Sexism and Men's Issues

And as for why someone would do that to the poor guy...

Well, maybe the answer is something as petty and mean-spirited as "Because I can". It's all about power. Maybe race was a factor too — a rich white guy feels inadequate in the presence of a successful and manly black man accompanied by his beautiful wife and decided to assert dominance by grabbing the man's junk.

I was thinking the same thing.

One thing that I really think screws people up when it comes to inter-gender dynamics is the "Men and women can't just be friends (unless the man is gay, or both are gay)" thing. Because apparently, men are incapable of seeing a woman as anything other than a potential mate. Which is obviously not true. But, if you go through life being taught that's how things are, you get trained into thinking that way.

Holy crap, there's been a lot of oversimplifying and generalizing in the last page or so.

Sexism and gender issues are a hugely complicated topic with a wide variety of causes and effects on both the individual person-to-person level and collective societal level. Saying things like "I wonder how many misogynists grew up on Save the Princess games" or "Hollywood is a Wretched Hive" are reductionist and unhelpful. Yes, there are absolutely real issues to discuss on those topics, but it's absolutely not as simply and easy as "people are sexist because they were exposed to too much sexist media" or "people are sexist because they're bad people" or "people are sexist because they have power, which turns them into bad people".

If things were that easy, then we could have solved the problem a long time ago by getting rid of the bad people and the bad influences. The reality of the situation is way more complicated and hard to unravel. Pretending otherwise not only doesn't help, it's actively harmful, since it perpetuates misleading attitudes about the problem we're talking about.

TBF, I didn't imply that playing too many games or watching too many movies which treat women as prizes was the sole cause of misogyny. Just that it's one of the many little ways guys are conditioned to dehumanize and objectify women.

It all adds up, especially if you lack more mature role models to teach you better.

edited 11th Oct '17 7:37:04 AM by M84

As someone who grew up idolizing Mario (although Luigi was always my favorite), I can say with absolute certainty that he never conditioned me to hate women.

It's not about hating women, it's about that narrative that when you finish the thing and beat the bad guy, you get the woman's affection.

Hey I enjoyed those games too and I'm currently not a misogynist. It helps that I had the "more mature role models" I mentioned earlier.

This. The cause of the misogyny in some is the disappointment some guys feel when real life doesn't work the same way. Think the "Nice Guy".

edited 11th Oct '17 8:05:09 AM by M84

The whole "if I'm nice to you, then you're obligated to reciprocate my feelings" mentality is toxic as hell, true. But I don't think it should be framed as solely a men's issue.

"Treat You Better" by Shawn Mendes was often mocked by critics for sounding like a "Nice Guy™" anthem. But I've noticed that if you took that song and reversed the genders, you'd have... well, you'd have "You Belong with Me" by Taylor Swift, one of the biggest hits of 2009.

edited 11th Oct '17 8:21:16 AM by TyeDyeWildebeest

It's one of those things where it's not only men, but a lot of it is men.

Funny how you mention Swift, because someone posted in the US Politics thread a while ago about an article describing how she is ravenously popular amongst the coalition of alt-right, neo-nazi, and white supremacist communities; who obviously make "returning to traditional gender relations" a big flagship of their beliefs.

edited 11th Oct '17 8:42:11 AM by FluffyMcChicken

Except—and I can't believe I'm about to defend Taylor Swift—you wouldn't. "You Belong With Me" has problems, but it's nowhere near as toxic as "Treat You Better". First off, unlike "Treat You Better", "You Belong With Me" actually establishes that the guy's relationship has problems, and it explains what those problems are. It also sets up the fact that the singer and the guy are already friends and that she knows about his relationship problems because he has, in fact, been telling her all about them. This is further reinforced by the music video, which makes the situation set up by the lyrics even clearer, and even more importantly, makes it obvious that the song is an internal monologue.

This is an important distinction from "Treat You Better" where there is no evidence of a preexisting friendship between the singer and the girl, and where, based on the lyrics and music video alike, he's not only being a jackass right to her face, but may well be stalking her and watching her via binoculars. Worse yet, the song doesn't even bother to state just what exactly her boyfriend is doing wrong; it just takes it as a given that Mendes can "treat her better" and that therefore she should get with him. This doesn't mean "You Belong With Me" is perfect, but it's still better (ironically) then Mendes' poisonous Nice Guy anthem.

If "Treat You Better" has a female equivalent, it's not "You Belong With Me", but Avril Lavigne's bitchy, condescending, made-even-worse-by-the-music-video, mean girl song "Girlfriend". And if "You Belong With Me" has a male equivalent it's American Hi-Fi's "Flavour of the Week". Please note the differences.

edited 11th Oct '17 9:41:22 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar

Good song analysis. Also, now I have nostalgia songs to listen to.

I find when people try to make direct gender comparisons, we often forget that sometimes part of the way gender disparity works is that the internal machinations to reach that point are also different, and thus it can be tough to try and explain or point out a double standard.

That's... actually a really good point. I guess the implication is that the boyfriend in "Treat You Better" is rude or unchivalrous to her ("and any girl like you deserves a gentleman"), but we don't really get any detail beyond that. While I wouldn't consider myself a Taylor Swift fan, I have to admit that she actually knows what she's doing when it comes to songwriting - at least, to a greater extent than Shawn Mendes or Teddy Geiger or whoever it was that wrote that dreck.

And wow, I'd completely forgotten about "Girlfriend", AKA Avril Lavigne's sellout anthem. God, 2007 was a horrid year for pop music.

edited 11th Oct '17 9:55:16 AM by TyeDyeWildebeest

"One thing that I really think screws people up when it comes to inter-gender dynamics is the "Men and women can't just be friends (unless the man is gay, or both are gay)" thing. Because apparently, men are incapable of seeing a woman as anything other than a potential mate. Which is obviously not true. But, if you go through life being taught that's how things are, you get trained into thinking that way. "

I think this is the crux of it. It's definitely a concept I can relate to, but it's an idea I rejected as an adult because it made me feel miserable. I remember being 18 and being a thoroughly grouchy asshole who sabotaged a couple potential relationships at second date because I was so insecure, and had so many abortive attempts at asking a girl out because "friendship" and "relationship" were these weirdly mutually exclusive states of being.

When I was 22, I started being like a high-hanging fruit feminist instead of being a low-hanging fruit one (like, considering how gender norms and cultural assumptions shape our treatment of women instead of simply supporting them getting equal pay for equal work), and I eventually wondered, "Why? Why am I pursuing a relationship with a woman if I'm not going to be her friend? Am I going to be her enemy? Are we going to make each other miserable? I wouldn't stand for associating with adversarial men, why do I consider doing that with women? Is sex really that important? What if she says yes? Will I have a girlfriend who hates everything I am? Everything I do? Will I hate everything about her? Will we be constantly trying to change each other in our own image? Will we be married and hate each other? Will I have children who hate their father like their mother hates her husband? Will I teach my children to hate their mother like their father hates his wife? When we break up, will our enmity scar us so badly, we regard everyone by saying, 'At least they're not as bad as the last one.' Who aspires to that? Why even bother with the whole exercise? Is she suddenly going to abandon a relationship if I become her friend? Who does that? Why not be her friend? Because she won't date me? There are billions of women who won't date me. Am I going to sacrifice a chance at having a friend over it? And even if they would, it's such an emotionally and physically tiring experience to always be at your best to impress that it becomes a chore if you're not with someone who you consider a friend."

Honestly, I've felt much happier being friends with women, to the point I could easily be single my whole life and have it not bother me. You have to use that as a starting point, or else it just is an exercise in futility. You'll be miserable, they'll be miserable, and the whole thing will be a waste of time. And it fucks up how you see women. You dehumanize them, and start viewing every interaction with them like hunting, or a chessboard. Empathy goes out the window, you become more selfish, and your standards start to lower as more women find you repellent for regarding them as nothing more than a walking vagina, and with a lack of regard for them, your sense of self-worth starts to vanish. A lot of these incel types are classic Inferiority Superiority Complex examples.

edited 11th Oct '17 10:34:56 AM by CrimsonZephyr

This is what makes "Treat You Better" so unbearable to me. I mean, there's no good way to write a song about thinking someone else's girlfriend should be dating you instead, but there are degrees of bad, and "Treat You Better" is near as bad as it gets, and what makes it so bad, beyond the obvious sense of gross entitlement ("why are we wasting time on your wasted crying when you should be with me instead?" Shudder) is the complete lack of information on the state of the girl's current relationship. Instead he spends all of his time complaining about how he's just better than her current boyfriend, without ever even specifying in what way, which means his supposed superiority could easily be all in his head—and given the context of the song's whining tone, it probably is all in his head. Claiming that you're a gentleman and the other guy isn't is a functionally meaningless statement without anecdotes.

What makes, say, "Flavour of the Week" so much more tolerable is that the song puts the emphasis on the problems in the relationship—namely that the guy's an addictive gamer and stoner who spends all his time fantasizing about other women, getting high, and playing Nintendo while barely acknowledging his girlfriend's existence. Better yet, the singer waits until the very last line of the song to admit his own interest in the girl, which gives his perspective through the rest of the song an important level of detachment that only lends credence to his depiction of the relationship. It's less, "Why won't this girl get with me?" and more "Why is she staying with a guy who makes her miserable?" with an added "And if she was single I would interested" at the end. Now, maybe that's still too problematic for some people, and I would completely understand that, but it's miles away an improvement on "Treat You Better".

Hell, even FM Static's "Definitely Maybe" does a better job. While it definitely shares some of the problematic elements of "Treat You Better", including the singer's interest in the girl being front and centre and the fact that the singer and the girl explicitly don't know each other very well (while in "Treat You Better" that's just a likely interpretation) it gets around a number of them by making it clear that the song is taking place at a high school, one of the few settings where you can know everything about someone's relationship without necessarily knowing the person. It makes the problem with the relationship clear—the boyfriend's dating at least one other girl unbeknownst to her, and is attempting to put the moves on many others, including her own sister—and lets us know that the singer has witnessed this personally (suggesting that even if he and the girl aren't close, they still move in the same peer group—enough so to have all gone to see a movie together). There's still some Nice Guy elements there, and I again get why people would have a problem, but it's not near as bald in its sense of entitlement as "Treat You Better".

Internet music critic, Todd In The Shadows, gave "Treat You Better" a pretty devastating critique if anyone's interested. It touches on the Nice Guy phenomena in particular, and gets into what makes this song so much worse than so many others, including "You Belong With Me".

I don't think I ever thought it through that much, but I had a similar revelation some time ago.

The whole adversarial relationship you're taught to have is really not a good way to look at life. Even beyond the harm it causes to women, it doesn't really help you either.

I feel much happier now that I've gotten myself out of it.

edited 11th Oct '17 11:07:04 AM by Draghinazzo

"We also get taught from a very early age that it’s not cool to talk about masculinity, or talk about some of the ways masculinity contradicts itself or treats other people poorly."

Is tribal mentality, "my group commit mistakes, the other group crimes!"

that is one point people dosent see that often: the Other guy is usually just a object to confrton and shallow chararter, is intersting the "trophy women" in many story is always dating a straw chararter who is bad because he is the one daiting.

edited 11th Oct '17 11:13:02 AM by unknowing

Now that I think about it, I'd never paid attention to the lyrics of "Treat You Better". I just disliked it because the singer's voice is... oily.

Given he sings like a dying parakeet this is perhaps unsurprising. Trying to parse out words is an exercise in futility.

I don't know—even most the rom coms I've seen, bad as they are, usually give the other guy some negative trait (the trainwreck that is Sleepless in Seattle aside; allergies are not a negative trait). Which still doesn't change the fact that the message they send is terrible.

edited 11th Oct '17 12:31:58 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

One of the "flaws" exhibited by the other guy in Made Of Honor was the fact that he doesn't like to share food. Like... seriously?

edited 11th Oct '17 12:46:06 PM by TyeDyeWildebeest

"Girlfriend" was meant to be sarcastic, as is a lot of Avril's music. But Poe's Law and Misaimed Fandom struck.

It's like Lady Gaga's Meat Bikini, which was actually a pretty clever idea, in a Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped sort of way. But stars aren't allowed to be gross. I don't think even trainwreck die-young party animal Kesha could pull it off.

Didn't say they do it well. Just that they do it better than Mendes.

I've seen that claim before, never bought into it. The song and video alike play it dead straight. Though frankly, even if it was meant as parody, that only makes "Treat You Better", the song I was comparing it to, come off as even worse. Congratulations Mendes, the only song that manages to act like the female version of yours is deliberate self-mockery. Well done.

edited 11th Oct '17 1:40:42 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

Also I'd note that Taylor Swift comparisons don't exactly work well, as Swift has a long history of relationships going badly and in her later works has acknowledged that the fact for thighs going badly doesn't rest only with her partners.

Taylor Swift isn't singing about healthy relationships and she doesn't pretend to be.

I admit, I was kind of annoyed with the lyrics of "Treat you Better", but I thought maybe I was overreacting. Now I know I'm not the only one who took issue with the lyrics. I think I'll give that Todd in the Shadows video a look soon.