Improving the effectiveness of the Men’s Movement in the UK.
A project to identify reasons for the relative ineffectiveness of the men’s issues campaigning in the UK and offer guidelines for more effective action.
These pages resulted from a series of online discussions during Feb/March 2023 between Zac Fine, Joe Horton, Geoffrey Breeze, Vincent McGovern, Nick Langford and Martin Seager.
Reasons for relative ineffectiveness.
The article here is the result of our early exploration of the main reasons for ineffectiveness. It identifies natural characteristics of men such as:
* stoicism – their habit of ‘putting up with’ the anti-male narrative
* lack of ‘in group preference’ which means that men do not organise for the group called ‘men’.
Characteristics of Positive Masculinity
This table was derived from the ‘King, Warrior, Magician, Lover’ (KWML) model of masculinity which identifies 4 main dimensions of what it is to be ‘a man’.
We chose to use the qualities ‘Leadership/Vision; Action/Fortitude; Wisdom/Knowledge and Compassion/Empathy’. The KWML approach identifies characteristics of a positive role model and two types of characteristic referred to as ‘immature masculine’: one over-bearing, the other weak. We have described the over-bearing one as ‘Men behaving badly’ and the weak version as ‘Men behaving weakly’.
MANifesto for an effective men’s movement.
Ten points to promote a message of positive masculinity that: MEN can embrace, FAMILIES benefit from, SOCIETY is crying out for, POLITICIANS can support, COURTS fully recognise, which will benefit EVERYONE.