Last month saw two new, separate but connected, developments in my research for the book.

The first, and most outwardly apparent, was the creation of this website. I’ll use the site both to self-publish articles on the subject of gender politics and to post progress information on the book.

As soon as you are about to dismiss something, don’t.

The other change was that I decided to have a look around the web to see what other people who were interested male rights were doing. This is a big change for me as, frankly, I don’t do much reading on the subject of gender politics as I prefer to concentrate my studies upon the more fundamental aspects of humanities and social science research.

I do this to keep my own research pure and by ‘pure’, I don’t mean that I avoid reading about gender issues in order to avoid unintentional plagiarism; rather, I endevour to make sure that my line of reasoning is as unpolluted as possible. I find that an argument that I have conceived, in this way, from the ground up is a stronger argument.

What’s out there?

In a nutshell, there exists a huge pool of other people (mostly but not only men) who are very concerned with male rights and male issues. There are a few overly-aggressive bad eggs who risk providing ammunition for those who oppose male rights ideology, but on the whole, the tone is in keeping with my own sense of what is acceptable.

In the last post, I blogged that people intersted in male rights don’t really have the same freedoms of expression that women activists do. My attitude is that this is unfair but it’s the system in which we have to opperate. I accept that, when arguing about gender-politics, men have to behave like Ghandi whereas a militant feminist can express any crazy theory with fear of censure.

It was a very strange feeling to see some of my own weirdo ideas being expressed by other people. If I’m mad, it would seem that I’m not the only one.

Having said that, if they are also mad, why is it that many of them are able express the reasoning behind their argument rather than falling back on the feminist staples of “everyone knows” or “anyone who dissgrees with me is a hateful sexist!”?

The main criticism that I would make of most male rights literature that I have seen (web based and print media) is that it isn’t very organized. The bulk of the material that I have been exposed to tends to favor the identification of individual points of unfairness, oppression, disadvantage and hypocrisy instead of trying to build it up into a systematic theory similar to feminism.

And this is exactly what I am trying to do.