I wish that men's rights advocates could see the obvious when it comes to parental rights: this is just another result of the traditional gender roles that feminists have been fighting since the beginning. This just happens to be a case where it disadvantages men instead of women (or, maybe, men as well as women).
The irony is, though, that instead of fighting these traditional gender roles, some men's rights activists seem to embrace the roles and then confuse diminution of those gender roles with the diminution of men. If more of them could embrace the goal of the abolition of traditional gender roles, and stop speaking in stereotyped terms about the need to promote and respect "masculinity" as though it were synonymous with male-ness, I think they would find that feminists (good ones, at least) are their greatest allies.
(This applies only to the "men's-rights" activists who don't say things like "All the cold-hearted jerks who run the world came out of the vaginas of women who married a–holes" and "Doesn’t no mean yes?" Clearly some men characterize themselves as "man's-rights activists" because it provides, in their view, a framework for legitimizing their antecedent misogyny.)
Family courts "do not just happens" to disadvantage men. There is duluth model and other literature produced mainly by feminists largely responsible for that. On any proposal such as child payments to be accountable or visitation rights enforceability, feminists screams rape.
MRA are making many efforts to cooperate with feminism. Many MRAs are feminists shamed and kicked out for not being radical enough. So far we got only acknowledgement that "men has issues too", that is kind of success.
I will not comment on article itself. I could go on any feminist conference and cherry-pick many statements.
> On any proposal such as child payments to be accountable or visitation rights enforceability, feminists screams rape.
It is hard to take MRAs seriously because they include people who say things like this.
This sort of language discredits any actual argument that feminists might actually have by reducing them to contentless, stereotyped feminine shreiks. That's seriously sexist. And at the same time, it mocks women's legitimate fears of being, you know, actually raped.
I am saying that every time some practical problem is brought up, authors gets shamed and discussion gets derailed to irrelevance. So 'screams rape' fits.
And men have legitimate fears of being raped as well.
1) You're making some incredible generalizations; this happens "every time"?
2) You started out by claiming "feminists" do that and when pressed, you immediately retreat to "Radfems". So it turns out that even by your own admission, it's not feminists who scream rape every time; it's only the radical ones.
3) Since you're presenting this hypothetical anecdote and using it as evidence, I'll introduce my own and point out that I just checked the faculty list for my old school (5th grade to 12th) and the teacher faculty was maybe 40 percent male. Thinking back to when I was in middle and high school, the current ratio seems about the same as it was back in the early 2000s. So I'm not seeing your claim about the absence of male teachers or babysitters.
> Many MRAs are feminists shamed and kicked out for not being radical enough.
Is feminism an institution? I was not aware anyone could be "kicked out" of feminism for not being sufficiently radical. I would know, being a not-particularly-radical feminist myself.
At any rate, this is quite dubious. The only MRAs I know of are not even close to being merely "insufficiently radical feminists," except perhaps in the same sense in which Catholics are insufficiently radical atheists.
Note that by "MRAs" I mean people who self-identify as part of the MRA movement. There are, I'm sure, many people out there who are aware of and interested in men's issues who could also qualify as feminists. Such people, such as myself, choose not to be identified with the MRA movement because of all the misogyny that travels with it.
I suppose you might make the argument: "why not refuse to be identified with the feminist movement for the same reason"? There are (at least) two reasons. First, feminism is less associated with a small particular people and institutions than MRA. This may just be because feminism is bigger. But, whatever the cause, I don't feel that identifying myself as a feminists as closely associates me with objectionable activities at the fringes. More to the point, I simply don't think most feminists generally are as virulently anti-man as MRAs are anti-woman. Again, maybe this is attributable to the size of the movement. I know that there are feminists who are virulently anti-man, but I think they make up a small fringe of the overall feminist movement. Ultimately, though, this is just a question of what labels one is or is not comfortable taking on.
Yes, feminism is pretty much religion today. You can be "kicked out" for being men or not agreeing with some 'axioms' such as rape culture or patriarchy. One link for demonstration:
Next time I see a "radical feminist" posting on HN I'll be sure to give him or her a piece of my mind.
Also, you'll need to do better than an article from, of all places, avoiceformen.com that merely assumes the existence of a feminist institution that you can be kicked out of and blames it for a man's suicide.
I'm certainly not aware of any such institution and I'm a feminist! Perhaps my membership card has just been lost in the mail? Or gasp! maybe it's because I'm a man and the mother ship is just not giving me the time of day? That explains a lot, actually...
There are many feminists institutions, that guy got kicked out from FEMEN Sweden. Others got kicked out from campus groups or web forums. If you want go to MRA forum and just ask.
Perhaps you have no membership card because you never applied anywhere. But some people are more involved.
Ah ha. There are, of course, organizations that identify themselves as feminist. And yes, you can get kicked out of them, I suppose. But this is not at all the same thing as getting kicked out of "feminism," as you have been alleging to have been the case.
This is more than a mere semantic distinction since any arbitrary feminist group can have whatever arbitrary rule or prejudices it likes without those views' being imputable to all feminists. I certainly don't accept that FEMEN Sweden speaks for all (or even many) feminists or that being kicked out of FEMEN means you can't be or aren't a feminist.
There is a widespread illusion that feminism is some ideology that favors justice and equality. In reality, it is a political movement that favors the interests of women.
As a feminist, I find this surprising. (Though it is true in this uninteresting sense: feminists think that women are systematically discriminated against so, of course, advancing justice and equality will advance the interests of women.) I suspect the issue is that we have different perceptions of what "justice and equality" requires.
It would be nice, though, to hear some specifics about what mainstream feminists you find objectionable so we can have a discussion based on something other than generalizations.
I don't begrudge feminists for favoring the interests of women anymore than I begrudge a union for favoring the interests of its members. There are just some cases where injustice and inequality are to the detriment of men, and feminists are unsympathetic to those cases. Which I again don't begrudge them for.
Realistically, I don't believe anyone can speak for everyone. Politics isn't about imposing an ideology on society, it's about different groups coming together and negotiating rules that they can all live with. Feminists speak solely for women; as a man, I don't expect feminists to speak for me. And that's fine.
That's an interesting view, but I strongly disagree.
I don't consider myself a feminist just because I want to advantage women. That would be pretty dumb, since I am a man. I consider myself a feminist precisely because I am interested in advancing justice and fairness, an endeavor that, given our history, requires particular focus on the situation of women. I would certainly not support a proposal that I knew to disadvantage men and advantage women unfairly. And I would hope that those who are more focused on men's rights would do the same. I frankly don't think that we will get very far if we take the adversarial approach that you describe, at least in part because women, for historical reasons, will inevitably be disadvantaged in that sort of process. In other words, the approach you describe -- if it is to be fair -- assumes that all parties arrive at the political barraging table with equal power. But that is very far from the case.
It may well be true that there are feminists out there (presumably women) who, like you, see themselves as engaged in a self-interested struggle against the opposite sex. But, speaking for my feminist friends, I don't think that is true of many, let along most of them.
Feminists might be under the illusion that they favor equality and justice, but in practice they only focus on inequalities and injustices that they perceive women to suffer from. And that's fine. But they will never address (and often deny the existence of) inequalities and injustices that men suffer from.
I'm a pragmatist. Ideologies never work. Ideologues are either hypocrites or worse. People whose entire worldview is based on the idea that women are uniformly and universally oppressed by men are never going to achieve gender equality on their own. Even a reasonable and moderate feminist like yourself won't go out of their way to help men even when that's the just and equal thing to do--or at least not as much as they will women. I don't mean that as a slight, but it's just a manifestation of bias. The way to prevent bias isn't to just trust some ideology or movement to be free of it; it's to openly acknowledge biases and vested interests and work in the spirit of mutual benefit.
It seems to me the men were laughing because the woman was objectifying herself in her selfie...
In any case, the woman in this article had her own experience, yet it is only a single person's experience, and as I can see, it is colored by her own pre-conceived notions and judgements. I appreciate that women are willing to listen to the message, but disappointed that she chose to focus on one thing she considered negative to ridicule their points of view and make ad hominem attacks on the speakers.
What do you feel is the one thing that the author "considered negative" which was used to ridicule the points of view of the presenters, and what do you feel are ad hominem attacks made by the reporter?
I think you're being awfully generous to the conference-goers, and a little unfair to the author of the article. That article highlights far more than "one thing she considered negative."
How about, in addition:
>When the conference’s MC, Robert O’Hara, asked a woman in the audience a question and she responded with a no, he quickly shot back “Doesn’t no mean yes?” The audience burst into laughter.
> Molyneux said that because 90% of a child’s brain is formed by the experiences it has before the age of 5, and women have “an almost universal control over childhood,” violence exists in the world because of the way women treat children.
> Women who choose a–holes guarantee child abuse . . . All the cold-hearted jerks who run the world came out of the vaginas of women who married a–holes. . . . Women worship at the feet of the devil and wonder why the world is evil. . . . And then know what they say? ‘We’re victims!’
I have no doubt, having taken a look at avoiceformen.com and related websites, that these were only the highlights.
Maybe it's debateable whether these statements are offensive, unreasonable, inappropriate, or incorrect. (Though I would contend emphatically that they are all four.) But I think it's fair to say that these statements reasonably contributed to Roy's negative experience.
And, on the other hand, I think there is little in her article that is fairly described as "ridicule." In fact, I was pretty surprised by how restrained and, on some points, openminded Roy was in her article. Her closing is representative:
> When you talk to someone like 68-year-old Steve DeLuca, the legitimate need to remedy some of the issues raised by men’s rights activists becomes more evident. A Vietnam veteran who was injured in combat, DeLuca spoke movingly to me about the two brothers he lost to suicide, and the unfathomable toll the high suicide rate among men can take. There are men out there, like DeLuca and Brendan Rex, who have a real stake in the movement’s success. The paranoia and vitriol of its leaders can’t possibly do anything for them.
So, yeah, as Roy points out, there are a lot of serious issues affecting men that could really be helped by the movement's success. But there comes a point when it comes with so much objectionable baggage that a person can't simply be expected to ignore, e.g., the rape jokes, for the sake of getting at the "real" issue.
I would think that the burden should be on the presenters at the conference to refrain from that sort of nonsense, and not on Roy to ignore it all.
If anyone is interested in a place where issues of particular importance to men are being discussed by a variety of writers (and not just men), I recommend checking out The Good Men Project.[1] I've found a good number of the articles there to be timely and thought-provoking, and the general spirit is one of cooperation rather than the antagonism that seemed to be underlying the conference detailed in the article.
Some of the topics frequently written about include the changing perceptions of masculinity, child rearing, friendships, dating, sex, work, community, race, self-worth and fulfillment. That's painting in very broad strokes, but with such a diverse collection of articles (and a narrower yet similar variance in quality) it's hard to give a more specific description without linking to individual articles, which I will not do since I am at work.
22 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 41.9 ms ] threadThe irony is, though, that instead of fighting these traditional gender roles, some men's rights activists seem to embrace the roles and then confuse diminution of those gender roles with the diminution of men. If more of them could embrace the goal of the abolition of traditional gender roles, and stop speaking in stereotyped terms about the need to promote and respect "masculinity" as though it were synonymous with male-ness, I think they would find that feminists (good ones, at least) are their greatest allies.
(This applies only to the "men's-rights" activists who don't say things like "All the cold-hearted jerks who run the world came out of the vaginas of women who married a–holes" and "Doesn’t no mean yes?" Clearly some men characterize themselves as "man's-rights activists" because it provides, in their view, a framework for legitimizing their antecedent misogyny.)
MRA are making many efforts to cooperate with feminism. Many MRAs are feminists shamed and kicked out for not being radical enough. So far we got only acknowledgement that "men has issues too", that is kind of success.
I will not comment on article itself. I could go on any feminist conference and cherry-pick many statements.
It is hard to take MRAs seriously because they include people who say things like this.
This sort of language discredits any actual argument that feminists might actually have by reducing them to contentless, stereotyped feminine shreiks. That's seriously sexist. And at the same time, it mocks women's legitimate fears of being, you know, actually raped.
And men have legitimate fears of being raped as well.
- Someone suggest that men could have more visitation rights to his children.
- Radfems answer that most men are rapists and they could rape their own children.
- Author answers that it is not true, and gets shamed as rape apologist etc.
Any more questions?
Men teachers or baby-sitters practically does not exist anymore, exactly for this reasons. So "screams rape" fits like a glove.
1) You're making some incredible generalizations; this happens "every time"?
2) You started out by claiming "feminists" do that and when pressed, you immediately retreat to "Radfems". So it turns out that even by your own admission, it's not feminists who scream rape every time; it's only the radical ones.
3) Since you're presenting this hypothetical anecdote and using it as evidence, I'll introduce my own and point out that I just checked the faculty list for my old school (5th grade to 12th) and the teacher faculty was maybe 40 percent male. Thinking back to when I was in middle and high school, the current ratio seems about the same as it was back in the early 2000s. So I'm not seeing your claim about the absence of male teachers or babysitters.
I will be very surprised if you can document for us a single time that this has ever happened.
> Many MRAs are feminists shamed and kicked out for not being radical enough.
Is feminism an institution? I was not aware anyone could be "kicked out" of feminism for not being sufficiently radical. I would know, being a not-particularly-radical feminist myself.
At any rate, this is quite dubious. The only MRAs I know of are not even close to being merely "insufficiently radical feminists," except perhaps in the same sense in which Catholics are insufficiently radical atheists.
Note that by "MRAs" I mean people who self-identify as part of the MRA movement. There are, I'm sure, many people out there who are aware of and interested in men's issues who could also qualify as feminists. Such people, such as myself, choose not to be identified with the MRA movement because of all the misogyny that travels with it.
I suppose you might make the argument: "why not refuse to be identified with the feminist movement for the same reason"? There are (at least) two reasons. First, feminism is less associated with a small particular people and institutions than MRA. This may just be because feminism is bigger. But, whatever the cause, I don't feel that identifying myself as a feminists as closely associates me with objectionable activities at the fringes. More to the point, I simply don't think most feminists generally are as virulently anti-man as MRAs are anti-woman. Again, maybe this is attributable to the size of the movement. I know that there are feminists who are virulently anti-man, but I think they make up a small fringe of the overall feminist movement. Ultimately, though, this is just a question of what labels one is or is not comfortable taking on.
http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&sl=auto&tl=en&u=h...
Feminism is not just 'bigger' it is multi-billion dollar industry. MRA is just a few web forums which barely managed to organize single conference.
If you disagree with some radical feminists, perhaps it is time to tell them, instead of bashing on MRAs.
Also, you'll need to do better than an article from, of all places, avoiceformen.com that merely assumes the existence of a feminist institution that you can be kicked out of and blames it for a man's suicide.
I'm certainly not aware of any such institution and I'm a feminist! Perhaps my membership card has just been lost in the mail? Or gasp! maybe it's because I'm a man and the mother ship is just not giving me the time of day? That explains a lot, actually...
Perhaps you have no membership card because you never applied anywhere. But some people are more involved.
This is more than a mere semantic distinction since any arbitrary feminist group can have whatever arbitrary rule or prejudices it likes without those views' being imputable to all feminists. I certainly don't accept that FEMEN Sweden speaks for all (or even many) feminists or that being kicked out of FEMEN means you can't be or aren't a feminist.
It would be nice, though, to hear some specifics about what mainstream feminists you find objectionable so we can have a discussion based on something other than generalizations.
Realistically, I don't believe anyone can speak for everyone. Politics isn't about imposing an ideology on society, it's about different groups coming together and negotiating rules that they can all live with. Feminists speak solely for women; as a man, I don't expect feminists to speak for me. And that's fine.
I don't consider myself a feminist just because I want to advantage women. That would be pretty dumb, since I am a man. I consider myself a feminist precisely because I am interested in advancing justice and fairness, an endeavor that, given our history, requires particular focus on the situation of women. I would certainly not support a proposal that I knew to disadvantage men and advantage women unfairly. And I would hope that those who are more focused on men's rights would do the same. I frankly don't think that we will get very far if we take the adversarial approach that you describe, at least in part because women, for historical reasons, will inevitably be disadvantaged in that sort of process. In other words, the approach you describe -- if it is to be fair -- assumes that all parties arrive at the political barraging table with equal power. But that is very far from the case.
It may well be true that there are feminists out there (presumably women) who, like you, see themselves as engaged in a self-interested struggle against the opposite sex. But, speaking for my feminist friends, I don't think that is true of many, let along most of them.
I'm a pragmatist. Ideologies never work. Ideologues are either hypocrites or worse. People whose entire worldview is based on the idea that women are uniformly and universally oppressed by men are never going to achieve gender equality on their own. Even a reasonable and moderate feminist like yourself won't go out of their way to help men even when that's the just and equal thing to do--or at least not as much as they will women. I don't mean that as a slight, but it's just a manifestation of bias. The way to prevent bias isn't to just trust some ideology or movement to be free of it; it's to openly acknowledge biases and vested interests and work in the spirit of mutual benefit.
In any case, the woman in this article had her own experience, yet it is only a single person's experience, and as I can see, it is colored by her own pre-conceived notions and judgements. I appreciate that women are willing to listen to the message, but disappointed that she chose to focus on one thing she considered negative to ridicule their points of view and make ad hominem attacks on the speakers.
How about, in addition:
>When the conference’s MC, Robert O’Hara, asked a woman in the audience a question and she responded with a no, he quickly shot back “Doesn’t no mean yes?” The audience burst into laughter.
> Molyneux said that because 90% of a child’s brain is formed by the experiences it has before the age of 5, and women have “an almost universal control over childhood,” violence exists in the world because of the way women treat children.
> Women who choose a–holes guarantee child abuse . . . All the cold-hearted jerks who run the world came out of the vaginas of women who married a–holes. . . . Women worship at the feet of the devil and wonder why the world is evil. . . . And then know what they say? ‘We’re victims!’
I have no doubt, having taken a look at avoiceformen.com and related websites, that these were only the highlights.
Maybe it's debateable whether these statements are offensive, unreasonable, inappropriate, or incorrect. (Though I would contend emphatically that they are all four.) But I think it's fair to say that these statements reasonably contributed to Roy's negative experience.
And, on the other hand, I think there is little in her article that is fairly described as "ridicule." In fact, I was pretty surprised by how restrained and, on some points, openminded Roy was in her article. Her closing is representative:
> When you talk to someone like 68-year-old Steve DeLuca, the legitimate need to remedy some of the issues raised by men’s rights activists becomes more evident. A Vietnam veteran who was injured in combat, DeLuca spoke movingly to me about the two brothers he lost to suicide, and the unfathomable toll the high suicide rate among men can take. There are men out there, like DeLuca and Brendan Rex, who have a real stake in the movement’s success. The paranoia and vitriol of its leaders can’t possibly do anything for them.
So, yeah, as Roy points out, there are a lot of serious issues affecting men that could really be helped by the movement's success. But there comes a point when it comes with so much objectionable baggage that a person can't simply be expected to ignore, e.g., the rape jokes, for the sake of getting at the "real" issue.
I would think that the burden should be on the presenters at the conference to refrain from that sort of nonsense, and not on Roy to ignore it all.
Some of the topics frequently written about include the changing perceptions of masculinity, child rearing, friendships, dating, sex, work, community, race, self-worth and fulfillment. That's painting in very broad strokes, but with such a diverse collection of articles (and a narrower yet similar variance in quality) it's hard to give a more specific description without linking to individual articles, which I will not do since I am at work.
[1]http://goodmenproject.com