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
Disasturbator
Not an overeaction,he disrespected the court with his over top behaviour,seriously what possess someone to do something like that in a fucking court?
New theme music also a box
AMC has pulled Chris Hardwick's shows over the allegations he was abusive to his ex-girlfriend.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
Unreasonably Quirky
Criticizing nerd culture and trying to do something to change it is fine.
Claiming that nerds themselves need to be "constantly shamed and degraded into submission"
◊ is not.
Call me Stick
Bloody hell, that looks like a Poe. Sadly it's probably serious.
Hopefully I'll feel confident to change my avatar off this scumbag soon. Apologies to any scumbags I insulted.
Unreasonably Quirky
Sadly, it's not a Poe. The person who tweeted that was a senior writer at Gawker at the time.
I love to learn, I love to yearn, and most of all... I love to make money.
So we're nutpicking Gawker in defense of misogynistic nerds now?
Relevant to this conversation, an old, but sadly still spot on article on Geek Social Fallacies
. Number 1 is particularly relevant, since the belief that "we must not ostracize anyone" is a huge part of what makes geek culture so toxic to women—a refusal to exclude the misogynists.
That seems like a pretty clear cut joke to me, though I’m sure the outrage was massive.
They should have sent a poet.
Unreasonably Quirky
Sam Biddle wasn't some anonymous crazy from the backwoods of the internet. We're talking about the senior writer of a hugely successful site that had millions of views per month when it was still around.
I did enjoy that article you posted, though. I find it pretty interesting that it argues that the most toxic elements of nerd culture are perpetuated due to a misguided view of friendship, rather than malice or spite. This part in particular spoke to me:
edited 17th Jun '18 1:50:09 PM by TyeDyeWildebeest
I love to learn, I love to yearn, and most of all... I love to make money.
Shin Megami Tensei IV
What's Gawker. By the way.
I'm wondering if we should do a thread exclusively about the issues in Nerd Culture. Not only sexism but also racism.
Good idea or not?
Watch me destroying my country
Unreasonably Quirky
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
It's a wildly successful news blog focusing on celebrity and entertainment-related news.
Well, it was, anyway. It went bankrupt in 2016 after Hulk Hogan filed suit against it for publishing his sex tape and refusing to take it down.
However, the Gawker Media Group, which owns Kotaku, Jezebel and Deadspin (among others) is still very much alive.
I love to learn, I love to yearn, and most of all... I love to make money.
Just for context, Gawker had an intentionally sarcastic and jokey tone to their reporting. It wasn't a straight news site like Wa Po or AP.
I can't imagine many people took that as a serious statement in favor of bullying.
They should have sent a poet.
Unreasonably Quirky
Even if I give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was entirely a joke, I don't think "I was just kidding" should be used as a blanket excuse for saying nasty stuff.
I love to learn, I love to yearn, and most of all... I love to make money.
The crazy shit about Gawker's going down is that it was actually a conspiracy to get them sued by Hulk Hogan as revenge from the creator of Paypal being outed as a gay man by them.
Do not fuck with Peter Thiel or he will destroy you in an entertainingly horrifying way.
I mean, he's a horrible person in real life, but this is a supervillain plot worthy of Nerd Palpatine.
edited 17th Jun '18 2:20:01 PM by CharlesPhipps
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
I tend to subscribe to the school of “no pity for the cruel” myself.
I subscribe just as much to far less known school of “no cruelty for the cruel either.”
Calling to bully the nerds is well, uncalled for.
Treating them like anybody else should be enough, anti-social attitudes will be cause for disgrace, crimes will be punished.
Not that demanding a task as most of those truly toxic among them are neither criminal badasses nor genius arch-villains, they serve as useful idiots and water-carriers for the real villains who, more often than not, are no nerds.
A procrastination in of itself
I don’t for a moment don’t that that was serious, here’s the thing, as much as we like to pretend otherwise bullying and harassment are a big part of internet culture, after all it’s one of the main uses of Twitter. That internet culture is where many of the asshole internet shitbag nerds spend their time, it’s also where many ‘journalists’ also spend their time, from Gawker to the likes of r/incel the same angry internet shitbag culture is there, fostering bullying and harassment.
The fact that the likes of Gawker once decided to pick a fight with another bunch of shitbags doesn’t make them good people anymore than Anonymouse occasionally picking fights with ISIS makes them good people.
"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran
What? Gawker got sued into oblivion for blatantly flaunting a court order to not release an illegally obtained sex tape. There was no conspiracy involved - they thought themselves above the law and got absolutely trounced because of that.
And nothing of value was lost.
edited 17th Jun '18 8:23:07 PM by DrunkenNordmann
Welcome to Estalia, gentlemen.
A procrastination in of itself
The creator of Pay Pal paid all of Hogan’s legal fees specifically as an act of revenge against Gawker for outing him when he was in Saudi Arabia, a country with a bad reputation for how it treats gay people.
So while the lawsuit happening wasn’t a conspiracy and Gawker ignoring a court order was only on them, the creator of Pay Pal did play a role while seeking revenge (entierly justified revenge in my eyes).
edited 18th Jun '18 2:48:19 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
Oh, bother.
Thiel's hedge fund lost a lot of money in the years following the publication of said article, which went out in 2007. He blamed the losses on homophobia in the Middle East, and by extension the Gawker article for outing him. A big part of his vendetta against Gawker may have simply been him not willing to admit that he's not as much of a financial wizard as he believed.
Disgusted, but not surprised
Which in no way dimishes the extreme shittyness of outing someone against their will. That's several levels of dude, not cool.
Oh, bother.
It's worth noting that Owen Thomas, the writer of said article, claimed that he tried to contact Thiel and that a rep told him Thiel had no problem with said article. If that was the case (and I'm not convinced it was) Owen Thomas probably should have gotten confirmation from the man himself and got it in writing.
I admit to being biased here since, even though I was never really a Gawker fan, I hate Peter Thiel.
edited 18th Jun '18 4:04:06 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised
There's another layer of complexity in the fact Thiel wasn't closeted.
It just wasn't public or well known.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
A procrastination in of itself
Considering that during the lawsuit Gawker made jokes about how they’d publish child porn if they could get away with it I’m going to assume that they’re lying about getting approval.
I don’t care how shitty a person someone is, you don’t out them when they’re in a country that punishes homosexuality with execution.
"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran
Unreasonably Quirky
I personally can't see what happened to Gawker as anything but Laser-Guided Karma.
But we're getting a bit off topic, so I'm gonna share an article I saw yesterday.
The TL:DR is that men are experiencing a "crisis of masculinity", resulting in them refusing mental health care and killing themselves at alarming rates. However, while some assert that this is a result of gender norms changing thanks to feminism, the article asserts that the crisis is happening because gender norms haven't changed.
Here's the article, with the important parts bolded:
That's the claim of Canadian psychologist and self-help author Jordan Peterson. Peterson argues that feminism and policies like no-fault divorce have destabilized traditional family and social structures. As a fix for this, Peterson recommends a variety of things including "enforced monogamy" - a solution that implies men are oppressed due to lack of consensual sex.
Peterson's claims have been broadly criticized but he does have his defenders as well. These often argue that the crisis of masculinity has been caused by feminism, which has led to "evolving norms... generating confusion and mixed signals," in the words of Cathy Young writing in the Los Angeles Times. Feminism has set men adrift. They are no longer sure how to be men, and as a result they are struggling economically and psychologically.
This weekend is Father's Day, a holiday typically celebrated with displays of testosterone and gendered cliches. It's also as good a time as any to acknowledge that there is indeed a crisis of masculinity. But it isn't caused by feminism and changing gender norms. Rather, men experience violence and oppression because norms are not changing. And it is, in general, powerful men who enforce these unhelpful and sometimes dangerous masculine expectations, not tyrannous feminist women.
As one example, consider male suicide rates. Men are the victims of three-quarters of suicides in the United States. This isn't because feminists have successfully carried out a campaign to keep men from having sex. Rather, male suicide rates are tragically high because of traditional, stereotypical standards of manliness.
Our culture tells men that they are supposed to be emotionally and physically strong and self-contained. It is not surprising, therefore, that men are less likely to seek medical help for mental health problems. A 2016 YouGov survey found that 28 percent did not seek out mental health care despite experiencing distress, as opposed to only 19 percent of women. A third of women told friends or family they had mental health problems within a month; only a quarter of men did the same. As Ally Fogg writes at the Guardian, "we tell boys not to cry, then wonder about male suicide."
Encouraging boys not to cry is dangerous; encouraging boys to love guns is even more so. "Guns are historically, stereotypically a masculine sort of thing," Lisa Gold, a psychiatry professor at Georgetown told Quartz. Connecting manliness with gun ownership exacts a brutal toll. Statistics compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that in 2016, men accounted for a staggering 85 percent of gun deaths in the United States.
Men own guns at three times the rate that women do. As a result it's not surprising that they are more likely to be hurt or killed in a firearm accident. And it also makes them much more likely to die when they attempt suicide. Women tend to prefer poison to guns when they try to kill themselves. Men use firearms - and firearms are a very effective way to inflict harm.
Gender expectations and stereotypical views of men contribute to another crisis - imprisonment. Mass incarceration disproportionately affects black people and people of color. But it also, and relatedly, affects men.
Rates of female incarceration are rising; between 1980 and 2014 they increased by 700 percent, according to the Sentencing Project. But even so, men still make up close to 93 percent of prisoners. This is not just because men commit more crimes. A 2012 study found that men receive much longer sentences than women for the same crimes.
It's true that white feminists have at times weaponized stereotypes about the hypermasculinity and violence of marginalized men. Women's rights activist Frances E. Willard advanced her crusade against alcohol by suggesting that white women in the south were threatened by drunk, "dark-faced mobs" - an argument that implicitly justified lynching. Hillary Clinton infamously referred to some criminals as "superpredators," a racist dogwhistle.
But the penal system is not run by feminists. Instead, it's run by politicians, who too often seek to bolster their own masculinity through tough-on-crime rhetoric. When Trump calls Mexicans "rapists," he's demonstrating his own masculine resolve by calling out and denouncing (supposedly) dangerous men. In this way men are ground up in the prison industrial complex in order to fuel the egos and the political careers of other men.
The crisis of masculinity Peterson's fans talk about is deliberately vague. The real crises of masculinity, though, are much more quantifiable. There were close to 45,000 suicides in the U.S. in 2016. There were approximately 38,000 gun deaths. There were around 2.3 million people in prison. Men bore the brunt of all of these problems. And yet the solid, demonstrable problems facing men are rarely discussed, while the fictional crisis of men oppressed by a lack of sex has obsessed putatively serious pundits.
Part of the reason why this happens is that the men most harmed by the real crisis are black, brown, poor, and mentally ill, and so are easier to ignore or erase. And part of the reason is that a narrative about women and feminists oppressing men seems dramatic and counterintuitive. A narrative about powerful men oppressing less powerful men is less exciting, and requires more self-reflection.
For Father's Day, though, we should focus on actual challenges facing men, rather than imaginary ones. We are not in a zero sum battle of the sexes, in which gains for women's equality erode male security.
Indeed, men need more feminism in their lives, more gender equality and a relaxation of rigid and counterproductive gender norms. In other words, feminism isn't killing men - toxic masculinity is. And it will continue to do so until both women and men are fully equal, and fully free.
Shin Megami Tensei IV
I'm a brown men. So let me said my opinion.
Why not both?
Gender roles are changing. Is not gonna be quick and fast, but is naive pretent otherwise. The Masculinity Crisis is because some people don't know how to cope with those changes.
Not that it would be a male-utopia if feminism didn't exist, feminism is good and if some insecure men ends up killing because it...well...it happened.
Ultimately the blame lies on Toxic masculinity being unable to cope with feminism. And yeah, that can be genuinely called a "Masculinity crisis" in some ways
Also. Non white people tend to live under even more rigid gender roles, so it's our own fault. Don't blame white men for our own stupidity.
edited 18th Jun '18 7:29:50 AM by KazuyaProta
Watch me destroying my country
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7fAH9aGroU
Many think the judge overreacted to butt slapping one's lawyer.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.