Liz Denys

As we all know, men's rights activists are grossly misunderstood. On the surface, the men's rights movement looks to be about getting equal rights with respect to things like adoptions and custody disputes, but actually, the movement is primarily a coordinated attack on women. After all, nothing says "we just want men to have equal opportunity" like threatening violence against women (content warning: rape, death threats).

With the men's rights movement coming into its own more and more, it's been the background motivating an increasing number of adventurers. I playtested a sun elf warlock who has my variant pact with the Patriarchy and this new men's rights activist background yesterday - it was loads of fun.

From page 125 of the Player's Handbook (5e, 2014):

Every story has a beginning. Your character's background reveals where you came from, how you became an adventurer, and your place in the world.

Here's a new background for the increasingly popular men's rights activist:

Men's Rights Activist

You have spent your life oppressed by women. You have watched other men share this fate, and you have formed a small brethren with some of these men to serve as the sole force for progress towards true gender equality in the world.

Choose a cause to focus on. Are you going to be the one to champion the cause for male adventurers to get the same increased recognition and pay as their less talented female colleagues? Are you going to fight for magical teachers to revamp their mentoring to focus only on the underserved needs of restless male wizards-to-be? Perhaps you will be the one to combat the discrimination men face in not being allowed to unconditionally unleash their barbaric rage? Figure out how to channel your anecdotal experiences to make necessary systemic progress.

Skill Proficiencies: History, Insight
Languages: Dialects of Abyssal and Draconic in which all sentences begin "Well, actually"
Equipment: A tinderbox, a scroll of the collected offenses against men from a dying male elder from the town you grew up in, a set of fine clothes, a pouch that automatically disappears whenever anyone allied with you asks you about how much money you have, and 30 gp you have inherited

Feature: Authority on the Hierarchy of Privilege

When you meet someone, you are able to immediately determine every way in which they are better off than you. You are also able to recall knowing someone who is even more privileged than they are in the town you most recently visited.

Suggested Characteristics

Men's rights activists are shaped by their experiences with the women they have known and their imagined ideas about women they have never met. Their reflections on half thought-out what-ifs affect their mannerisms and ideals. Their flaws might be that fiction often affects their reality as much as their obviously fully unbiased observations.

d8 Personality Trait

1. I envy a particular woman's position in life and constantly belittle the unnecessarily hard work she has had to spend her whole life to get there.
2. I can find common slights against even the most dissimilar of men and empathize with them completely.
3. I see the potential for discrimination against men in every event and action. Women try to ruin us, we just need to see it.
4. Nothing can shake my paranoia.
5. I slander women in almost every situation.
6. I am tolerant of other people as long as they are men.
7. I've enjoyed high status and undeserved aid from society. Easy living coddles me.
8. I've spent so long interacting only with men that I have little practical experience relating to women.

d6 Ideal

1. Equality. Everyone, not just men, benefits from equal opportunity. (Good)
2. Power. I hope to one day push women to the lowest class in society. (Evil)
3. Change. We must help bring about the changes the world needs to advance us all. (Any)
4. Awareness. The path to power and self-improvement is through spreading knowledge. (Neutral)
5. Responsibility. It is my duty to protect and care for the men who cannot do so themselves. (Lawful)
6. Respect. I must prove that I can do anything I want despite the oppression of my gender. (Chaotic)

d6 Bond

1. I would die before admitting a woman deserves her lot in life more than I do.
2. I will someday get revenge on the woman who wronged me.
3. I owe my life to the man who enlightened me about the oppression men face.
4. Everything I do is for the common man - man, not person.
5. I will do anything to protect the men I know.
6. I seek to destroy the unfair ways society advances women.

d6 Flaw

1. I judge women harshly, and give myself a pass on all my faults.
2. I put too much trust in those who enlighten me about another way men are oppressed.
3. My self-righteousness sometimes prevents me from noticing my hypocrisy.
4. I am inflexible in my thinking.
5. I am suspicious of strange women and expect the worst of them.
6. Once I notice something oppressing men, I become obsessed with it to the detriment of everything else in my life.

As we all know, the patriarchy is just a figment of feminist imagination. My friend Geoffrey and I feel that such figments of the imagination are well suited for becoming otherworldly patrons for Dungeons & Dragons 5e warlocks, so we created a variant otherworldly patron for the Patriarchy.

From page 108 of the Player's Handbook (5e, 2014):

The beings that serve as patrons for warlocks are mighty inhabitants of other planes of existence - not gods, but almost godlike in their power. Various patrons give their warlocks access to different powers and invocations, and expect significant favors in return.

Some patrons collect warlocks, doling out mystic knowledge relatively freely or boasting of their ability to bind mortals to their will. Other patrons bestow their power only grudgingly, and might make a pact with only one warlock. Warlocks who serve the same patron might view each other as allies, siblings, or rivals.

Here's our new option for an otherworldly patron, the Patriarchy:

The Patriarchy

You have made a pact with a system in some other plane of existence - you're not sure which one, but you're absolutely positive it's not the plane you're in.

You can only make this pact if your character is a cishet man. Since you are a cishet man, the Patriarchy will constantly work for you, no matter how often you try to deny its existence or defy its assistance.

The Patriarchy gains power by working against certain characters, and your pact gives the Patriachy the right to draw from those around you. Any female characters, wood elves, drow, half-elves, half-orcs, dragonborn, tiefling, or fey within a 10-foot radius of you - whether or not they are allied with you - must roll a d20 before attack rolls, saving throws, and skill checks at the DM's discretion. If they roll a 1, they roll with disadvantage. It may be beneficial to have a party that consists of none of those characters.

Expanded Spell List

The Patriarchy lets cishet men choose from an expanded list of spells when you learn a warlock spell. The following spells are added to the warlock spell list.

Patriarchy Expanded Spells

• 1st level: command, heroism
• 2nd level: calm emotions, enhance ability
• 3rd level: stinking cloud, water walk
• 4th level: compulsion, phantasmal killer
• 5th level: dominate person, mislead

Additionally, you know the friends cantrip and do not have to count it against the number of cantrips you can learn.

Blindness to Privilege

Starting at 1st level, every time you see a character make an attack roll, saving throw, or skill check, if your applicable modifier or skill bonus is higher than theirs, your character believes that they rolled with your bonus. If they fail, you believe it's because they are not working hard enough.

Reverse Discrimination

Starting at 6th level, whenever any female characters, wood elves, drow, half-elves, half-orcs, dragonborn, tiefling, or fey get any temporary bonus or advantage on a roll, so do you, as long as you complain loudly.

Double Standards

Starting at 10th level, when you get advantage on a roll, you get to roll with increased advantage - on every d20 roll, roll four d20 and take the maximum.

Any female characters, wood elves, drow, half-elves, half-orcs, dragonborn, tiefling, or fey within a 10-foot radius of you - whether or not they are allied with you - must roll a d20 before attack rolls, saving throws, and skill checks at the DM's discretion. If they roll a 1, they now roll with increased disadvantage - roll four d20 and take the minimum.

Exceptionalism

Starting at 14th level, your party members react as if you had rolled the best possible number for every roll. For instance, if you were likely to kill an enemy by rolling a natural 20 on attack and the maximum for damage, your entire party leaves combat to celebrate, and the enemy gets a surprise round. Since the Patriarchy draws power from female characters, wood elves, drow, half-elves, half-orcs, dragonborn, tiefling, and fey, those characters do not get a surprise round.

As we all know, intent is an ancient eldritch power! Dungeons & Dragons 5e warlocks enter into pacts with otherworldly patrons who grant them such ancient magics in the form of pact boons.

From page 107 of the Player's Handbook (5e, 2014):

At 3rd level, your otherworldly patron bestows a gift upon you for your loyal service. You gain one of the following features of your choice.

Here's a new variant for the ancient eldritch power of intent:

Pact of the Intent

Whenever an action you take has what you consider to be an unintended outcome, you can roll a d20 and add it to your attack roll or subtract it from your opponent's saving throw. You can do this as many times as you like.

Additionally, if your critical fumble hits a teammate and causes them to faint, you get the XP from the monster you were targeting - it's only fair. You get this XP even if your attack would not have killed the monster.

Content warning: rape, anti-abortion rhetoric

On June 26, I left Richard Rodgers Theatre with an embarrassingly big grin - after all, I had just experienced Hamilton. Like many others, I'd listened to the soundtrack many times before even acquiring tickets to the musical, and I'd heard praises for the costumes, the acting, the staging from my friends who had already seen it. It lived up to the hype.

That giant smile wasn't primarily about performance, but about the racial subversion that underscores the story. Lin-Manuel Miranda painstakingly researched Alexander Hamilton's life to create a transformative work (read: fanfic) that bent race to elevate those who were left out of the formation of my country despite the reality that the oppression of people of color was integral to its creation.

Of course, not everyone got that, but none missed it as poorly for me as Alex Nichols complaining that Miranda's choices "ducked the question of slavery." So when Todd VanDerWerff replied that "it's not a work that tries to excuse Alexander Hamilton's failure to do anything substantive about slavery" but a "rumination to make a better story," I smiled because someone directly responded to Nichols's criticisms with Hamilton's transformative nature. VanDerWerff speaks to how Hamilton's "story about stories" presented a platform to stories too often robbed of that platform and describes how Miranda picked what to include and what to exclude didn't remove slavery from the narrative - "the story that seemed like the most important one" didn't have to be the most important one - but ultimately I think he missed the point in a way that left me feeling sour.

VanDerWerff draws parallels between the circumstances of his birth - namely his mother possibly being raped by his father and her choosing not to get an abortion - and his father's story to Miranda's approach to Hamilton, but where Miranda's choices change the common narrative of our society, VanDerWerff's continue it.

Miranda chooses not to linger on the Founding Fathers' tacit acceptance of slavery, but that decision wasn't one that meant Hamilton sanctioned slavery. Unlike with Miranda's swift exclusion of slavery, VanDerWerff lingers on never getting his father's side of the story, how he chooses to "never, ever call his father a rapist." Miranda approaches the inexcusable exclusion of people of color from having a say in the conception of the United States subversively, but VanDerWerff continues the status quo by repeating the need for the (usually male) rapist to condemn himself instead of pausing to deeply reflect on the woman victim's story. I do not begin to think it would be easy to think that someone related to you so closely could be guilty of the terrible act of rape, but he could have dropped the subject just as easily as Miranda did the details of slavery in Hamilton instead of repeatedly circling back to the night in question. VanDerWerff could have written the untold story of his father instead of continuing an often told story that damages women.

Inspired by the series of accidents surrounding Alexander Hamilton's involvement in the American Revolution, VanDerWerff discusses the happenstance of his mother's choice not to get an abortion. I agree with his insight that "We are, all of us, accidents, in a sense" like Hamilton. But Miranda's Hamilton subversively focuses on accidents surrounding an immigrant in a time where immigrants are systematically denied the respect they deserve, while VanDerWerff plays up the dominant narrative that not getting an abortion ushers joy into a mother's life - the same narrative prioritizes the possibility of a dependent fetus becoming a child that is incorrectly used to pressure a woman out of considering the needs of her own life and body, the story used to pressure women out of getting abortions. It's the same story that incites violence against the women who exercise their right to one despite that undue pressure.

The beauty of Hamilton lies in using catchy beats and phrases to help us think critically about the world we live in, to think about how it could be better by including people of color, respecting immigrants, and praising the works of marginalized groups. Hamilton works specifically because it focuses on important things missing from the narrative we're overwhelmingly taught - instead of picking pieces from the narrative in a way that highlights already common, and damaging, beliefs like VanDerWerff's article.

Liz rides the subway is a series containing thoughts I have on the subway, mostly as an experiment to get me to write more. The ride home after yet another day hearing someone famous has been abusing a woman in his life:

Content warning: abuse, rape

Johnny Depp has allegedly been abusing Amber Heard, and a judge granted Amber Heard's restraining order against him on Friday in light of her claims of repeated physical and verbal abuse. Of course, an army (of mostly men) has been saying (very loudly) that we don't know that he abused her and that we have to give him the benefit of the doubt since obviously he's innocent until proven guilty.

"Innocent until proven guilty" is an insidious phrase people toss around to give cover to abusers all the time. We dodge the possibility that a celebrity harmed a woman by blaming it on the legal system. But as Kate Harding writes in response to the accusations against Jian Ghomeshi of sexual violence, "innocent until proven guilty" has a very specific legal meaning that has nothing to do with this:

I shouldn't need to say this, but I will: Taking reports of sexual violence seriously doesn't mean denying anyone due process or chasing the accused down with pitchforks. I'm not talking about punishing people at all right now; I'm talking about forming educated opinions, by weighing up what evidence we've been allowed to see and deciding what we think of it all. We do this every day when we take in the news, except when the news is about rape, in which case we act like "innocent until proven guilty" means no one - preferably not even investigators and prosecutors - may legally suspect that the guy might actually have done it.

Let me tell you a wonderful secret about the U.S. and Canada: If you're not on a jury, you are allowed to hold any opinion you like of an accused criminal's guilt or innocence, regardless of whether he's been prosecuted and/or what the prosecution can prove! You are not required to wait until some vague future date when "all the evidence" has come in, nor to withhold judgment until a jury has decided the matter, nor even to accept that a jury verdict is necessarily correct! So far, there are no actual thought police - isn't that terrific news?

That is terrific news!

Now, if we could also use our newly acquired abilities to evaluate the evidence of abusers and rapists within our own social circles - the evidence that is right in front of us - we could make life a whole lot better for the survivors we know, too.