Men’s rights conference takes aim at feminism

Article here. Excerpt:

'At what was billed as the first annual international conference on men’s issues, feminists were ruining everything.

“I call it the evil empire,” Erin Pizzey, the British founder of one of the first domestic violence shelters and a staunch anti-feminist, said Friday, borrowing Ronald Reagan’s description of the Soviet Union. “We need to go after them. We cannot allow this to continue. And if we don’t stop it, I don’t see a future for marriage, for love, or for anything.”

“We need to name names,” Pizzey said, “and first on my list is Hillary Clinton.” One of the few overtly partisan moments at the conference, it drew loud cheers and applause from the attendees.
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Men’s rights activists have a long list of grievances. They say fathers have to navigate a family court system that unfairly privileges mothers in divorce, and that boys are falling behind in education. They worry about high unemployment among men and the fact that men are more likely to commit suicide. They argue that domestic and sexual violence against men is underplayed by the media, and that men are unfairly stereotyped as violent sexual predators. These are all fruits of a society where women are valued and protected, while men are not.

Many of the more than 100 attendees at the conference spoke of being prevented from seeing their children, or struggling financially in the aftermath of a divorce.

But those issues got short shrift from most of the speakers on the first full day of the conference Friday, hosted by A Voice For Men, an online hub for men’s rights activists founded by Paul Elam. What animated most of the speakers at the conference was feminism and how it needed to be defeated.

Although generally understood as an ideology of equal rights for women, at the conference such feminists were called “equity feminists,” discussed the way Democrats might refer to “sane conservatives” or Republicans to “good liberals.” In other words, a largely fictional exception whose purpose is merely to define the whole as extreme. Feminists, for many of the speakers, were the enemy.

Feminist activists had protested the original venue for the conference, the DoubleTree Hilton in Detroit, in early June. A Voice for Men said that they had moved the conference to the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in St. Clair Shores, saying that they had sold so many tickets the Hilton could no longer accommodate them. A spokesperson for Hilton said that “there were some obligations in their contract that they were unable to adhere to.”

“The protest really came out of the fact that what they say is not about men’s issues, it’s about violence against women, it’s about blaming feminism for issues that feminists in a lot of cases actually work [on],” said Amanda Levitt, a feminist activist and postgraduate student at Wayne State University who was involved with the protest. Levitt posted online an open letter from her and her fellow activists Wednesday, saying that “due to concerns for physical safety we have decided the best way to oppose the conference that is now going on in St. Clair Shores is to keep our distance.”
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Most of the speakers on the first full day of the conference were women, a fact Palmatier noted proudly. ”I am the third presenter to speak at the first annual international men’s human rights conference, and that would be the third woman presenter,” Palmatier said to applause. “My aren’t we an interesting group of misogynists. I hate to tell you guys, but I think we might be doing it wrong.”'