blog is named Gynocentrism Theory and can be found at gynotheory.blogspot.com

photo via Google

A Modest Proposal for Male Reproductive Rights

By Robert O'Hara The issue of reproductive rights is, no doubt, one of the most important issues that any society deliberates. The decision to reproduce, with whom, when, and under what circumstances is, by far, the most important decision that any individual will make in their lifetime. Because of this human beings have, in every society, developed social conventions, laws, contraception, fertility control methods and medical procedures to both enable individuals to exercise control of and hold them responsible for their reproductive decisions. Since we are a diecious species the division of rights and responsibilities between genders is of tantamount importance and should be done so in an equitable manner if we are to value gender equality. Yet one thing is certain: Women currently have total control l over their reproduction and exorcize the right whether or not to assume whatever degree of parental responsibility they choose both before and after child birth. Men, on the other hand, have very little control over their reproduction and are held completely responsible for the choices women make as far as becoming a parent is concerned. There are those who would argue that this has largely been the case for most of civilized history and that it is only right and good. But this is not so. As pointed out in a previous article, The Real Reason We Do Not Have a Male Pill the paradigm of reproduction before the advent of birth control and abortion was drastically different than what it is now. If a woman were to reproduce she had to do four things that were crucial for her well being and that of her offspring. These were:
1. Find a man who was able to assume the parental role of father 2. Find a man who was willing to assume the parental role of father 3. Make it worth said mans while to take on the parental role of father 4. Do something to make said man feel assured that the child/ren she were to present to him were in fact his through chastity before their relationship, fidelity during the relationship or through flat out lying about who the real father was

If a woman failed to do these things and chose to have sex with a man, thus causing a pregnancy, (and make no mistake, I am talking about adult women who know where babies come fromnot children) without doing these things then she would put herself and her offspring in a very precarious position. Likewise a man who wanted to become a father had to make decisions converse to the decisions a women would have to make such as carefully observing the womans behavior as far as fidelity, assessing her motherly attributes and demonstrating his ability to assume the role of father to her child. Parental responsibilities were divided along the lines of care giver and home maker for the women and provider and protector for the man. These roles and responsibilities where never the result of social constructs such as patriarchy or male privilege or gender stereotypes rather
Cont. pg 34

Guilty As Charged: How the American News

Media Blithely Destroys Men Accused of Rape

I founded one of the few Web sites in the English speaking world dedicated to giving voice to persons falsely accused of rape, The False Rape Society. Among other things, I closely follow the way the American news media covers rape accusations. I write today to tell you that it isnt pretty. In the false rape milieu, this is an important topic warranting an extended discussion. When I review news reports of alleged rapes, I often predict to myself whether I will be reading a story in a few days announcing that the accusation was false. My correct score in predicting the many that turn out to be false is infuriatingly high. Not only is the lie infuriating, too often, so is the way the initial accusation was reported. News Reports Typically Credit the Accusers Story as the Truth Mainstream news media reports about garden

variety he said/she said rape allegations are routinely unfair to the presumptively innocent men accused. Not all are covered unfairly; some are covered with evenhandedness. But overall, false rape claims do not fit the news medias preferred narrative, so in a variety of subtle, and not so subtle ways, news reports of alleged rapes typically credit the accusers story as the truth. Reporters often act as little more than stenographers for police; police, who are trying to build a case against the accused and not exonerate the accused, tell reporters only what the accuser has told them, leaving out the parts that dont add up. It is not hyperbole to assert that when it comes to he said/she said rape accusations, the she side is typically wrapped in the mantle of truth and victimhood, and the he side is dismissed as the mendacities of a rapist. The result is what we saw in the infamous Hofstra

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false rape case last year.

In that case, reporters didnt just rush to judgment; they did a 60meter sprint in record time. The headline of a New York Post story read as follows: Nightmare gang rape at Hofstra. The first two sentences of the story left little doubt for readers that a rape certainly occurred, even though it didnt: An 18yearold Hofstra University coed was gang raped by five men on campus, cops said last night. The shocking attack took place Sunday at around 3 a.m. The names and lineup photos of the four scared rapists, young men barely older than boys, and the lurid tale of their supposed vile gang rape, were splashed all over the newspapers for the worlds titillation. In contrast, the accusers identity was guarded with greater tenacity than Clark Kent protects Supermans. But it was TV reporters who were best equipped to foment a little oldfashioned rape hysteria. Typically, a television reporters idea of covering a rape case amounts to passing on what the police told her without challenge and without doing her own investigation. Then the reporter grabs a few passersby to say how frightened they are that a vile rapist is on the loose.

drama of its initial report suggesting that a rape had occurred. It was delivered in the hurried, matterof fact style of news reports that the news team knows wont be of much interest to viewers. Presumably, rapists are scary; false rape accusers are only scary to the people, and their families, whove been falsely accused.

Likewise, when Dallas Cowboys stars Erik Williams, an AllPro offensive lineman, and NFL Hall of Famer Michael Irvin, were falsely accused of rape, the same thing happened. The media was too quick with covering this in a huge way the play the news got, the sensational page1, topofthenewscast story, said Anantha Babbili, thenchairman of the journalism department at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth. There was a given in the tone and the tenor of the media that Irvin and Williams were guilty until proven innocent. And when the charges were dropped, the media reaction mirrored Hofstra. Mr. Williams explained: Did you notice that no bulletin flashed across all these sport channels declaring that Michael Irvin and I were innocent? Where was the coverage? I bet you no one stopped Baywatch or pulled the prime time movie to tell those same people the truth. Michael (Irvin) was right nobody was interested in the truth. News Media Transforms Accusers into Victims

In this case, television reporters described the supposed crime with a gravitas usually reserved for the death of a president. The Associated Press television report started off with these chilling words: She was tied up in a mens bathroom stall where five men, one by one, would rape her. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EmbZ1X3M5w. The report proceeded to implicitly credit the accusers farfetched tale as factual dont trust me, watch it for yourself never bothering to point out that the evidence for the alleged rape was nothing more than the evolving narrative of an 18yearold woman groping for victimhood, and that her story had more holes than the basketball net at the Mack Sports and Exhibition Complex on campus. Nor did the report make clear that the young men she accused provided police with consistent and adamant accounts that flatly contradicted the accusers tale. If the report had provided a balanced account of the evidence, viewers likely would have concluded the same thing the district attorney concluded later the very day the story aired: the accusers account was a lie. In the aftermath of the Hofstra debacle, Carol DAuria of 1010 WINS said this: We [reporters] need to move slower. She added: But I dont see that happening. No Reciprocal Coverage When the Lie is Revealed

Hofstra was a microcosm of how presumptively innocent men are smeared by the fair and objective American news media, often viciously. Many news reports of rape claims that turn out to be false start off with words similar to these: Police say a college student was raped in her dorm room last night. 19yearold [males name] was arrested in connection with the crime. [Males name] held the victim down and threatened her with a knife, police say. Reporters have no compunction about labeling rape accusers as victims, blinking at the fact that if shes a victim, the man she accused, by necessity, must be a rapist. I believe that words matter, especially when it comes to serious things like rape charges. I complained to the New York Times last year about an online story that dubbed a rape accuser as the victim, and the story was immediately changed to add the crucial alleged before the word victim.

The Associated Presss television news report about the Hofstra false accusers recantation was much shorter and lacked the overthetop Chicken Little

But another time when I complained about the use of the term victim in a story reporting on how a rape charge had been dropped, the reporter went all high and mighty on me: Journalistically, I cant quite go far enough as you. The prosecutor made it clear that shes not prosecuting the girl for false claims, and her case against [the man accused] couldve been dropped for lack of evidence, not just because he was falsely accused. Of course, prosecutors word isnt golden, but given that no one has proven

the girl made a false claim here, I cant take away her victim status. There are tons of questions, though. Thanks for reading. I read the response several times to insure it wasnt a joke. Heres how I responded: I appreciate your response, but precisely who elevated this girl to the status of a victim? She is, in fact, a selfproclaimed victim, and I am unaware of any journalistic standard that justifies the use of this nomenclature for someone whom the objectively verifiable facts tell us likely is NOT a victim. The falsely accused man seems every bit as much and more so a victim, does he not? At worst, we have one persons word against anothers, with ample circumstantial evidence for rejecting outofhand the young ladys account. It is wholly inappropriate to attach sanctity to her tale for no reason other than the fact that she made the claim. That is offensive to a man who is supposed to be presumed innocent, and who the facts tell us in all likelihood is innocent. We owe it to all men falsely accused of similar crimes to stop presuming their accusers are victims when, because of the nature of the crime, it may never be possible to disprove the accusers account beyond any conceivable doubt. Nevertheless, the reporter refused to change the word victim. False Rape Claims Stick Like Skunk Odor

rape claims has caused more damage to innocent people than the scorn connected with any other type of false claim. False rape claims have caused innocent men and boys to be killed and to kill themselves; to be beaten, chased, spat upon, and looked upon with suspicion long after they are cleared of wrongdoing. They lose not only their good names but often their jobs, their businesses, and their friends. It is often impossible for the falsely accused to ever obtain gainful employment once the lie hits the news: for the remainder of his life, a falsely accused man will have prospective employers Googling his name and discovering the horrid accusation. A More Dangerous Problem: Jurors Improperly Rely on the Skewed News Accounts

Last year, the New York Times reported that in a major Florida criminal trial, not one, but nine nine jurors had been doing their own internet research about the case during the trial, resulting in what the Times called a Google mistrial. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/us/18jur ies.html?_r=1. It turned out this was just the tip of the iceberg. During a child sexual assault trial in England, a juror was torn about how to vote, so what do you suppose she did? [S]he posted details of the case online for her Facebook friends and announced that she would be holding a poll. After the court was tipped off, the woman was dismissed from the jury. J. Browning,
When All That Twitters Is Not Told: Dangers of the Online Juror, 73 Tex. B. J. 216 (March 2010). Because nothing

Even though the young men at Hofstra were declared to have been falsely accused, it is impossible to say the story had a happy ending. The typical reader and viewer of the news coverage did not realize that accounts of the purported rape, gussied up as fair and objective journalism, were nothing more than the accusers naked allegations. The men themselves immediately realized they were damaged goods because of the news coverage. Anytime anyone Googles my name, rape is going to be right there beside it. My name is forever tarnished, said one of the 19yearold men. What if I am applying for a job or whatever in the future? I feel like I am always going to have to offer some explanation. Readers will recall that in the aftermath of Duke lacrosse, even after the states attorney general went so far as to declare the young accused men outright innocent of the charges, there were still people who insisted no one knows what really happened that night, even though we do know what happened that night a woman lied about being rape. What effect does this coverage have on innocent men? One need not look to the hanging trees in the Old South to know that the public scorn from false

says justice better than a Facebook poll.

During another Florida criminal trial, a juror looked up the defendants rap sheet on the Internet, and shared the information with his fellow jurors, resulting in a mistrial. R. Artigliere, J. Barton, and B. Hahn, Reigning
in Juror Misconduct: Practical Suggestions for Judges and Lawyers, 84 Fla. Bar J. 8 (2010).

These disturbing instances of juror indiscretion are not isolated examples. They point up a grim problem that judges and lawyers are only beginning to understand occurs more than anyone cares to admit: Jurors accessing the Internet before and during trials to learn or talk about the parties, witnesses, and legal issues they are confrontingconduct that violates the universal legal principles that jurors should judge the case on the evidence and law presented in the courtroom and not discuss the case or consult with outsiders until the jury is discharged. H. Dixon, Guarding Against The
Dreaded Cyberspace Mistrial and Other Internet Trial Torpedoes, 49 Judges Journal 37 (Winter 2010).

For every case where juror impropriety is discovered and a mistrial declared, it can reasonably be assumed that many go undiscovered. What does this mean for rape cases? Given the way

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the American news media reports rape accusations, the implications for presumptively innocent men are chilling. Rape trials frequently devolve to he said/she said disputes over whether the accuser manifested consent to engage in the act. Jurors looking for any help they can get to sort out thorny fact disputes might Google the defendants name to learn the real story behind the case. What they will find, more often than not, are skewed, and sometimes grossly unfair, reports of the case masquerading as objective news reports, as described above. Its bad enough that the news media typically rushes to judgment to suggest the guilt of the presumptively innocent, destroying their reputations and sometimes causing them to be physically beaten and worse. Now, when presumptively innocent men are on trial for rape, they can be deprived of their liberty simply because a jury relied on some reporters wickedly skewed recitation of the facts. What To Do? The outcry over this latest trampling of mens due process rights has been muted, at best, and there have been no serious calls for routine sequestrations of juries in rape cases. Nor has there been an outcry over the reputational damage to the falsely accused generally caused by routinely reckless journalism. In short, there is virtually no recognition of the unconscionable and severe harm to our falsely accused sons whove been publicly identified as potential rapists. In contrast, we are quick to protect our daughters good names when they accuse men of rape by cloaking them in anonymity. It is reasonable to argue that anonymity for accusers and accuseds is dangerous in a free society. It is also reasonable to ask, why is the victimization of our daughters deemed more worthy of our protection than the victimization of our sons?

What can we do to help? For starters, all of us need to call out journalists who report rape accusations as fact, who credit the accusers story as truth just because she said it, and who blithely destroy the lives of our sons without airing their sides of the story. In short, all of us need to complain about the mad, morally grotesque rush to judgment. Today, it may not be your son whos been falsely accused. But someday it might. Wouldnt it be nice to know that other fair minded fathers care about his fate, too?

Ef f a c i n g t h e M a l e
The war in Kosovo between March and June 1999, tragic as it was, offered an ideal opportunity to analyze the representation and rhetoric of gender in western mass media. An overriding Serb strategy in the conflict was "gendercide" against noncombatant men the same strategy Serb forces had followed from the outset of Yugoslavia's war of dissolution.(1) From the first day of the war in Kosovo (24 March 1999), and indeed long before, the Serbs overwhelmingly targeted "battleage" men for the most severe atrocities, although women, the elderly, and children were also exposed to a wide range of abuses and war crimes, ranging from killings to rape and forced expulsion (Jones, 1994). The report issued after the Kosovo war by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was emphatic in pointing to these gender and ageselective strategies: Young men were the group that was by far the most targeted in the conflict in Kosovo ... Clearly, there were many young men involved in the UCK [Kosovo Liberation Army] ... but every young Kosovo Albanian man was suspected of being a terrorist. If apprehended by Serbian forces VJ [Yugoslav army], police or paramilitary the young men were at risk, more than any other group of Kosovo society, of grave human rights violations. Many were executed on the spot, on occasion after horrendous torture. Sometimes they would be arrested and taken to prisons or other detention centres, where, as described afterwards by men released from such detention, they would be tortured and illtreated, while others would simply not be seen again. Others were taken for use as human shields or as forced labour. Many young men "disappeared" following abduction.(2) The present article, based on a broad sampling of media coverage during and after the war, explores how this reality was conveyed or not conveyed by major western news media. It is my conviction that the strategies are of relevance far beyond the Kosovo case, and indeed beyond the theme of gender and international conflict; they speak to the typical means by which male victims of violence are marginalized or "effaced" from the prevailing media and humanrights discourse.

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"Including Women," Excluding Men

In their groundbreaking work, Manufacturing Consent, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky devoted a chapter to the subject of "Worthy and Unworthy Victims" in media coverage. (Herman and Chomsky, 1988: 3786.) They presented a comparative treatment of the intensity and character of media coverage of victims who were convenient for U.S. policymakers Cambodians under the communist Pol Pot; the Polish priest, Jerzy Popieluszko, murdered by Polish security agents contrasted with inconvenient victims, such as the slaughtered and systematically starved inhabitants of East Timor (invaded by a U.S. ally, Indonesia), or one hundred religious workers killed by U.S.sponsored terror regimes in Central America. Comparing directly the coverage of the priest Popieluszko with the mass of "inconvenient" religious workers (including a Salvadorean archbishop and four US nuns raped and murdered by Salvadorean soldiers in 1980), Herman and Chomsky concluded: For every media category, the coverage of the worthy victim, Popieluszko, exceeded that of the entire set of one hundred unworthy victims taken together. We suspect that the coverage of Popieluszko may have exceeded that of all the many hundreds of religious victims murdered in Latin America since World War II, as the most prominent are included in our hundred ... [W]e can also calculate the relative worthiness of the world's victims, as measured by the weight given them by the US mass media. The worth of the victim Popieluszko is valued at somewhere

between 137 and 179 times that of a victim in the US client states; or, looking at the matter in reverse, a priest murdered in Latin America is worth less than a hundredth of a priest murdered in Poland. (Herman and Chomsky, 1988: 39.)

The concept of "worthy" versus "unworthy" victims seems a fertile one in analyzing the treatment of the victims of the gendercidal atrocities in Kosovo, and male victims of violence more generally.(5) In this section, I sketch some of the predictable, even ritualized, means by which "unworthy" male victims were excluded from the analysis, and "worthy" ones notably children and women privileged.(6)

The effacing of male victims in mass media is generally accomplished by three interrelated strategies. The first might be called incidentalizing. Modern news, as noted, is a hierarchical creature. It generally "leads" with the dominant theme of the article, which the headline is also meant to convey. Many newspapers, printing or reprinting an article or wireservice report, will include only (a version of) the headline and the first several paragraphs of the story. Thus, to relegate an important theme to passing mention in the middle reaches of the article, or to introduce it only at the end, is effectively to render it incidental and inconspicuous, if not outright invisible. Consider, for example, the strategy adopted in the following Agence FrancePresse dispatch (emphasis added):

Forensic experts examine a mass grave near Srebrenica in 2002.

The Death March of the Kosovo Refugees

MORINA, Albania, April 18 (AFP) Among the thousands of refugees fleeing Kosovo, none suffer worse than those forced to travel for days and nights on end on foot. While many cross the border into Albania and Macedonia in cars or open trailers drawn by tractors, the rest have had to walk, harried by Serbian troops on what for some became a death march. Staggering up to the red barrier marking the frontier, carrying children and baggage, and supporting the elderly, they sob as they gulp down food offered by humanitarian organisations. Their accounts, consistent, precise and detailed, describe a Kosovo that has been turned into a hell, crisscrossed day and night by columns of refugees expelled from the Serbian province in ferocious "ethnic cleansing." "We walked almost without stopping for four days and four nights," groaned Hysnije Abazi, 22, from Kladernica in central Kosovo. "We were escorted all the time by Serbs in vehicles or on foot. We were not allowed to drink, stop, rest or shelter from the rain. Before we set off they set fire to our cars and tractors and ordered us to march in columns." They also took away all the males aged 15 or over [!]. Crinklehaired Afertita Kajtazi, 23, her eyes ringed with fatigue, said their [i.e., the refugees'] treatment was deliberately harsh. ... (emphasis added)

danger to the prisoners ... 19 bodies of prisoners lay in and around the courtyard, and on Monday those bodies lay in the same spots ... An inspecting magistrate said the bodies were left outside because he had not had time to carry out his work, what with all the bombing. ... Then there was the new group of dead on display Monday ... Twenty five bodies in the foyer, some lined up on top of one another dominostyle, many with streaks of blood on their bodies ... These corpses were not dusty. ... No one seemed to know why the 19 Saturday bodies were left outside, but ... (Williams, 1999, emphasis added.)

There was precisely one reference to "men" in the story: to the "masked [Serb] men with rifles" hovering around the facility. Males as agents of violence were visible, and gendered; as victims, they were effaced from the discourse. Perhaps the most bizarre example of the displacement strategy employed during the war came in midApril, when the subject of Kosovar men used as forced labourers surfaced in press briefings and subsequent media coverage. The BBC began its report on "Kosovo 'grave gangs'" with the claim that "Kosovo Albanians dressed in red [were] being forced to move dead bodies and dig graves" a strange emphasis, given the subsequent acknowledgment that these crimsonclad Kosovars were all "men and boys." (BBC Online, 1999a; emphasis added.) By the time the story reached the Press Association, the gender variable had disappeared completely: "Chilling new evidence has emerged of Serbian attempts to cover up massacres of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. Armed Forces Minister Doug Henderson said he had received 'disturbing reports' of unarmed civilians dressed in red transporting bodies away from atrocity sites." The story quoted Henderson as stating: "To cover up atrocities, the Serbs are using civilians dressed in red to clear up massacres. They are clearing bodies well away from where massacres have occurred." (Press Association, 1999; emphasis added.) As the Kosovar men buried the dead, so were they largely buried in the policy equation and public discussion. The Press Association report managed to go its entire length with the gender of the chainganged gravediggers unmentioned, although the colour of the prisoners' dress was noted twice, and the children, mother, and grandmother among a group of refugee landmine victims (the main focus of the story) were carefully designated. The third marginalization strategy is simply exclusion. The trope most commonly adopted here can be summarized in the littleexamined phrase, "including women" or, equally commonly, "including women and children." The trend has been persistently evident in media coverage of the Bosnian war, as a report as recent as October 1999 makes plain (duly emphasized throughout):

Here the "genocidal cull of ethnicAlbanian males" takes place in the blink of an eye, amidst a torrent of frankly lachrymose descriptions of the convoys of helpless "worthies." A second strategy is displacement. Here, the male is defined by some trait or label other than gender even when gender obviously, or apparently, is decisive in shaping the experience or predicament being described. During the Kosovo war, typical displacement terminology included designations such as "Kosovars," "ethnic Albanians," "bodies," "victims," and "people." In this context, consider Daniel Williams' report in The Washington Post on the mass murder at Istok prison, a facility bombed by NATO planes in late May 1999. After the last of three bombing raids, the Serbs paraded 19 male corpses before western media, declaring that they were the bodies of prisoners killed by NATO. It now appears likely that many of these men, along with up to 100 others, were massacred by the Serbs in one of the war's larger acts of gendercide. Here is how Williams reported the Serbs' propaganda show: Bodies of dead prisoners were shown to reporters lying around the prison courtyard Saturday [22 May], and on Monday [24 May] another group of corpses inside a foyer entrance to a cellblock. ... Despite the presence of 1,000 mostly ethnic Albanian prisoners, [NATO] bombed it twice Saturday and once early Sunday. No one seemed to take into account the possible extra

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Bosnian forensic teams have exhumed 251 bodies, mainly of Muslim civilians, in the Serbrun half of Bosnia in the last two weeks ... The bodies, victims of the 199295 Bosnian war, were exhumed from more than 14 mass graves each containing up to 15 corpses, as well as individual graves ... The majority, including 12 women and five children, were executed by Bosnian Serb forces who had captured these regions at the beginning of the war ... Some 3,000 people, mainly Muslims, were still missing in northwestern Bosnia. (Agence France Presse, 1999a.) Ninetythree percent adult male casualties. But this fact passes unmentioned in the rush to draw attention to the "worthy" victims. Literally dozens of examples of this strategy could be cited from the wartime and postwar coverage of Kosovo: In Velika Krusa, Dutch soldiers yesterday reported finding charred remains of around 20 ethnic Albanians, including women and children, and said they expect to find more nearby. (Dan, 1999.)

And this, from the aftermath of the Kosovo war:

Air Marshal Sir John Day, deputy to Britain's Chief of Defence Staff, Gen. Sir Charles Guthrie, said NATO was "within days" of making a formal decision on a ground invasion and was confident NATO would have approved. Guthrie told the allies the Yugoslav army was "overrated" and "bully boys good at killing women, children and old people." (United Press International, 1999.) The emphasis in the first passage is on the presence and newsworthiness of "many" women and children (which is, after all, what one would expect in any demographicallyrepresentative population). In the second, the cowardliness of the Serb forces is exemplified by their murder of every element of the civilian population except "battleage" males. The manifestly most vulnerable demographic is the only one not represented in the formulation except insofar as the killing of defenseless battleage men is seen as a legitimate test of the Yugoslav army's power and machismo.(9) (As R.J. Rummel put it in a different context, "One would think that murdering an unarmed man was a heroic act." [Rummel, 1994: 323.])

Splashes of blood are still visible on the lower portion of a door at a pizzeria in Suva Reka, where up to 50 people, including women and children, are believed to have been slaughtered. (Lynch, 1999.)

Since starting work on 18 June, the UK forensic team has exhumed over 260 bodies of Kosovar civilians from mass graves, including women and the remains of 21 children ... (British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook). (Kirkland, 1999.)

Let it be stated plainly: "Including women" excludes men. To get a better sense of the origins and implications of the phrase, substitute "including Europeans." (Indeed, the systematic exclusion of one category of victims, and the implicit prioritizing of the minority category, is very similar to colonial discourses in Victorian times.) The trope is particularly misleading when the phenomena described such as the massacre at Velika Krusa and the campaign of mass killing in Kosovo as a whole are so disproportionately and methodically slanted against males. In virtually all cases, the phrase "including women and children" can be translated as "including a majority of adult men and a minority of women and children." But men remain the "absent subjects," entering the narrative only indirectly and by inference, if at all.(8) A more subtle version of the exclusionary strategy can be seen in the following passages:

The analytical befuddlement to which this strategy rapidly leads was exemplified by a 22 April 1999 story in The Washington Post, "Accounts of Serbian Atrocities Multiplying." As the headline suggests, this was one of the Post's major attempts to confront the scale and patterning of the Serb rampage in Kosovo. The article featured several examples of the displacement strategy mentioned above, referring to "scores of accounts of Yugoslav forces killing small groups of ethnic Albanian civilians" and the "'summary, random executions of small groups,'" although the vast majority of the atrocities specifically mentioned in the article were not at all random they fit the standard genderselective pattern.(10) But the most astonishing reference in the Post story was to "the [Yugoslav] government's role in the massacre of dozens of women and children at the Kosovo village of Racak" in January 1999. This is the prewar massacre for which international monitors gave a breakdown of 31 victims as follows: Twentythree adult males of various ages. Many shot at extremely close range, most shot in the front, back and top of the head. ... Three adult males shot in various parts of their body including their backs. ... One adult male shot outside his house with his head missing ... One adult male shot in head and decapitated. ... One adult female shot in the back ... One boy (12 years old) shot in the neck. ... One male, late teens (shot in abdomen). (The New York Times, 1999.)

Several dozen Kosovo Albanians, many of them women and children, were hiding there in the hills when about six Serbian paramilitaries found them and shot the men, demanding to know where they were hiding their weapons, villagers said. (Fisher, 1999a.)

The standardlycited death toll for the Racak massacre (the investigators arrived after more than a dozen autopsies had been completed) is 45. I have

found specific mention of one female killed 18yearold Hanushune Mehmeti (apparently the "adult female shot in the back"), who was described by one witness as having been "shot when she tried to come to the aid of her brother." (Bird, 1999.) Other sources cite two other women among the total of 45 victims, thus three in all. The one child victim was the twelveyearold boy "shot in the neck." Thus, at the outside: fortyone adult men executed in cold blood, and three women and one boy also killed, in this massacre of "dozens of women and children." The Post's eagerness to find "worthy" victims among the carnage leads to their conjuring by the dozens out of whole cloth. Nor is this a matter of simple historical accuracy. It amounts to a misrepresentation of the essence of the slaughter at Racak which was a harbinger of the hundreds, possibly thousands, of individual acts of gendercide against Kosovar males between March and June 1999.(11) The point can be buttressed with a further example from Kosovo reporting. One of the most widelynoted acts of gendercide during the war was the massacre at Izbica in early April. The Christian Science Monitor (1999) related the events in only slightly less distorted a fashion than did the Post in reporting Racak: "The Monitor tracked down three men who in separate interviews insisted they were among 60 or 70 people who helped to bury the dead. One gave the number of victims as 148, with two survivors; the others spoke of 150, including several women ..." (emphasis added). Remarkably, in the entire Monitor story, it was nowhere stated that this "worst massacre known in Kosovo" was a truly towering act of genderselective slaughter.(12)

Bosnian concentration camp detainees

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Bosnian Croat concentration camp internees

One of the most intriguing and revealing motifs deployed during the Kosovo war, both in policy statements and media commentary, was the notion that Kosovo was being "emptied" of its ethnicAlbanian population. There could hardly be a more blatant contradiction between this theme of emptying/expulsion and the numerous passing references to mass detentions and executions of "battleage" males. Take the following examples: Kosovo Could Be Emptied Soon. A complete emptying of Kosovo appears possible as the expulsion of ethnic Albanian refugees resumes with brutal force, the UN refugee agency said Friday. "The effort by the Serbian authorities to expel the entire ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo is again underway," Kris Janowski, a spokesman with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) told journalists. (Agence FrancePresse dispatch, 16 April.)(13) Britain accused Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic Monday of trying to empty Kosovo of its entire ethnic Albanian population as NATO examine ways to help refugees on the run within the Serbian province. ... "From reports overnight, it is clear that Milosevic is once again trying to empty Kosovo of all ethnic Albanians," [Tony] Blair told the annual meeting of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development ... (Agence FrancePresse dispatch, 19 April.)

"Emptying" Kosovo

Kosovo Serbs Holding Pictures of Friends and Relatives Missing in Kosovo

Expulsion of Kosovars to Be Total, U.S. Says. ... New evidence indicates that Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic intends to sweep all of Kosovo and not allow ethnic Albanians to remain even in the province's most sparsely populated areas, the State Department's top authority on atrocities said on Wednesday. ... (The New York Times, 22 April.)

A moment's thought reveals the fallaciousness of the framing. Quite clearly, Kosovo was being "emptied" in manner that was highly selective according first to ethnicity as was generally acknowledged and secondly to gender, which rarely was. Rather than being allowed to seek refuge, a substantial portion of the civilian male population was falling prey to a "genocidal cull," and tens of thousands of others were in hiding, at mortal risk of roundup by the Serbs. Any who attempted exit with the refugee populations usually ran a gauntlet of Serb paramilitaries and/or regular forces that were prone to strip them selectively and en masse from refugee columns and lead them away to detention or summary execution. In the light of these manifest realities, the "emptying" motif seems nothing short of Orwellian an excellent example of the kind of conceptual vacuum into which Kosovar males fell during the war.

Rape Worse Than Death?

Another phenomenon in public discussion of the Kosovo war and the Balkans more generally has been the privileging of rape or mass rape of women over the slaughter or mass slaughter of (non combatant) males. The implicit prioritizing of sexually assaulted women, often on ambiguous or scanty evidence, reflected both ageold biases and more recent feminist activism on the issue of mass rapes in Bosnia and elsewhere. While feminist research in this area is to be commended and learned from, it has also contributed to a onesided depiction of the atrocities of war that tends to consign the male victim to oblivion. Consider the evaluation of the Bosnian war by Bogdan Denitch, otherwise one of the most cleareyed appraisers of Yugoslavia's collapse: The gendering of the massacre victims and concentrationcamp inmates was fairly well established by this point (1994), but Denitch reserves the very "worst" designation for the mass rapes of women, rather than the "vast and well documented massacres of mostly Muslim civilians," overwhelmingly males.(14) This dubious hierarchizing of human suffering was implicit throughout much of the discussion of the rape controversy during the Kosovo war. For example, James Rubin on 13 April called for Yugoslavia to "take immediate steps to punish the perpetrators of rape and other crimes ..." (Rubin quoted in Agence FrancePresse, 1999c.) Reporting David Scheffer's comments on the massacre at Velika Krusa, where (as the story notes) "Yugoslav troops gunn[ed] down more than 100 men and boys between ages 14 and 50," The Washington Post added: "At the Pentagon, Defense Department spokesman Kenneth Bacon revealed that U.S. officials had received reports of an even more ghastly crime of mass rape followed by executions" i.e., up to 20 deaths at the alleged "rape camp" near Djakovica. Twenty raped and murdered women was "even more ghastly" than 100 men shot and burned to death some indication of the relative value of the worthy versus unworthy victims. (Loeb and Smith, 1999; emphasis added.)(15) For an especially interesting example of the trend, we can turn to an article by Tommaso di Francesco and Giacomo Scotti, published in Le Monde diplomatique at the midpoint of the Kosovo war. The authors wrote that in the "process of vicious mutual ethnic cleansing" in BosniaHerzegovina,

It is there [Bosnia] that by far the worst atrocities have taken place. Not only have there been vast and welldocumented massacres of mostly Muslim civilians by Serbian militias, but concentration camps and massive forcible population transfers, known as "ethnic cleansing," have also been used to change the demographic realities of Bosnia. The
worst of the horrors has been the systematic use of organized, repeated mass rape by Serbian

militias of nonSerbian, mostly Muslim women as a part of "ethnic cleansing." To be sure, there have been cases of rape by all sides, and the UN has documented that Croats and Muslims have committed massacres and run concentration camps. What was unprecedented was the organization of mass rape as a matter of policy in a manner that could not have been unknown to the highest military and political authorities of the so called Serbian Republic of Bosnia. One obvious victim is the prospect of a tolerable and decent life together after the war. (Denitch, 1994: 124; emphasis added.)

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physical and psychological terror stemmed largely from the barbaric treatment inflicted in the prison camps created by both Croats and Serbs

particularly, in the case of the Serbs, the notorious Omarska camp with its raping of women. (di Francesco and Scotti, 1999.)

This depiction of the horrors of Omarska one of the three concentration camps closed after international protests in late 1992 is a mindbogglingly casual inversion of the gendered reality. Helsinki Watch gave the population of Omarska as 2,000 men and 33 to 38 women. In an article for International Affairs on "The Crime of Appeasement in Bosnia," Ed Vulliamy, who witnessed the release of Omarska's survivors, wrote:

Omarska had been a place where a prisoner was forced to bite the testicles off a fellow inmate who, as he died of pain, had a live pigeon stuffed into his mouth to stifle his screams. The guards responsible for this barbarism were described by one witness as "like a crowd at a sporting match." Another man was forced to bark like a dog and lick at motor oil on the ground while a guard jumped up and down on his back until it snapped. Prisoners, who survived by drinking their own and each other's urine, were constantly being called out of their cramped quarters, by name. Some would return caked in blood, bruised blackandblue or slashed with knives; others would never be seen alive again. Special squads of inmates were ordered to load their corpses on to trucks. (Vulliamy, 1998: 7475.)(16)

Helsinki Watch wrote in Volume II of their study of War Crimes in BosniaHerzegovina that Omarska indeed "appears to have been the most brutal of the four Serbianoperated camps that were discovered by the press during the summer of 1982. Almost all former Omarska detainees interviewed by Helsinki Watch claimed that they had been bestially beaten, that scores had died from the beatings and that some were executed." There is no evidence that any of the women at Omarska were killed.(17) The rape of the small number of women at the camp was certainly generalized and atrocious. But by what standard is Omarska "particularly ... notorious" for the rape of its women detainees, when thousands of civilian males were viciously tortured, hundreds killed and almost certainly a great many more raped and sexually abused than women, given the unbridled sexual sadism that pervaded the camp?

Arkans militiaman kicking a dying woman Ron Haviv (31 March 1992)

Orders of Gendering
Let us try to bring additional structure to this discussion by distinguishing between first, second, and thirdorder gendering. These can be seen as analytical "rings" spreading outwards, progressively drawing into the analysis greater territorial reach, longer historical time, and broader applicability to the gender group under discussion. A firstorder gendering is focused at the level of the individual person, case, or event. In the Kosovo context, this might be a reference to the rape of a particular Kosovar woman, or a given case of mass rape; for Kosovar males, it might be a reference to the genderselective execution of a man, or a given mass execution. framings to the experiences of one gender group, and a neartotal absence of such framings for the other, there may be grounds for intellectual concern. If we find the particular experiences of suffering and victimization similarly treated, there is grounds for additional normative and ethical concern. If we find, for example, that the torture of males is widely acknowledged and discussed, but the widespread rape of women is ignored, then we might legitimately object. Likewise, we may find that the rape of women is prominent in media discussion and/or policy initiatives, and contextualized internationally and historically, while the torture and even the mass murder of males is rarely noted and virtually never accorded a second or thirdorder framing. If so, we should have the courage to acknowledge that there is a yawning gap in the analysis; and that the disadvantaged or systematically excluded group deserves greater consideration than it has traditionally received.

A secondorder gendering of the same subject seeks to isolate a pattern of victimization. In so doing, it directs the audience to broader conceptual and experiential similarities that bind individual persons, cases, and events though the pattern is still restricted in its territorial reach, geographical scope, and historical time. In the context of the Kosovo conflict, this could mean isolating a pattern of rape of women in the conflict, or a pattern of gender selective executions of men. A thirdorder gendering extends the analysis beyond the boundaries of the immediate conflict, region, and contemporary timeframe. It usually seeks to make broad generalizations about regional, global, and/or historical trends. Again to use our Kosovo examples, this might involve placing the rape of Kosovar women against the broader backdrop of rape as a tool of war in the Balkans in the 1990s. It might go further still, and examine the sexual assault of women as a feature of warfare across civilizations and throughout history. A similar perspective on gender selective executions of men would seek to place these killings against a regional and globalhistorical backdrop. I take it as a normative and analytical "given" that while firstorder, secondorder, and thirdorder treatments may be entirely worthy in and of themselves, secondorder and thirdorder framings are necessary if an effective gender analysis is to be mounted. That is to say, the analysis cannot remain stuck at the level of individual cases or conflicts if it is to contribute to a sophisticated understanding of gender. Indeed, any conceptualization of "gender" is inconceivable without a second and thirdorder framing. A scholarly analysis that confines itself to firstorder analyses may turn up extraordinarily useful and important material. But such analyses cannot buttress realityclaims beyond their own pre set boundaries.

Let us now consider the press coverage of Kosovar men according to this framework. It can be said with confidence that only the barest fragments of first and secondorder framings emerged in this coverage. One can see glimmers of comprehension in the occasional references to a pattern of male selective killing in the Balkans conflict, and the attention paid to the phenomenon of male detentions and disappearances after the release of the inmates from Smrekovnica and Liplje prisons in May 1999 (see below). But the coverage in no way approximated the kind of nuanced historical analysis that imbued treatments of Kosovo's women rape victims. For the most part, the civilian male victims of the slaughter were buried in a slew of other designations "Kosovar," "ethnicAlbanian," etc. and their specific vulnerabilities were thereby blurred into the larger backdrop of ethnic conflict. Neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post the two major "agendasetting" newspapers in the United States published a single story or editorial focusing on the phenomenon of gender selective mass executions. The closest the Times came to a meaningful "secondorder" and "third order" gendering of the slaughter, to my knowledge, was a story by John Kifner, early in Operation Horseshoe: "What is striking about the refugees is that they are largely women, children and old men. The young men, they say, are either hiding in the mountains or have been separated out by the Serbs and taken away to some unknown fate. While there is no way to verify independently the accounts of killings ... their similarity suggested that they were credible. Earlier Serbian efforts to remove Muslims from parts of Bosnia were accompanied by numerous massacres." (Kifner, 1999.) The excerpts came eight paragraphs into the story, and the "striking" subject was then dropped. Certainly it was

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If, then, we find that there is a consistent and systematic according of second and thirdorder

never deemed worthy of a story in its own right. The flicker of a higherorder gendering (that is, the isolation of a pattern, and the citing of the Bosnian precedent) was about as faint as could be.

The Post, for its part, did publish an editorial, "Captive in Serbia," pointing out that "Many Kosovars, particularly men, are being held captive," and referring to "the imprisonment of some Kosovo men" as "undoubtedly part" of a "planned ... destruction of ethnic Albanian Kosovo as a working society." But the editorial appeared on 1 July, more than three months after the outbreak of the war and weeks after its end. It concerned itself, moreover, only with the thousands of prisoners transported alive from Kosovo to Serbia at the end of the Yugoslav occupation. (The Washington Post, 1999.) Might some concerted attention to the pattern of gender selective detentions and mass killings earlier in the conflict have changed the course of the gendercide? But the reader was again confronted, in Post coverage, with only glancing references to "men missing" and "summary executions of men," except on the rare occasions when policymakers stressed the particular vulnerability of "battleage" males.(18) The contrast with the coverage of women rape victims was striking. We have already seen that on regular occasions the rape of women was privileged over the murder of noncombatant males. Furthermore, virtually every news outlet ran at least one story on the subject; secondorder and third order framings, placing the crime against the backdrop of the Balkans war and even the whole history of human conflict, were standard. Consider, for example, the following reports:

Rape as a Weapon of War While fleeing Pristina on April 1 ... ["B."] said she was torn away from her family and raped in a garage by four masked soldiers. They then freed her in time to board a packed refugee train that took her and her family into exile. Similar stories are starting to emerge from ethnic Albanian refugees who have crossed from Kosovo into Albania and Macedonia in recent weeks. Western officials and human rights groups say that scores of women have reported being raped since the Belgrade government started waging allout war in Kosovo against separatist rebels and ethnic Albanian civilians supporting rebel demands for independence. ... During [the Bosnian] conflict, Bosnian Serb forces carried out a systematic campaign of rape against Bosnian Muslim and Croat women, resulting in several indictments by the international war crimes tribunal at the Hague. ... (Smith, 1999.) US probes Serb rape allegations The United States is investigating reports that young Kosovo women are being systematically raped at a Serb army camp and that up to 20 of them have been killed. Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon [said] ... "This is a very eerie and disturbing echo of documented instances of rape and killing of women in Bosnia during the Bosnia war and it is obviously outrageous that this is occurring." ... During the 1992 war in BosniaHerzegovina thousands of women were forced into "rape camps" by Serbian militia. The accounts received by the Pentagon are backed up by similar reports of systematic rape now emerging from Kosovo refugees who have fled the province. ... Consistent accounts are emerging of soldiers separating women from groups of refugees, apparently with the intention of raping them. (BBC Online, 1999b.) Albanian Tells How Serbs Chose Her, 'the Most Beautiful One,' for Rape Few other issues have become as highly charged as rape in the former Yugoslavia. During the war in Bosnia, Serbian forces were accused of systematically raping women as a deliberate tactic of war, a particularly cruel means, human rights investigators said, of terrorizing and demoralizing one's enemy. Bosnian Serbs were accused of operating "rape camps" where Muslim women were held captive and repeatedly assaulted by Serbian soldiers. (Rohde, 1999.)

Yugoslav forces use ancient ways to break civilian spirits Throughout history rape has been one of the most common but least documented acts of violence committed during wartime. Yet it has been an inescapable aspect of many conflicts, from the rape of the Sabine women in Ancient Rome to the allegations that the Serbs set up 'rape camps' during the recent war in Bosnia. ... Few reliable figures exist for the incidence of rape in wartime before the Balkan wars this decade but anecdotal evidence suggests that it was widespread. It has been alleged that Nazi troops indulged in mass rape during the second world war, particularly on the eastern front where Jewish, Gypsy, Polish and Russian women were all subject to systematic sexual violence. ... The Japanese army was notorious for its sexual torture of Korean and Chinese women during the second world war. ... More recently, Pakistani troops were alleged to have raped 200,000 Bengali women during the battle for Bangladeshi independence in 1971. ... In Bosnia, according to United Nations estimates, 20,000 women were raped by Serbian army units, apparently as part of a systematic policy. (Kettle, 1999.)

The framing of the first excerpt is notable. The experience of women rape victims is placed against a backdrop, not only of the Kosovo war and the wider Balkans conflict, but of humanity's "ancient ways." (Note also the headline referring to "rape as a weapon of war.") The secondorder framings in all of the excerpts are powerful and detailed. And what these brief extracts do not capture is the nuanced and highlypersonalized treatment generally given to

the individual female victims. The reader cannot help but be drawn into their stories and suffering, and respond with moral outrage, which is presumably the intent.

The Globe on 6 April, and deserves to be cited at length:

In stark contrast, I have never seen a detailed third order treatment of the gendercidal killings of males in Kosovo (my own aside), let alone one with a historical scope comparable to the first excerpt. But the slaughter of "battleage" noncombatant men is at least as prominent and enduring a "weapon of war," in the Balkans and throughout history, as is the rape of women and a more brutal and severe one, by any reasonable standard. Even secondorder framings were exceedingly rare and usually fleeting. My sample of media coverage was broadest and most rigorous between 26 March and 25 April. This monthlong period surely encompasses weeks when intimations of humanitarian disaster and "gendercide" were widespread, and confronted western governments and organizations, as well as media observers, with critical moral and practical choices. During this period, the sample set turned up only the most fragmentary glimpses of a crisis in Kosovar male ranks. Perhaps the most consistently attentive media outlet was the Agence France Presse, which regularly issued dispatches citing David Scheffer's (and later the U.S. Information Agency's) estimates of 100,000 or more men "unaccounted for." As early as 26 March, the AFP delivered a succinct secondorder framing of the "disturbing reports of mass killings trickl[ing] out of Kosovo." It cited U.S. State Department spokesperson James Rubin's reference to "ominous indications that men of fighting age were separated from their families," as did a number of other sources; but it went further, with a brief thirdorder reference to the fact that "Such separations of men from women was [sic] commonplace in massacres carried out during the 199295 war in Bosnia between Moslems, Serbs and Croats." (Agence FrancePresse, 1999d.) To be sure, this is not a very extensive or sophisticated thirdorder framing, and the depiction of gendercide in Bosnia as the result of a "war ... between Moslems, Serbs and Croats" rather blurs the primary agents of the slaughter. Indeed, it is pathetic that such passing references have to be unearthed like precious jewels in the media coverage, and presented as examples of what should have been a generalized and much more indepth media treatment. But the AFP, with many lapses into blindness and banality like other media, nonetheless stood out for the frequent attention it paid virtually alone to the fate of Kosovo's men. Speaking of the entire monthlong sample, I found only one article, by Alan Freeman of The Globe and Mail, that actually focused on the mass detention and apparent genderselective killing of Kosovar males. By "focusing," I mean with both a headline and a lead that alludes to the subject. It appeared in

Missing: Kosovo's young ethnicAlbanian men Women, children, aging men pouring over the borders; reports say 17to45 year olds massacred or in hiding KUKES, Albania As UN aid worker Laura Boldrini surveyed the steady stream of refugees flowing over the border from Kosovo at the remote Qafa Prush border post, she thought she had been transported to another planet "a planet without men, only women and children."

"It was unbelievable," she said yesterday, estimated that 90 per cent of those crossing at the border point on Saturday were women, children and aging men. "There were no men. The old men were there, but I'm talking about young men between 17 and 45." Kosovo's young ethnic Albanian men are missing. They are believed to have been massacred by Serbian forces or to have fled to the Kosovo hills, possibly joining the Kosovo Liberation Army. Eyewitness reports collected from refugees show a pattern of killings of young male Kosovar Albanians. They are reported to have been gunned down with automatic weapons, stripped naked and used as human shields or, in a case alleged yesterday, had their throats slashed at a mosque. Most of these reports cannot be verified.

One international aid worker, who asked not to be identified, said he fears that Kosovo has been turned into a giant killing field. "This is going to make the My Lai massacre look like a Christmas party," he said, referring to an infamous killing of Vietnamese villagers by a U.S. Army platoon. ... Belzat Tertini, 62, said that as many as 80 people were killed at a Muslim place of worship in the centre of the city. Many were young men who had gone there for a prayer service, he said. ...

"Everybody is in the mountains," [Ramadan Gashi] said. But Mr. Gashi worried that many are marooned without food or arms. Sixteenyearold Banan Kadria, who fled to Kukes with his family from the village of Lumarsh, said the danger came when they encountered Serb police checkpoints. "When I entered the checkpoints I was covered with blankets at the end of the tractor, and they didn't see me," he said, adding that his family travelled at night. "During the day, many young men were arrested." ... (Freeman, 1999.) One other Globe article, by Geoffrey York, deserves honourable mention for a forceful secondorder

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gendering. York zeroed in on the firestorm that had descended upon Kosovar males: Most of the refugees who arrived yesterday [4 May] were women, children, and the elderly. Young men were conspicuously absent. Many of the refugees were exhausted, crying, and obviously in shock. They said Serb police had taken away hundreds of young men from the refugee convoys. Aid workers said the refugee accounts strongly suggested that the Serbs have massacred more of Kosovo's young men. "The common thread in their stories is that a lot of young men have been taken off the tractors or taken away before the tractors left," said Ray Wilkinson, a spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency. "They're talking about killings again. A wide area of Kosovo is being cleaned out. Men are being taken away and possibly killed." Some refugees spoke of a massacre of dozens of men in northern Kosovo about three days ago. Others said the Serbs only allowed one man to remain in each refugee wagon the driver. (York, 1999.)

conceptualize and report the "genocidal cull of ... males" in Kosovo during the critical first month of the slaughter. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, the BBC, The Guardian all appear to have published nothing comparable to the tiny smattering of articles sampled above. Even the provision of one or two counterexamples an editorial here, a column there would hardly offset the general impression of a conspiracy of lowkey mumbles, if not outright silence, on the gendercidal assault against ethnic Albanian males.(19)

From a more random sampling of reports on English language electronic media during this period, one other article eventually turned up from The Los Angeles Times, using two of the same principal sources as the Freeman piece just quoted (U.N. refugee worker Laura Boldrini and the humanitarian worker with the My Lai analogy). After citing Boldrini, John Daniszewski wrote: "Like many aid workers and journalists, Boldrini has observed that the overwhelming majority of refugees streaming in from Kosovo are female, and that those males who have made it through the gauntlet of Serbian checkpoints have tended to be the old and the very young. ... Along with persistent reports of summary executions and mass internments of young men inside Kosovo, the low number of ethnic Albanian men making it over the border since the exodus began last month has raised fears here. 'There's a story happening over there that's going to make the My Lai massacre look like a Christmas party,' one humanitarian worker warned Monday." There followed a crystalline passage of analysis and speculation: "Where have Kosovo's young men gone? To hear refugees now in Albania tell it, many have been killed, often gruesomely. Others reportedly have been arrested and held in undisclosed locations, or have been forced to serve as 'human shields' against strikes by NATO or by Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas. But many say they believe most militaryaged men are hiding in the forests of Kosovo, either because they have joined the KLA or because they dared not accompany their families through police checkpoints for fear of being arrested or killed." (Daniszewski, 1999.) Good as Daniszewski's piece was, though, it again limited itself to the Kosovo context, failing to place the gendercide in regional, let alone globalhistorical, perspective. This largely exhausted the attempts to

The release of about two thousand men from Smrekovnica and other Serb detention facilities, in late May 1999, marked the one occasion on which victimized males came to the forefront of the discussion. The result was some solid and nuanced reporting of the men's experiences. This came very late in the game, however, and it was notable how infrequently terms like "torture" were applied to the men's experiences. More common were phrases like "mistreatment," "maltreatment," "beatings," "abuse" all of which seems inadequate to capture the sadism of the Serb jailers (akin, perhaps, to describing rape as "unwanted sexual attention"). It was equally striking that what secondorder gendering there was of the prison releases that is, coverage referring to a pattern of genderselective detentions and disappearances in Kosovo suggested that a quandary or "mystery" somehow had been solved by the release of the men. Thus John Ward Anderson, in perhaps the best article on the released, wrote in The Washington Post: "It was feared that many [men] were dead, locked in camps, or being held by the Serbs as human shields against NATO bombings. ... Thousands of female refugees have told of being expelled to neighboring countries while their husbands, sons and brothers were ordered out of cars and convoys at gunpoint and forced to stay behind. Little has been heard of the men's fate, but humanrights workers and other observers have feared the worst. ... There was good cause for concern." (Anderson, 1999.) The International Herald Tribune, for its part, declared that the "Gaunt Men Arriving in Albanian Provide[d] Answers to a Chilling Puzzle" and "One of the Scarier Questions" in the Kosovo war. "What happened to the thousands of ethnic Albanian men from boys barely of fighting age to grandfathers who were separated from their families in recent weeks in Kosovo and shoved into trucks, and who then disappeared?" (Fisher, 1999b.)(20) The comments, and similar ones, invite two questions. First, where were the specific expressions of "fear" and "concern," the posing of "one of the scarier questions," the references to the "chilling puzzle," two months or one month earlier, when they might have made a difference? And how did the release of a mere 1,000 men (later increased to 2,000) obviate, or even meaningfully mitigate, the

possibility that "many [men] were dead, locked in camps, or being held by the Serbs as human shields," as The Washington Post put it? The releases were used as an excuse to declare a general relief and go home, analytically speaking. The men still left behind, at Smrekovnica and elsewhere, would become subjects of analysis and concern only after the war, when thousands of them were spirited away to unknown fates in Serbia. Then, suddenly and rather bizarrely, there was a spate of highsounding articles and expressions of concern, such as this editorial from The Washington Post: For a sizable but unknown number of [Kosovars] ... return still is not possible. Many Kosovars, particularly men, are being held captive inside Serbia. Serbian officials have told the Red Cross that they are holding more than 2,000; according to other estimates, the number may be 5,000 or even greater. Some have been prisoners for many months ... Others were studying or working in Belgrade when NATO began bombing in March and were promptly rounded up. And many are believed to have been trucked across the border as Serbian forces retreated earlier this month. Given the Serbian torture chambers NATO troops have discovered in Kosovo, no one can feel easy about the detainees' condition. A few days ago Serbian authorities released 166 of these prisoners, gaunt but alive. The rationale for the small release is as unclear as the motivation for keeping the larger number. Mr. Milosevic seems to have planned the destruction of ethnic Albanian Kosovo as a working society. The imprisonment of some Kosovo men, like the killings and forced expulsion of others, was undoubtedly part of this plan. ... The war is not over until Mr. Milosevic accounts for the Kosovars he has kidnapped and allows them to go home. (The Washington Post, 1999b; emphasis added.)

Again, where was the editorial on the "imprisonment of Kosovo men" and the "killings and forced expulsion of others" two months earlier, when it might have helped to arouse concern and influence the policy agenda? This analysis should not close without attending to one of the most extraordinary Englishlanguage media commentaries during the war one that stands, given its author's prominence, somewhere between an opinion editorial article and an insider contribution to the policy discussion. This was a piece by Daniel Ellsberg in The New York Times the daily which in 1970 had broken one of the biggest political stories of the postwar era by publishing the "Pentagon Papers" that Ellsberg, a renegade Defense and State Department official, fed it. Ellsberg's article was entitled "Contemplating A Fatal Mistake." (Ellsberg, 1999.) It was unique, in the range of materials I consulted, in focusing on the situation within Kosovo; examining the specific vulnerabilities of men, among others; and arguing that these considerations should govern NATO policymaking. Ellsberg applauded the passing reference to the situation within Kosovo in a prointervention "open letter" signed by luminaries including Zbigniew Brzezinski, Saul Bellow, and Susan Sontag. The signatories had stressed the necessity of "saving the lives of the nearly one million Kosovars now facing death from starvation and murder within Kosovo." The question, he argued, was "whether a ground invasion would serve that goal or whether, as I believe, it would be a death sentence for most Albanians remaining in Kosovo." From there, Ellsberg moved into analytical territory charted by no other prominent commentator in the English language, to my knowledge:

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By all accounts, it would take weeks to months to deploy an invasion force to the region once the decision to do so was made, and Slobodan Milosevic already has troops there fortifying the borders. Wouldn't the prospect of an invasion lead him to order his forces in Kosovo to kill all the militaryage male Albanians and hold the rest of the population as hostages rather than continuing to deport them? We do not know how many male Kosovars of military age broadly, from 15 to 60 years old have been killed already. But even if the number is in the tens of thousands (NATO has conservatively estimated 4,600 civilian deaths), that would still mean that most of the men were still alive. Facing invasion, would Mr. Milosevic allow any more men to leave Kosovo to be recruited by the KLA, or to live to support the invasion? The Serbs could quickly slaughter 100,000 to 200,000 male Kosovars. (In Rwanda five years ago, an average of 8,000 civilians a day were killed for 100 days, mostly with machetes.) Obviously, Mr. Milosevic and his subordinates are brutal enough to do that. If they haven't done it already (and there is no testimony that they have on that scale) it may well be because they fear that such annihilation would make an invasion inevitable. A commitment now to ground invasion would remove that deterrent, just as the commitment in March to begin bombing in support of an ultimatum and the consequent withdrawal of international monitors removed an implicit deterrent against sweeping ethnic cleansing and expulsion.

"As for the remaining civilians in Kosovo women, children and old people," wrote Ellsberg, "tens of thousands of them could be used as human shields, in a way never before seen in warfare":

Pictured: Cover Image for TIME Magazine April 12, 1999

Fighting in builtup areas, NATO troops would probably be fired on from buildings that were packed on every floor with Kosovar women and children. Using the traditional means explosives, artillery and rockets to destroy those buildings would make NATO forces the mass executioners of the people we were fighting to protect. I believe these reasons alone are enough to rule out the option of a ground invasion. Merely preparing for such an invasion, which many have urged as a way to threaten Mr. Milosevic, would give him an urgent incentive to exterminate remaining male Kosovars in Kosovo. Carrying out the threat would eliminate most of the women and children. ... Distasteful as it is to bargain with Mr. Milosevic, the fact is that he holds a million hostages. There is only one way for NATO to stop the ethnic cleansing, avert even worse slaughter and permit refugees to return safely. That is to negotiate as quickly as possible the immediate, unopposed introduction of a large international security force into Kosovo, capable of protecting the Albanians there as long as needed.

However one evaluates the accuracy of Ellsberg's analysis of the situation inside Kosovo (and I believe it will stand as very accurate), and whatever one thinks of the recommendation to open negotiations with Miloevi, there was nothing remotely comparable to Ellsberg's sophisticated analysis and insight in any other commentary sampled for this study. A full sensitivity was evident to both the gender and age variables as they had shaped the atrocities so far. Something of the process and periodicity of slaughter that often occurs in these cases was acknowledged (i.e., with the reference that the destruction of Kosovar civilians could proceed in two phases, the "threatening" males first, then the "women, children and old people"). Ellsberg understood that enormous numbers of people (tens if not hundreds of thousands) were at mortal risk. And most importantly, he argued that these factors were sufficient in themselves to rule out certain policies and warrant the adoption of others. In so doing, he briefly raised factors, issues, and options above the din of meaningless and misleading chatter in media and policy circles.

W ho c o u l d e v e r ha v e i m a g i ne d 5 0 y e a r s a f t e r Never Again, after Auschwitz, Treblinka, M a u t t ha u s e n, O r a ni e nb u r g , S a c hs e nha u s e n t ha t w e w o u l d a g a i n s e e c o nc e nt r a t i o n c a m p s , m a s s e x p u l s i o ns , m a s s m u r d e r t ha t g e no c i d e w o u l d ha p p e n a g a i n? A nd ha p p e n a g a i n i t d i d , i n t he he a r t o f E u r o p e i n B o s ni a & H e r z e g o v i na .

F a d i l a M e mi e v i

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Some generalizations may be advanced on the basis of this extensive, if not rigorously systematic, sampling of Kosovo coverage. The first is that males tend to assume the status of "nonpersons" in analyses and reportage of conflict and genocide. Most commonly, they are effaced from the picture. If their presence is noted at all, it is likely to be obliquely, with the gender variable subsumed by others (e.g., race/ethnicity, nationality, abstract "victim" status, colour of clothing). Campaigns aimed at the genderselective killing of males will tend to be ignored or underemphasized in media coverage, in favour of a focus on secondary policies that target "worthy" victims (e.g., rape and harassment of women, forced expulsions). If the character of "gendercidal" strategies is noted, it will tend to be relegated to the later and less prominent reaches of coverage. All of these strategies can be isolated not only in media coverage, but in the humanitarian equation (e.g., the reports of organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International) and in policy statements by national governments, although there is no space to enter into a detailed discussion of these themes in the Kosovo context. Very similar patterns reasserted themselves during the slaughter in East Timor (SeptemberOctober 1999), which followed upon the Kosovo war by a matter of mere months.(21) The conclusions that can and should be drawn from this body of evidence and argument depend very much on whether one views males as "natural" targets of victimization, and therefore irrelevant and unnewsworthy; or whether, on the other hand, one sees them as equally deserving of attention and protection in the face of violent assaults, up to and including genocidal mass killing. My own preferences are no doubt apparent. In my opinion, no meaningful claim to humanity, fairness, or analytical accuracy can be advanced by those who, consciously or unconsciously, would consign half the human race to secondclass status in the humanitarian and policy equation. This article has argued that an alternative framework is possible, and needs to be adopted rapidly to ensure that all victims of violence receive the empathy, attention, and assistance they require. Created by Adam Jones, 2001 http://adamjones.freeservers.com/effacing.htm

"A Modest Proposal" Continued from pg.13 they were deeply rooted in biology and the fact that they are ubiquitous throughout history and across all cultures proves this. This division of labor between men and women who chose to have children has resulted in many generations of healthy, happy children and the recognition of the responsibilities and rights of both parents is responsible for all of civilization as we know it. Let us return to the state of reproductive rights and responsibilities as they stand today. services like contraception and abortion would deny that they are crucial to happy healthy children being born to mothers who are ready and willing to have children. Indeed, the proponents of these services sell the idea of family planning to politicians and the public in these terms. What is never mentioned, or even considered, are the familial planning needs of men and male reproductive agency. It is as if these things didnt even exist, or even if they did, that they would be antithetical to the entire idea of family planning itself. Are they? Is it really dangerous to give men equal consideration in family planning and give them the same power to make decisions as to when and with whom they become parents? Is it really dangerous to allow men to have complete control over whether or not they become parents at all? As to the last question, keep in mind that men do not have complete control as to when they become parents. As noted above any woman can lie about her fertility status and, despite what many would have you believe, far too many women do just this in order to drag men into parenthood who are not ready or willing to become parents.

Currently, in addition to abstinence, women have virtually total control over if and when they become pregnant as well as with whom. Furthermore, any woman can, without the permission of the father, terminate a pregnancy after conception on demand and for any reason no matter what the relationship with the father. If she is not wed and decides to bring the pregnancy to term she can decide to keep the child or she can very easily give the child up for adoption without even having to notify the father. If she does decide to keep the child she can make the father a wage slave for the next eighteen years even if the father was lied to about her fertility status or the father was the victim of statutory rape. Furthermore, the fathers right to parent his child by being part of the childs life and instilling his values as well as protecting the child from harm and the ability to simply see and share affection with his child is based in most part on the goodwill of the mother. This is not good for children, and it is not only unfair, but underscores an incredibly inhumane set of circumstances that a particular group of much maligned people in our society are subject tofathers. Consider the fact that an astounding number of children, currently around 40% of all newborns in the U.S., are born out of wedlock to women, over 50% of whom, have never even lived with the fathers of their children. Also consider that 25% of all children in the U.S. are living off of food stamps. Consider again that fatherless children are susceptible to a wide array of physical, mental and social ills that include much higher rates of mortality in youth, morbidity in youth, mental illness, delinquency, criminality, addiction and incarcerationjust to name a few. What is unnamed in that list and what is indeed incalculable is the denial of a set of needs children have which cannot be fulfilled by mothers alone. The need for someone to make you feel safe, the need for guidance and conditioning while developing into adulthood and advice throughout young adulthoodcrucial advice. Perhaps most importantly is the need for a child to have a mana father hold their hand or comfort them when they are crying or to hear his voice say things like I know you can do it, I am very proud of you or simply I love you. Family Planning services and the discussion surrounding family planning is all but entirely gynocentric. No one who believes that family planning

Think about it, do you really believe that every one of these single mothers by choice were completely honest about their fertility status? Do you really think that married couples who ostensibly didnt want that third child simply had a happy little accident just like mommy said? We also need to ask if this is good for children. Is it ok to force a man to finance a child that he cannot afford? Is it good for children that men who do not want children simply because they dont really care to have them be forced into the parental role of father to a child that they didnt want? Whenever a woman forces a man into fatherhood when he is not ready or willing and negative results occur it is he alone who is blamed. When he complains that he was tricked or wasnt ready we always hear something along the lines of you have the right to wear a condom or keep it in your pants. Do women not have condoms? Do they not have diaphragms? Do they not have a whole arsenal of devices, pharmaceutical products and methods including keeping their panties on to prevent a pregnancy? Is it not extremely bigoted to tell men these things when they are forced into parenthood and complain about it? Are not men truly far more susceptible to forced (coerced) reproduction then women are? Can we honestly say that any woman can be coerced into being a parent when they have all of these fertility control options as well as the option of abortion and the ability to put the child up for adoption after birth? Amazingly, mothers even have the ability to abandon their children even up to the age of 14 under the safe haven laws. Why is it that when we talk about reproduction we see women as having rights and no responsibilities

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and men as having no rights and all of the responsibilities?

This is clearly a big problem and the differential between rights and responsibilities between genders is the primary cause of fatherlessness in our society. This has been argued by many men who support the idea of male reproductive rights. The resistance to the idea of male reproductive rights, however, is intense and most see the problem as insoluble or the very idea of male reproductive rights as esoteric. But the problem of male reproductive rights is neither insoluble nor esoteric. There is nothing esoteric about a boy aged 14 who is forced to pay child support to his rapist and there is nothing insoluble about the problem of forcing men to become parents when Roe V. Wade clearly states that the imposition of parenthood is too much power for the state to hold. Clearly something needs to be done. There are two popular ideas that Lawyers and Mens Rights advocates tout concerning male reproductive rights. One proposal is to have a window of time in which a man gets to choose whether or not to assume the responsibilities for and assert the rights to his child that is contemporaneous to the period of time a woman can have an abortion. Another proposal is that, after the birth of a child, a man should be able to bring to court a case in which he can establish, by some standard of evidence, that he was misled by the mother who misrepresented her fertility status. Both of these proposals are problematic. The window of time proposal makes the outcome of a case in which a mother does not inform the father of the pregnancy ambiguous. Would he be required to pay child support if only after birth she decided to announce that he was a father? Could he assert his rights as a father if the mother did not want to have him in the childs life? How can he prove that he was lied to about the mothers fertility status if an unwanted pregnancy occurs? Are verbal contracts binding in such instances? Clearly establishing fault on the mothers part would be difficult and litigation would be expensive. Could a man with anything less than a substantial amount of money be able to defend himself from such a legal problem? There is a third, less talked about, solution that could eliminate if not greatly mitigate the problems associated with the other two. This solution would come in the form of a legal document called an Acknowledgement of Consent.

rights and responsibilities would only apply if the child is biologically his or if otherwise stated as in the case of adoption.

This document would be presented to the putative father before conception, as in the case of a married couple planning to try for a child, after conception or even after the child is born. It would be presented in some certifiable manner (certified mail or signed in the presence of a witness) so that in the event that the mother conceals the pregnancy from the father he can still assert his rights if the mother attempts to exclude him from the life of his child. He can say that he was never notified and therefore never given the opportunity to make a decision to parent the child, giving him the ability to contend for fatherhood in court.

This legal instrument would not in any way diminish the reproductive rights of the mother. She still has available to her every form of contraception as ever, can still abort the pregnancy and in the case she wants to give the child up for adoption the father can still, in absence of being given proper notification, be given the chance to assert his rights and responsibilities as a father. The mother CAN NOT force him to sign the Acknowledgement of Consent thus giving the man full reproductive rights. This will force the mother to do four things:
1. Find a man who was able to assume the parental role of father 2. Find a man who was willing to assume the parental role of father 3. Make it worth said mans while to take on the parental role of father 4. Do something to make said man feel assured that the child/ren she were to present to him were in fact his through chastity before their relationship, fidelity during the relationship or have a DNA paternity test performed.

Before any mother can enter any court of law and demand support for her child at the expense of any man she must produce an Acknowledgement of Consent. This is a document signed by both parents in which the father asserts and the mother recognizes the fathers rights also in which the father assumes the responsibilities outlined in the document. These

What would happen if women were again required to do these things when they wanted a man to take up the responsibility of providing for her children? There is almost no doubt that fatherlessness would all but disappear. Women would be forced to assume responsibilities to both their children and the fathers of their children commiserate with their rights as women and mothers. This, although some will surely disagree, is a modest proposal, one that involves the free will of both parties and the clear and necessary consideration of the children and of each parent for the other. In other words fathers would be put back into the equation of families giving children the proper upbringing they need and deserve. Not only a modest proposal, but one that would have the most positive of outcomes.

The Apex Fallacy

For those new to the Mens Movement, this is such an important concept that it probably needs some explaining. Understanding it will explain a lot of the issues men deal with today.

by: Zed

" S e e ms w o me n a s a s e x t e n d t o f a l l v i c t i m t o t h e Ap e x f a l l a c y . F e mi n i s m h a s b e e n w o n d e r f u l f o r a l p h a me n . S o c o n w o me n s e e t h i s a n d a s s u me t h a t t h e b e h a v i o r o f t h e o n l y me n i n t h e i r e r o t i c f i e l d o f r e g a r d ( e . g . , a l p h a s ) h a s b e e n a d o p t e d b y a l l me n , a n d t h e r e f o r e r a h r a h b e h i n d f e mi n i s m s a t t e mp t s t o s t i c k i t t o a l l g u y s ." El u s i v e W a p i t i
a wealthy banking/finance/business family to marry the daughter of a waitress or coal miner. The coal miners daughter (thank you, Loretta Lynn) would most likely marry another coal miner, and living on the income someone else made by crawling into a hole in the ground every day, and risking death every day plus eventual death due to black lung, was far preferable to having to make that income herself.

First, one needs to understand female hypergamy. What it boils down to is that women generally only consider men for potential mates who are least equal to them, and preferably above them, on the wealth/status pyramid. They are always looking up, never down, so men at their own level and below are simply invisible and women do not even realize that they exist except to the extent that such men annoy them by actually seeking their attention. As many have said, most women absolutely hate beta males. If you take such statements by women like MEN run the world, that is true for them because the only men they can see are the ones who do run the world. Statements like most CEOs are men are true both in fact and in perception. (The reasons this is so are beyond the scope of this particular essay.) However, the implication of the converse that most men are CEOs is obviously not true to men. It does seem to be true for a lot of women, because most of the men that they can see are CEOs. While the women are looking upward and only see CEOs, the men at their level and below see a lot of nose hair.

The fairly large middle class gave women a lot more options. The daughter of a shopkeeper, for example, could get a job as a receptionist in a doctors office, and end up snagging the doc and retiring. Even another reasonably successful shopkeeper allowed her at least a lateral move. However, as women entered the workforce en masse, their fixation point on the wealth/status pyramid drifted upward. With each increase in her income, the number of men at and above her own level shrank geometrically. If I felt like putting in the time I would create a diagram, but I dont, so Im going to rely on peoples imaginations. Imagine a pyramid stacked with 10 levels. The first level is 1010 or 100 potential mates. Up one level and it is 99, or 81 potential mates, then 88 or 64 potential mates all the way to the top layer where there is only 1 man.

The old cultural practice for dealing with female hypergamy was the generalized practice of giving most jobs to men, and creating social roles that demanded men work by incorporating the provider role into their male identity. Thus, most marriages ended up being hypergamy because a man with a job could provide a much better life than a woman without one. There was also the benefit that with normal female hypergamic tendencies mostly neutralized, people tended to sort themselves out in the dating/mating pool along lines of compatible social class. It was rare, for example, for the scion of

A woman who is herself at level 7, and will only consider men at levels 8, 9, and 10, restricts herself to a universe of 1+4+9 potential mates, or 14 total. A woman at level 2, has 1+4+9+16+25+36+49+64+81=285 potential mates more than 20X what the woman at level 7 has. Given the fact that men are not, as a general rule, hypergamous, any woman at or below his level is a potential mate, so a man at level 7 has 16+25+36+49+64+81+100=371 potential mates, or 26.5X as many potential mates as a woman at his own level has.

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Its just not fair!!! (Evil grin)

since

So, when EW says that alpha men have benefited a great deal from feminism, this is what he is talking about. The men at the top of the wealth/status pyramid only have each other to really compete with, while all the men lower down have to compete not only with each other, but also with the apex men who do not need a womans own wealth, because he has his own, and instead may opt to trade his wealth power/status for a womans beauty power/status. Male doctors are still more than happy to marry their receptionists if they are cute. But, no female doctor would be caught dead marrying the orderly who pushes gurneys around. The situation for women is reversed. A woman at level 7 only has 14 potential mates, but 371 competitors. Given that she spent the years while her own beauty power and fertility were at their peak chasing career and riding the alpha cock carousel, while she may be a 7 on the wealth/status pyramid, she has dropped to a 3 on the beauty/status pyramid. However,

a) she got used to riding the alpha cock carousel when she was younger and much hotter than she is now, her ability to pull men who were 9s for one night stands have made her believe that she is a 9. So, she is still going to try to enter the pyramid at at least level 7, skipping levels 4, 5, and 6 entirely. and b) men in general are not in the least bit interested in her accomplishments, and do not see them in any way as adding to her Sexual Market Value

the best she can get today is much less than the best she could have gotten years before, so all her chasing of achievement has not only been a waste of time, it actually resulted in her throwing away all the advantages she did have at one time. Wah!!! Its not fair!!! There are no good men!!!!!

Open Letter

The lives ofmostboys andmen are now more unfulfilling than everbefore in postmodernAmerica. Itis situation the beginnings ofwhich arguably can be tracedbackto the post-WorldWarII generation ofmen. Thatis an importanthistory to be told. In general, misandrytypically dresseddown in the media in the tatters ofbad jokeshas by now produced two generations ofmales born since 1975 who feel less than welcome at home, in the workplace, and especially atschool. This state ofaffairs is slowly coming into focus in our public collective sensibility even while the slack water ofa turning tide has made it seem that things are at a standstill for men and boys. They are not. A movement is underway that is proactive. It is taking hold in colleges and universities, even as the enrollment ofyoung men in college nationwide (now at about 39%, an all-time small proportion ofmale post-secondary students) continues to decrease. Significant spaces are opening up: mens centers where small groups ofyoung males can meet informally to talk about what is important to them, their doubts andconcerns, theirhopes andaspirations. Mens centers on college campuses are the place to workmost effectively forboys andmen. The students are at risk, but with oursupport they will leadus forwardto a new generation ofmales, as exemplars andas fathers. They will be the nextpartners andfriends, andwill speakformen who have been silent for so long. Their influence on sons and young boys will help change the dismal literacy situation and emotional state in which so many ofthese young males currently findthemselves. This is a first report on such centers. Only four years ago the Mens Center for Leadership and Service was formed at St. Johns University, in Minnesota, by Gar Kellom. Subsequently, with his steady guidance, a grant was secured from the Lily Endowment to sponsor two-year funded pilot projects at 14 colleges and universities. The results ofthese projects which focused on vocational discernment were published this summer in Engaging College Men: Discovering What Works and Why, edited by Kellom and Miles Groth, and published by the Mens Studies Press. This fall, Wagner College, one ofthe pilotprojectschools, openedamens centeronits campus onStatenIsland, NewYork. Itnow serves as the model forsuch centers across the nation. Within eight weeks ofopening, the Wagner center gained the support ofa benefactor. A designated gift has made possible the Theuer Mens Center at WagnerCollege. Thirty otherschools are now considering implementing the Wagnermodel. The formulaforestablishing such acenteris follows: A faculty member identifies himselfas a mentor for the college men at his institution. There is at least one such person on every campus just waiting to step outofthe shadows andsponsoramens center. The faculty mentorgains the supportofavisionary president. A small core group of students known individually to the mentor are brought together. These boys invite other young men to sit in on the centers discussion group, which usually meets weekly. One of them takes on the role of managing the schedule of meetings. The faculty mentor meets individually with members ofthe cohort, butthe group itselfprovides its ownessential leadership. Thatis crucial. In the second phase ofestablishing a mens center, the mentorworks with the schools development and alumni relations offices to identify alumni/ae who would likely be in a position to fund the center for a two-year start-up period. The center is named after the benefactor. There will always be alumni with a son ofcollege age oryoungerwho are concernedaboutthe deteriorating situation formen on college campuses: lackofavital andengaging academic and co-curricular life, often a feeling ofbeing unwelcome on campus. Atarget amount for a two-year period is $4,000 per academic year for a core group of 10-12. Featuring the initiative in the institutions alumni/ae quarterly bulletin is effective in reaching out for further support. Coverage by the local newspaper brings attention to the college and to the situation college males now face. The biggest surprise is that most people are simply not aware ofthe situation as itis. Let this be a call to readers to take part in helping establish a mens center on the college campus where you once studied or have a son in residence. The tide is rolling in for boys and men, and that means we are finally beginning to learn, not more about what males have done, but about their experience. Contrary to the standardview, this is unknownterritory. Ifyou have not been in contact with your alma mater for a while, call or write to the officers in alumni relations and tell them that you would like to support a mens center on campus on the Wagner model. Ifyou know a faculty member there who once made a difference in your life, contact him and invite himto be amentor. Askaboutthe ratio ofmales to female now enrolledthere. Ifyou have a son or grandson at college, ask him about his life there. He will have stories to tell about feelings ofdisengagement, even alienation from campus life. He may be among the few males on campus who are still engaged, but most ofhis friends are not. Askhim to identify a faculty memberwho is willing to workto establish amens center. He will know such aperson. These teachers standoutas being male-positive intheirclasses andoncampus. Ifyou are on the faculty orstaffata college oruniversity, bring this idea to yourcolleagues attention. Many have been wading in the slackwater, knowing what is coming to pass and waiting for news ofothers interest in how boys and men are faring. In every case, it will be a challenging and rewarding experience. Alotis atstake here. Miles Groth, PhD, WagnerCollege

Recommended Reading:

Men's Issues Websites:

www.mensnewsdaily.com www.glennsacks.com www.standyourground.com www.mensactivism.org www.angryharry.com www.thespearhead.com www.avoiceformen.com www.mediaradar.org falserapesociety.blogspot.com counterfem.blogspot.com antimisandry.com

PUA: Pick Up Artist good with women, usually a practictioner of Game in one form or another.

Terms and Definitions:

Game: Practical understanding of the base natures of women, and what they respond to. MGTOW: Men Going Their Own Way men who have decided women aren't worth the trouble. MRM: Mens Rights Movement MRA: Mens Rights Activist

Men today face more obstacles and barriers than ever before. Men face diminished employment prospects, barriers to obtaining a quality education, even demonization of their very masculinity. Socially, men as a group occupy increasingly devalued positions. The destruction of the 'Traditional' male role, along with the removal of the Father from the family, has led to generations of men with little guidance, save the voices of those who hate them. The everpresent media neither represents their views, nor does it even accurately portray them. Rather than being seen as half of society, men are increasingly portrayed as occupations, or archetypes, their humanity carefully hidden from view. For decades, men were forced to keep quiet. For decades, men thought they, and they alone, 'felt that way'. But no more. With MenZ Magazine, you will be exposed to ideas and arguments you will assuredly never hear on your television, or read in your local paper. These are the views of men, and women, who are tired of being spoon fed misinformation. People who want YOU to know that you, as a man, matter. So please, join us.
menzmagazine.blogspot.com