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To extrapolate on my initial question about the reputation of the Promise Keepers organization:
Back in the days I remember reading a succinct definition on one of the Manosphere blogs that used to exist: the patriarchy is [in a broad and very simplified sense] a system where men are responsible for women and women are accountable to men. (More accurately, it’s a system where women are accountable to their fathers/husbands and men are responsible for their daughters/wives.*) When this system is dismantled as oppressive and outdated, as it has very obviously happened throughout the developed world already (contrary to the loud protestations of die-hard feminists), we inevitably end up in a social rule set where women are no longer accountable to men and men are no longer responsible for women.
As it was also observed on said blog, it’s safe to conclude if you have eyes and ears that society is generally OK with the former and doesn’t even think twice about it but is ambiguous at best about the latter. This ambiguity manifests in various attempts to compel men to claim responsibility for women one way or another**, and is exacerbated when there’s an ever taller mountain of evidence to observe that the brave new world of sexual equality and freedom is failing to materialize in the way normies imagined it would***.
One obvious consequence of this is that anti-feminist public figures appear. They include both men and women from the onset already, but anyone can observe that the only ones getting any positive attention are women, of course. And society is generally structured in a way that a critical mass of women advocating for something is perceived as a sign by men that it’s also safe and even beneficial for them to advocate for it. And since said women are generally promoting some murky concept that can best be described as a new positive masculinity****, you’ll inevitably see men’s groups appearing with the aim of promoting the same concept.
As far as I know, the Promise Keepers was just one of these and not even all of them had a religious profile, and there were/are many outside the US as well. Their common denominator is that they are nebulously pushing a narrative that rejects both radical feminism and rigid old patriarchal norms and endorses a new positive view of masculinity that is designed to appeal to normies, especially women, without antagonizing lipstick feminism (they claim no allegiance with PUAs, for example). As you can imagine, this is largely doomed from the start already for the simple reason that defining masculinity in any form would also necessarily entail defining (and thus restricting) femininity as well, and as you can imagine, that is today a big no-no. As I alluded to above, any message such groups carry is thus destined to be rather murky.
(On a sidenote, I even find the name cringy. “Promise Keepers” implicitly means that other men do not keep their promises, the scoundrels they obviously are. I guess the naming was designed to gain sympathy from single mothers. Then again, maybe I’m just a dick.)
Before I continue I should mention that the organization briefly had a sort of heyday in the ‘90s but has long been defunct in a practical sense, as many of you might have already noticed and commented on (I assume they still exist in the legal sense). That is no coincidence, and I’m sure the main reason is that their leaders made the most obvious rookie mistake there is in politics: when their opposition (in this case, some radical feminist talking heads) denounced them in the press for some made-up reason, they apologized. (Take this with a grain of salt though, as I’ve only read this claim on a long-gone blog.) They thought they need to apologize to some feminist loudmouths, even though their entire public image hinged on being as inoffensive as possible, which clearly renders any idea of publicly apologizing a really bad one (why would you want to give any impression that you need to apologize when you’re a bog standard church org?). Anyway, even if this incident didn’t happen the way I remember it or if it didn’t happen at all, I think the general point still stands: it’s clear that the Promise Keepers were treated with either indifference or scorn and ridicule by the mainstream media, and only found sympathy within their own culture war tribe / wagon fort. This is a general rule of society: a man making any complaints about women, no matter how indirect or mild, is a sign of low status. Or to quote a former Manosphere blogger: a man pointing out the pettiness of petty women is actually seen as a sign of he himself being petty. For further proof just look at what public image fathers’ rights groups and activists have; they are basically lepers.
(end of Part 1, I suppose, as at this point I’m just rambling maybe)
*In reality it went even further than that. It was generally expected of young men to keep socially undesirable men away from their sisters, and it was normal for said sisters to act as matchmakers for their single bothers etc. But that is largely beside the point here.
**Exhortations by Christian preachers and so on for single men to marry single mothers and gamers/slackers to man up, man-shaming in the media in general, the endless denunciations of “deadbeat dads”, the Bradley Amendment, affirmative consent laws, the Duluth model etc. are all examples of this, I’d say
***I guess this included the notion that promiscuous women will be able to live without sexual shame and that “average” women will have casual sex with “average” men because they actually want to have sex for the sake of it; then again, I’m just guessing (I’ll explain the quotations marks if anyone is interested)
****Believe it or not, a handful of sympathetic women did visit these Manosphere sites back when these existed, at least for a while; they generally agreed that while the post-patriarchal age means that women don’t need men in their lives per se, they still generally want [some of] them, and that it should be possible to be a functioning masculine man in a feminist cultural milieu still
Hmm.
Let me suggest for conversation's sake that there's no reason PK failed that isn't explained by the same reasons that every other male-centric organization was either infiltrated or undermined in this period.
My contention is that martials arts might be the sole remaining bastion of pure, healthy masculinity left in Western Society. I become more certain of this every passing year.
All else has been skinsuited or crushed. The UFC is the only sports league left that doesn't even try to cater to women or push LGBT causes, and it revels in its appeal to the dudebro.
So perhaps the failure of PK was they simply had no 'martial' aspect or even any competitive spirits to it to keep men engaged and deter entryism.
How have the martial arts faired over the progressive era in terms of participation and seriousness of effort? I’ve been out of the loop for 15 years. For comparison, we are rapidly losing other skills like painting and drawing.
That's the reason Martial Arts has been able to resist infiltration, the traditions are strong and they DEMAND seriousness of effort.
You can't easily fake the 'seriousness of the effort' anymore. McDojos are still a thing, but thanks to the rise of MMA, there's an 'objective' measure of what works and what doesn't. "Oh you have trained in an ancient, secret style of martial arts passed down by a tribe of Eskimos for centuries? Cool. Take an amateur MMA fight and let us see how you do."
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu is RIDICULOUSLY popular still. I literally drive past FOUR separate BJJ gyms on the way to my gym. Where I train Krav Maga and Boxing, but also offers BJJ.
You CANNOT fake BJJ ability.
So in short, you can't be an entryist in the MMA world without actually getting good at martial arts. And if you get good at martial arts, why would you want to then destroy your own hobby?
Likewise, there's not really any one central organization to infiltrate to overthrow everything. Even if a lefty ascended to the top of, say, the Gracie Family, there's a dozen other competing orgs that will just branch off if you try to turn it into another lefty political org.
And of course, the difference between the sexes cannot be papered over. "Girls are just as good at fighting as boys" blows up instantly when you see that a teenage boy can demolish all but the very-best trained women in a 'serious' sparring session.
So in short, its hard for politics to infect martial arts, you can't fake the skills, and it shows many lefty shibboleths to be flat out lies.
And its fun. So I expect it'll remain 'safe' from infiltration for a long time.
You can try. And fail, hilariously.
There is an ongoing theory that BJJ is fake in the sense it doesn't work against someone unwilling to engage in BJJ with you. Although I think that only counts with regard to the sport aspect.
That's kind of the rub with figuring out how good someone is at real real fighting. You can't practice that without someone at risk of maiming or death.
And a "real" fight is chaotic so there's an irreducible element of chance involved.
The secret to winning fights is mostly "bring more guys, with better discipline."
Add to it that "winning" a fight might well send you to prison. We all live in civilization with cops, prosecutors and judges, and we all know that they salivate at the chance to drop a book on law abiding white person defending himself from criminals (especially law abiding person who is busy online on extremely extreme extremist forum).
This is why serious trainers will tell you: "I am not going to teach you how to "win" fights, I am going to teach you how to get out of fight."
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