Sexism and Men's Issues

This has to do, I think a lot, with how discourse works. For a long time, it wasn't "oh what causes people to rape other people" or "oh how do we prevent rapes" it was "rape happens"

The argument had to be about proving rape was even a thing, and a thing worth punishing. And when you bring it up people assume it's not as much, or there's some lying going on. So what happens is people argue bigger and bigger pictures, in the hopes that at some point it hits home.

This isn't even just rape. All forms of oppression sort of fall into the cycle of, so long as they have to argue the validity, they have to be able to prove it as successfully and definitively as possible, otherwise no one will believe them.

And men's issues also fall into this. Where sometimes convincing people that it's even an issue involves having to make those big grand mind-changing statements, and due to the unique nature of their situation, it often causes strange results.

Yeah, pretty much. To stop a problem, you have to convince people it exists in the first place. This is pretty much the situation men's issues are currently. Too many people don't believe men have those issues, so it's hard to convince they something should be done. That also runs into the worse problems fallacy, in that even if they think it is a problem, they don't think it's worth doing anything about, since they don't think it's as serious of a problem as other problems. And one of the worst parts about that is that a lot of that shushing comes from people who claim to be fighting for equality.

If note that I actually see the "all men are rapist perverts" narrative coming often not from progressives but from regressive old white men. It's a big thing in the anti-trans movement as they believe that all men are inherently rapists/perverts and as such allowing what they wrongly perceive to be men into women's bathrooms with result in rape.

Now that same crowd does include other groups than the old men of the religious right, anti-trans feminists are a thing, but I'd say that one of the more vocal voices in a regressive one.

The more vocal ones are usually the ones at the edges. The most progressive, and the most regressive. The middle ground don't tend to be that vocal.

With that point in particular, I think the main difference is that the regressives are more concious about it, since that's their narrative, while when I hear it from progressives, it's more often something unconscious or an unfortunate implication.

There's a difference:

On the radical left, the ones saying Men=Rapists are a dumb little college girls going through “babby’s first feminism”

On the radical right, the ones saying it are much of Congress and the President elect

I think you aren't giving the radical left enough credit here. There's tons of rape legislation that makes some really stupid assumptions regarding "all men are sexual predators" and such.

Were they actually passed by the radical left though, or right-leaning Moral Guardians looking out to protect women's chastity? Because a lot of the protests to update federal rape laws to include envelopment rape come from people on the left as well as MRA hullabaloo.

Baby's first feminism, or TER Fs. TER Fs are a real problem for everyone, and in general I support anything that shows their ideology as the terrible thing it is.

Granted, many feminists never really graduate past a superficial glance at the rhetoric. S'unfortunate.

edited 9th Dec '16 10:39:36 AM by MrAHR

Ideologies that are only skin deep tend to not be rooted in reality, for some strange reason. Not that I'm all that familiar with the political culture over the pond.

I'm not under the impression that babby's first feminism are necessarily TERF's, so much as young women who haven't properly understood the nuances of privilege and the complex situation regarding men's place in the culture.

edited 9th Dec '16 1:50:46 PM by Draghinazzo

Yeah, while it's not limited to them my experiences with honest-to-goodness TERF's is that they tend to be on the older side, born in the 80s before trans issues started to become mainstream or residuals of Second Wave Feminism and the like. That's not to say babby's first feminists can't dabble in TERF territory out of ignorance or a nonspecific desire to use some demographic as a punching bag under the guise of self-righteousness.

edited 9th Dec '16 1:57:03 PM by AlleyOop

I put an "or" there to try and distinguish that Terfs and feminism 101 were separate groups, my baddo.

Hell what legislature could even be said to be under the control of the radical left? The radical social left has very few people in government and I can't think of any country where they have enough power to actually pass any legislation. Now culturally the social left have done a lot in making previously exstream positions maliable to mainstream politicians, but it's the more sensible views that get made acceptable.

edited 9th Dec '16 10:12:39 PM by Silasw

You could have said the same about right wingers up until a little under a month ago.

Not really, the radical cultural right have held a lot of legislative power in the US at a local level for years.

I was thinking more at a federal level. At the local and state (because gerrymadering) levels yeah the far right as more significant sway, that's more because of how things are laid out. No clue about how things are run in the cities (which do have more sway leftward).

Hard-lefters have been enemies of the US for too long too recently. The Cold War lasted a lot longer than WW 2, and likely has more impact in the mind of the typical voting American. We all know someone who was in Vietnam. Very few of us are in contact with someone who was in Normandy, or crossed the Rhine.

The evils of the Far Right have had more time to infiltrate our culture and political system.

I'd argue that we've spent literally the past decade or two fighting against hard conservative extremism, just from foreign cultures. And even when we were fighting against the far-left, it was more the economic far-left (communism) than the social far-left, which were making meaningful strides across the board during said period.

The type of social far-right populism/fascism that we've seen growing in power throughout 2016 is very, very new and different from the typical, familiar terrible sort of socially far-right ideology that the left often times tries to pin on the right. And I'd argue that its rise is quite a bit more complicated than simply the remnants of Mc Carthyism.

Much like the far-left slowly wormed its way into American politics (see: civil rights movements) through lots of back and fourth, the far-right as been, perhaps more subtly, implanting its views into western society as well. The effects of both halves only become evident when you look towards states entirely ruled by righties (Texas) vs, states entirely ruled by lefties (California, Mass). Of course, because of everyone's favorite friend Gerrymandering, the second part of that has been increasingly hard to see on the state level.

I agree that the far-right has had more influence on the state level, but on the national level we see lots of examples of far-right influence and far-left influence, typically indirectly, be it through Roe v. Wade (which is controversial now, never-fucking-mind in the 80's) or gay marriage and the current push for weed legalization vs. the war on drugs and such.

For most of American history, the far-right and the far-left have been mostly playing by worming their ideas into the establishment, who then leads the actual charge. Very rarely have we had situations (like now) where one of the sides takes direct control over the positions of power.

I wish this was satire. I wish this was satire. I wish this was satire.

Complaining about people using self-replying on Twitter to write essays is one thing. Blaming it (via anecdotal evidence) solely on men...well...I wish this was satire. I wish this was satire. I wish...

Yeah, that's just weird.