Feminism is not a religion any more than physics, says a District Court judge in response to a “guys’ rights” lawsuit brought against Columbia University. And… yeah. No shock there.
The contention? That Columbia uses government aid to preach a “religionist belief system called feminism.”
Roy Den Hollander, the man behind the cases, sounds like a real winner:
Mr. Den Hollander devotes much of his private practice to representing men in civil cases — “antifeminist cases or guys’-rights cases,” as he puts it – and said his bitter 2001 divorce from a woman he married in Russia helped tweak his anger toward feminists and laws he sees as favoring women.
In July 2007, Mr. Den Hollander filed a class-action suit against prominent Manhattan nightclubs like Copacabana, China Club, Lotus and Sol, claiming they discriminated against men with their ladies’ nights offering free or reduced admission, which violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, the suit said.
In February 2008, he filed a suit against the federal government calling parts of the Violence Against Women Act unconstitutional.
Those cases are still pending. Mr. Den Hollander said that today’s lawsuit completes a “trilogy of antifeminist lawsuits.”
At least someone is taking on the great injustices that are Ladies Nite and federal programs to help women escape abusive relationships.
I actually do think that disparate entry rates at bars are wrong and unfair, and I would be happy to see Ladies Nite disappear. But I suspect it will shock no one when I point out that Mr. Den Hollander’s objections to Ladies Nite aren’t about fundamental fairness, but about his serious issues with “girls”:
The other night—nite?—Den Hollander was maneuvering his way past a maroon rope that marked the entrance to LQ, a dance club in midtown. It was a Salsa Wednesday: five bucks for ladies, ten for gents. Den Hollander shelled out and went inside, where he cruised the pink-lit periphery of a dance floor, sparsely populated with wrinkled couples practicing twirls. “Last time I was here for an after-work, you had younger people,” he said. “Problem is, the music’s so loud. When I hit on a girl, I need to be able to talk to her.” Forgoing a complimentary buffet, he made his way to the bar, where he ordered an Absolut vodka gimlet. “I tend to be attracted to black and Latin chicks, and Asian chicks,” he said, citing the influence of the twelfth-century Provençal troubadour Guiraut de Bornelh. “He said, ‘For a man, attraction goes through the eyes.’ ” Den Hollander was unfazed by the notion that, as a hound dog, his fight to defeminize clubs was perhaps counter to his self-interest.
Den Hollander likes to keep his age a secret. He was wearing a greenish double-breasted suit and, judging from his gray buzz cut, rubbery grin, and Hypnotiq-blue eyes (courtesy of contacts), seemed to be about forty-five. His frequent references to the Vietnam era, however, put him slightly earlier. “I look around,” he said, recalling his college years, “and there are all these girls walking around in see-through skirts and having sex whenever they want to, and there I am, dodging the draft.”
Bitches.
He reached into his pocket and produced a typed forty-one-point list headed “Discrimination against men in America.” (Sample gripes: child-custody laws, circumcision, “5% of females have borderline personality disorder.”) “What I’m trying to do now in my later years is fight everybody who violates my rights,” he continued, bringing to mind a combination of Leon Phelps, Che Guevara, and Travis Bickle.
…
The club was filling up as Den Hollander held forth on Title IX (“Sports isn’t a big thing to girls, but it’s a big thing to guys”), pickup tactics (“You sort of cut the person you’re after from the herd”), his personal finances (“Have you heard of the dot-com bubble?”), and his belief that “the Feminazis have infiltrated institutions, and there’s been a transfer of rights from guys to girls.” Too bad, it was suggested, that his lawsuit is set to be heard by Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, herself a known female. But Den Hollander was not deterred. “What I think will happen,” he said, “is that clubs will reduce the price for guys and increase it for girls. Every guy will have ten or fifteen more dollars in his pocket, which the girls will then manipulate into getting more drinks out of him. If they drink more, they’ll have more fun, and so will us guys. And then when she wakes up in the morning she’ll be able to do what she always does: blame the man.”
Maybe he can file a lawsuit about that, too.