How to Present Men's Issues. Part I: Give credit where credit is due.

There is an especially active feminist cohort at my university; consequently, I've had, and have made use of, a number of opportunities to discuss the advocacy of men's issues with the people most likely to oppose it. In so doing I've learned a number of useful techniques for effectually presenting the subject. The next five entries will describe those techniques.

Part I

I noticed two things about my first debate with a feminist about the merits of men's issues advocacy:

1. She seemed to want me to concede that men's behaviour had harmed women more than women's behaviour had harmed men. 
2. I seemed to want her to concede the opposite.

Essentially, our conversation was a winner-take-all zero-sum game. I had never seen anyone concede the truth of anything when doing so involved publicly admitting absolute defeat, so I shouldn't have expected one of us to succeed.

Perhaps more interestingly, most of the feminists with whom I've discussed men's issues advocacy have asked me why I wanted to destroy feminism. I wondered why they suspected that I wanted that. I had never wanted that, so the question surprised me. In any case, it seems that many feminists fear that the advocacy of men's issues will harm their sub-culture.

I've succeeded in allaying the aforementioned concerns by expressing my appreciation of the historical accomplishments of feminism, such as

• the abolishment of laws that denied fundamental liberties to half our population, and 
• the attenuation of gender roles which increased the number of socially acceptable ways that men, and women, might participate in the commercial and domestic economies,

and by acknowledging the importance of contemporary feminist undertakings, such as

• promoting women's entitlement to their human rights in jursidictions where women do not enjoy them, and
• ensuring that women constitute a proportionate number of our law makers, thereby ensuring legislation benefits men and women equally. 

Moreover, acknowledgement of the importance of these undertakings produces a set of premises that both parties accept; without such a set of premises, agreement is a logical impossibility.

In Part II, I will describe how these premises imply the importance of men's issues advocacy.