Origin of the phrase ‘Men’s Human Rights Movement’

March 28, 2018August 11, 2023 / Peter Wright / Leave a comment

The question of when the phrase Men’s Human Rights Movement was first coined continues to crop up in conversations in the manosphere and beyond, with conflicting claims. So this post is designed to set the record straight.

It’s worth stating that the shorter phrase human rights has been in use in relation to men’s issues for several decades, by a number of people, so the idea of thinking about the human rights of men is certainly nothing new nor original. However no one to my knowledge had coined the longer phrase Men’s Human Rights Movement until January 2013 when I raised it in an email exchange between Paul Elam and myself, as detailed here:Following that email exchange, Paul Elam went ahead and wrote an article in which he made the following official announcement:

“From this day forward, it is the editorial policy of AVFM to refer to the movement of which we are a part as the Men’s Human Rights Movement, or MHRM.”

[Paul Elam, Entering a New ERA]

As you can see from the date stamps, Paul’s article was published within 24 hours of our above email exchange, and was followed by widespread discussion across the manosphere regarding the pros and cons of the new phrase. The rest as they say is history, and the phrase Men’s Human Rights Movement is now used widely.

With the dated email exchange above, and the inaugural MHRM articles which first promoted the MHRM phrase, the history of the phrase is clarified. While I wouldn’t necessarily be surprised to learn that someone used the phrase before this time, a search of the internet revealed nothing with earlier dates.

As an aside, those who like and use the MHRM phrase might like to check out the following free-use human rights logo. The symbol, which is part bird and part hand (see directly below), is internationally recognized and can be used on blogs and printed materials promote human rights status of many men’s issues.

Lastly among the numerous examples of the shorter phrase human rights being utilized in relation to men’s issues, former editor at AVfM John Hembling used the phrase ‘Men’s Rights are Human Rights’ in a poster campaign, which received some media coverage at the time. Example of potential use of that phrasing with the human rights symbol below:

Discussing Gynocentrism with Paul Elam & Alison Tieman

March 27, 2018 / rtbavfm / Leave a comment

Alison Tieman and Paul Elam give their thoughts on the phenomenon of gynocentrism.

Catholic man talks about the Virgin Mary, chivalry, & feminism (published in 1897)

March 7, 2018December 23, 2023 / gynocentrism / Leave a comment

The below article penned in 1897 by Mr. Marion Reedy states that the widespread veneration of Mary encouraged the pedestalization of women, gave birth to the chivalrous gentlemen, and was responsible for the “New Woman” of feminism, quote:

“The church it was that built up the modern ideal of woman. The church it was that cultivated, so to speak, chastity, by its insistence that the creature who had borne a God was worthy of veneration, and was not to be only an utensil in ministration to male passion. Not only was man indoctrinated with a higher idea of woman, but women became possessed of a higher, better sense of their own worthiness.

There is no love poem in the world that equals the Litany of the Virgin, composed by the celibates of the church, and all that is ethereal and spiritual in modem love’s expression is to be found in the beautiful titles whereby the Virgin Mother has been supplicated for centuries. This idealization, not to say idolization, of woman could not but have its effect upon men and women in a time when the church was supreme, and so we see, as woman is more and more recognized for her worth & her value in the scheme of things, coming down the centuries, woman’s ideas gradually changing the heart of the world. As civilization progressed, cruelty was put away. This was the influence of woman.

The gradual growth into life, out of religion, of the reverence for Mary manifested itself in the development of chivalry, and then, when chivalry, its ends accomplished, passed away, in the development of what we now know as the gentleman.

This Mariolatry, as some people call it, led to the modern gynolatry about which there is, now and then, much protest. Yes, the devotion to Mary is responsible for the New Woman, and the New Woman is only a distortion of the real woman as she will be when emancipated completely from the denomination of the ideas against which Mariolatry has been an age-long protest. If the church enslaved woman, it did so, in one way, only to give her greater power in another.

The nunnery up-held chastity in times when universal and continuous war ravaged the world ; for the Middle Ages were anarchy. The church maintained the indissolubility of marriage when every petty tyrant in Italy, Germany & France deemed himself a god, and thought to appropriate other men’s wives and daughters as he would their cattle. Churchmen at times were dissolute enough to convert unbelievers on the theory that an institution which could survive such infamies must be Divine, but the teachings of the church held the great body of men true to purity in woman, and to the sanctity of the marital relation.

The church has upheld Mary consistently as the type of sacred womanhood and, by its influence upon the minds of men, has brought about a general attitude toward all women as if they partake of some of her mystical attributes of worthiness and even of divinity. Ave Maria!

Source: Mrs. Marion Reedy, published in The Philistine in 1897.

Further reading: ‘Mariolatry and Gyneolatry’

Jordan Peterson on psychological differences/similarities between the sexes

March 3, 2018December 25, 2023 / Peter Wright / 4 Comments

In a recent interview Jordan Peterson took the opportunity to clarify his position on the vexed question ‘are the sexes different or the same,’ which he definitively answers in favour of males and females being more alike than they are different. – PW

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JORDAN PETERSON: “I am a psychometrician, that’s technically my job and we study measurement, and it’s a truism of psychomentrics that men and women are more the same than they are different. Y’now it’s funny because I’ve been sort of positioned as someone who is constantly on about the differences between men and women, but men and women are more the same than they are different, And what that means is the development of masculinity in women is perhaps not as important as the development of masculinity in men, but its damned important. It’s like a close second.”

And from an earlier interview:

Are men and women more similar or more different? Well it depends on how you define the terms.

They are more similar. Why? Well they’re the same species, so we could start with that. But the question is what are the differences and how do they manifest themselves and are those manifestations important?

Here’s an example, if you took a random woman out of the population and a random man, and you had to bet on who was more temperamentally aggressive, if you bet on the man you’d be right 60 percent of the time. But you’d be wrong 40 percent of the time and that’s not a walloping difference right 60 ~ 40. Its not like 90 ~ 10, so there’s a lot of overlap between men and women in terms of their levels of aggression. And you think well they’re more the same, yes.

So then let’s play a slightly different game: lets pick the 1 in 100 most aggressive persons from the general population; and they are all men, and that’s why all the people in prison are men. So even though on average most men and women, 90 – 95 percent of them [are similar], and often if the women are in prison its because they got tangled up with the really bad guy.

So one of the problems is that differences at the extreme are where the differences really start to manifest themselves. So you can have a small difference at the level of the average, but out at the extremes it starts to make a massive difference.

Further study materials:
Robert Sapolsky, Humans: tournament or pair-bonding species?
Janet Hyde, The Gender Similarities Hypothesis (2005), and Gender Similarities and Differences (2014)