Every revolution requires its polemics since oppressors are usually deaf to reasoned whispers. - Sylvia Ann Hewlett, A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women's Liberation in America

1992 Bellevue, Wash. - Ever since Anita Hill came forward to tell the world about Clarence Thomas, women have followed her into the spotlight to protest that men "just don't get it." And with more than a little justification: for their own good, men need to understand feminist issues.

The purpose of this book is to answer that criticism by helping men "get it."

What Every Man Should Know About Feminist Issues is organized to systematically inform men about gender-issues and respond to them in a convenient handbook format: what do you say when someone says women need employment priority because their sexist, male-dominated employers pay women only 69 cents for every dollar men earn? What are the facts? This book gives you those facts.

Referring to feminist sources whenever possible, this book covers several gender issues, providing insights and information that will help you understand real feminism.

Much of what is taken for feminism these days is not true feminism, but anti-male media hype. Pop feminism.

Pop feminist propaganda is a lot like a cake, full of empty calories and coated with a layer of frosting, thick and sweet. The campaign against men is just that -- social deconstructionism coated with saucy surveys and sweet statistics reflecting a small bit of the human experience pop feminists use to promote the absurd ideas to women, politicians and judges that all men are potential rapists, all men are violent and abuse women, and "men are pigs and deserve to die."

It is hard to measure what suffering they have caused. But the time has come for men to understand the real issues. In response, I offer this book to you.

Good Luck. Rod Van Mechelen, Bellevue, Washington, 1992

2012 Olympia, Wash. - Twenty years ago when I wrote this book and the introduction above, I believed that there were different flavors of feminism. And while there are many who claim to be feminists who are truly not misandrists (they don't hate men), and do believe in real gender equality, I am now persuaded that they are not feminists.

All feminism is predicated on some presumption of female superiority. Bluntly put, it is a female-supremacist ideology. Once that may not have been the case. It is, now.

A few years after I wrote this book I was invited to be a guest speaker at a women's studies class at the University of Washington, in Seattle. The women there were not interested in anything I had to say. Their sole interest was to hurl insults, indulge in sexist stereotypes, and it didn't take long for me to realize that in every sense of the word they were, as Rush Limbaugh put it, "feminazis." Most were motivated by hate. A few were motivated by power. None cared about real gender equality.

The mistake we made then, and the mistake most still make today, is in accepting the lie that feminism has anything to do with equality. Shulamith Firestone made this clear in her 1970 book, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. In it, she clearly articulated a feminist critique of marriage that should have warned us of their intention to destroy the American family.

Since then, they have destroyed millions of families.

As I update the chapters that follow I will try to answer some of the questions people have raised, and I may update some of the facts. But I don't intend to do a thorough rewrite at this time. While the feminist attacks have changed very little during the past 20 years, the responses from the Men's Rights Movements (MRM) have, in many cases, evolved far beyond anything I had in mind when I wrote this book.

The always-excellent works of Warren Farrell, Christina Hoff Sommers and Cathy Young aside, a new generation of advocates for truth have come forward who are making the most of the internet. There are perhaps thousands of MRM blogs and MRM videos on Youtube, including A Voice for Men, GirlWritesWhat, and even Tom Leykis has resumed "broadcasting" on the web.

The challenges remain, however; the federal government and many corporations feel just as threatened as the feminists by the free flow of knowledge and information on the web. And so at this writing we are facing yet another attempt to censor the net. If they succeed, it will strike a horrific blow against liberty that many feminists, who are entrenched in government and politics, will celebrate.

Our enemies are many, but Ron Paul gives us reason to hope that we can win back the freedoms and liberties for which America stands, and that government funding for the feminists' war on families will end.