Sexism and Men's Issues

It makes the problem worse because it makes more people think "Oh, they're just bullshitting an excuse to justify misogyny. The problem can't be that bad." And let's be frank, most of those MR As don't give a shit about the real problems men face.

Remember that she's the one who made The Red Pill. She is not a trustworthy source. She completely downplayed and ignored Paul Elam's rampant virulent misogyny.

edited 16th Nov '17 6:44:54 AM by M84

Disgusted, but not surprised

While the next two examples you bring up are important issues, this one in particular stands out for me. It's interesting that you specifically cite female on male abuse and rape as a core problem facing men. While it's true that men are about as likely to be victims of abuse and even rape as women are, an overwhelming number of abusers and rapists of both sexes are men.

Female-on-male and female-on-female abuse and rape exists, but represents a slim minority of the abuse and rape that happens in the world. Emphasizing that we should be talking about women abusing and raping men instead of merely the fact that men are being abused and raped is, in and of itself, one of the ways that MRA principles betray their true motives.

Male-on-male abuse and rape is a much larger and more significant problem, but MRAs rarely even give it the slightest concern because there's very few ways to present it as "The reason why women suck." And at the end of the day, that's all MRAs are really interested in talking about.

edited 16th Nov '17 7:28:30 AM by TobiasDrake

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That's it exactly. MR As will only lightly touch on actual issues men face if it means they can bash women.

edited 16th Nov '17 7:29:07 AM by M84

Disgusted, but not surprised

You claim that the only options are that MRAs stick up for men, or these issues are completely ignored.

Those choices are barely equivalent on a good day.

Of course the rest of the groups are going to be scattered and of limited visibility when you have Paul Elam as the supposed leader of the men's rights movement. What do you think I meant by poisoning the well?

And of course the issues men face are not going to be majored on due to how many structural advantages they have in society as is.

What's next, are you going to show up in some other thread insisting that black on black crime is the real problem?

edited 16th Nov '17 7:32:53 AM by Krieger22

I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot

First of all, that's not what false equivalence is. The fallacy you're thinking of is "false choice", and... in retrospect, I can see how my argument could be seen that way. I was just frustrated that, because the MRM is so toxic, the legitimate issues they bring up get swept under the rug as a consequence.

I'm not asking them to be "majored on" (whatever that means). I'm asking them to be addressed, in any capacity. But if you're going to sit here and claim that they don't matter because men have all the power, I have to wonder what you're doing here in the men's issues thread.

Okay, I'd appreciate not being talked down to and insulted. Please and thank you.

They don't? Because I just went over to the subreddit r/mensrights, and searching "prison rape" brings up quite a few results.

edited 16th Nov '17 7:48:29 AM by TyeDyeWildebeest

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Have you bothered reading them? The outcomes of one's sexual repression do not make actual talking points.

I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot

Yeah, I have. Please tell me where exactly you're getting "sexual repression" from this, this, this, this, or this.

I love to learn, I love to yearn, and most of all... I love to make money.

Yeah, like these types mean a thing they type out online

I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot

Blaming feminism for men's issues is a dealbreaker for any men's rights spokesman or movement. Equality is not a zero-sum game. Quite the opposite, in fact — gender equality will solve a lot of issues faced by men.

Take the issue of male victims of abuse. One of the major reasons why this problem exists in the first place is because of the idea that men are strong and active while women are weak and passive, especially when it comes to sex. People simply have a harder time believing that a woman beat her husband or raped her boyfriend than a man beat his wife or raped his girlfriend. Family law is all kinds of screwed up because of the belief that mothers are inherently better parents than fathers. The same thing leads to the idea of a stay-at-home father being far less accepted than the idea of a stay-at-home mother.

All of these are issues of gender inequality that feminism would love to address.

However, it's equally important to note that this doesn't mean men's issues should be rolled into feminism. Feminism is — and should be — focused on issues faced by women, not issues faced by men. Feminism and men's issues are complementary areas of advocacy, but that doesn't mean they're identical or interchangeable. Men's issues need their own movement and their own activists, but it should work with and alongside feminism, not in opposition to it.

Anyone who opposes feminism isn't an advocate for men, they're misogynists trying to rebrand themselves into something more socially acceptable. These people are assholes whose antics damage the cause of both men and women.

edited 16th Nov '17 8:13:00 AM by NativeJovian

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

The comments are awful, yes, but I fail to see anything wrong with the actual articles linked by the OP. Do you?

I agree. In fact, I wrote an essay on the Men's Rights movement for a Social Movements class in college (which I believe I've posted here before), and that was pretty much my conclusion.

But it takes two to tango. We need to have men's activists who are willing to work alongside feminists, and feminists who are willing to work alongside men's activists.

edited 16th Nov '17 8:19:08 AM by TyeDyeWildebeest

I love to learn, I love to yearn, and most of all... I love to make money.

edited 1st Dec '17 5:15:14 PM by PhilosopherStones

GIVE ME YOUR FACE

Well, explain to me who exactly in the men's rights movements can be engaged in good faith.

Actual embezzler Paul Elam? Actual rape advocate Roosh V?

Funny thing that, plenty of MRAs claim to be egalitarians. Hence nobody else using that term being taken seriously.

edited 16th Nov '17 8:40:38 AM by Krieger22

I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiot

Because egalitarianism, while ostensibly being a reasonable enough premise, is every bit as overflowing with toxic agendas and reasonable-sounding hate rhetoric as the MRA movement.

It's the standard go-to cause for people who want to push a toxic agenda but are at least self-aware enough to know that, on the face of it, their agenda isn't going to win them very many friends. So they mask it in egalitarianism instead.

"I'm here to talk about how men are the REAL victims of rape culture because feminists making false rape accusations ruins the lives of all men, and women are never really raped so that's not actually a problem. What? No, I'm not an MRA. I'm an egalitarian, and I'm pushing back against the anti-men doctrine of that hate group "feminism"!"

I've never met an egalitarian who didn't just happen to think that straight white men are the real victims and groups like feminism, the civil rights movement, "Social Justice Warriors", etc. exist to perpetuate the one true bias: keeping straight white men down.

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This is classic false equivalency. Self-declared MRAs who are actually anti-feminists are far more numerous and influential within the MRA community than self-declared feminists who are actually misandrists are within the feminist community. Most prominent feminists are focused on women and the problems that they face. Most prominent MRAs are focused on women and why they're evil and holding men back.

This is why the entire "MRA" name itself is toxic as hell, and most people who are actually focused on issues faced by men reject the label in order to avoid being tainted by association.

If you want to help men, then discrediting men who use men's issues as a facade for their misogyny is a far more serious and urgent issue than misandrist feminists. The former control the conversation and harm the movement by being the most visible aspect of it. The latter are fringe figures with little influence in the wider movement.

Treating them as equivalent problems is disingenuous in the extreme.

Because they're different movements with different goals, even if those goals are complementary rather than competitive. Feminism is about women, and the men's issues movement is about men. That's fine — social movements need specificity in order to concentrate their efforts. There's no reason someone can't be both a feminist and a men's issues advocate, but trying to combine the two into a single movement risks diluting their purpose.

To take the idea to its logical extreme, why have separate movements for anything? Why not just have a single "Make Things Better" movement that addresses gender issues, economic issues, political issues, cultural issues, civil issues, etc?

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Egalitarian societies don't arise by themselves, since pre-existing inequalities often are self-sustaining through positive feedback effects. They need to be actively counteracted through things like affirmative action and a lot of egaliarian-minded people forget about this.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Basically, the fundamental problem with egalitarianism is that it's not a real movement. It's a vague and useless umbrella term commonly used to avoid having to state exactly what causes, specifically, you are passionate about. Their primary focus is to unironically play Devil's Advocate for those people who are being put out by the advances of an underprivileged group.

As I've said many times before, an egalitarian is someone who looks at the Emancipation Proclamation and asks, "Why is nobody talking about the unfair burden that this places on white plantation owners? I think the liberated slaves should have to pay them reparations to compensate them for their losses. It's only fair."

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How about Warren Farrell? I've read some of his work before and he's pretty cool.

I never said anything about misandrist feminists. Saying that there are feminists who are reluctant to work alongside men's activists because of their bad reputation isn't the same thing as saying that they hate men.

edited 16th Nov '17 8:55:28 AM by TyeDyeWildebeest

I love to learn, I love to yearn, and most of all... I love to make money.

edited 1st Dec '17 5:14:59 PM by PhilosopherStones

GIVE ME YOUR FACE

You've met me, back when I also called myself an Advocate For Men's Rights, then I was shown how both names have been poisoned and my only option was to call myself a "feminist". Or an "ally". I don't feel entirely happy with either word, honestly. While I'm also a feminist, when I'm talking about men's issues and dealing with that topic, that's different: I'm talking about men's problems and helping men, even though the source of the problems is largely the same, patriarchy.

It's as if a "socialist" should be stuck calling themself a "workerist", or an anti-racist stuck calling themselves a "POC-ist", at least in white-dominated cultures.

I guess "anti-patriarchist" might work? "Gender anarchist"?

I kinda like "gender anarchist". It's more spectrum-friendly.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Gender anarchist actually does sound pretty cool. I like it.

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Then your original statement is nonsensical. The whole point of "complementary, not competing" is that each group can pursue their own goal entirely separately from each other and both sides will benefit regardless. The two sides don't need to cooperate and work together, they just need to not try to tear each other down.

Feminists do not need help from the MRA movement. They just need the MRA movement to not be anti-feminist. The reverse is also true, but the vast majority of feminism is already not anti-male, so that's not really an issue.

Semantics are important. A feminist can (and should be) egalitarian, but calling themselves "feminist" rather than "egalitarian" says something about their priorities — and having priorities is important, because no movement can do everything. Feminism focuses on women. The men's issues movement focuses on men. Both groups are ultimately egalitarian, they just come at it from different directions.

Feminism does care about men, and the feminist movement does benefit men, as I mentioned above. That doesn't mean that men and men's issues is their first priority. This is a legitimate point of disagreement with some people — I've come across feminist who argue that men don't need a movement of their own, and that equality for women inherently leads to equality for men. While I don't disagree that it helps, I do disagree that this means men don't need a movement focused on them. There are problems that have a huge effect on men but only a small one on women, and it's unfair to expect feminism to address those issues, but they're still issues that need to be addressed. That, ideally, is the sort of thing that the men's issues movement would deal with.

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I've heard the term "gender anarchist" used before, but there it was about a non-binary gender identity (similar to what people more often refer to as "fluid"), rather than some kind of social movement.

The best stance for a real men's issue movement is not to discredit anyone, feminists or MRAs. That wasted effort. Distance, perhaps, but not discredit.

Most people I've heard call themselves egalitarians are people who're fed up with gender politics only focusing about gender politics, and want to deal with the actual issues facing any gender. Very few who just pretend to fall under the label to avoid suspicion.

Bringing up female-on-male abuse and rape as an issue as opposed to male-on-male does have a point, but not for the point MRAs bring it up for. It's about how women are not seen as capable or responsible for their own actions. It leads to them being treated more like children. It makes it easier for them to get away with things men never would, but on the other hand, it also gives them less respect and trust overall (which among other things is part of the pay gap). Asking to focus male-on-male over female-on-male makes that worse.

On the men's side, whether the perpetrator is male or female doesn't matter. What matters is that there's still an overwhelming idea that men can't be victims in the first place. For that issue, arguing about whether they should focus on female-on-male or male-on-male abuse is irrelevant.

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I disagree. I think both movements could benefit from some level of cooperation and coordination. If they're both going for a common goal (gender equality), why shouldn't they work together? Men's issues and women's issues are intertwined.

And "nonsensical" is a pretty strong choice of words, wouldn't you say? I don't know why you're being so hostile.

I love to learn, I love to yearn, and most of all... I love to make money.

edited 1st Dec '17 5:14:39 PM by PhilosopherStones

GIVE ME YOUR FACE

Then you must be hanging out in a very different part of the Internet. The reality is that the term is coopted by MRAs and their allies nine times out of ten, as part of the endless game of trying to prove they're "better" than the evil feminists.

Presumably because unintentionally or not you're parroting arguments normally deployed by the MRA crowd and that automatically makes people suspicious of your intentions.

Because of the MRAs, plain and simple. Ever since feminism took off, there have been men whining about how giving women rights will entail taking rights away from men. And those men have always dominated the conversation about men's issues and have always tried to shift the blame for men's problems to women, rather than keeping it where it belongs. Since feminists are forced to listen to their drivel even more than the rest of us are, it causes them to associate anyone talking about men's issues with the raging misogynists who dog them every day.

This is what we mean about poisoning the well.

edited 16th Nov '17 9:41:00 AM by AmbarSonofDeshar