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
Well, it's only natural. Guys who are hurt or affected in any way by emotional events are mocked, and there's probably something wrong with them. Like being arses who deserve it anyway.
But it's a little bit like the joke about how 99% of lawyers give the rest a bad reputation. Or now that I think about it, more similar than that, since immoral lawyers aren't bad people for being lawyers. They're bad people for being bad people, which doesn't necessarily coincide with them being lawyers. You also hear much more about the bad apples than the good ones.
If that makes sense.
edited 4th Mar '16 10:29:54 AM by AnotherDuck
Check out my fanfiction!It's the type of thing where, ideally, if you are around a certain type of person, you know the worst parts and the best parts.
Like I LARP and I can absolutely tell you the worst corrupt bigoted aspects of the community where I'm at. And I'm white and a lady, and I can easily tell you some of the shitty stuff that goes on in those communities as well.
It's not that hard to self police.
Read my stories!I expect this issue to only be relevant for men who have a romantic attraction to a female friend. If you're just approaching a stranger at the bar or something, staying besties isn't really on the table because you don't even know the person. It might become an option over the course of getting to know each other, but then we're right back at romantic attraction to a friend.
In essence, cutting off a friendship because she wouldn't be your girlfriend is really skeevy. It communicates that you find nothing of value in her as a person; only in her ability to be a Sex or Romance Object. This is a key part of the problem with how men approach women these days: not to get to know a new person, but to fill a preassigned Woman-Shaped Object Role they've already decided upon.
Yes, rejection sucks, but learning to deal with disappointment and appreciating what one does have are all part of being a mature adult. One can't appreciate the positive influences a friend has on his life if he's willing to dump the entire relationship into an incinerator because she doesn't want to date - and the fact that he's the kind of person to do that is probably a contributing factor in why she said no.
Conventional wisdom says, "Love finds you when you stop looking for it." This is part of the reason why.
edited 4th Mar '16 11:21:12 AM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Or maybe it's just too painful and unsatisfying to be friends with the person at that point, at least right away? People's feelings aren't really that easy to control or predict to the point where you can always be the person that takes everything in stride. If necessary, the guy could just take some time to be away from them and get over it, and they could eventually be friends again. I do understand your point, but it doesn't necessarily say anything about how much they value or don't value them as a person, it really has to do with their own personal feelings and what's best for them at that time. In fact, If they're actually your friend the situation just becomes more painful and uncomfortable, meaning taking some time away might be healthy. They may even want to still be friends but find that it's just too hard at that point.
There's also the matter of your intent and how you approached the situation to begin with. If you were interested in them from the beginning, hanging around basically pretending to be a friend but only doing it because you want to date them eventually, and then getting mad when the woman actually considers you a friend and turns you down, then you're definitely scummy and just wrong.
If you met someone and happened to become friends, but developed feelings for them afterwards that's a more complex and unfortunate situation and I think what you are saying might be more applicable there.
Finally, there's a lot of area between "stranger at a bar" and "close friends who have you some measure of emotional intimacy with". A lot of the time when this happens the two people have known each other for a little bit (whether it because they met through a friend, workplace, school, etc) and so you aren't really friends but not strangers either. Women in this situation upon being asked out might give you the friend spiel, but it doesn't necessarily mean she actually wants to be friends so much as keep you as an acquaintance and maintain your present relationship, so it's really not the same as tossing a potential friendship in the incinerator.
edited 4th Mar '16 11:43:57 AM by wehrmacht
This is why open communication is a good idea. Tell the person, cause as usual, they probably don't realize the issue.
Cause most issues I've seen are complete cutting off, forever. Basically implying that the entire friendship up until that point had solely been for a romantic relationship, and nothing else had mattered.
It kinda sucks.
Read my stories!Learning to deal with pain and disappointment is part of growing up. If a person considers the fact that she said no to be so agonizingly painful that he can never again bear to see the sight of her face, frankly, he has a lot of growing up to do.
There are far worse things in this world than rejection. In fact, the friends those guys take for granted are very important for helping you through those things.
edited 4th Mar '16 11:44:45 AM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Even if you were actually close friends that cared about each other? It might actually be pretty uncomfortable to keep being friends if you actually had strong feelings for them, at least for the time being. I imagine most people don't want to just toss the friendship in the bin in that situation but might find that distance is the best choice for a while.
To be more clear about this since I think I might have been talking past people, I think these situations kind of have to be taken on a case by case basis, how one person reacts in one situation might not really be the most appropriate or understandable way to react to another one.
edited 4th Mar '16 12:01:29 PM by wehrmacht
Case by case is smart. For me, I'm on the aromantic spectrum, so I often don't really crush hardcore on folks without some degree of reciprocation. So I know that as a girl, for me personally, if a dude asked me out and then cut me out due to rejection it would make me... have an extremely low opinion of that guy.
Dating and breakup and no longer see each other despite previously being friends? That makes sense, doing it over something that never existed in the first place? A bit less forgiving.
edited 4th Mar '16 11:59:02 AM by MrAHR
Read my stories!It really sucks that I don't think people realize how bad of a time such an attitude can give you. We kind of love to romanticize the concept of "loving from afar" in stories.
Read my stories!We do, and it's terrible. Better Myths
did a fantastic job of talking about this.
And yet pretty much every movie produced in the 90s is an ode to courtly love with one key point altered: where the old stories had tragic consequences, the new stories have zero consequences. The Wedding Singer, Wet Hot American Summer, Revenge of the Nerds, The Fucking Karate Kid, and about a million other movies all follow the courtly love formula, right up to the point where the love is consummated and there is NO NEGATIVE FALLOUT. The 90s took “If you fuck someone’s honey, bad things will happen” and turned it into “If you fuck someone’s honey … you will have fucked someone’s honey?”
What we’ve done, and where the whole “Nice Guy” thing comes from, is we’ve taken the purpose and the outcome of courtly love and flipped them. We act like because our love is noble, we deserve satisfaction. Courtly love says “your love is evil and you will never be satisfied, so you might as well make it noble.” Neither one is super healthy, as evidenced by the amount of death and vitriol both camps have dealt out, but at least courtly love is honest about what you can expect.
Look, I’m not saying you shouldn’t try to fuck your boss’s spouse. Fuck away, for all I care. All I’m saying is that our modern conception of hopeless romance, of the tormented lover pining away in the night, striving to become worthy of the unattainable beloved, is based on a ridiculous, outdated, socially motivated code of behavior that was invented at a time when marriages were business mergers and adultery carried the god damn death penalty. And I get that it feels good to feel bad, to experience the exquisite pain of loving somebody you know you can never be with. I’ve done it loads of times, and I got some great poetry out of it. Just, for God’s sake, don’t pretend like your secret pain has a noble lineage. The noble lineage is inbred.
Does Wet Hot American Summer really count? It kind of gets subverted at the end where the girls go "you know I'm 16 and paul rudd is hot so... I'mma go back with my ex."
Read my stories!Unrelated but I love how that article is written.
I have pretty much always thought that pining after somebody's partner might be an understandable emotional response in some situations, but also something to try and overcome with time, and not be encouraged as a way to do things. There are so many people in the world, it's not wise to encourage people to be fixated on the ones who are already committed to someone. It's not a productive or healthy mentality.
" you probably shouldn't wait THAT long to make your intentions known if you were interested in that person from the getgo,"
Because the point there is not wait until the last moment is way until she MADE the movement, many shy guys just act like a boyfriend without being one excepting the girl figure out the clues and answer in kind, so yeah they become the moe like figure in the story.
"I've always thought the "friendzone" thing was just people going through the motions of rejection" I call that the "friendphase" where someone is reject or now nothing is going to happen and ether adjust or flee.
is why dating can be terrible some times, if you are not charming,handosome or have confident it really play against you and them it create this self defeating actitude, for many advice about this sound more like mocking and tell you stuff that is like breathing to others.
something like that happen to me, I lash to my ex for breaking out with me and them at myselft for doing something wrong, I think people like to blame something, that ether you scare them away or they are heartless monster for rejecting you.....
Sometimes, it just dont happen.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"Pre-emptive self-rejection is definitely a problematic phenomenon. I had that problem when I was young too. I spent years creepily pining for one girl or another, never making an approach because I had already rejected myself in her place.
This is another area where female friendships can help, because those criticisms women make are valid. Texting a woman a bunch of pictures of your dick is a terrible way to show interest. What many young guys miss is that the problem isn't that women are being approached, it's how women are being approached and the best people to explain that distinction are other women in your social group.
edited 4th Mar '16 1:06:39 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.I would agree that healthy socialization with women from a young age ends up having a lot of benefits. Too often we're segregated and encouraged to approach women as otherwordly beings whose inner workings are known only to themselves. You hear about it all the time ("i just don't understand women" or some variation of that line i've heard both irl and in fiction more than I can count, "men are from mars, women are from venus"), but now that I'm older I found out that the differences between the genders are way exaggerated.
I ended up having very little contact with women growing up. Unsurprisingly I didn't exactly have the best idea of how to approach them or act around them, which ended up causing a lot of problems.
edited 4th Mar '16 1:14:37 PM by wehrmacht
Hah, fools. I avoided making a dick of myself by instead developing a crippling self hatred and sheltered soul within myself. So now I have no stains of tawdry behavior in my file, or foul recriminations over the idiot things I said to a girl or not!
Neener neener!
God I'm so lonely
edited 4th Mar '16 1:13:24 PM by Aszur
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothesYep. This is exactly what I'm talking about any time I mention "Women are Unicorns". Young boys are raised with a basic premise of women as fantastic and mythical beasts of absolute beauty and perfection, who will only grace those of pure heart and noble deed with their presence.
This fundamental misconception of women is at the heart of a lot of male foolishness.
edited 4th Mar '16 1:18:40 PM by TobiasDrake
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Younger Son: This girl in class calls me names and keeps putting paste in my hair!
Father: As you know, she does that only because she likes you and wants your attention. Her name-calling means nothing.
Mother: I concur.
Older Son: There's this girl-
Father: I know that you're a bully. Leave her alone before she calls the police on you.
Now, as that person pointed out, the fun double Standard abuse that was present, but another part of it I saw was reinforcing a perception on communication.
That, the obviously negative, bullying behavior = secretly liking as a little kid, could result in someone growing up, perceiving the signs that a girl is uncomfortable around them, and misinterpret it as something its not.
edited 4th Mar '16 2:22:57 PM by Jetyl
I'm afraid I can't explain myself, sir. Because I am not myself, you see?

IIRC during physical fights women tend to throw things, like anything on their reach. From shoes to flower vases or from tv remotes to clothing iron. Understatement Those things hurt a lot.
It also doesn't help there are laws stating that when the police is called they are supposed to arrest the largest party member involved, which means if a woman is attacking a man he will be arrested if he calls the police.
edited 4th Mar '16 5:29:35 AM by AngelusNox
Inter arma enim silent leges