An analogy for the "we were oppressed in the past" logic

C0CKPUNCHER · 2012-08-22T07:10:09+00:00

We used to sometimes castrate young boys to make them better singers. Harsh no? It is just too easy to cherry pick specifics from history so as to miss the wood for the trees. But there is no point in history were womans suicide rate was as high as mens, were they did not live longer, were more of them were homeless or alcoholic etc etc. These are the best measures of suffering and quality of life.

In history not everyone could vote, power was rested away from the monarchy bit by bit, women were some of the last to get it because of their lack of participation, it isn't a sign of their victimhood but of their privilege.

2012-08-22T09:32:35+00:00

Makes sense to me.

You can get the "repayment" crowd upset by asking simple questions:

"So you're saying that because your grandma had it bad, I'm supposed to treat you better than other people?"

mikesteane · 2012-08-22T08:32:13+00:00

There is another difference: no one who was disbarred from voting because of their gender in the 10 years that elapsed between universal male suffrage and universal female suffrage is now alive. There are still a few holocaust victims currently alive. The feminist argument is not "we" but "members of our sex". The argument that they should have privileges now because of alleged oppression would be bogus, even if the alleged oppression did actually take place.

TracyMorganFreeman · 2012-08-22T14:27:54+00:00

Last I checked the Irish, the Chinese, and the Jews were all oppressed in the past.

Looks like they did something about it that wasn't whining to anyone who would listen: they took responsibility for their lives.

whiteout69 · 2012-08-22T11:37:03+00:00

[permanently deleted]

DavidByron · 2012-08-22T14:34:29+00:00

isnt the recurring feminist use of "we've been oppressed in the past and my great grandmother couldn't vote" to say that men are bad or vindicate doing something a completely flawed argument?

It's actually an argument format that is characteristic of a hate movement. It includes the assumption that all the people of the hated group have a collective guilt for whatever activity they are (usually entirely falsely) accused of in the past. Collective guilt is a type of thinking that is characteristic of hate movements.

A feminist would never agree that if one woman commits a crime then all other women are guilty of that crime, but that is what they say about men. Without collective guilt there's no point falsely asserting men in the past committed crimes against women.

kazagistar · 2012-08-22T21:12:20+00:00

I take this argument a lot further. People should not be responsible for anyone's actions but their own, but also do not get credit for anyone's actions but their own. Nationalism, sports team fanaticism, and so on are all aspects of the same "group identity fallacy" to some degree.

rightsbot · 2012-08-22T07:00:17+00:00

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corrodesnudo · 2012-08-22T15:07:58+00:00

I totally agree. I'm of Jewish and Polish descent and my best friend is German (like born, raised, and grew up in Germany, not German just by ancestry). Does he owe me something? Should I be entitled to privileges kept from him? I'm all for righting the wrongs of oppression, but continuing to dole out special rights and privileges when they are no longer necessary to achieve or maintain equality is just as bad as the special rights and privileges that the former oppressors enjoyed in a bygone era.

2012-08-22T18:40:58+00:00

"we've been oppressed in the past and my great grandmother couldn't vote"

This is a fallacy anyway. For the vast majority of Western history, most people of BOTH genders did not have the vote.

HeadingTooNFL · 2012-08-22T19:12:45+00:00

Or, as I prefer it, two wrongs don't make a right

JockeVXO · 2012-08-22T20:53:57+00:00

Women weren't oppressed, they were discriminated against. Guess who else were? Men! I'd even go so far as to say that men were oppressed as they were conscripted.

djlewt · 2012-08-22T22:53:23+00:00

Lets see if I can complicate this. Some folks believe black people in america are owed compensation for slavery and the continued "black balling"(I wish I had a better term for that..) that went on in most of america even after the civil rights movement, and while as of this moment in history black folks by and large have nearly the same opportunity as all others, it's pretty well documented that whites have time and again done things which continued to hinder the "catching up" of black folks in modern society. Cointelpro would be a great example of this, by some accounts the newly released information regarding how the black panthers started, as well as information released through FOIA requests shows that in at least some neighborhoods we're still seeing the lasting effects of the CIA/FBI's willful attempts to damage if not outright destroy the black people's family unit. Many historians believe these were major contributors to the current unwed black mothers/fatherless black children statistics that are off the charts compared to other races. This along with the fact that many white people have had most of recorded history to "shore up" their familial holdings whereas black folks in america have barely had 30 years (some places in the deep south still remain quite unfriendly to black people trying to make it)to many tends to lead credence to the idea that black folks should get some kind of preferential treatment, hence some people's view on why programs like affirmative action are not entirely without merit.

So what do we do?

Title	An analogy for the "we were oppressed in the past" logic
Author	whiteout69
Upvotes	33
Comments	38
Date	August 22, 2012 6:58 AM UTC (13 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/ymkh4/an_analogy_for_the_we_were_oppressed_in_the_past/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/an-analogy-for-the-we-were-oppressed-in-the-past.1015303 https://theredarchive.com/post/1015303

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