Several years ago a Canadian writer contacted me. He had some concerns regarding the employment situation in Canada. So I agreed to publish an article he wrote on the subject. As it happened, the Seattle Times published a highly inaccurate piece on me, along with an awful picture (page 1, page 2) at about the same time. The Times article cost me my job, and I had to suspend publication of The Backlash! But not before I published this writer's article, "The unemployed nation within: What to do with the boys?" A few months later, I moved The Backlash! onto the web. The Seattle Times and NPR had tried to silence the leading voice for the equalitarian cause, and they failed. We will not be silenced. But not everybody shares our dedication. A few years later, the Canadian writer sent me an angry email which we might kindly call "vitriolic" in which he demanded the immediate removal of his article. With hundreds of articles on the site and no search engine at the time, there was no means by which I could sift through the hundreds of articles to find his. Fortunately, that had changed by the time he sent more flame mail a couple years later. The least vitriolic of which included, "While I offered an article for publication in the Backlash back in 1995, I did not release it for the World Wide Web, as that was not part of any agreement." Ironic, given that he had offered the article unencumbered by any agreement. But, by then we had the search engine and I was able to find his article, which I replaced with the terse though unoffensive excerpt above. Then, tired of his harassment, I told him not to contact me again. That was in April, 1999. Now, more than 2 years later, he is harassing my web host. It's one thing when a person cops out on their convictions. That's a private matter. But then, as is so often the case within the men's equalitarian movement, upon discovering it's not something you can do as a hobby, that it takes real dedication and integrity, many also try to hide the fact they ever took a stand for justice. And that's when it stops being personal and starts being political. And that may also be why history will generally remember the men of my generation as a cadre of cowards who were largely unwilling to stand up for what they believed in. Hypocrites who talked big over beer, but were unwilling to take a manly stand for justice in the sobering glare of those who oppose real gender equality. Not that the cost of being true to your convictions cannot run high. Ultimately, I lost my job at Microsoft because of it. My department head asked what the book I was working on was about. When I answered, she stormed off in a huff and it wasn't long before she trumped up the charges of sexual harassment to fire me. But for that, I'd be one of those smug retired Microsoft millionaires by now. But if I have grandchildren, and they ask, "What did you do during the war on men, Grampa?" Had I taken the easy way out, instead of answering proudly that I took a stand for what is right, I would have had to make up some excuse for cowering in the shadows. And, given the courage displayed by so many young people today, I would hate to do that.
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