In Her Face!! -- Bellevue Man's Magazine Is A Grenade In The Gender War

Women just don't get it.

All this hand-wringing about sexual harassment and pay equity and violence against women? Get over it! Because the real victims today are men.

This is The Backlash!, a Bellevue magazine dedicated to exposing "anti-male bigotry," to poking a finger in the eye of feminism and a few holes in the accepted wisdom about gender roles in today's society.

Consider:

"When men make money, they spend it on women. When women make money, they spend it on themselves. 71 cents on the dollar is too much. (Women) should get no more than 50 percent on the dollar, and for the first 10 years they should work for free."

This is the gender war, ungloved.

The Backlash! is one of the first local publications for the growing men's-rights movement, an in-your-face soapbox that is equal parts shrill vitriol and provocative discourse.

The monthly magazine started with fewer than 200 readers less than two years ago and now claims an international circulation of 8,000, making it the largest of several men's-rights newsletters published locally. In a good month it may gain as many as 500 new subscriptions, according to its editor and publisher, Rod Van Mechelen.

A self-described computer nerd, the 42-year-old Van Mechelen seems unlikely as the man behind the magazine. He works at an Eastside computer software company, wears a ponytail and has glasses with thick dark frames that are too big for his face. He comes off

soft-spoken, even pensive - not what one might picture as the man responsible for publishing such misogynistic musings as this:

The average man's brain weighs 557 pounds more than the average woman's brain. The average woman has 14,189 more pounds of subcutaneous fat than the average man . . . much of this fat is in women's heads, where obviously they have some spare room.

Van Mechelen calls himself an "ex male-feminist," a former apologist for his gender whose "beater" Hyundai now sports a bumper sticker reading "Proud to be Male."

He has never been married and has no children. He publishes the magazine out of his studio apartment in Bellevue, where old issues of The Backlash! line the walls and two large bookshelves contain works ranging from Gloria Steinem to "The Myth of Male Power." Van Mechelen estimates he loses $200 to $300 a month on his publishing venture, which he calls Shameless Men Press.

His argument isn't with feminism in general, but with "pop feminists" who bash men to get ahead.

"We need to desexualize this whole victim thing," he said. "Let's stop stereotyping men as bad and women as good."

`They're turning into angry men'

His personal wake-up call came in 1991, when he was fired from Microsoft for sexual harassment. His version of the story: A co-worker took offense when he suggested she was wearing too much makeup, "like putting vinyl on fine walnut."

Then he posted an article on a Microsoft computer bulletin board called "chat.men" questioning whether a man would really be guilty of rape if he were overcome by a woman's perfume. He was fired four days later.

Sexual harassers. Deadbeat dads. Wife-beaters. Child abusers. Men are tired of being unjustly stigmatized and labeled, falsely accused by women bent on getting their money, their jobs, their kids, their power, Van Mechelen said.

"They're turning into angry men," he said. "They're coming out wounded. . . . There are a lot of men who have just been pushed way, way, way too far, who have stories to tell as horrible as any woman who's been raped or battered."

The idea of men as the oppressed class would be laughable if it weren't for the broad appeal of the movement's misogyny, said Thalia Syracopoulos of the Seattle chapter of the National Organization for Women.

"This demon-seeking and blaming women for their unhappiness is so destructive," she said. "Their bottom line is a reversion to the peaceful and accepted oppression of women by men," the kind of relationship glorified by TV in the 1950s.

Syracopoulos agrees with local men's-rights activists who say their numbers are growing. It's difficult to nail down the numbers, but two years ago, when Warren Farrell, author of "The Myth of Male Power," made an appearance in Seattle, 125 people turned out. A year later, on a return visit, his audience grew to 300.

In fact, Seattle is considered to have one of the strongest men's- rights movements in the country, maybe because it's also "a hot seat of radical feminism," in the opinion of Sidney Siller, a Manhattan divorce lawyer and founder of the 11-year-old National Organization for Men.

But the men's-rights movement nationally is poised for major growth in the next five years, said Siller, who has written a men's-rights column for Penthouse magazine for the past 12 years.

"Men in this country have been so browbeaten by radical feminists," Siller said. "It's very difficult to rouse the consciousness of men. . . . They're just now blinking one eye open."

What they're seeing is a women's movement that is no longer pushing for equal rights but for special privileges, said Dave Ault of Men's Rights Inc.'s Equal Rights Amendment Project in Seattle.

"The men's-rights movement is being drowned out. We're going to have to gain political clout in order to be heard," he said.

Gain it? Feminists say men have never lost it.

"By most measures of who has the power, it is not women . . . it is men,"said Nalani Askov of the city of Seattle's Office for Women's Rights.

Still, Askov has a certain amount of sympathy for men, who she thinks must feel "pretty dislocated" by the complex changes in society brought about by having more women and people of color in the workforce. "But the women's movement is not responsible for all those changes going on in society," she said.

Tone is edgy, sometimes violent

Van Mechelen sees The Backlash! as a pressure valve for angry men, a forum that helps men come to grips with their victimization while providing a counterpoint to feminist extremism.

He goes a step further by suggesting the magazine's cathartic value may actually help prevent violence against women by men who become rapists as a perverse response to feminism.

Syracopoulos retorts that rape existed long before the feminist movement began. "To blame rape on feminism is really denying history," she said.

The tone of The Backlash! is edgy, sometimes even violent. In January's issue, the magazine tackles sexual harassment (why shouldn't men be able to argue that women wearing tight sweaters and "libido-arousing perfumes" are guilty of sexual harassment?), the myth of female powerlessness ("Since 1920, women have had control of the American political system because they have been the majority of voters") and maternal bias in custody cases.

A sampling of the writing:

-- "The vast majority of men, as George Gilder observes in `Men & Marriage,' must struggle to be heard, where most women can command attention with a whimper (or a flash of cleavage)."

-- "Men are tired of being treated as nothing more than sperm donors and cash cows."

-- OK, so maybe Anita Hill did tell the truth. "So what? . . . If Professor Hill's ears are really that delicate, then maybe she's living in the wrong century. . . . Look, ladies, if you can't stand the heat, go back to the kitchen and leave the real world to grown-ups."

Even Van Mechelen admits the anger exhibited in some of the articles, most of them written by freelancers, makes him uncomfortable sometimes. "But that's where a lot of these guys are coming from. It needs to be done," he said.

Another project seeks harmony

Van Mechelen's heart is really in a new publication he started a year ago called The Equalitarian, a quarterly journal meant to be a forum for the discussion of gender politics and equal rights. While it's the job of The Backlash! to decry the excesses of "sexist sows," it's up to The Equalitarian to establish a new center for gender harmony, he said.

But what if the harmony is drowned out by the hatemongering?

That's a risk, Van Mechelen concedes. "We needed to start with something that has a hard edge to it, to establish that men have issues that must be dealt with," he said. "My hope is we can move on from that and all come to the center."

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For more information on The Backlash!, leave a message at 649-0892.