We Hunted the Mammoth is a good site to read if you don’t know what the men’s rights movement is. If you’ve ever heard the acronym “MRA” and not understood what it means, that’s where I’d suggest you go (hint: the “A” stands for “activist”).
So I guess it’s only fitting that Dave Futrelle, author of WHtM, be the one to chronicle the fact that Richard Dawkins has never heard of the men’s rights movement. And that Paul Elam, founder of MRA web site A Voice for Men and commonly recognized unofficial leader of the men’s rights movement, was shocked to hear this.
Frankly I’m a little shocked, myself. See, it’s not really that unusual to not know about the men’s rights movement, or especially about Paul Elam, if you’re the average person. But Richard Dawkins is very far from the average person in this regard. He has a dog in this fight, you see, and it’s a little jarring to realize that he doesn’t seem to know which dog is his.
Not only is Dawkins a self-proclaimed feminist who issues proclamations about what “true feminism” is, but he’s a self-proclaimed feminist who has angered feminists again and again by making comments which are tone-deaf at best, and unquestionably anti-feminist at worst, on Twitter and in other places. He’s a self-proclaimed feminist who is apparently a big fan of another self-proclaimed feminist who seems to specialize in anti-feminism these days, Christina Hoff Sommers.
Now, it seems to me that the difference between anti-feminism and MRA is a very small one, indeed. It’s as if Dawkins found himself a hole in the side of a mountain and moved into it, making friends with the bats and the blind fish and what-not, only to emerge one day and be utterly astonished when somebody asks “So Richard, what’s it like to live in a cave?”