Articles & Letters
 
New Dobbs Ferry-based Organization Strives to Shore Up Men's Rights
The Enterprise, October 13, 1995
By Jennifer Stern

Those who don't think men don't need any more rights should stop and think again. That's the opinion of the Men's Action Network (MAN), a new national men's rights group based in Dobbs Ferry that believes the women's rights movement has gone a bit too far.

Last Friday, October 6, the three-month-old group held a demonstration outside New York City's Grand Central Terminal protesting women's right to vote. It was the last day of an exhibit inside the terminal celebrating the 75th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment granting women suffrage.

It actually wasn't the vote per se the men were protesting, but rather "representation without obligation:" that women can vote but do not have to register for the draft with the Selective Service System.

"The draft has always been a main issue in the men's movement," said Carl Brooks, the group's membership director and a five-year Dobbs Ferry resident. (He said men's rights groups have been around for 15 to 20 years.) The group is undecided about whether women should be involved in combat, but is emphatic that if the draft exists, women should sign up. He called the current law that deprives unregistered men of federal loans, federal jobs and federal job training and subjects them to up to five years in prison and/or a $250,000 fine "an egregious political double standard."

Brooks, 46, is married, has two daughters and works in construction.

On East 42nd Street, about a dozen members of the group participated in the demonstration. Some held up placards with slogans such as "No Draft, No Vote"; "Men Have a Right to Life, Too"; "Hillary Demands Equality"; "Chivalry is Dead," and "Make 'Babes' Register [for the Selective Service]."

Others attempted to distribute--to men only--flyers calling for the federal government to "End the Discriminatory Male-Only Draft Now." It's not easy to hand out flyers in New York City, especially on a block where pedestrians are already being accosted with circulars for Duane Reade drug stores. Nevertheless, the MAN men tried their best.

Some male passerby chivalrously declined the flyers. Others took them with the practiced outstretched hand of New Yorkers who look through, not at, leafletters. But a few who took the leaflets and read them seemed genuinely to have had their eyes opened. ("Hey, thanks, man," a few said.)

Men's Action Network currently has about 100 members, including about 20 from the quad-village area and a number of women. "That's not a bad start for a men's group that does not get funded by the government," Brooks said.

The group grew out of another men's organization, the National Center for Men, which Brooks said was very involved, back in 1991, in getting the Yonkers City Council to refrain from passing laws against the "Bikini Weenie Girls," a group of bathing suit-clad women who sold hot dogs from roadside stands. "People kept saying the women were being exploited, " he said. "But it was the men who were being exploited; they were the ones who were pulling over in their cars and spending their money."

MAN co-founder Francis Rogers, an unmarried New Rochelle resident and freelance writer, said the new group is more democratic than the National Center for Men. The group meets once a month, he said, in various locations in Manhattan, Westchester and Long Island.

The draft and Bikini Weenie Girls are by far not the only issues the group must address, said Brooks last Thursday.

He said that last spring several members of the then-unofficial group protested "Take Our Daughters to Work Day" in front of the New York City office of the Ms. Foundation for Women. (They believe working parents should be told instead to "Take Our Children to Work.")

Another issue is educational equality. He said that "biased studies" have concluded that girls are "getting the short end of the stick" in schools. He disagrees. "Basically, schools are run by women for girls," he said. "What we want is an equal playing field."

In the workplace, they think there should be no gender-based affirmative action and think sexual harassment cases have gone too far, particularly those alleging that women have been harassed by "a hostile environment at work," produced by things like nude or pornographic pictures of women hanging on walls or a tradition of telling dirty jokes. "The law leaves [the decision as to what constitutes a hostile environment] up to the standard of a reasonable woman," Brooks said. "It should be the standard of a reasonable person."

He added that punitive damages in sexual harassment cases have been incommensurate with the offenses. "The companies are sued for millions of dollars and the [harassing] men are fired," he said. "It's like killing an ant with a sledgehammer."

They also believe more fathers should get custody of their children in divorces, that judges should not presume children should live with their mother, except perhaps when children are very young.

But they also believe that fathers should not be required to support their children born out of wedlock. "If a woman becomes pregnant," Brooks said, "a man should be able to go down to court during the first trimester and write off all legal, emotional and financial responsibility to the child." He argues that currently women have the right to have an abortion, but men have no right in the decision as to whether the pregnancy should be continued. If a woman chooses to have a baby, he said, she should have to provide support.

Brooks said the group plans eventually to demonstrate its position on "men's reproductive rights" outside the Women's Medical Pavilion in Dobbs Ferry, which has been the site of many anti-abortion protests.

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