It's weird reading this argument and agreeing with Dave, right off the back of being told I'm an MRA(lol), and essentially that I'm too white, Straight(lol), Vanilla(even more lol) and have the wrong genitals to be allowed an opinion(to reduce a six paragraph pseudo-academic word-salad that meant literally fuck-all to a single sentence), let alone to argue a point.
The problem with feminism is that it is an incredibly academically advanced set of ideas. It's not packageable as a simple message anymore. Once any such social movement moves beyond its opening stages, the message gets more complicated. Thus, only very well educated people can even understand it. This is why you have people who think racism is a solved problem, like some SCOTUS justices.
Even someone pretty dumb can see the inequality in something like men being able to vote and women not being able to vote, or people with colored skin being physically segregated. It takes a significant amount of education and study to understand how something that seems obviously to be an impingement upon the rights of men can actually be part of the patriarchy.
Many, if not most, MRAs are just misogynist shitheads. But there are also a significant percentage of MRAs who are actually feminists and are just too fucking stupid to realize it or understand it. The number one thing holding back feminism is simply that too many people are just not smart enough or haven't studied enough. People will try to espouse their opinion, even though they have not studied in any way shape or form. They will oppose what they can not understand even if they actually agree with it. They just haven't learned.
You wouldn't argue about quantum physics, even on the Internet, if you weren't a physicist. Why? Because you have no fucking clue what you are talking about, and you know it. If a quantum physicist tells you something about quantum physics, you would have to just trust and believe them.
Feminism in its current form is an extremely advanced academic topic. Someone who hasn't studied it extensively will have no fucking clue what they are talking about. The difference is that they don't know they don't know. If a feminist scholar says something about feminism, I treat it the same way as if a quantum physicist says something about quantum physics. Why? Because I know I have no fucking clue.
I suggest everyone either follow the same policy as me, or at least keep your mouth shut. Why? If you do not, then every word you say on the topic will be translated into smart people's ears as "I'm a misogynist MRA shithead. Disregard everything I say and do not associate with me in any way. I think I know more than people who spend their entire lives studying this." Do not be that person.
Churba I was feeling pretty comfortable in /r/feminism until I got banned for disagreeing with somebody that anybody who utters the words "men's rights" is automatically and necessarily a rape apologist.
Anyway I'm not really trying to step into the role of defending MRAs here, believe it or not. All I'm trying to do is express that I understand (and why I understand) that they exist, and that it's NOT just knee-jerk misogyny or a "me too" complex.
And Apreche - if it's not accessible, then it's useless, because the end goal is education and social justice. You can't have those if you can't craft a message that's accessible to society at large.
Have I complained here about getting banned before?
Actually, Rochelle, I was banned from /r/feminism for a single, short comment. Before that, I was the top comment on almost every submission I commented on for a week on /r/feminism (at least for a few hours at a time, it tends to change throughout the day there.)
Anyway I'm not in this thread to sell anything. I can go on any of a dozen other forums and get lots of commiseration and other 30-40 something year old male geeks/IT types saying "yeah they're all nuts, you're totally right!" but that's useless. I like posting stuff like this on here because a lot of you challenge the things I say and I can either refine my arguments or learn why they flat out don't hold up. That's valuable and worthwhile.
You wouldn't argue about quantum physics, even on the Internet, if you weren't a physicist. Why? Because you have no fucking clue what you are talking about, and you know it.
Oh, I see you're new to the internet. Welcome aboard, pleased to have you.
Well I was asking if that article was your definition of what the Men's Rights movement was supposed to be or if you were offering that as a stance on what you believed was a just cause. I assumed the former but that article literally does not clear up any confusion. All it says is why they are not those things but it never mentions what they stand for. Then I saw this other page it linked to and started laughing.
Anyway I'm not in this thread to sell anything. I can go on any of a dozen other forums and get lots of commiseration and other 30-40 something year old male geeks/IT types saying "yeah they're all nuts, you're totally right!" but that's useless. I like posting stuff like this on here because a lot of you challenge the things I say and I can either refine my arguments or learn why they flat out don't hold up. That's valuable and worthwhile.
I didn't read the whole page of statistics but is it laughable to talk about how young men get indoctrinated into the military in the US as a gender issue? I'm not sure that it is, although I wouldn't want to try to defend that point right now with the knowledge I've got (almost none on this topic).
The problem with giving a good summary/inventory of Men's Rights is that it's a chaotic, infant ideology that's tough to pin down. Anything I picked off of Google is going to have major problems. It's easier to talk about specific scenarios, but the problem with that is that they tend to be dismissed as "because patriarchy" which isn't that useful.
Everything on that list is expertly ludicrous and half the things that are valid are just general issues with the American government. They're not a men's rights issue on a global level. Most common women's rights issues at least breach the government bullshit border a little bit.
I didn't read the whole page of statistics but is it laughable to talk about how young men get indoctrinated into the military in the US as a gender issue? I'm not sure that it is, although I wouldn't want to try to defend that point right now with the knowledge I've got (almost none on this topic).
If that's all Men's Rights was about I would think that's pretty cool, but anti feminism is weird and stupid. The cool thing is that men are considerably more oppressed by other, wealthier, more powerful men then they are by women or any supposed "matriarchy" or w/e, but for whatever reason this whole thing gets debated as some kind of boys vs. girls playground fight.
And just for the record, I absolutely understand why the stereotype of the creepy, misogynistic, clueless, angry, abusive MRA exists. They're all over the place. Absolutely. And I wish they'd all drop dead.
Which is a good reason these "gap" issues for men are really hard to discuss, because nobody (except clueless assholes) wants to be associated with those guys.
I fully agree that there are issues facing men that ought to be addressed. I continue to insist that the majority of these issues are based on traditional definitions of masculinity/femininity which feminists aren't enforcing, but a large-scale culture desperately clinging to the status quo is.
I think feminism as practiced isn't as inclusive as it is supposed to be. Even the label, while historically understandable, is exclusionary. And major outlets of feminism like /r/feminism don't properly implement the ideology, which weakens all feminist arguments within their scope of influence. It's a very complex, touchy subject. People are pretty attached to their gender identity and prone to take even mild criticism to heart.
Then you have the seriously angry and the deliberately divisive, who get far too much attention on all sides, and who certainly don't help. If people as a whole were better at marginalizing deliberate agitators whose goals are clearly antagonistic and not progressive, progress would be worlds faster. And that goes for gender issues, politics, religion, race issues... more or less everything that humans divide into tribes over.
I fully agree that there are issues facing men that ought to be addressed. I continue to insist that the majority of these issues are based on traditional definitions of masculinity/femininity which feminists aren't enforcing, but a large-scale culture desperately clinging to the status quo is.
It's not necessarily a false argument to point out that feminism elements in it that are dismissive of men's issues or which straight-up come from a position of, well, basically loathing for men. Feminism is like any other thing; even if feminism's core principles are correct, it's just a difference between 99% of feminists being wrong, and 100% of non-feminists being wrong. Feminism has a long and retched history of racism, classism homophobia, transphobia, and the spreading of really crappy tenants (see: denial of female agency under patriarchy, political lesbianism, gender denialism/TERF bullshit, sex-negative feminists being bros with the religious right to ban pornography, etc.) Feminism is far from perfect. It's been the driving force for countless morale crusades, for Prohibition, for censorship and some other fairly wack-ass bullshit over the last century or so. Feminists, like anyone, are frequently terrible people, and will use their ideology, regardless of the actual content, to push their terrible ideas and beliefs.
That said, the raw core of feminist though (we exist within the confines of a gendered hierarchy which rewards men and masculinity, and punishes women and femininity, as it defines it, and that's bad mkay) is essentially unarguable between intelligent persons. After that, you invariably end up talking about what is more right than some other tenant of some other brand of feminism, and then it becomes politics and politics is the mindkiller, attempt no conversation there it's entirely tribalism at that point.
That's why I think Scott's assertion that feminism is like physics is kinda bullshit. Feminism would be like physics if Newtonian and Aristotelian physics were still a matter of dispute between scientists, with almost everyone having their own interpretation of the observations of physical objects and their interactions, and Eisenstein was still working on a patient office quietly putting the finishing touches on Relativity. You ask five feminists what they think feminism is and you'll get twelve descriptions and a fistfight. It simply isn't true to say that SRS or social justice tumblrs or Ms Magazine is more or less feminism than Bell hooks or feministing.com. About the only true assertion blanket assertion you can make is "Feminism is a more true thing than anti-feminism", and after that you have to discuss specifics. There is no "academic perspective" on feminism, because there are a lot of feminist academics and they tend to disagree with each other, with "popular" feminism, and with society as a whole in about equal measure.
It's similar to economics in that sense. There are serious, learned economists who are all for austerity and trickle-down economics. These people exist. They have jobs doing economy-things. They definitely know more about economics than I do, and their judgement on economical matters will be sounder than my own, but I still think they are wrong. I don't have economic learnings, but I can and have read a lot of books about economics by other economists and can then make an informed decision about what my own beliefs re: economies, which is that trickle-down economics is dumb. Similarly, I may not be a professor of femconomics, but I can read a lot of books by actual feminists and come to an informed conclusion, like "MRAs are dumb and smelly and so are boys.", which is roughly the level I operate on right now.
EDIT: Just thought of a good comparison: there are political scientists who are also republican, and uneducated voters who would never vote Republican. Education only makes it more likely that you are right; it doesn't 100% correct for people being fucking morons, nor does lack of education negate the ability to have an informed opinion or simply the stopped clock effect.
I agree with the group that feels the "mens rights" stuff is bullshit.
Globally men are still considered (as a generalisation) with higher regard than women. That women are easier to control and expected to be submissive.
I can see where a so called "MRA" believer would see these imaginary things that are going on but he would have to have sufficient self esteem and confidence issues to develop this. For example 85%+ of Veterinary graduates are female. When I have been to conferences there are courses for women on bargaining for work contracts. There are dinners specifically for women to network.
One might see this and think "that's not fair to all the male attendees and veterinarians in the industry".
However the very presence of these things means that there is already inequality in the workplace that favours men.
As a guy I have always been offered wages and salaries higher than women but it's not obvious to anyone unless you talk about your pay with others. Some jobs would preferentially hire me over applicants just because of my gender. Other times you would have a boss who likes a completely submissive harem of female Vets who he can bully into using his specific medical or surgical protocols (regardless of whether they are optimal or not) and he will disregard me because I am male.
However we do have issues where we become overly sensitive as a society especially with any physical contact. e.g. One of my female nurses was freaking out not being able to take an ET tube out of a recovering patient who I had just done an intensive 2 hour surgery on. It was waking up and for some reason she had put a choker chain on the patient. He looked like he was going to vomit (meaning his lungs would be filled with the vomitus = critical patient and severe infection). I rushed over there and properly removed the ET tube and the patient recovered fine (saving myself and the practice from a malpractice case).
That female nurse did not think anything of it however another senior nurse was watching this play out and reported me to practice management and the owners as having tackled the nurse as if I had maliciously hit her on purpose, it was completely out of context however that is what society is programmed to think. The nurse involved stayed neutral because she didn't want to get involved. It ended up going all the way to the fucking practice owner's lawyer to get it solved.
1. open_sketchbook, your post was both hilarious and informative. Keep it up.
2. When I originally asked muppet if he could show (or tell) me the "major tenets of the ideology," I was worried that he kept qualifying the examples he gave. Every ideological movement has certain values that are shared amongst all members, or else it wouldn't (by definition) be a single ideology. "Movements" that don't have any core values are meaningless group-identifier labels, like "freedom loving" or "holistic medicine." But these core values don't have to be complicated! Let's play a game:
Communism: - workers should own the means of production - resource allocation is best done through the consensus of the people, rather than a market system
There are many branches and offshoots of Communism, but they all adhere to at least these two things. Some thought "the people" should be a collective, some thought it should be a central government. You get where I'm going with this, I hope.
Feminism: - "we exist within the confines of a gendered hierarchy which rewards men and masculinity, and punishes women and femininity, as it defines it, and that's bad mkay"
See? Not so hard. Now, what are the core tenets of "Men's Rights"? Because it seems to me, and to fellow forumites, and to pretty much anyone who doesn't associate with MRA people, that the core tenets include:
- a backlash against feminism, with nostalgia for an age where gender roles were more clearly defined (at least in the popular culture) - "raising awareness" of issues that might not actually be significant (blog post with a summary and link to study on gender bias in divorce proceedings) - banding together to harass women (and frequently men) on the internet
Now, this is obviously biased by our encounters with self-described MRA folks, which is why I originally asked you to define what you believe the core tenets are. So, what are they? I'd be interested to hear why you don't dismiss them out of hand, as so many other people have. I'm not being flippant, I really want to know.
The other dispute I would like to register with Scott is the idea that feminism is really complex, requiring decades of education to have a real discussion about. Nah that's p much bullshit. First off, it's about human experiences. If you don't have one of those, you can listen to some people who do and do a bit of emulation. I hear humans are pretty good at that.
(On that note, the whole "cherk yer privlage!!!" thing p much comes down to the fact that, in larger culture, the dominate perspective be it white, cis, het, dude, able, not poor, etc, isn't just dominate, but also assumed and long integrated into the cultural narrative, and so interjecting with that dominate perspective in a conversation which is about the blind spots and missteps of that perceptive is kinda derp. It's just easily highjacked by people who try to use it as a way of shutting down arguments instead of the actual purpose, which is basically "Yo, we all know that already because it's the dominate narrative. Shut up a moment, because some people who normally don't get much of a voice are talking about this now, and you might larn something.")
But like, more than that, you confuse the idea of developing a concept with understanding it. I could never in a million years have written the book "Feminism is for Everyone" because Bell hooks is a crazy genius with incredible understanding of systems of oppression etc etc and I'm a dumb cis white boy whose closest association with feminism is owning a Sleater-Kinney button for my army jacket. However, I can read Feminism is for Everyone no problem, because I failed to check my literate privilege. I may not have been able to observe or articulate the content of that book, but I can make a fair shot at understanding it, discussing it with others and coming to conclusions about it's content and what it says about the world. Some of those conclusions may even be novel, but if they aren't, they'll still be valid and have meaning when discussed with my peers. And some person way smarter than me is going to read that book the way Bell hooks read the feminist books of her day, and compare it to their experience, and go "That's not quite right...", write their own book, and the philosophy will advance, it'll be forth wave feminism, and if Galaga has taught me anything the forth wave is a bonus round where you can just shoot the spacebugs and rack up lots of points.
While anti-intellectualism is a disgusting practice, it isn't enough to appeal to authority; you also need to execute on critical reasoning skills to figure out which authorities to appeal to. The world is not painted in stark black and white, with unfailing academics and unthinking proles. Somewhere in between those two points is a real world where real people have to try to parse what experts say and draw personal conclusions for their own lives.
Anyone can draw valid conclusions from things. Not necessarily correct conclusions, but valid ones, with meaning, personal or otherwise, and we can discuss those, have reasoned conversations about them, and change them as a result. Anyone can do this, you don't need a piece of paper and a throwing hat to manage it. Those things just help. A conclusion only really becomes intellectually invalid when a person refuses to discuss it; I simply submit that MRAs as a whole p much started at that point. "Men issues" is a thing you can discuss. "Mens am are oppressored by teh bitches." is like having a conversation with a screaming four-year-old who is upset they aren't getting both toys.
EDIT: Oh shit Neil Cicierega is talking about this right now. I think we can all agree that he is the expert we should all listen to.
The movement itself, as executed by its flesh and blood proponents, is cargo cult activism. It’s for dudes who hate feminists and want to beat them at their own game, so they dig around for injustices and issues (all of which are better explained and helped by other movements, mostly feminism) or things-that-superficially-look-like-issues that they can ham-fistedly fashion into what they think is an ethos. If it were a cause that needed to exist, it would have its own history. Instead, like clockwork, it only seems flare up a couple years after every wave of feminism.
Also: fedoras
edit: I’m being pretty generous in this description. The truth is most MRA dudes are pathetic shitdreams who are bigoted in every way.
1. Even if Men's Rights is only a simple backlash against radical feminism, and I'm not convinced it is, that doesn't invalidate it.
2. An immature and variegated ideology will naturally not distill easily. Feminism has had about 200 years to hone the message.
And yeah, the typical "Reddit MRA" who just screams about unfairness when women are given accommodations in order to level an historically slanted playing field are jerks. No argument there.
And while in retrospect I certainly could have used more neutral language and given a better explanation of my point, I really don't think it's very inflammatory.
I can only assume this is what I was banned for, because the mods won't tell me.
(I'm MadebyMonkeys). I can't seem to get a link for just the parent and my reply because the "context" button seems to be missing, so that probably means my comment was deleted and you probably can't see it.
The text of my comment:
/r/mensrights is a young community that hasn't matured yet. The moderation is spotty and the community standards in flux.
So yeah, some shit gets on there. Quite often. But that doesn't mean there aren't important, valid aspects to Men's Rights. A mature Men's Right's advocate will talk about issues that are glossed over by the larger feminist community because they impact mostly men (whether or not they're a result of a patriarchal society). Just like there are crap feminists, there are crap MRAs. The latter are just way more over-represented than the former, because of loose and evolving community standards, which are the real problem.
Comments
Even someone pretty dumb can see the inequality in something like men being able to vote and women not being able to vote, or people with colored skin being physically segregated. It takes a significant amount of education and study to understand how something that seems obviously to be an impingement upon the rights of men can actually be part of the patriarchy.
Many, if not most, MRAs are just misogynist shitheads. But there are also a significant percentage of MRAs who are actually feminists and are just too fucking stupid to realize it or understand it. The number one thing holding back feminism is simply that too many people are just not smart enough or haven't studied enough. People will try to espouse their opinion, even though they have not studied in any way shape or form. They will oppose what they can not understand even if they actually agree with it. They just haven't learned.
You wouldn't argue about quantum physics, even on the Internet, if you weren't a physicist. Why? Because you have no fucking clue what you are talking about, and you know it. If a quantum physicist tells you something about quantum physics, you would have to just trust and believe them.
Feminism in its current form is an extremely advanced academic topic. Someone who hasn't studied it extensively will have no fucking clue what they are talking about. The difference is that they don't know they don't know. If a feminist scholar says something about feminism, I treat it the same way as if a quantum physicist says something about quantum physics. Why? Because I know I have no fucking clue.
I suggest everyone either follow the same policy as me, or at least keep your mouth shut. Why? If you do not, then every word you say on the topic will be translated into smart people's ears as "I'm a misogynist MRA shithead. Disregard everything I say and do not associate with me in any way. I think I know more than people who spend their entire lives studying this." Do not be that person.
Anyway I'm not really trying to step into the role of defending MRAs here, believe it or not. All I'm trying to do is express that I understand (and why I understand) that they exist, and that it's NOT just knee-jerk misogyny or a "me too" complex.
And Apreche - if it's not accessible, then it's useless, because the end goal is education and social justice. You can't have those if you can't craft a message that's accessible to society at large.
Not trying to be sarcastic, but wouldn't you just be better off doing something else and more worthwhile like read a book?
Have I complained here about getting banned before?
Actually, Rochelle, I was banned from /r/feminism for a single, short comment. Before that, I was the top comment on almost every submission I commented on for a week on /r/feminism (at least for a few hours at a time, it tends to change throughout the day there.)
Anyway I'm not in this thread to sell anything. I can go on any of a dozen other forums and get lots of commiseration and other 30-40 something year old male geeks/IT types saying "yeah they're all nuts, you're totally right!" but that's useless. I like posting stuff like this on here because a lot of you challenge the things I say and I can either refine my arguments or learn why they flat out don't hold up. That's valuable and worthwhile.
The problem with giving a good summary/inventory of Men's Rights is that it's a chaotic, infant ideology that's tough to pin down. Anything I picked off of Google is going to have major problems. It's easier to talk about specific scenarios, but the problem with that is that they tend to be dismissed as "because patriarchy" which isn't that useful.
And just for the record, I absolutely understand why the stereotype of the creepy, misogynistic, clueless, angry, abusive MRA exists. They're all over the place. Absolutely. And I wish they'd all drop dead.
Which is a good reason these "gap" issues for men are really hard to discuss, because nobody (except clueless assholes) wants to be associated with those guys.
http://www.avoiceformen.com/sexual-politics/game/deconstructing-game-and-pua-frauds/
I fully agree that there are issues facing men that ought to be addressed. I continue to insist that the majority of these issues are based on traditional definitions of masculinity/femininity which feminists aren't enforcing, but a large-scale culture desperately clinging to the status quo is.
Then you have the seriously angry and the deliberately divisive, who get far too much attention on all sides, and who certainly don't help. If people as a whole were better at marginalizing deliberate agitators whose goals are clearly antagonistic and not progressive, progress would be worlds faster. And that goes for gender issues, politics, religion, race issues... more or less everything that humans divide into tribes over.
That said, the raw core of feminist though (we exist within the confines of a gendered hierarchy which rewards men and masculinity, and punishes women and femininity, as it defines it, and that's bad mkay) is essentially unarguable between intelligent persons. After that, you invariably end up talking about what is more right than some other tenant of some other brand of feminism, and then it becomes politics and politics is the mindkiller, attempt no conversation there it's entirely tribalism at that point.
That's why I think Scott's assertion that feminism is like physics is kinda bullshit. Feminism would be like physics if Newtonian and Aristotelian physics were still a matter of dispute between scientists, with almost everyone having their own interpretation of the observations of physical objects and their interactions, and Eisenstein was still working on a patient office quietly putting the finishing touches on Relativity. You ask five feminists what they think feminism is and you'll get twelve descriptions and a fistfight. It simply isn't true to say that SRS or social justice tumblrs or Ms Magazine is more or less feminism than Bell hooks or feministing.com. About the only true assertion blanket assertion you can make is "Feminism is a more true thing than anti-feminism", and after that you have to discuss specifics. There is no "academic perspective" on feminism, because there are a lot of feminist academics and they tend to disagree with each other, with "popular" feminism, and with society as a whole in about equal measure.
It's similar to economics in that sense. There are serious, learned economists who are all for austerity and trickle-down economics. These people exist. They have jobs doing economy-things. They definitely know more about economics than I do, and their judgement on economical matters will be sounder than my own, but I still think they are wrong. I don't have economic learnings, but I can and have read a lot of books about economics by other economists and can then make an informed decision about what my own beliefs re: economies, which is that trickle-down economics is dumb. Similarly, I may not be a professor of femconomics, but I can read a lot of books by actual feminists and come to an informed conclusion, like "MRAs are dumb and smelly and so are boys.", which is roughly the level I operate on right now.
EDIT: Just thought of a good comparison: there are political scientists who are also republican, and uneducated voters who would never vote Republican. Education only makes it more likely that you are right; it doesn't 100% correct for people being fucking morons, nor does lack of education negate the ability to have an informed opinion or simply the stopped clock effect.
Globally men are still considered (as a generalisation) with higher regard than women. That women are easier to control and expected to be submissive.
I can see where a so called "MRA" believer would see these imaginary things that are going on but he would have to have sufficient self esteem and confidence issues to develop this.
For example 85%+ of Veterinary graduates are female. When I have been to conferences there are courses for women on bargaining for work contracts. There are dinners specifically for women to network.
One might see this and think "that's not fair to all the male attendees and veterinarians in the industry".
However the very presence of these things means that there is already inequality in the workplace that favours men.
As a guy I have always been offered wages and salaries higher than women but it's not obvious to anyone unless you talk about your pay with others. Some jobs would preferentially hire me over applicants just because of my gender. Other times you would have a boss who likes a completely submissive harem of female Vets who he can bully into using his specific medical or surgical protocols (regardless of whether they are optimal or not) and he will disregard me because I am male.
However we do have issues where we become overly sensitive as a society especially with any physical contact.
e.g.
One of my female nurses was freaking out not being able to take an ET tube out of a recovering patient who I had just done an intensive 2 hour surgery on. It was waking up and for some reason she had put a choker chain on the patient. He looked like he was going to vomit (meaning his lungs would be filled with the vomitus = critical patient and severe infection). I rushed over there and properly removed the ET tube and the patient recovered fine (saving myself and the practice from a malpractice case).
That female nurse did not think anything of it however another senior nurse was watching this play out and reported me to practice management and the owners as having tackled the nurse as if I had maliciously hit her on purpose, it was completely out of context however that is what society is programmed to think. The nurse involved stayed neutral because she didn't want to get involved. It ended up going all the way to the fucking practice owner's lawyer to get it solved.
1. open_sketchbook, your post was both hilarious and informative. Keep it up.
2. When I originally asked muppet if he could show (or tell) me the "major tenets of the ideology," I was worried that he kept qualifying the examples he gave. Every ideological movement has certain values that are shared amongst all members, or else it wouldn't (by definition) be a single ideology. "Movements" that don't have any core values are meaningless group-identifier labels, like "freedom loving" or "holistic medicine." But these core values don't have to be complicated! Let's play a game:
Communism:
- workers should own the means of production
- resource allocation is best done through the consensus of the people, rather than a market system
There are many branches and offshoots of Communism, but they all adhere to at least these two things. Some thought "the people" should be a collective, some thought it should be a central government. You get where I'm going with this, I hope.
Feminism:
- "we exist within the confines of a gendered hierarchy which rewards men and masculinity, and punishes women and femininity, as it defines it, and that's bad mkay"
See? Not so hard. Now, what are the core tenets of "Men's Rights"? Because it seems to me, and to fellow forumites, and to pretty much anyone who doesn't associate with MRA people, that the core tenets include:
- a backlash against feminism, with nostalgia for an age where gender roles were more clearly defined (at least in the popular culture)
- "raising awareness" of issues that might not actually be significant (blog post with a summary and link to study on gender bias in divorce proceedings)
- banding together to harass women (and frequently men) on the internet
Now, this is obviously biased by our encounters with self-described MRA folks, which is why I originally asked you to define what you believe the core tenets are. So, what are they? I'd be interested to hear why you don't dismiss them out of hand, as so many other people have. I'm not being flippant, I really want to know.
(On that note, the whole "cherk yer privlage!!!" thing p much comes down to the fact that, in larger culture, the dominate perspective be it white, cis, het, dude, able, not poor, etc, isn't just dominate, but also assumed and long integrated into the cultural narrative, and so interjecting with that dominate perspective in a conversation which is about the blind spots and missteps of that perceptive is kinda derp. It's just easily highjacked by people who try to use it as a way of shutting down arguments instead of the actual purpose, which is basically "Yo, we all know that already because it's the dominate narrative. Shut up a moment, because some people who normally don't get much of a voice are talking about this now, and you might larn something.")
But like, more than that, you confuse the idea of developing a concept with understanding it. I could never in a million years have written the book "Feminism is for Everyone" because Bell hooks is a crazy genius with incredible understanding of systems of oppression etc etc and I'm a dumb cis white boy whose closest association with feminism is owning a Sleater-Kinney button for my army jacket. However, I can read Feminism is for Everyone no problem, because I failed to check my literate privilege. I may not have been able to observe or articulate the content of that book, but I can make a fair shot at understanding it, discussing it with others and coming to conclusions about it's content and what it says about the world. Some of those conclusions may even be novel, but if they aren't, they'll still be valid and have meaning when discussed with my peers. And some person way smarter than me is going to read that book the way Bell hooks read the feminist books of her day, and compare it to their experience, and go "That's not quite right...", write their own book, and the philosophy will advance, it'll be forth wave feminism, and if Galaga has taught me anything the forth wave is a bonus round where you can just shoot the spacebugs and rack up lots of points.
While anti-intellectualism is a disgusting practice, it isn't enough to appeal to authority; you also need to execute on critical reasoning skills to figure out which authorities to appeal to. The world is not painted in stark black and white, with unfailing academics and unthinking proles. Somewhere in between those two points is a real world where real people have to try to parse what experts say and draw personal conclusions for their own lives.
Anyone can draw valid conclusions from things. Not necessarily correct conclusions, but valid ones, with meaning, personal or otherwise, and we can discuss those, have reasoned conversations about them, and change them as a result. Anyone can do this, you don't need a piece of paper and a throwing hat to manage it. Those things just help. A conclusion only really becomes intellectually invalid when a person refuses to discuss it; I simply submit that MRAs as a whole p much started at that point. "Men issues" is a thing you can discuss. "Mens am are oppressored by teh bitches." is like having a conversation with a screaming four-year-old who is upset they aren't getting both toys.
EDIT: Oh shit Neil Cicierega is talking about this right now. I think we can all agree that he is the expert we should all listen to.
2. An immature and variegated ideology will naturally not distill easily. Feminism has had about 200 years to hone the message.
And yeah, the typical "Reddit MRA" who just screams about unfairness when women are given accommodations in order to level an historically slanted playing field are jerks. No argument there.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Feminism/comments/1uvhq7/saw_this_image_in_some_antifeminist_circles_the/cem747a
And while in retrospect I certainly could have used more neutral language and given a better explanation of my point, I really don't think it's very inflammatory.
I can only assume this is what I was banned for, because the mods won't tell me.
(I'm MadebyMonkeys). I can't seem to get a link for just the parent and my reply because the "context" button seems to be missing, so that probably means my comment was deleted and you probably can't see it.
The text of my comment:
/r/mensrights is a young community that hasn't matured yet. The moderation is spotty and the community standards in flux.
So yeah, some shit gets on there. Quite often. But that doesn't mean there aren't important, valid aspects to Men's Rights. A mature Men's Right's advocate will talk about issues that are glossed over by the larger feminist community because they impact mostly men (whether or not they're a result of a patriarchal society).
Just like there are crap feminists, there are crap MRAs. The latter are just way more over-represented than the former, because of loose and evolving community standards, which are the real problem.