MOD NOTE: Please note the following part of the forum rules:
The initial OP posted below covers it well enough: the premise of this thread is that men's issues exist. Don't bother posting if you don't believe there is such a thing.
Here's hoping this isn't considered too redundant. I've noticed that our existing threads about sexism tend to get bogged down in Oppression Olympics or else wildly derailed, so I thought I'd make a thread specifically to talk about discrimination issues that disproportionately affect men.
No Oppression Olympics here, okay? No saying "But that's not important because women suffer X which is worse!" And no discussing these issues purely in terms of how much better women have it. Okay? If the discussion cannot meaningfully proceed without making a comparison to male and female treatment, that's fine, but on the whole I want this thread to be about how men are harmed by society and how we can fix it. Issues like:
- The male-only draft (in countries that have one)
- Circumcision
- Cavalier attitudes toward men's pain and sickness, AKA "Walk it off!"
- The Success Myth, which defines a man's desirability by his material success. Also The Myth of Men Not Being Hot, which denies that men can be sexually attractive as male beings.
- Sexual abuse of men.
- Family law.
- General attitudes that men are dangerous or untrustworthy.
I could go on making the list, but I think you get the idea.
Despite what you might have heard about feminists not caring about men, it's not true. I care about men. Patriarchy sucks for them as much as it sucks for women, in a lot of ways. So I'm putting my keyboard where my mouth is and making a thread for us to all care about men.
Also? If you're male and think of something as a men's issue, by golly that makes it a men's issue fit for inclusion in this thread. I might disagree with you as to the solution, but as a woman I'm not going to tell you you have no right to be concerned about it. No "womansplaining" here.
Edited by nombretomado on Dec 15th 2019 at 5:19:34 AM
I wouldn't go so far as to use this as an excuse to call men shallow. I don't think it's that at all. (Though I could be wrong.) I think it's just awareness. I don't know what I've walked by because my head wasn't in it, but I can certainly zero in on whom I deem to be attractive without much effort.
"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur
A procrastination in of itself
I'm just surprised at how many people were helpful enough to return a dropped glove, sounds like a nice part of town.
"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran
A nice butterfly
Some men showed zero brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that lights up when one ponders another person’s thoughts, feelings, and intentions. Researchers found that shocking, because they almost never see this part of the brain shutdown in this way.
And a Princeton professor said, “It is as if they’re reacting to these women as if they’re not fully human. It’s consistent with the idea that they are responding to these photographs, as if they were responding to objects, not people.
In a separate Princeton study, when men viewed images a women in bikinis, they often associated with first person action verbs such as: “I push”, “I grab”, “I handle”. But when they saw images of women dressed modestly, they associated them with third person action verbs, such as “she pushes”, “she grabs”.
I am cross posting this to the Womens issues thread but I think it is relevant to the subject of Mens issues being touched here right now for the reason that is also mention in this one Ted X talk by Jessica Rey called The Evolution of the Swim Suit
. She uses the talk to explain and talk a bit about how her idea to build a rather different line of swimsuits from what has sprung since the 60s but the mention of this study does bring up the question.
Are men evolutionary predisposed to see "less clothing" as a sexual invitation? That study alone seems to suggest it does become harder for men to see it so (though I contend a bit with the study metholodogy but whatever, not the point). But it still works for no excuse because it is the same for violence or whatever but no one beats the crap out of someone for the simple fact of disagreeing with them.
Still. Something, I guess, interesting to take into consideration and that I thought I would share at this moment of the thread.
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes
Visiting from the Hoag Galaxy
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I kind of want to see a similar study done with women as the subjects. It would be interesting to see what the effect is.
Pictures of women are in fact, literal objects. Not actual women.
Show me the same results with men (And women, they always seem to leave that out even though it's an obvious control)interacting with actual people in front of them, and maybe we'll have something actually worth something.
A nice butterfly
The study mentions that it will be replicated for women and in what conditions, actually. Also with the hypothesis of the researcher of its results.
Funny that you contend with the idea of visual examples not serving to prove any emotional or brain connection with a post of mine, of all people here. Because of my avatar.
edited 20th Nov '14 9:42:09 AM by Aszur
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes
No, the other one.
What about your avatar?
Check out my fanfiction!
A nice butterfly
Shop Owner
All I get from his avatar is me, when I just started posting here. Given I also had Rorschach avatar. I find that such results are worrying in themselves for the implications that on a subconcious level we dehumanize so throughly someone as to shut down entire brain sectors. Wow.
The Mistress
I see someone looking angrily at me. He also has a mustache.
No, the other one.
I see someone with spots for a face.
As for viewing people purely as objects when they're attractive, I don't really understand that. Adding a person and emotion to someone makes them far more attractive than a mere object. Is it a gender thing or something I'm just different with?
edited 20th Nov '14 10:19:11 AM by AnotherDuck
Check out my fanfiction!
A nice butterfly
The Rorschach inkblot test is a rather outdated (basically only one version of it is mathematically valid nowadays) which consists of a series of 'inkblot' marks on spreads of paper shown to people, and they say what they see in there.
It is, quite literally, showing people pictures to gauge reactions emotional and cognitive. And it is named, like the character of my avatar, Rorschach, who is named after that test.
If the contents of a picture or the picture itself did not matter, even different pictures would reveal the same reaction on brain scans if it sees it as merely an object, but no. The brain sees the content.
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes
A procrastination in of itself
Even just doing it with video could have rather different results, motion and sounds are a big way for us to distinguish something from just being an object.
As the machinery used to scan brains is rather large I doubt you could have an actual person there when scanning. You can fit a screen into such machines, but it's not possible to see out.
edited 20th Nov '14 10:51:05 AM by SilasW
"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran
In the pursuit of great, we failed to do good.
I don't know if it would change anything but I'm curious if the results would be the same if the men were talking to an actual woman instead of looking at a picture of them.
I wish the evopsychs would stop and think for a second. This smells like a culturally indoctrinated response, not something hard-wired. Done early enough, and you will get the neurology to build on it enough to pull Weird Stuff like the "clothed = person; bikini = thing" thing.
'80s TV Action Hero
Meh. Somebody of either sex looks at a picture of a fully clothed person and they think 'oh, there's a person', they look at a picture of a person with nothing on and they think 'yay, sex!' and stop thinking in terms of social interaction.
And...? This is news to who, exactly?
'All he needs is for somebody to throw handgrenades at him for the rest of his life...'
No, the other one.
Sometimes I wonder if some people think it should be taboo to consider a stereotypically attractive or scantily clad person sexy.
Check out my fanfiction!
V
I think some people think it should be taboo for anyone to be considered sexually attractive.
I get that sex is a big thing. It is an innate biological force. But I think we put way too much emphasis on being sexually attractive, especially to women, which puts the pressure on the other side, especially men, to be constantly sexually seeking.
Even the whole "Every body is beautiful!" campaign is still judging beauty by sexual objectification. And because this is geared to women, it is telling men that their way of appreciating a female's inner or outer beauty is through their penis.
We are setting both sides up for failure with that attitude even if that's not our intent.
"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur
I dispute that. Define "naked", for starters. <_< (And, remember I grew up in South Africa where a lot of tribes don't traditionally consider a woman going topless as anything particularly special. Because that's not "naked" as they culturally define it (although they've had to start: American tourists get prissy when they break out the actual traditional dress-code and don't wind up coughing up the cash).)
edited 21st Nov '14 4:45:09 AM by Euodiachloris
What if that phrase was changed to "Every person is beautiful!"? Would it make it alright?
edited 21st Nov '14 4:45:58 AM by Quag15
No, because some people aren't. Beauty is subjective.
I much rather see "Respect yourself and others."
"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur
Hmmm...
If you generalize it that much there wouldn't even be a point.
It'd be hard to deny that men are still trained by much of culture to value both themselves and women according to their ability to pursue stereotypically attractive mates. If you're barraged by messaging telling you to be shallow, it's no surprise when you respond to situations instinctively shallowly.
OTOH, I can't help but wonder if those scenarios would have turned out similarly, had we switched out the 'attractive versus unattractive woman' for an 'attractive versus unattractive man,' keeping in mind that what women are taught to find attractive is not necessarily about shoe styles or body weight. Our media messages are very much indicative of a society that teaches both genders to be shallow, just in different ways.
Furthermore, I think Guantanamo must be destroyed.