When you get down to it I think both the women's rights, and men's rights movements are wrong and are responsible for a lot of the problems you see on this front. When you get down to it I feel this way about the poles of most social conflicts where I'll also say wind up opposing the KKK and left wing "social justice" crusaders pushing for minority rights and representation on whatever front is hot this week.
I'll also say that trying to read anything prophetic into "Married With Children" is going too far, the show was at the time a very reactive subversion of tropes present in other sitcoms, and then developed it's own weird logic based on those subversions.
When it comes to Rodger Elliot, the guy was highly intelligent but also pretty badly adjusted, and lacked perspective. Honestly trying to say that what he did could have been predicted, and all this stuff people are digging up now, is benefitting entirely from hindsight. It's like that with most serious killers after they happen to be caught. To be honest all of the signs you see here, including the rants, aren't all that unusual, and frankly if people were to take action based on the guy being a weird, hateful, bastard, and most of this, things would rapidly snowball into a police state. Especially on a forum like this I'd imagine all of us could be made to seem like a deranged psycho if we were put under a microscope and someone wanted to interpet things in the worst possible way (which is possible with Rodger after the fact, since he did snap and kill people). At the end of the day I do not think any particular habit, philosophy, or extreme set of attitudes, can be blamed here. There is a huge difference between being pissed off at the world and having a chip on your shoulder, and going on a shooting rampage, but from the perspective of evidence there isn't much of one, and we can't exactly blame everyone who is pissed off and rants about it or treat them pre-emptively like criminals.... not that anyone is saying that outright, but it does seem that there is a kind of undercurrent present in saying those who believe in a modern "men's rights movement" are similar to this guy, or perhaps that this guy was inspired by that movement and is simply one of the few that actually had the guts to pull a trigger.
At the end of the day I don't think the MRM even at it's extremes is any worse than feminism. Let's be honest, when you get down to it a lot of feminist philosophy comes down to self-validation and forcing others to recognize it. The basic idea that women should see themselves as proud, strong, and special, and others should be expected to cater to this if they want to be with them. Taken to it's extreme this tends to lead to "gold digging" with a lot of feminist philosophies trying to find other terms for that, or remove the negative connotations. The idea being that if your special, there is no reason why you shouldn't be entitled to the very best. Talk shows in TV have even done a lot to sell this point of view and even had "proud gold diggers" show up as guests and such over the years to talk about the philosophy, and feminine magazines spout this kind of thing all the time. When you get down to a philosophy that says men should validate you by worshipping the ground you walk on, and prove their devotion to you through gifts and personal sacrifice (your worth it honey...) and equating personal relationships to what amounts to a social business transaction combined with ego stroking, isn't really all that different from the currently hated attitude men are accused of where relationships are treated as something where you insert ego stroking and gifts, and get sex and a partner to show off in return. Indeed if you want to know where a lot of guys get this kind of attitude from, it's probably from a lot of the crap women themselves talk, with guys interested in girls reading/noticing the same stuff
and then playing the game accordingly. Of course the real "issue" here is that it's not an actual business transaction (well not usually) and of course women are able to say "no", and actually encouraged to string people along for the benefits and personal validation, being able to get all of this stuff from guys, and then not give anything in return
is a sort of power, and of course guys who run into this, especially a lot, can become pretty resentful. Indeed the whole "Friend Zoned" thing people hate discussions of, generally comes from guys playing the game and then getting
shut down, oftentimes by a girl who knew very well she was stringing him along.
Now, before anyone jumps on this, this is not what ALL relationships between men and women are like, but this is a big part of the dance nowadays. Those who haven't run into it or "played the game" of course really don't get it. It is however becoming increasingly common, and of course combined with the various stigmas already against men (in divorces, child custody, etc...) it slots people off. Hence guys taking a somewhat anti-female attitude and occasionally pushing for some rather unreasonable policies.
Do not misunderstand this doesn't apply to every relationship (as I mentioned) but enough to create the trends.
For the most part my basic attitude is that the way the whole "courtship" game is played gifts and such have always had a role, as is a sort of "plausible deniability" for the guys claiming they aren't looking for a girlfriend, due to the guy-stigma of being shot down. You wind up with a bit of a dance until that revelation on his part. That said it's pretty obvious that if a girl is being given things by a guy, something is usually going on there. Basically if some dude is giving half of his take home pay to some girl in the form of gifts, or doing things with her, there is some interest there. My basic attitude is a girl with no interest in a guy should be very clear about not being interested romantically from the beginning before taking anything (where things might continue just as friends), a girl who takes stuff from a guy and intentionally leads him on with no interest isn't someone I have a lot of sympathy for, not that a lot can practically be done about it. One thing I noticed in the Rodger Elliot case was that his professed target was a local sorority, where this kind of behavior can be at an all time high.
Basically I think it's wrong for guys to expect giving gifts to be an automatic guarantee of sex. At the same time however I think girls leading guys on to get things from them because they can is equally wrong. The dueling philosophies here come from a mess that has probably been going on since the dawn of time, it's just that in the information age a lot more is being said and done on both sides of the equasion, and it's leading to heated arguments. Ideally these issues wouldn't exist, but they do. Both feminism and the men's right movement are products of these
kinds of eternal issues, and really nothing is going to be resolved here since human nature won't permit it.
If *I* had to try and solve the problem though, the first thing I'd do is remove the concept of self-validation from society. I think half the problem in the US at least is that every kid is told "your special" since they can think, the entire school system and infrastructure is set up to reinforce this attitude. I think the attitudes of entitlement from both men and women, especially those who actually are fairly "special" at least in terms of looks/the genetic lottery lead to these kinds of problem philosophies where men feel entitled to sex (after all they are special) and women feel entitled to leverage the possibility of sex into benefits of one sort or another without necessarily having to do anything (after all they are special). In part the first world suffers from increasing numbers of sociopaths because of the conditioned sense of exceptionalism and entitlement, which of course leads to all kinds of problems when other people refuse to acknowledge the inherent greatness of someone conditioned to believe they are great... of course complicated by the other people on the other side thinking the same thing.
