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
Because if you want to get your male students to genuinely understand the female experience, sooner or later you're going to have to resort to outside-the-box measures. I've taught too many stupid guys to think that simply explaining things is going to get through to them. A lot of them simply have no frame of reference at all from which to understand what women go through every day, and trying to teach them without providing that frame of reference is infuriating and often, pointless.
Sometimes putting the shoe on the other foot is a useful way to make a point. The next time one of these guys tries to talk over a female classmate, or overrule what she says, or declare "actually..." maybe he'll think about how it felt when it happened to him.
Fits in Heavy's pocket!
Or the teacher will just lose the trust and goodwill of a large chunk of the class. Good work. Yay.
Sorry to be sarcastic. Like I said: bad memories.
The last thing you hear before an unstoppable juggernaut bisects you with a minigun.
A teacher will lose the "trust and goodwill" of a large part of the class the moment that they point out men have privileges that women do not. Men don't like having their assumptions about how the world works questioned, and tend to react with extreme hostility to the notion that they may not have earned all the power they've been given.
If a simple experiment like this one is enough to make you stop trusting the prof, you had preexisting issues you have not addressed. The prof didn't make them roleplay being raped or going into combat. She conducted a very simple experiment in which men had to, for one lesson, step into the shoes of women when it comes to discussion. It's an important lesson, and a useful one.
Fits in Heavy's pocket!
Well, I mean, I know it's my own issues making me have this reaction. That's my point. Teachers should be careful what they make their class do since they're in a position of power and they have no idea what backgrounds their students have. Thats exactly why I'm so against this.
The last thing you hear before an unstoppable juggernaut bisects you with a minigun.
Oh, bother.
Are you seriously suggesting that teachers have to go in assuming that all of their students might have been raped or something before setting a lesson plan?
And again, this experiment didn't even involve rape.
Edited by M84 on Jul 17th 2018 at 12:39:26 AM
Disgusted, but not surprised
We all have baggage of one sort or another. That doesn't mean a teacher cannot conduct a reasonable experiment that does no actual harm to any of the students. We expect women to just tolerate being silenced all the time. We can ask the male students to put up with it for one class.
Fits in Heavy's pocket!
I don't see it as reasonable at all. I guess we're not gonna agree on this.
Although I'd be interested to hear the feelings of the female students in that class. How many didn't mind the experiment? How many disagreed with it? How many resented being made part of it? I feel like that would be pretty interesting to hear.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
And I kinda feel like teachers are supposed to try to be mindful of things like that in general, aren't they?
Edited by Murataku on Jul 17th 2018 at 2:52:37 AM
The last thing you hear before an unstoppable juggernaut bisects you with a minigun.
Which is why we don't have experiments to test one's reactions to being assaulted. Just ones to demonstrate what it's like to be silenced.
Personally, I think it says a lot about male fragility that they could not take one class of being silenced like women are all the time.
Fits in Heavy's pocket!
I'm not sure where that was said in the original post...Didn't it just talk about one specific student hating it, for very good reason, and the teacher finding that funny?
The last thing you hear before an unstoppable juggernaut bisects you with a minigun.
The law in the night
This alone implies that men, due to a lot of reasons, are simply supposed to enjoy it and can't be raped.
Inter arma enim silent leges
Oh, bother.
It is kind of presumptuous to assume that a "large chunk" of the students would completely lose trust in their professor due to an experiment like this.
Disgusted, but not surprised
Nope. The OP states that the student never told the teacher about his experience. You just made up the teacher mocking him.
And it also doesn't say that most of the men in the class stopped trusting the teacher; that was an assumption you put forward, and we are discussing it.
Fits in Heavy's pocket!
No, the post did specifically say the teacher noticed the student getting angry and thinking it was funny. I did not make that up.
Land i never said men. I said the class . Everyone. But I admit I may have been assuming a bit there. It's true my own reaction may not necessarily be the reaction others would have.
Edited by Murataku on Jul 17th 2018 at 3:05:24 AM
The last thing you hear before an unstoppable juggernaut bisects you with a minigun.
Some men will have had bad experiences like the anecdote that was described, which is unfortunate but I can agree that the experiment on the whole has some merit. In general, men don't have any frame of reference for what it's like living in an andocentric society while not being a man, and getting them to accept or at least humor the idea of male privilege is often extremely difficult. So this kind of out-of-the-box thought experiment can be useful; I don't know how effectively it would pan out in practice but that's why you need to try it and see how it works.
Yes you did. You tried to imply that the teacher knew about the student's experience. The OP states she did not. Which means all that happened is that a female prof found the frustration of the male students amusing. Which yeah, of course. She's watching men who've spent their entire lives ignoring the problems of women struggle when the shoe is on the other foot. That's the entire point of the experiment and it is, in point of fact, hilarious. I'd have trouble not laughing at it.
You said: "Didn't it just talk about one specific student hating it, for very good reason, and the teacher finding that funny?" which tries to make it sound like she laughed at him being raped. She did not.
Edited by AmbarSonofDeshar on Jul 16th 2018 at 10:10:53 AM
Fits in Heavy's pocket!
I never tried to imply she knew about his experience. I'm not sure where you're getting that.
That second part was poor phrasing on my part. As I think I've said on this forum before, I don't always express myself well. To clarify, the story says she found his frustration funny. You did say that above but yeah I'm just making clear what I meant to say.
Edited by Murataku on Jul 17th 2018 at 3:17:50 AM
The last thing you hear before an unstoppable juggernaut bisects you with a minigun.
Which is a nonissue. The frustration of male students when forced to walk a mile in women's shoes is funny.
Fits in Heavy's pocket!
The story only mentiond one male student being frustrated. No other male students had their reactions described.
The student who was frustrated was frustrated because he was raped. That's not funny.
The last thing you hear before an unstoppable juggernaut bisects you with a minigun.
Taking aside the issue of the specific anecdote for a moment, it's also worth pointing out that while we generally view discomfort as a negative thing (for good reason), there are times where it can't be avoided and is necessary for personal growth. A male student might be frustrated in the moment, but the idea is that they'll hopefully get over it and understand that there was a point to it, even if it takes them a while.
Unless I'm misreading the anecdote, the teacher had no way of knowing what the student was frustrated about because she wasn't informed. I'm not sure what your argument is anymore, because if it isn't "she found him being raped funny" then what is it? I don't think people are trying to denigrate the guy's experience as a victim, just saying that while unfortunate it's a specific case that doesn't necessarily make the experiment illegitimate.
Edited by Draghinazzo on Jul 16th 2018 at 1:26:02 PM
Oh, bother.
A lot of the learning moments in my life, particularly when it came to race, gender, and LGBTQ issues, were uncomfortable and frustrating ones. But I'm glad they happened, in hindsight. I'm still an asshole most of the time, but I'm not a bigoted one.
Disgusted, but not surprised
Fits in Heavy's pocket!
Well it's "Be careful what you get your students to do because you don't know their experiences".
The thing about the rape and it not being funny was specifically answering those saying every guy in class was uncomfortable, and that that was hilarious. I was saying we only know that one student was uncomfortable, and that his discomfort is no laughing matter.
The last thing you hear before an unstoppable juggernaut bisects you with a minigun.
Oh, bother.
Your argument was we should never have such experiments like this because of the off-chance a few people may have gone through a bad experience that made it unnecessary.
This ignores that the majority of people have not gone through it and do need to learn the lesson somehow. And while a good teacher will make exceptions for students with special circumstances, they have to be informed of said circumstances first.
It's not fair to expect teachers to prepare lesson plans that assume every student has been through horrible life experiences that would render such experiments redundant.
It really comes off as you searching for an excuse to condemn the professor and this experiment.
Disgusted, but not surprised
Fits in Heavy's pocket!
It may come across as me searching for excuses, but that's not how it is. I could defend myself more on that point but I don't wanna make this into a conversation about myself since this isn't the place for that sort of thing. So I guess you can think whatever you like. I've made my point as best I can.
Edited by Murataku on Jul 17th 2018 at 3:53:25 AM
The last thing you hear before an unstoppable juggernaut bisects you with a minigun.
Unreasonably Quirky
My friend already did have the shoe on the other foot. He was raped by a woman who then gloated that the authorities wouldn't sympathize with him if he spoke out about it. And she was one hundred percent right.
And, lest you forget, she did it under the threat that if he didn't put out for her, she would accuse him of having raped her, knowing full well that the authorities would take her word over his, solely because of their gender.
Excuse me, but my friend wasn't infuriated because of his "fragility". He was infuriated because the class triggered memories of the time he himself was silenced.
About his rape.
Thank you.
Edited by TyeDyeWildebeest on Jul 17th 2018 at 8:18:14 AM
I love to learn, I love to yearn, and most of all... I love to make money.
I think it's a stupid experiment. It makes potentially hurtful and damaging assumptions about the lives of the participants. All participants, not just the guys. And again, if it were me in there, due to my own specific experiences I would then see that teacher as untrustworthy from that point on.
It's a dumb, unnecessary experiment that telies on assumptions. Why would you do it.
The last thing you hear before an unstoppable juggernaut bisects you with a minigun.