Sexism and Men's Issues

I'm not a supporter of the practice but I will note that the logic is quite clear. Child support does not exist to punish men, it's to ensure the wellbeing of the child. Just because the man was raped doesn't mean that the child's needs disappear.

That doesn't mean it's a nice situation or kind to the man, but I can see why mandating child support regardless of consent exists as a concept.

Ultimately the solution is to make a society where child support is unnecessary because everyone's needs are taken care of regardless of what wealth the parents do or don't have.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Aug 9th 2021 at 7:48:52 AM

"Whoever came up with that idea"

Are we sure that anyone deliberately created it, or could it just be a loophole/oversight?

A better solution would be to grant custody to the survivor, and make the rapist pay child support.

Either way, the rapist should not get custody.

Edited by SkyCat32 on Aug 9th 2021 at 12:59:25 PM

That assumes the survivor wants the kid. If the rapist gives birth to a child the survivor doesn't want anything to do with, the kid still needs support and a chance at life. There needs to be a way of helping the child without punishing the father.

This is a very fringe case, but not impossible, so I hope there is some law/system out there to help address it.

Isn’t the reason for one of the big cases of this further complication by having emerged due to the victim having later had a (at least nominally) consensual relationship with their rapist and them having raised the child together as a family?

I don’t know if there are instances of female rape victims having a child that was conceived via rape, later going back to their rapist and raising the child with them but eventually separating in such a way that the rapist got custody. If there are though, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the victim was then made to pay child support.

The entire situation wouldn’t even come about if we just had a hard rule that rapists can’t get custody of a child they conceived by raping someone.

Has anyone heard of this story:

Unfortunately I can't find mention of this story outside the right-wing rags^note Granted, that could mean that the lefty papers are suppressing it. so its veracity is uncertain.

Edited by TommyR01D on Aug 14th 2021 at 2:24:16 AM

If you cannot find it in more reputable sources, it is probably bullshit.

It did happen.

Basically everyone was pissed off and the school, the principal and even the state education board had to give public apologies. The right wing rags have twisted it into some officially sanctioned thing, rather than a school principal being really dumb.

Edited by deludedmusings on Aug 14th 2021 at 7:37:26 PM

Yeah the Spectator is right-wing but it’s not generally going to fabricate things, just remove context and have a bias around what news the report.

Sounds like one bigoted principle on a crusade to hurt people. I’m concerned by what says about the response though, such a deliberate attempt to traumatise children should result in a firing and lifetime ban from working with children even without the sexism element to it.

I'm new to this forum and I was wondering if there had been much discussion on this particular topic mentioned in the sticky:

Also The Myth of Men Not Being Hot, which denies that men can be sexually attractive as male beings.

I have a lot of insecurity and self-hate regarding my body but I find it difficult to talk about because it has historically been a problem that affects women more and I don't want to be seen as trying to steal focus. I am particularly interested in the opinions of the women who post here.

Hazy memory: Ten years ago I watched an interview^note The interview might have been conducted as early as 2004. with MRA psychologist Angry Harry who talked about the imagery used in magazines aimed at heterosexuals - the magazines for men were loaded with images of women, the magazines for women also mainly had pictures of women. It was only in the gay magazines that pictures of men were seen.

More recently someone in the Mens Lib subreddit talked about his issues with body negativity and said he'd hung around with gay gym rats because they were the only ones to show any appreciation as well as the only ones who could give him any clear advice about fashion and fitness.

That's interesting (although I am sceptical of "Men's Lib"). I suppose women are brought up being very aware of aesthetics in regards to themselves than men are and typically put more effort into their appearances, so I can understand them seeing men who don't put much effort in and thinking that it's due to privilege, i.e. "women will date me even if I don't make myself dateable".

But speaking from a male perspective, the reason I probably don't appear to put much effort into my appearance is because I really have no idea what looks good and what doesn't. I'm scared that any changes I do make to my clothes or body will just make me look even worse than I already do. There's also the fact that female body types have become a lot more varied in the fashion and modelling industries (which is definitely a good thing, don't get me wrong) but the same cannot really be said for men.

But it is a privilege, the reason that women are taught more about fashion and managing their appearance is because society judges them more harshly and often for it.

To some extent it is a double-edged sword in that it means that too many men aren't taught about the particularly of how to dress effectively that's mostly because they don't need to.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Aug 14th 2021 at 8:37:53 AM

I would agree with you for the most part, but I don't think it's true anymore that men don't need to look good to be accepted by society. Growing up, I certainly didn't feel the pressure to think about my appearance the way I'm sure my female peers did but now, in my adult life, I do feel judged for it and also completely clueless about how to improve it.

Edited by thethirdwinklevoss on Aug 14th 2021 at 4:58:42 PM

I guess it depends on whether you mean dress/fashion standards, body standards, or both? It sounds like it could go either way.

I do think there's a difference between being men expected to dress sharply (and in that case I'll agree with you; I was once mocked by my bosses for coming in to work in 88-degree weather in cargo shorts as that I "looked like a college freshman") and women expected to conform to body and face/makeup/hair standards. For men, whatever negatives there are to say about the corporate drone life (and there are many to say), if you wear black slacks and a white button-down, keep your hair short, and shave, you're acceptable for 95% of social situations, and in many cases you'll be over-dressed. How you're built underneath CAN matter, but there are also cases of celebrities like Adam Sandler and so on fully embracing the schlub look.

David Mitchell did a skit on this.

You're not stealing focus. It's all connected issues anyway. Men not being seen as attractive is heterosexist to begin with. Because it only allows for the viewpoints of heterosexual men. Fighting for men's issues goes often hand in hand with fighting for women's issues. And when it doesn't, it's not detrimental. We can care about several things at once. Those people (like MR As) who claim otherwise are the ones who are not interested in helping men but oppressing women.

Big ol' for Anti. A whole lot of men's issues are also predicated on what's masculine being defined as what ISN'T feminine - boys don't cry, boys don't have long hair, boys don't wear makeup, don't be a pussy, don't be a girl. Helping anyone helps everyone.

Adam Sandler is a good example of something else that makes me feel insecure, which is when people criticise movies for giving men unrealistic love interests or women who are "too hot" for them. Oftentimes this is because the man is quite a bit older than his female co-star, and in cases like that I can completely understand the criticism and how creepy it can be.

But when it's more to do with the guy being too fat or ugly, I feel conflicted. On the one hand, I can understand being frustrated that there are higher standards for women than men in the media. But on the other hand, this criticism also reinforces the idea of staying in your lane being acutely aware of your own level of attractiveness which has massively hurt my own self-esteem.

I haven't watched those videos in ages, but they're great.

Edited by thethirdwinklevoss on Aug 14th 2021 at 5:19:17 PM

@Antiteilchen You're right, of course, and I do try to remind myself of this. A lot of the problem is my own fear of being perceived as an MRA type.

Edited by thethirdwinklevoss on Aug 14th 2021 at 5:21:56 PM

The whole "dating women out of your league" thing is pretty interesting because in a way it strikes the same toxic cord as the whole incel/MRA thing in which average looking men want to date super models, but implicitly don't feel like they should be giving average looking women the time of day.

And personality is/should be important. I think one of the issues with the whole sitcom "fat dad/hot mom" thing is that usually the dads' personalities aren't realistically portrayed as a thing that would get the women they're married to to be interested in them. It's just "he makes me laugh sometimes, and that makes up for the other 90~95% in which his constant lying, childishness, and neglect of my feelings makes me want to tear out my hair".

So it is male fantasy, but the criticism of the fantasy is often done in a toxic way, I think.

I actually can think of examples with standard dynamic that do bother to give reasons for why this couple would actually work, but those are sparse. And even those don't totally avoid the jokes.

Edited by LSBK on Aug 14th 2021 at 12:08:59 PM

Exactly. It's important to criticise these types of shows and movies, I just dread the "also he's fat and she's hot" comment coming up.

That's fair, I think it's certainly true that men are judged by the clothes they wear and how they wear them.

I think the privilege lies in terms of degrees, men are judged to a lesser degree than women but they're still judged.

It's like how police brutality affects black people worse but white people can and do suffer from it.

There's also the presumption that "normal" people can't be physically attracted to a fat people, which also doesn't help anyone.

Women probably get hit harder with that then men (there definitely aren't as many "fat wife/conventionally attractive husband" fictional pairings), but that does still implicitly apply to the trope, and really shouldn't be cool.

The Men's Lib subreddit is legit. It's tightly moderated and discusses the same sort of things this thread is intended to — honestly I would recommend it over this thread, as there's often not a ton of activity here. The title "men's lib" is perhaps a little unfortunate, but it's hard to come up with a name for the topic that isn't either a mirror of the feminine version (like men's lib) which runs the risk of seeming to mock or minimize women's struggles with sexism, or else has been co-opted by misogynist assholes only pretending to care about men (eg "men's rights"). The current thread title of "men's issues" is about the only entirely neutral way I can think of to refer to the subject, and even that's a bit too neutral, in that it needs the "sexism and" part to make it clear what the hell you're actually talking about.

In regards to masculine attractiveness, like almost everything else regarding gender roles, it's entirely double-edged sword. Gender roles help those that conform to them and harm those that try to buck them. A man who's perfectly content with conventional dark suits as the only kind of formal wear they ever wear is helped by the convention that "dark suits are the only appropriate kind of masculine formal wear", but men who would rather wear somewhere else are harmed by it. That doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with liking dark suits as formal wear, but there's equally nothing wrong with wanting to wear something else. The difference is that society judges one to be acceptable and the other not.

Which is why I don't particularly care for things like the video posted above. Tongue in cheek or not, it presents this issue as a zero-sum game. If we let some men wear things besides suits, then suits are ruined for everyone. But that's just not true. No one is saying that suits are problematic and should be gotten rid of entirely, or even that they shouldn't be a reliable, default option — just that they shouldn't be the only acceptable option.