Changing paradigm

Eliminate affirmative-action programs. Do the same with the sexual-harassment industry. Refuse to accept bias against boys in public schools.Those don’t sound like the talking points of your typical feminist, but while Wendy McElroy isn’t typical, she is a feminist.Mrs. McElroy advocated her feminist agenda in Washington last week, but it wasn’t at the annual National Organization for Women (NOW) conference in town.

Instead, her remarks were made to a very different audience — one largely of men — at an event sponsored by the National Free Men Coalition, a group that could be described as masculinist, the opposite of feminist.

She said men have been silenced, threatened and abused. They have been slighted and dismissed by the law as the result of a crusade led by a brand of feminism she terms “gender feminism,” the goal of which is not equality with men, but advantage over them, she said.

The founder and editor of IFeminists.com, Mrs. McElroy is part of a growing movement to redefine the gender wars, seeking to dispel what she describes as a mythical belief that women are systematically discriminated against.

Men aren’t taken seriously as victims of domestic violence and sex abuse. Divorce and family courts are stacked against them. Health research for women’s ailments outpaces research for men’s illnesses in some areas. And public schools thought to disadvantage women, are, in fact, underserving boys.

NOW-style feminism, Mrs. McElroy said, is dead because “it turned the sexes against each other in the workplace and in academia.”

A NOW spokeswoman did not return calls for comment on Mrs. McElroy’s assertions, but many feminist scholars still contend that women are oppressed.

The director of research at the Women’s Research Institute, Barbara Gault, says that women have yet to reach pay parity in certain fields and that in careers such as construction, engineering and other math-dependent fields, men still dominate.

Ms. Gault conceded that more women than men are earning bachelor’s degrees, but she said women’s economic returns from education still trail men’s.

“There is no blatant discrimination in this day and age, but it’s subconscious,” she said. “I wouldn’t say that men need the catching up.”

But advocates for men say males are now the disadvantaged in many ways.

For instance, 90 percent of custodial parents in divorced couples are women, according to Dianna Thompson, a spokeswoman for the American Coalition for Fathers and Children, a group that combats what Mrs. Thompson calls a bias against fathers in court.

Custodial mothers routinely deny fathers access to their children, and the men’s only recourse is to pursue additional court orders that could still be ignored, Mrs. Thompson said. It is a pattern of court battles most men can ill afford. It fuels a billion-dollar divorce industry, she said.

“We have a changing society,” Mrs. Thompson said. “Women are working, and men, for years now, have been taking on active roles with their children, and the courts haven’t caught up with that.”

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