Pelle Billing . com

Last week the Swedish Men’s Network launched a stand alone website. We’ve existed for about a year – as a Facebook group – and now we finally have a proper web presence. Sweden, as you may now, is more affected by radical feminism than almost any other country in the world, so we badly need this initiative.

As the founder of the Men’s Network, I’d like to outline our core offerings in v 1.0 of the site. Perhaps this can serve as an inspiration for similar sites in other countries, and in turn we can be inspired by your feedback on what we could add.

Some of the main features implemented so far are:

• An overview of the most common men’s issues, where every claim is backed up by academic research, official statistics or references to Swedish legislation.
• A first person account of what it’s like to be a man. In this essay I honor the achievements of the original women’s movement (i.e. equal legal rights) while highlighing that women tend to know almost nothing of men’s struggles. Most men have been taught about women’s issues, and therefore have empathy for women, whereas most women haven’t been taught about men’s issues and therefore lack this kind of empathy.
• A mixture of longer PDF documents and shorter articles that are a quick read.
• A calendar of events on men’s issues. The calendar itself is meant to help generate events, since almost all events on gender are feminist events. There are some informal meetings in Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö for men’s rights activists, and father’s rights groups organize events every now and then around the country.
• The ability to become a member. Each member supports the cause, and membership is also the only way to get our newsletter.
• Guest writers will be invited to ensure that we cover a wide variety of men’s issues.

Our plans for the future are to implement:

• A blog.
• A wiki-like section where members can post links to research reports, books, articles, movies, etc that are relevant to men’s issues.

To implement this v 2.0 of the site we will migrate to the Wordpress platform, so we are looking for a programmer with solid Wordpress skills who loves men’s issues and will work for free.

At the moment we have no plans to add a forum, since forums can lead to heated debates, personal attacks and an inability to differentiate between women and feminists (I love the former category). Since our initiative is vulnerable enough as is in the political climate of Sweden, we need to control the image we project, and forums will have to wait until we’ve made some progress in changing the paradigm on gender issues.

And change the paradigm we will. This beautiful quote, used in one of our articles, illustrates how unstoppable we really are:

Rocco: Men build things, then we die. It’s in our fucking DNA! THAT’S WHAT WE DO!
Murphy MacManus: And when it all falls down?
Rocco: We build it right back up again.
Connor MacManus: But this time bigger. BETTER!
Rocco: Look! Look what we can do. Look how fuckin’ beautiful we are. You think the men that built all this had it easy?
[The Boondock Saints II]

We are men. And nothing can stop the men’s movement as long as we keep on building web sites, brochures, lobby groups, political parties or whatever it takes to restore sanity. It’s in our DNA, so let’s get to work.

Your input, feedback, donation or encouragement is greatly appreciated.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 24th, 2011 at 1:44 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.