My readers must have noticed what a big movie fan I am, and not unlike Ronald Reagan (about all we have in common) I tend to extract characters and scenarios from films to illustrate a point. I'm about to do it again.

In "Absence of Malice", a Sydney Pollack film from the 80s, Paul Newman plays the son of a deceased mob boss, who finds he is under investigation by the FBI but cannot get anyone to tell him why. Consequences ensue, and a reporter whom he befriends (played by Sally Field) is duped by her government contacts into writing a story that reveals a secret about one of Newman's friends, which leads the friend to take her own life.

In outrage, Newman's character, whose life is collapsing around him as engineered rumors spread that he is a mobster himself, comes up with a perfectly legal scam to get all the players to entrap themselves in their own decisions, and in the end a hearing is convened by the Feds to sort it all out. The federal attorney sent to solve the situation (one of Wilfred Brimley's best roles ever) sees through Newman's ruse but cannot catch him in an illegal action, so just asks him straight up why he has done what he has done.

Newman says, basically, "a lotta smart people in this room, just doing their jobs, and my friend is dead. Who do I see about that?"

That's basically how I sum up the whole dilemma of feminism, misandry and gender double standards. They have become so entrenched, so woven in to the very fabric of almost every society, protected by presumptions, pre-determined statistical analysis, "common knowledge", and not least, raw fear of being caught not supporting women's claims and demands at face value, that there literally is no one left to "see" about that.

I did a search on women's grants vs. men's grants, and I thought for a moment that I had broken the internet by asking what it obviously saw as a ridiculous question: how does a man or men get funding for academic research, charitable work, legal support, media access, etc? According to Google, the question was irrelevant. The search results looked like I had asked a mainframe to divide infinity by zero, until it took the fallback of displaying the results for women again, but for a moment I could swear I smelled circuits burning...

So, how does any group, this website or any other group so inclined toward men's issues, acquire funding, access, legitimacy? How does it move out of the status of struggling private club, barely having any influence even over its own content or reputation, while dodging the inevitable "hate group" stamp so easily handed out by mass media, academia, and of course, that mighty engineer of human prejudice: "common knowledge"?

Recent events in Vancouver and elsewhere tend to support my thesis here.

Men, and our children, are getting the short end of a lot of sticks, and they're getting shorter, and the power to control that is firmly embedded in every realm of civilized institutions, with no relief beyond the occasional, exceptional and limited success story, and thank God, and a lot of dedicated activists, for even that much good news.

Who do we see about that?