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An organization for men to deal with men’s problems? How bad could it be? Let’s take a look at their manifesto:
“Wolf Pack aims to tackle the challenges of social isolation amongst adult men by helping foster social connection and new friendships through vulnerable and supportive conversations around topics of depth.
Our Wolf Pack groups will be meeting on a monthly basis, and similar to our youth programs, we’ll be diving deep into topics around our pillars of self (acceptance, esteem, love, and awareness), health (mental, emotional, and physical), and others (inclusiveness, diversity, empathy, and relationships). Don’t worry if this sounds a bit different then your usual after-work gathering – Wolf Pack is going to be a fun, engaging, and unique event every time.”
Well, doesn’t seem like a bad start. Choosing ‘wolf pack’ though, given the sheer volume of specious MRA arguments based on a the contrived notion of ‘wolf-society’ should make one pause. Is our hesitation justified? Let’s view the next line from the w-pack manifesto:
“The goals of Wolf Pack are to:
Create brave spaces for conversations about masculinity and positive, healthy ways to ‘be a man’
Break down social isolation and foster lasting connections and meaningful support with our peers”
What precisely is a ‘brave space’? Perhaps it involves blue war-paint and shouting in bad Scottish accent, “Freedom!”? Who knows, but it seems like a ham-handed way to avoid saying ‘safe space’ because as we all know feminists and women use that term, and certainly one should not be associated with unmanly people like that.
Hope for the W-pak took a bit of dip when reading the first line. Masculinity is fucking toxic. It is based on creating worth for one set of human beings by degrading, debasing, and savaging another subset of species. Trying to tease out positive healthy ways out of the vile shit-soup that is masculinity would be quite the feat. Furthermore, how about healthy ways to be a ‘person’ rather than one side of the oppressive gender hierarchy.
I realize that casting a radical feminist analysis at the wolf-pack might not be entirely fair, but these folks are getting media attention for essentially stating that they are not overtly hostile to females and feminism in general. A very large cookie for each of these embiggended and bold men daring to not threaten the status-quo in society…
“Who can participate in Wolf Pack?
Wolf Pack is open to men and anyone who identifies with maleness/masculinity looking to meet like-minded men who are interested in redefining what it is to “be a man” and make friends along the way! […]”
Way to portray masculinity in a positive light! – Because we all know how awesome the masculine set of gender stereotypes happen to be.
The Wolfpack seems to be getting some media attention for the noble attribute of not being particularly horrible. Of course, in our patriarchal society, that is all it takes. It would be more interesting to see some media coverage of women’s organizations and the women that run them, but then again males being ‘not horrible’ is judged to be the newsworthy piece.
:(
IBTP.
[Source: The Wolf Pack/ NextGen Men]
Reading dry academic books so you don’t have to… :) Niebuhr tackles what he sees as contradictions in the base make up of American culture. He uses a plethora of words to say what he means, but importantly, he zeros in how important collective action is – even in a society that claims to be ruggedly individualistic.
“Sometimes the irony in our [US] historic situation is derived from the extravagant emphasis in our culture upon the value of dignity of the individual and upon individual liberty as the final value of life. Our cherished vales of individualism are real enough; and we are right in preferring death to their annulment. But our exaltation of the individual involves us in some very ironic contradictions.
On the one hand, our culture does not really value the individual as much as it pretends; on the other hand, if justice is to be maintained and our survival assured, we cannot make individual liberty as unqualifiedly the end of life as our ideology asserts.”
[…]
If the academic thought of a scientific culture tends to obscure the mystery of the individual’s freedom and uniqueness, the social forms of a technical society frequently endanger the realities of his life. The mechanistically contrived togetherness of our great urban centers in inimical to genuine community. For community is grounded in personal relations. In these the individual becomes most completely himself as his life enters organically into the lives of others. Thus our theory and our practice tend to stand in contradiction to our creed.
But if our academic thought frequently negates our individualistic creed, our social practice is frequently better than the creed. The justice we have established in our society has been achieved, not by pure individualism, but by collective action. We have balanced collective social power with collective social power. In order to prevail against our Communist foe we must continue to engage in vast collective ventures, subject ourselves to far-reaching national and international disciplines and we must moderate the extravagance of our theory by the soberness of our practice. Many young men, who have been assured that only the individual counts among us, have died upon foreign battlefields. We have been subjected to this ironic refutation of our cherished creed because the creed is too individualistic to measure the social dimension of human existence and too optimistic to gauge the hazards to justice which exists in every community, particular in the international one.
-Reinhold Niebuhr. The Irony Of American History p.7, p.10.
“there’s no such thing as “taking control” of being objectified. the women who say that through stripping or other forms of performative sexuality they are regaining control of their own objectification aren’t understanding the concept of control. control is gained through power, power is systematic and industrialized, power is not a feeling. you can feel good while you’re being objectified, or you can feel bad, but realistically that changes nothing about the exchange: the woman being exploited for male consumption. “
Of course, there might be other factors at play.
Scholar and feminist activist Jasmine Curcio addresses this polemic and the domination of men in leftist politics, especially around issues pertaining to feminism:
“And so many years on, feminist discussions around the left continue to be subtly dominated by men and their perspective, with the aid of theoretical frameworks that marked disdain towards feminism in decades past. Men have become gatekeepers of feminist discussion, and many debates take place with ignorance, disdain, and sometimes subtle tactics of bullying. Phenomena that lie outside of the bourgeois-proletarian contradiction are not really taken on board as material facts, but either made to fit with constructed orthodoxy or they are discarded.”
Paradoxically, when women point this out, the reality of sexism bites back and they are regarded as “bitches,” “whores,” and even shut down both on social media and in public forums.
One of the frustrations that women experience is that people don’t believe them when they point out sexism in society. So, now thanks to Elizabeth Plank and Vox we can get a newscast rundown of the sexism that pervades our society and of course, the Olympic games.
Enjoy?
As always, if you’re wondering if we are even close to equality take a peek in the comments section of the video. They will disabuse you of any sort slappy-happy egalitarian nonsense that happens to be bumbling about in your neural network.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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