Don’t worry, I’m still alive and still beavering away at the book, in between other writing assignments.

Excerpted from my main website:

I’ve just had an article published over on Men’s News Daily. It’s a great publication for people interested in gender politics and the growing men’s rights movement. Some of you will know that I have been working on a book on gender politics (see the gender equivalence subsite site for more info)for the past few years. It’s also the first time that I’ve written for a website rather than a print mag in over a year, and it’s a funny feeling to get back into the fast paced dynamic of web publishing. I hope that I’ll be working with MND a lot in the future.

The subject  of the article is the rather unpleasant practice of rich middle aged women travelling to third world countries in order to have paid-for sex with young men. In case you’re wondering, yes, Haiti is a top destination for these women, or was until recently. The most infuriating aspect? Feminist writers have long condoned this in newspaper articles that spin things around to seem like the women are the victims in the situation.

Excerpts:

…consider the growing number of middle-class young women in places like the UK and Japan who are reportedly paying their way through college by doing sex work. Most people would agree that there is a qualitative difference between that and the lot of a crack-addicted street hooker.

…

However, astonishingly, there are sympathetic voices to be found, and in mainstream publications too. Try it yourself, do a search for “female sexual tourism” and prepare for some Olympic-class mental gymnastics.

…

The hypocrisy of this double standard is aggravated by the fact that the group that write the articles, feminist journalists, typically espouse a disparaging and zero tolerance view of prostitution.

The omnibus book is called Tech Book 1 - Published articles Oct 2006 - June 2008 by Michael Reed. Even though this book is about tech, it does contain two gender politics articles, rehashed versions of two of the articles on this site. If you follow the links to the oldish articles entitled ARTICLE: Defining equality and ARTICLE: Attacking feminism: why should a geek care? you can read the updated versions that I created for the book.

[edit: In addition, please note that, although a self published book, it is still a valid, citable source complete with an ISBN number. If you are writing about or researching male rights, it might  be handy. Look over the PDF version of the article. It contains UK-centric information about affirmative action, female involvement in open source software development, education and feminism. Lot's of handy (and fully cited) facts and figures.]

If you like, you could buy a copy of the book by visiting my main website. Or, if you’re feeling a bit hard up, you can download a free e book copy by clicking here (PDF format 6.5 megs).

Hopefully, there won’t be any other delays and I can get on with creating a first draft of the GE book from my masses of notes. At the moment, the book exists only as a mass of about 50,000 words of notes. The delays that I have had so far mean that a release before the end of the year is impossible. I’m aiming to have some news about the book by about May 2009.

It ended up being something of a time-sucker of a project, but I learned quite a lot by doing it. As a result, the gender politics book is going to be much better. If it does end up being self published book, the publishing phase will move much more quickly.

A quick point on self publishing. I’m proceeding as though I will have to self publish the GE book, but I may attempt to find publisher interest. When I started writing it I didn’t have any published material under my belt. However, I am now making inroads into the world of freelance tech journalism. If things continue as they are doing, I might be able to develop a profile sufficient to get a publisher on board. We’ll see where things stand next year.

From the article:

“Full-time employed males (whether fathers or not) on average work eight hours a week more than full-time employed females. According to the International Labor Organization, the average American father works 51 hours a week, whereas those mothers of young children who do work full time (themselves a minority) work a 41-hour week. Women earn 76% of what men do for working 84% (not 100%) as many hours. “

Is Pay a Function of Gender Bias? (link to the full article)

As most of you will know, the government website sports an official petition system. Using this system, members of the public can set up web-based petitions which, apparently, the goverment will monitor.

I spotted a good one today, on the subject of extending provisions of shelter facilties to include all victims of domestic abuse. Currently, there exists almost no assistance for men who find themselves in this position.

Click on this link to read more about the petition. Consider signing up if you are a UK citizen and agree with what is being proposed. http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/DVJUSTICE/

About half the people reading that statement might be left scratching their heads, wondering why this is significant. In a nutshell, the police and government statistics show that the problem of, so called, “battered husbands” is extremely significant. Some studies estimate that 17% of all victims of domestic violence are male. For some more background on some these issues, I invite you to check out this blog posting on another male rights blog:

“Monk” and domestic violence

As ever, my advice it to read up about the subject, with an open mind, and come to your own conclusions.

Are Fathers’ Rights a Factor in Male Suicide? By Wendy McElroy

Interesting and balanced overview of some father’s rights issues. Worth a read, IMO.

Wendy also has an interesting website called ifeminists.com which describes a sort of libertarian third wave equity feminism. It’s feministic but at least makes an attempt to include male/female equality as opposed to the typical feminist ‘women good/men bad’ dogma. As the content of the above article would suggest, her ideology includes some acknowledgment of both male rights issues and criticism of feminism. Just a shame that she has to call it “feminism” at all, IMO.

Male abortion rights? by Marianne Bossert

Another nice article. This touches upon a topic that I am developing 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.

A few days ago (at the time of writing), a news site that I sometimes contribute to linked to an article about gender issues affecting women’s entry into IT. The article was quite provocative and I think that I’m being fair when I describe the tone of the article as “feministic”. Anyone who knows me well can probably guess what happened next… I decided to make “gender issues in IT” the topic of my fourth article for that site.

Unfortunately, this article was rejected. And through the experience, I think that I’ve learned a few things. I’ve taken the criticism on board, and the truth is that the article could have been better executed. The subject matter is important to me and the article - in both conception and execution - isn’t representative of my best efforts. However…

I would consider it to be in poor manners to reproduce private correspondence on a public website such as this but the editor told me that he considered the tone of the article “shrill” and aggressive. He explained that he did not agree with my ideas. He then went into a bit of detail about his own beliefs on the subject and quite frankly, I was left feeling that he wanted me to re-align the ideas to match his own before he would publish the article.

This is the point that I am most annoyed about.

As part of my response I pointed out that it was the job of an editor to edit rather than to tell the writer what to write. I made it clear that I was willing to discuss compromise in terms of editing (such as removing part 1 - 2,000 words or so - of the article).

The incident left a particularly bitter taste in my mouth as the same site had, earlier that week, linked to such a feministic article on the same subject. The comments section of that article posting revealed that other users of the site were, both interested in the subject matter, and like me, opposed to some of the ideas.

It’s a shame if this means that that sites’ policy is now to only publish articles about the gender politics of tech issues if they are written from a feministic point of view.

But then, I have started to wonder how other people would have perceived my article. When I muse about the way that any loony, fringe feminist is ‘allowed’ to express her view, while on the other hand, a man might be impeded in his attempts to express equivalent views with the same vigor, I wonder if I have stumbled onto a useful principle.

After examining the situation, I feel that, yet again, this is an example of feminism and political correctness combining to rob women of power. I think that when a man says something, it somehow carries with it a greater importance. For example, in the film, About A Boy, one of the characters is wearing a “Lorna Bobbit For Surgeon General” T-shirt. Can you imagine the outcry if, in a comedy film, a man expressed an equivalent sentiment of vengeful, sexual violence against a woman? (btw, another film in which every women is a virtuous victim and every man is an idiot or a villain.)

A culture, in which feminist views are over-represented, and as a result, is now almost hysterically over-sensitive about “women’s rights” and “women’s welfare” has become paternal.

What this comes down to is accountability. I often say that a person with no accountability is a person of no account. In a society in which a man would be free to face up to a women and say, “How dare you be so sexist!”, in response to one of her comments, the importance of what women say would be increased.

“You can’t start a fire without a spark” and women by being able to criticize while being free of any criticism, are being robbed of their elemental power.

I understand why the article was rejected but I do not agree with the decision.

I strongly disapprove of their apparent policy of only allowing one side of the arguments surrounding gender and IT to be represented on the website. Feminism isn’t something that was delivered down from God, it is something that people made. Consequently, it’s flawed rather than divine and other people have developed counter views. I consider the content of my article to be extremely mild compared to many feminist articles on the same subject.

I wonder if the article that was originally linked to was conceived under similarly rigid parameters of: “don’t write anything that might offend men or be perceived as criticism of male orientated institutions.”? I doubt it.

I suppose the thing that really annoys me most about the article being rejected is that it mirrors some of the issues discussed in the article! Women have written articles about the difficulties that women face in an environment such as a technical-forum and yet, in this case, it seems that the woman’s view has been represented while a man’s counter view has been repressed. This is in contradiction to the sentiment expressed in the article that I was responding to and one of my points has been proven correct!

So, what is the lesson that I have learned?

I’ve realized that saying “it’s ok when women do it!” is a reversal of a weak argument of a loony-feminist. I have to better than the thing that I am criticizing. It’s laziness to fall back on rhetoric and easy polemic. If an idea is well conceived, perhaps one need not hit people about the head with it.

Continuing the self-criticism for a moment: I should have narrowly defined precisely what I meant by the term ‘feminism’. There is an ambiguity to the term, and for example, some schools of feminism such as “sex positive feminism” or “equity feminism” would be fairly compatible with my own views. Having said that, however, I would maintain that it is valid to criticize the value of any *.ism that explores gender issues from a the perspective of a single sex.

So, in summary, I can’t really be too angry about an experience which has probably considerably improved the book. I may try again one day to create a more skillfully written article on this subject so that it can be published on a mainstream site.

I still wish the article had been published in front of a wide audience. The users could have made up their own minds and ripped the article apart if they disagreed with it. I consider myself to have been a victim of sexism.

As I don’t want the article to be wasted and I want the ideas to be heard, I have made it the first article content on this new site. Please feel free to comment on it, privately or via the site. I’d love to know what you think.

The only alteration I have made to the article is to split it in half to make two articles. It is available via the side menu as:

“Attacking feminism: why should a geek care?” (the old part 2 and 3)

and

“Defining equality.” (the old part 1)

Expect to see the occasional article and more information about my philisophy of gender politics.

The site can also be used as the central resource for progress information on the book.

Although it might not be immediately apparent, I see a connection between the subjects of ‘tech’ and ‘gender’. In a way, it’s a bit like class-struggle: we geeks make the world what it is as we invent everything but, I wonder, do geeks do very well in the sex wars? I would hope that tech-geeks would be interested in the subject matter of my book. Does an ‘average geek’ ever get upset when when he observes ‘men’ being criticized in the media again. Are we really that inferior? The principle idea behind Gender Equivalence is that men and women are equals in matters such as morality, intelligence and romantic sensibility and I hope that fellow geeks would agree with that.

All in all, I suspect that a fair proportion of my fellow geeks will have had the same experience of saying ‘but that doesn’t make sense…’, quietly to themselves when they are confronted with yet more media feminism.