- published: 10 Apr 2012
- views: 83241
The men's movement is a social movement that includes a number of philosophies and organizations that seek to support men, change the male gender role and improve men's rights in regard to marriage, child access and victims of domestic violence.[citation needed] Major movements within the men's movement include men's liberation, masculism, men's health, mythopoetic men's movement, anti-sexism, and men's / fathers' rights, anti-misandry, as well as organizations supporting male victims of rape.[citation needed]
Participants vary in terms of religion, politics and sexuality with a number of women also involved.[citation needed] The movement is predominantly Western, although since the early 1990s men's movements have been growing in non-western countries; an example is India, where dramatic rises in false accusations of dowry harassment as cited by the Karnataka judiciary in 2003 "In as many as 44% of these cases prosecution is thoroughly unjustified", and other issues have resulted in large scale false imprisonment of innocent men and their parents, which have in turn provided impetus to a growing men's rights movement.[citation needed] Attitudes vary on issues such as gender roles, human relationships, sexuality (including gay rights), reproduction (including birth control and particularly the abortion debate), work and violence (its causes and resolution).[citation needed]
Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL (born 26 March 1941), known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.
Dawkins came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term meme. In 1982 he introduced an influential concept into evolutionary biology, presented in his book The Extended Phenotype, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms.
Dawkins is an atheist, a vice president of the British Humanist Association, and a supporter of the Brights movement. He is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, he argued against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he described evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker. He has since written several popular science books, and makes regular television and radio appearances, predominantly discussing these topics. In his 2006 book The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion—"a fixed false belief." As of January 2010 the English-language version has sold more than two million copies and had been translated into 31 languages.