I saw this extract in a recent comment.

There’s no doubt there’s been some great success in the past. Some men responsible for this are still on this forum. Reaching anywhere near that level again seems out of reach at this present time. Most of us are just hanging in there consumed by family court processes, lawyer and child support bills.

We could write a book about “what happened” remembering that this was in the period between the start of MMP in 1996 and the first two terms of the Labour Greens government that achieved so much ‘social reform’ as they call it up to 2005.

Creatures who are taught to think only and without the benefit of morals are a menace to society – it was close to a civil war and attracted a much larger participation very quickly.

But back to the comment, in that it suggests that nothing can change until the same thing happens again.

Society changes and the approach should be what is the best option now. Ideas often meet with resistance as some of us know a suggestion has been tried before and we already know what happens when you do that.

You get the critics quashing these individual moments of enthusiasm and while it seems wrong, it points also to a lack of consideration to the best option rather than a reaction.

We’ve had 15 years to get better at this – have we?
Are we a more developed society today than the one some of us started fighting for 20-25 years ago?

What is the best approach today?

In my recent conversations it is surprising now how many women who don’t know me try to tell me how bad it is for men today, how much they disrespect their feminist sisters and across the spectrum of European, Maori and Polynesian women.

These women are equally surprised at the hostility they experience for voicing that opinion. Some are expelled from organizations, study courses and social groups for daring to have that opinion and that is sometimes how these conversations start.

Women are starting to wake up to what thugs feminists are and that the girls their sons are dating are teaching their sons to hate their mothers – it’s an advance on the typical alienation of mothers teaching their children to hate their fathers.

Journalism doesn’t report this trend like it should as a public reaction to the legal environment our parliamentary wing continues to pursue.

There’s an element of Conservatism there with many people looking at what we haven’t hung on to, what we might want back to have a more stable society and what we might be specifically asking for.

That raises the question now as to whether there can be a political solution. It couldn’t happen previously even though those protest groups supported political parties in an attempt to do that.

It’s a different landscape now amongst the public rather than in the administration. You wouldn’t be reading this if there wasn’t still a problem. Talking to people on the street, as I do, I’m hearing a different narrative, one that’s invented itself out of the circumstances … that’s encouraging.

Why it’s most encouraging is this: finding like minded people in a population to protest a problem can be difficult. If they are much greater in their numbers and particularly women as well then it’s not only a different place to look but an easier number of people to find to work with.

That I suggest is the way to approach the moment rather than hoping the past will reinvent itself on your behalf.