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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fathers/husbands and men are responsible for their daughters/wives.*) When this system is dismantled as oppressive and outdated, as it has very obviously happened throughout the developed world already (contrary to the loud protestations of die-hard feminists), we inevitably end up in a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
A thing I don't think the 'manosphere' (loosely defined) has really grappled with, is men's role dismantling the 'patriarchy' (loosely defined).
" 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.*) "
That works as a definition well enough.
For that system to hold, its a 2 way street.
A real question, culturally, do men want the responsibilities, or just the perks?
Its relevant that concurrent with Promise Keepers, we had elected Bill Clinton twice to the highest office in the land, JFK was considered the coolest possible politician, Joe Namath had been famous for going on 30 years at that point for being good with the ladies.
Culturally, men, held up that ideal as something to be aspired to.
If men are going to aspire to be cads, a feminism that decides that men aren't worth trusting the patriarchy to is a reasonable response.
My mental model of Promise Keepers, their main message was "hey men, be worthy of the patriarchy"
Promise Keepers as a phenomenon, it was always fighting massive cultural headwinds, it was founded with that express purpose.
Is it a failure that it's not still going strong 30 years later? idk, what's that half-life of these things? I mean Lilith Fair isn't still selling out shows, whatever Louis Farrakhan is up to, a million people aren't showing up in DC on the regular to hear him. These things peter out.
If some men took it to heart and actually lived better lives, I would say that counts as success, even if in 2025 the movement is a minor footnote in history.
I think that’s key. The church needs to teach men to do their part, even when women sin against them, and it needs to teach women to do their part, even when men sin against them. But it’s fine for a parachurch ministry, or a church’s men’s or women’s ministry, to focus on just one of these at a time.
I do think that such a ministry needs to be willing to frankly discuss the other side’s duties. But it would be odd if that were the primary focus.
Maybe. But not if all such are focusing on the same one; then you're just teaching that half to be chumps. And contrary to the GPs insinuation, it's mostly not men who are demanding perks without responsibilities, and insinuating that when talking about a group specifically called the "Promise Keepers" is especially bad.
...why? Are we going to take the People's Republic of North Korea on their word that their republic belongs to the People in a higher proportion than the ones not called that?
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