But I digress.

Monad–
allow me to throw a more direct answer regarding your concerns about the men on mancoat, etc. Simply put, what you see is water seeking it’s own level. This is better known as a comfort zone. Zed knows my internet history, but I will kick you some background anyway.

To start with, I am one of those baby boomers that fucked everything up for the rest of you guys. Sorry about that. I bought all of the sensitive nice guy shit hook, line, and sinker. Back when the earth was flat it was easy to engage in “isolate and scold mode” against any guy who dared to question what the hell was going on with any matter between the sexes. (Side note here, I refer to men and women as “sexes” instead of genders, I am a man, not part of sentence structure). Isolate and scold wasn’t performed by women, men did it to each other too. It was also very successful as there were very few outlets for communication. And NONE were of the anonymous variety. Needless to say, the pussy agenda gained a lot of momentum from the late 1960’s to the mid to late 1990’s with this lack of resistance.

Then came the internet. I joined the cyber party in 2003. One of the first discussion forums I joined was “intellectualwhores”. Minds out of the gutter, folks. Intellectual whore was another way of saying “emotional tampon”. It was my thought that an unimpeded forum would be a great place for like minded guys to discuss what the hell was going on with the hopes of mobilizing to fix it. The first few months were great, after that a bunch of women joined and it went to hell in a handbasket. The site was reduced to booger and fart jokes, women flirting and men following. Pretty soon, men were being used as intellectual whores on a site called intellectual whores. Water had sought it’s own level, so I left.

I then moved to niceguy/mancoat. Mancoat was a step up so I started posting there. I did notice a certain whiny/victimhood tone to the forum, which I did address. Even Zed starting posting there in an effort to mobilize the guys and it didn’t work. I left when more women/trolls started joining and the guys defended from my attacks. I think for these guys at mancoat, that forum and state of mind is their comfort level. So I left.

I have learned a couple of things through this process. First, you can’t save everybody. Secondly, most men are one blowjob, hell, one stinkfinger for that matter, away from quitting the MRA movement alltogether. Most guys would rather flirt or whine than do something. Don’t waste any time concerning yourself over their well being. They will navigate the process of life at the level they have chosen.

FWIW, I will address where I am in the MRA process. The best way I can summarize it is a reference base. I was born in 1963 so I have seen a lot of changes. As such, I can point to where Zed is dead nuts on, and point out where someone is about to reenact one of our generation’s fuckups. Yes, the younger guys would have every right to say “your generation screwed it up so what the hell do you know?” Well, other than the fact that we know what doesn’t work AND we didn’t have the internet, I can’t think of anything. I’ll get back to you if something leaps to mind.

Final note here, my posting style. I don’t play to the lurkers and I possess the tact of a sledgehammer.

History is always revisionist, and the revision is always done by the victor. In considering the 2nd half of the 20th century, the ideology of feminism was clearly the victor.

Feminists surely did win as we surely live with palpable results.

This was not a fleeting victory as in one useless political party over the other.

Rather, it was a victory in the way the North triumphed over the South. It is permanent and the culture shall never be the same – nor return to a fixed reference point of glory days.

(There’s a good Bruce song)

I think, along with what Zed has said, that there isn’t really an easy way to deal with the more long-term angst present in some areas of the men’s internet.

I understand the anger and resentment quite well, as well as the basis for it. But at some stage in order to live one’s life, one needs to move past the resentment and channel the anger into something that pr0pels one forward, rather than simply running in place. That can be difficult, in practice, if you get slumped down into depression a a result of some of these things, and I do think that a good number of men do suffer from clinical depression due to the situation concerning women.

I think the best we can do is nudge these guys to do something with their lives. It doesn’t have to be PUA. It can be something completely different, something for themselves that improves themselves, that keeps their lives moving towards new goals and just simply — moving.

Welmer had an excellent post last year about how men can be liberated, rather than depressed and defeated, by the current scenario. The past is not coming back, and pining for it to do so is not going to lead to anywhere useful for individual men. The present and the future, however, are more wide open for us as men than they have ever been. There is a great freedom there. That freedom does not encompass women, in some cases, due to the current distortions between men and women in our culture. But there is much more to life than women, and there are freedoms to be had in the current culture to shape our own lives and destinies in ways that men in prior generations simply did not have open to them in the same way. It’s this freedom that needs to be a focus for men, once they get past the “mourning” stage, and are ripe for moving on to the “doing” stage.

Loosing one’s ire is not about accepting the status quo and passively letting it continue, it is about not letting women nor society to have control over you via your emotions whether it is feelings of shame, anger, resentment or what-have-you.

That is a very good way to put it, Monad. I wish I had an answer to how to help them out of their disempowerment, but I don’t. The answer that works for me, and was the standard prescription for men when I was young, is simply to take action. I think a lot of people today no longer understand the distinction between “control” and “influence.” I can influence a lot more things than I can control. Becoming actively involved in doing what I can to influence something important to me is what I regard as the secret of all power. It’s kind of like the old Nike slogan – “Just do it.” The problem lies in getting people unstuck enough to do it.

This issue is the reason behind my little pep talk above. I see a lot of guys stuck in feeling helpless and hopeless, and that certainly leads to anger. Anger can be a great motivator to get a man off his butt to take some sort of action, but it can also be a pit he slides into which just eats him alive. The trick is to find some way to channel that anger into some sort of constructive action.

What I had to do for myself in order to stay sane was to realize and accept that you can’t save everyone. What happened in New Orleans after Katrina is a perfect lesson in the long term effects of chronic helplessness. Sometimes people just lose the ability to help themselves, and get angry at and blame everyone else for not saving them. I think the only way to deal with situations like that is to recognize they exist, be sad that they do, and turn your attention back to something you may have some chance of influencing.

DGM and the forums which have come out of it’s demise seem to me to be taking a better tack than Mancoat. The Happy Bachelor’s forum seems more proactive and in its name promotes the concept of happiness. When the MGTOW concept germinated on Mancoat, I went out and set up a CMS and a couple of related websites and a forum in hopes that some of that frustration could be harnessed into doing things like building a centralized site with a bibliography of good articles, maybe a registry of false accusers, original essays, and other things of interest to men – kind of like what Welmer has set up here.

What happened was absolutely nothing. The same 4-5 guys who had carried every other effort I’d seen in the past few years got involved, built the framework, and then it just sat there empty.

Lee’s meltdown over at DGM2 is a textbook case of MRA burnout. Some guy decides to do something to “help other men”, takes some action, and ends up attracting a bunch of dead wood who don’t want to do anything except gripe about the fact that the free beer isn’t cold enough. I’ve learned the hard way that trying to “help” other men more often than not ends up harming myself.

In the long run, I think the only effective strategy will be to create a place which generates enough energy that guys will start to become attracted to it. They will see some good stuff happening and get curious – “Hey, what’s going on over there?” – and check it out.

That is why I got involved here.

Loosing one’s ire is not about accepting the status quo and passively letting it continue, it is about not letting women nor society to have control over you via your emotions whether it is feelings of shame, anger, resentment or what-have-you.

It’s also important to remember that women be universally uninterested in a guy doesn’t necessarily tell the whole story. We’re treating this as universal rejection, but as a universally rejected man gets older there are women who will feign interest in the man since they need a bail out. We can say that rejecting said woman isn’t a victory for the universally rejected man since she isn’t really interested in him, but it actually is a victory since the man foiled her real plans. If nothing else, their anger gives them clarity of vision to see what these women are really after.