females, feminists and femininity.

There are some things to be discussed, and I don't have time at this moment... but could you stop using male and female, please?

Men. Women.

Male and female is not just clinical it's non-specific.

Sorry. It's a pet peeve.

 

You know, I was thinking this exact same thing last night. Thank you.

 

Jezebel goes beyond mere self-destructiveness and deep into what even my friend's ardently feminist wife flat out calls misandry, we're talking about a website that mocks and celebrates half of all domestic violence. Hell they're so sexist and bigoted that they once provoked the entire female staff of the Daily Show into publically smacking them down. If you read that article you'll see it's basically a roadmap of how to justify sexism with circular language and semantics, exactly what I mentioned in my Gender Politics thread. Men are always privileged and never victims, women are always victims and never privileged. Even the word "sexism" is redefined to be exclusively male.

Everything about that article, from the title to the conclusion, is sexist, hateful, and bigoted. Even before the first paragraph is up the author is not only mocking but denying the existence of male victimization, and justifying her prejudice because men dare so much as believe they face discrimination. Just read it:

It's not only "specious" but hurts women for men to be victims. This is exactly what I've been talking about the entire thread. The toxic definition of femininity that monopolizes and weaponizes victimhood, that defines women as victims and everything as victimizing women so it can produce Victim Cred.

I could systematically rebut every single line just about with hard facts and evidence, but that's not the point,that's just getting bogged down in minutae when the very basis of the entire article should be plainly offensive to anyone who believes in equality. Nobody should ever find it acceptable to threaten people with prejudice for claiming to be victims OF prejudice. It's beyond circular, it's absurd on its face.

Her entire worldview, her very definition of female and femininity, is fundamentally bigoted and destructive.

This is Toxic Femininity.


And while we're at it, this is Jezebel's business model in a nutshell:

 

I'm not even sure how someone can draw a line under the inequity of the sexes and say, "Okay. That's taken care of. Nothing to see here, let's move on."

Are things different today than they were 100 or even 50 years ago? Yes. Are they better, in some ways, yes. Have we managed to get rid of the inequity between men and women? No.

I don't think we will ever get rid of it entirely and, as I suggested above, there are aspects of what it means to be human that informs how we see the world. Racism, sexism, etc. are part of what it means to be human. What we do with those impulses. How we treat the Other, is all the difference.

 

I certainly don't agree with every point in the article, but I, too, think "misandry" is non-problem, a rhetorical invention by people who hate feminism. I don't think I have ever met anyone who matches the misandric caricature.

 

When Earl Silverman tried to open the only shelter for abused men in the entirety of Canada he was harassed, ridiculed, bankrupted, and eventually driven to suicide. When Erin Pizzey, the woman who started the very first women's shelter and singlehandedly made domestic violence an issue, said that men could be victims she was ostracized, her family's lives were threatened, and her dog was murdered.

Jezebel mocked male domestic violence victims, feminist protestors at an intersectional meeting pulled a fire alarm, mocked the 4:1 male suicide rate... this isn't even getting into the millions of ordinary people like the Agent Orange Filesexposed and SYABM deal with. It's not even getting into the flat out genocide some advocate, or the staggering legal erasure of male rape that's needed to continue monopolizing Victim Cred and is often met with lies or mocking responses of "mantearz".

Misandry is not a caricature, it's been right in front of your face in this very thread. Just look at what started the last few pages of discussion, casual misandry which escalated to sexist slurs about all men, and attacks directed at anyone who disagreed where the attacker claimed to be... you guessed it, a victim.

 

Excellent read. Thank you @Baraka_Guru!

 

Despite the attempts, there is no equivalency in this discussion. Misandry and misogyny are not even close to equivalent.

Are there examples of misandry that can be revealed? Sure. Are they as prevalent and ingrained as societal norms? No.

If anything, examples of misandry are outliers. To even add them to this discussion as more than a, yes it exists, is to further engage in false equivalency leading ultimately to denial.

This is like the KKK demanding white rights in the face of institutional racism.

 

I'm still here. But I see no point in repeating myself. You disagree with me and I, you. Some men, even when they seem sincerely as if they are trying to speak to we women as equals still use terminology that belies the fact that they don't see us as their equals. Why should I rehash the article? I've made a copy of it and saved it to re-read. It's not toxic feminism and it isn't anti-man. I see the writer, Lindy West, practically bending over backwards in her phrasing in an attempt to not step on men's feelings. And yet, some of you are still taking offence. She makes a clear argument and give example after example to back up her assertions.

I've often thought of how lucky I am to have been born white, middle class and Canadian. Lucky, fortunate, blessed. And it was all by chance--as West describes her feelings about herself as not just a woman but a white woman:

"It's not easy to swallow your own privilege—to admit that you're a Fleetch—but once you do, it's addictive. It feels good to open up to perspectives that are foreign to you, accept your complicity in this shitty system, and work on making the world better for everyone instead of just defending your territory. It's something I had to do as a privileged white woman, and something I still have to work on every day, because it's right. That doesn't make me (or you) a bad person—it makes me an extremely lucky person who was born into a white body in a great family in a vibrant, liberal city in a powerful, wealthy country that implicitly values white bodies over all other bodies. The least I can do is acknowledge the arbitrariness of that luck, and work to tear down the obstacles facing those who are disenfranchised by the insidious fetishization of whiteness. Blanket defensiveness isn't going to get any of us anywhere."​

​

You guys didn't do anything to gain the privilege of being men. But it is a privilege all the same. I'm afraid we fundamentally disagree on this and unless we can remove the knee-jerk defensive tone, we can't have a productive conversation. Or maybe, we are all talked out.

Also, I don't have a Masters degree in feminism, so please, Very Educated Guy, could you bring the complexity of the discourse down to say, a grade 12 or 13 -level?

Every point that @Charlatan and @Baraka_Guru have made in this discussion I've thought rational (and did a silent Yes! upon reading). If they don't think of themselves as feminists they certainly sound like that here. If there's any question, I mean that as a very positive observation. I would wallpaper the world with men such as them if I could.

 

Do you know how I know you didn't even look at a single link, source, or citation I gave? It's blatantly obvious because if you had you'd know they flat out disprove, with cold hard facts, everything you've said. You're following the exact pattern of claiming by default that "Women must always be oppressed and men must always be oppressors", ignoring any evidence to the contrary, and then claiming there's no evidence. It's like the people who claim men commit 98% of rape but ignore that the definition OF rape was "a man forcibly having sex with a woman" until a year or two ago. And then at the end of the road, when I've buried you in cold hard evidence and documented facts, you finally resort to silencing tactics like comparing me to the KKK.

It's the modern equivalent of accusing someone of being a witch, and exactly the kind of behavior i've been talking about. That you would remotely think it's acceptable to make that kind of heinous and offensive attack in any situation is proof positive of just how deeply ingrained misandry is.

Firstly she's not bending over backwards to avoid "stepping on men's feelings", which is itself a very sexist thing to say on par with me accusing you of being "hormonal", she's going out of her way to be offensive and sexist. Lindy's sexist diatribe is old enough that it's been refuted very thoroughly. I linked to one of the best responses earlier, Here it is again: Catapultam Habeo - If I Admit That ‘Hating Men’ Is a Thing, Will You Stop Turning It Into a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?.

The author goes through her article Step. By. Step. and backs up his arguments every step of the way.

Privilege rhetoric is like saying "God said so". It claims that men are always privileged and are only harmed by their privilege "backfiring", but women are always the victims of male oppression and only ever benefited by "benevolent sexism". The way it's written men are never the victims of sexism, and women can never have privilege. If you prove men are being discriminated against the response is that's a "privilege backfire". If you prove women have privilege the response is it's "benevolent sexism" (something Karen strongly disagrees with: Owning Your Shit: The Female Privilege Checklist)

How is ignoring every shred of evidence i've given, claiming they're right "Just Because", and then saying I'm no better than the Ku Klux Klan rational? Rational is providing evidence and proof, like I did. Not ignoring evidence and proof and claiming you're right because... well, just because.

 

I looked at the links.

I was not moved.

I don't see a need to repeat myself but will, for what it's worth.

Perhaps harsh with the KKK... let me back that off and say:

This is like white folks claiming, in the face of institutional racism, that we are in a post-racial society.

 

I hate stereotypes

There are instances where I feel guilty for being born asa male. Mostly from media - in those cases I mostly hate the men who caused it. But I also get offended when women care less and make sweeping judgements.

There are things that had made me weep. Women go through shit. I am talking about real hard core injustice. Not sure whether anyone cares or else I can share.

 

Alright that's a fair metaphor and I thank you for reconsidering.

That said the organized legal and political erasure of 50% of domestic violence and rape victims, 150% greater chance of incarceration, 3x greater sentencing for the same crime, 20x greater chance of being sentenced to death, double rate of being drugged as a child, half letter grade penalty by default, and utter disregard for 90% of workplace deaths, 70-90% of the homeless, 90% of prisons, 40% or less (emphasis on less) of college graduates, and 75%+ of suicides are all evidence of a profound systemic and institutional prejudice against men.

What crosses this over into cultural misandry, and directly relates to this thread, is the political necessity of that erasure and disregard of those biases in order to preserve the Patriarchy/Privilege/Victimhood narrative. If you suddenly recognize that rape and domestic violence are non-gendered then it becomes far harder to maintain the victimhood narrative. The monopolization of victimhood and the strategic value of victrim cred begins to fail as the Men-Are-Predators narrative falls apart. The same for other institutional prejudices. Recognize that men are being destroyed in virtually every aspect of education from kindergarten up through college, that young women are out-earning and out-employing young men, and privilege rhetoric fails a well.

And then what do you have? No more "I Win" button, no more unassailable high ground defended by the shield of gynonormativity and victim cred, no more ability to instantly shut down all dissent with accusations of misogyny or being blinded by privilege... which is a hilariously hypocritical accusation given it's made by those who so violently refuse to believe they have any that they claim their own privilege is oppressive "benevolent sexism".

The very severity of your reaction itself speaks volumes to just how deeply ingrained gynonormativity is in our culture, how acceptable it is to attack men, and how unacceptable it is to dare challenge the destructive ideas of femininity behind all of this. Like the Jezebel article said: The mere belief that men are even capable of being victims is equal to the most damaging misogyny.

What kind of standard is that? What idea of equality truly needs to demand that nobody else even think they're CAPABLE of being victimized? And how incredibly broken must that idea of "equal" be if the mere recognition that someone can be a victim is equated to another person actually being directly victimized.

You want a Civil Rights analogy... it's the exact same as claiming that blacks merely saying racism exists is an act of racism against whites that's just as bad as a lynching.

 

Dude: You know how I know? I've lived almost 54-years as a woman. That's "just because" how I know.
You can cite until the cows come home. You need to live it.
You are pretty hardcore and your attack style of arguing your points is off-putting. I'm willing to consider different points of view. But again, fundamentally we disagree and I'm OK with that. I don't hate men as a group, never have, and I certainly don't hate being a woman or women as a group but I do hate arguing for the sake of arguing.

 

@Shadowex3, it might be a good idea for you to start a new thread rather than diverting the intention of the original post.