I just finished reading Dr. Helen's book Men on Strike which overall is a very well written book. Over the next few days I will work on putting together a book review and hopefully it will be ready to be posted by the weekend.
However, I will say that as a Man Going my Own Way I do see things a little bit differently than what she wrote as her 6 tips in the final chapter.
Which means in my review at the end I will need break down 2 big important issues. One would be the two options society gives to the majority of men.
The other is why Men's Groups are utter failures. While I think Dr. Helen Smith means well I'm not sure how much she understands the history of Why Men's Groups Fail.
I remember back in 2007 Irlandes from the Don't Get Married wrote a very good post on Why Men's Group's Fail.
I did a google search to see if it could be located and I did find in in the Best of Happy Bachelors and I did find under the thread Words of Wisdom from Irlandes but was not separated from the other 31 posts.
Therefore I decided to copy and paste it here so it could be seen all by itself, while your at it, I also high recommend reading the thread it's your problem NOT ours by Irlandes as well.
With said here is the post Irlandes wrote called Why Men's Groups Fail! Enjoy!
Why MRA/FR Groups Fail
Married said he believed an MRA
organization could be made to work. A lot of people over the last 40
years have agreed with this statement. None of them actually
accomplished anything of importance, but they started out with the
belief they could. The best of them got some publicity, and from time to
time made changes affecting a man or two, but the feminist steam-roller
never so much as slowed.
How well I know. Been there; done that.
I
was active as an individual from 1978 until 1993, and from 1984 till
1993 I supplied no-fee counseling services from my home to divorced and
unwed fathers, my Real Daughter did a statistical sampling when she was
in the University and estimated I must have worked with over 1,600 men,
and a very few non-custodial women (since their problems are virtually
identical.) From 1984 till 1987, when a stupid, ignorant bas tard broke
it up because we didn't do things his way, I was both counselor and
spokesman for the board of directors of a Father's Rights group. I also
read a lot, and studied other groups to see why no one could get any
serious participation.
The reason I like the marriage strike and
this message board is because it doesn't matter if we men agree on
things. As long as the general trend is a collapse of marriage, and that
is indeed the current trend, the feminists are guaranteed to lose, the
only question is what language we will be speaking next and how many
will be killed when this nation is destroyed. I like to fantasize that
we can fix the nation, cast out the vicious man-haters, restore the
family as the building block of our society, and return to the
Constitution, but I realize that is not rational to think so.
Here,
I am going to write some of the basics that I learned about MRA groups
and why they have always failed, and why they will always fail, no
matter how brilliant and dedicated the men involved may be. Hint: they
always die from internal illnesses.
[I]. A REFUSAL TO STUDY
HISTORY. Very few men who found MRA/FR groups bother to talk to those
who came before. The argument goes like this: "I don't want to talk to
you. You accomplished nothing, so you are a loser. I can learn nothing
from a loser like you." Yes, at times, they use that sort of language.
Already
at this stage, they are 100% guaranteed to fail. They not only have to
re-invent the wheel. They have to first learn how to walk; discover the
cave as a residence; discover clothes and fire; and find a supply of
food before they can even think of something advanced like the wheel.
Every step of the way, it is fight, bicker, and quarrel, and they are
merely relearning the most basic elements of what has been tried dozens
of times before. Most groups never reach the wheel stage.
There
is no time for this. For forty years, the average MRA/FR organization
has only lasted an estimated 18 months before some know-it-all, who
almost never does anything personally, breaks it up.
And, of course, the founders do not always avoid terminal mistakes at the most basic level.
This
is usually a subset of "I am special and different. Everyone else is a
loser, so of course they failed. Since I am special and different, I
will succeed where the losers all failed."
[II]. LETTING WOMEN
HELP. Here, on DGM.com, it doesn't matter, since we don't have to
actually do anything as a group except help Lee keep his Internet
service working. The function here is simply to convince men that
marrying AW on a business-as-usual basis has a high probability of
destroying their lives, and making their children's lives equally
miserable. There is room here for those who want to find and marry the
extremely rare Lydia; live as a solitary bachelor; bring in a FW; move
to a foreign country; or become a sex tourist. Every single AW who
doesn't obtain a wage slave to kick around and divorce is another
victory for all men. Even if they manage to take away Lee's services
forever, he has already created an excellent cadre to carry on the work
underground.
In an MRA/FR group with real goals, female
participation is the kiss of death. This is not intuitive, but it is
reality. I am going to tell what happened in our FR group, but I
contacted other groups to see how things went with them. Most of those
in groups that accomplished NOTHING proudly said they had women helping,
and they also sadly admitted they had a constant number of suicides
among members. Our suicides dropped to zero once we ousted the women.
[a].
The women, mostly second wives or girl friends, who attended meetings,
demanded half of the group's work be to help women, in the name of
equality. Women already have the Army; Air Force; Navy; Marines;
National Guard; State Highway Patrol; State Bureau of Investigation;
Sherriff; City Police; DHS; the local DV center; and the entire Federal
and State Budgets at their fingertips. Men have nothing except imputed
payments for this and that and threats of jail if they can't pay. Our
annual budget was probably around $200. Yet, these fiends insisted we
had to be 'fair'.
[b]. They demanded we not allow men to whine;
men are "supposed to act like men." See suicide info above. After we
(okay, I, under authorization of the State President) got rid of the
women, our meetings emphasized counseling techniques and suicides
dropped to zero.
[c]. The minute anyone attempted to enforce
group bylaws, which generally meant telling an obstreperous woman to sit
down and shut up, other men would do a great imitation of Don Quixote
and rush to the attack against the vile brute who actually dared to seek
justice for MEN. (For those unfamiliar with classic Spanish literature,
Quixote was a senile, doddering old fool on a knightly crusade in his
private world of dementia, and could not tell the difference between a
windmill and the enemy, nor between a horrid female fiend and a woman of
flawless purity.)
[III}. MEN ARE INCAPABLE OF COOPERATING TO
STAND UP TO WOMEN. This is the ultimate reason MRA/FR groups are
inevitably doomed to fail. Men simply cannot organize to stand up to
women. Not now; not in the Greek Empire; not in the Roman Empire; not
ever.
No, I am not contradicting my statement that in Mexico men
cooperate to keep women under control. Men can do that. But when women
once take control of the entire system and raise a generation of
children, men can't get it back. It it were possible, we would still be
speaking Ancient Latin or Greek.
