A Response to ACT’s MRA-Style Rant

On the 19th of March, ACT announced they would be running candidates in this year’s local government elections. Accompanying that call for “common-sense kiwis” was an anti-woke essay typifying the views they expect their candidates to hold.

I have included that part of their mailer, Free Press, in its entirety.

The Oppression the Left Forgot

Besides a pandemic, the last decade has consisted of economic paralysis and cultural division as Governments dumped years of live-and-let-live liberalism to focus on identity politics. Jacinda Ardern and Justin Trudeau were the pin ups for this dismal movement, managing to tank their respective countries’ economies and make everyone angry at each other.

Free Press regrets to inform you that the DEI brigade missed a large oppressed group. This group has disastrous education statistics, lives years less than the national average, in part because of their high suicide rates, and is far more likely to be arrested, charged, sentenced, and imprisoned. Some speculate this is due to years of violence, including being held in state institutions, and in armed conflict.

In recent years, prominent members of this group have been forced by their managers into public humiliation, pronouncing that they’re sorry for being part of this group. The group is regularly ridiculed in media and advertising, and not expected to complain.

The group is, of course, men. If any other group had the social statistics men do, there would be a special ministry, a ‘day,’ targeted support programs, and probably quotas to help them on their way.

That there is none of that, and that some people will be angry to read any of this, is just one of those modern mysteries. Why are men such a blind spot for all the luvvies, despite dismal social statistics that would normally justify an entire Government department?

Some will point out that women do face serious problems. Domestic and sexual violence are overwhelmingly problems for women. Even today there is a connection between domestic work and earned income. Claudia Goldin won the Nobel prize for explaining the remaining gender pay gap this way.

Other people having problems, or even causing other peoples’ problems, has never stopped the luvvies before. There must be some better reason why men’s abysmal suffering is not the subject of some major leftie sympathy.

Our best theory is that men doing badly blows up the whole DEI identity politics movement of the past decade. The movement’s basic story is that if anything is wrong in the world it’s because bad people have been oppressing them, perhaps for hundreds of years.

Why are Māori doing badly in the stats? Colonisation. Women? The patriarchy. LGBTQI+. So many reasons. There is even a fattist movement claiming ‘society’ has designed its aeroplane seats, magazines, and institutions to silence fat voices (we are not making this up).

But who oppressed men? Men can’t be oppressed. They are needed to play the villain of the piece. In a play where everyone is a victim or a villain for historic reasons, not everyone can be good, and certainly not those needed to be bad.

A worse conclusion would be that women are oppressing boys. Practically all early childhood teachers, six-out-of-seven primary teachers, and two-out-of-three high school teachers are women.

If it was the other way around the picture would seem sinister. Perhaps teacher gender is why last year 42 per cent of girls came out of high school with University Entrance compared with 32 per cent of boys. Oddly this explanation of oppression by a dominant group has not been emerged.

Nor should it. The whole idea that we are not thinking and valuing individuals but instead members of a group is bunk. It’s led to more division and anger than it’s worth (which is not much to start with). It’s disempowered people by making them think they are products of history, instead of masters of their own destiny.

A better way is to let people problem solve by innovating. Charter schools are a pin-up example of this. Vanguard Military School (run by ex-servicemen), and Te Aratika Academy (run by a civil construction firm) offered different education that some might see as filling the male role-model gap in education.

The same could be said for most problems we’re currently blaming on colonisation, the patriarchy, or whatever cause du jour is on people’s minds. More innovation in social services, more economic opportunity for people who want to take it, a more dynamic and innovative society generally is what’s needed.

For all those who still think the world is made up of victims and villains, with the past made up of endless oppression, what are you doing for men?

David Seymour, the ACT leader and Deputy Prime Minister who has done not a jot to advance the specific inequities that men face.

My response is below.

Re:

https://www.act.org.nz/the_oppression_the_left_forgot

I am on the left, and I spend a lot of time talking about the need for seperate spaces to be carved out for men in terms of addressing some of the issues they face due to extreme gender separatism in our society. Some topics you neglected to mention are male circumcision, or as some men prefer to call it, male genital mutilation, male loneliness and lack of connection (which you do reference the partial effects of with the abysmal suicide stats), and the effects of violent assault that’s typified against men in public e.g. “king hits” (it’s not like women don’t face a risk in public, but it’s worth drawing attention to the fact that the risk of violence is different). 

My statement to you is: your party is in government. I am not. What would you like to start doing about these issues?

When you decide to address them, if you decide to address them, should you like assistance, feel free to reach out to me or most likely any other feminist organisation in New Zealand. We’d be happy to help in the struggle against the archaic structures holding our society back. 

Warm Regards,

Stephanie Cullen