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A post on TwoXChromosomes about "Male Studies" program

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April 15, 2010

31 upvotes

/r/MensRights

http://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/bpv1j/interesting_wagner_college_now_has_a_male_studies/c0nzm37

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Title	A post on TwoXChromosomes about "Male Studies" program
Author	[deleted]
Upvotes	31
Comments	78
Date	April 15, 2010 1:16 AM UTC (16 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/br1zx/a_post_on_twoxchromosomes_about_male_studies/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/a-post-on-twoxchromosomes-about-male-studies.1049865 https://theredarchive.com/post/1049865

Comments

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points4 points 16 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–][deleted] 11 points12 points13 points 16 years ago (20 children) | Copy Link

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points3 points 16 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]XFDRaven 4 points5 points6 points 16 years ago (18 children) | Copy Link

Pick any political movement in history. It's workings are pretty straight forward:

Clearly define your group in such a way as it can be easily differentiated from other groups.
Determine a politically wealthy objective which the most common people can buy in to, at little to no personal cost to them.
Define a boogyman to pin the blame on.
Refine the boogyman's attributes that they might touch upon certain people in the social pool. This begins the incentive to differentiate themselves from the scape-goat group.
Villify the scape-goat group by defining those in its group as a kind of socially or morally dirty class.
Turn the whole subject into a binary condition: you're one of us, or one of them.

Feminism is following the formula just like every other group in history. The poster's use of a kind of newspeak almost comes directly out of 1984 in such a way that if it comes from feminism it can't be bad because feminism analyzes itself to make sure it is wholly subjective unto itself. Just like Chairman Mao and Kim Jon Il, etc.

The best way to deal with a feminist is to have nothing to do with them to begin with. If you're talking to someone and they profess to being a feminist, end the conversation and move on. There is nothing to be gained in interacting with people from hate movements.

[–]cryptogirl 15 points16 points17 points 16 years ago* (17 children) | Copy Link

[–]XFDRaven -4 points-3 points-2 points 16 years ago* (16 children) | Copy Link

[–]cryptogirl 11 points12 points13 points 16 years ago (14 children) | Copy Link

[–]XFDRaven -1 points0 points1 point 16 years ago (13 children) | Copy Link

[–]cryptogirl 5 points6 points7 points 16 years ago* (4 children) | Copy Link

My point isn't that one should never use negative terms to describe hate groups (I understand the futility of such an exercise), rather, my point is that describing feminism as a hate group is inaccurate, and ultimately antithetical to the legitimate goals of men's rights.

That the more extreme discourses in men's rights vilify feminism in precisely the ways you list in your earlier comment is indicative of an anti-feminist "group serving bias" at work. While the existence of such a bias cannot prove that feminism is not a hate group, it should at very least give one pause.

The problem of proving that feminism is a hate group (I believe the burden should lie with accuser) is that we must first arrive at a mutually acceptable definition of "feminism." For example, if one uses the dictionary definition of feminism as "the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes" then calling feminism a hate group is flatly inaccurate, even paradoxical. If, on the other hand, one defines "feminism" as the set of persons and organizations that have allied themselves with the term feminist, then the exercise necessarily becomes one of complex historical analysis, where each of us could raise examples and counter examples in support of our position, and each of us would likely walk away unconvinced.

Rather than trip down that rabbit hole, I come here as a real live feminist offering myself as evidence (not proof) that feminism is not hate group. You might argue that I am an exception, that I am not a "true" feminist, but my existence can at least disprove the hypothetical assertion (which you personally have not made) that "all self-described feminists hate men." I <3 men. QED :)

Perhaps it is because I am transgender that I so strongly oppose the problem described in the sixth item on your list: "[turning] the whole subject into a binary condition: you're one of us, or one of them." I've seen it from both sides, and experienced on a deeply personal level the negative effects of binary gender politics. I truly believe we can work together to change this kind of thinking. I see the increasing tolerance of trans people within feminism and men's rights as evidence that this change has already begun.

And if the movements for gender equality truly need boogeymen, let's make a common boogeyman of sexism.

[–]XFDRaven 5 points6 points7 points 16 years ago* (3 children) | Copy Link

So the disconnect between you and I is the means of how I categorize.

Pretty much any group (political or otherwise) will have a sales pitch description, but we all know that what people say does not always reflect their actions. Since truth in advertising is so rare I do not buy into it. I look at the actions of groups, see what they actually do and ignore what they say they are about. Actions speak louder than words if you will.

So when you browse /MR and you see all of the issues brought under the banner of feminism, hearing someone pipe up and associate themselves with feminism means (to me) they're okay with those things. So even if the individual is a good person, it's to their own detriment to associate with a group which we see doing harmful things. If this person wants feminism to be seen as a positive thing they have twice the work to do, first they have to work to undo the damage caused by their peers (per their own inclusion to that group) and then work for the positive things. Honestly that isn't even very fair, I wouldn't bother. If /MR hosted the people of /rape or similar I wouldn't associate with it. Good actions follow the people who do them, so by the way I think if you're not acting and simply following, you're associating with the behaviors of those who do the actions under whatever banner.

A loose example (and so I'll probably be shooting myself in the foot here) is if I give the following behaviors: - Unhinged spending - Blatant disregard for citizens privacy by things like the FISA act - Continuous Military Action in Foreign countries; Which political party am I describing? Two parties have "advertisement" descriptions which oppose these things, but which actually act in accordance with them? So if you associate with one of these groups you're associating yourself with those attributes.

So look at the policy, acts and behaviors of the people who carry the banner of Feminism. The ones who marginalize dissenters, the ones who say DV is only something women suffer, who say only men rape, etc, etc, etc. The intent of those messages earlier was to express that if you cannot call people out on their acts because they don't like those words, you've been deprived the capacity to disagree. You have to have the permission of the person in the higher status to use that owned language. That's a scarce privilege. Look at the gal from /2X that came into here. Didn't agree with her, and got personally attacked and marginalized to a hilarious extent. I didn't have the privilege to disagree and so she started crafting misleading and dishonest statements. Were we all in a room in person, I wouldn't be surprised if she'd try assaulting guys who disagreed with her.

All of the line-items on the list are bad things. But they are what groups do for political power. The continuous claim is that Feminism is a scattered array of tribes, becomes meaningless when those tribes reep the benefits gained by the "few radical" groups. It's disgusting that they'll disassociate when it's bad, and associate when it's good.

My thinking, which I base on my rolling of all feminists as members of the hate movement "feminism," is that if you're deriving benefit and specialized treatment you're carrying the same burdens for the negative actions used to get it. This is reinforced when people start looking at the non-existent number of feminists working to neutralize pro-woman laws to make them sex indifferent. Weight the actions and the conclusion draws the same conclusions as the benefits of men in earlier centuries. All that has happened is an exchange of the superior/inferior idea, equality is nowhere to be seen.

And it's still bugging me, so I want to apologize for the transgender example I used. In other discussions in the past, the only way I've found to get you to "get it" is tailoring the example to something that directly impacts you. I don't like it but it was necessary.

[–]cryptogirl 4 points5 points6 points 16 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

Well thanks for the apology, but I wasn't confused because your example didn't impact me directly (the Nazis killed LGBT folk too, remember). I was confused as to why you seemed to be raising the specter of political correctness in the context of my comment on anti-feminist bias in men's rights and the possibility of men's rights working together with feminism to achieve common goals. Please don't believe that you need to touch an emotional nerve with me in order for me to "get it." I'm actually a little offended that you think that is the case :(

Regarding your other points on feminism, I can only ask you to keep an open mind, and perhaps seek out a broader understanding of feminist history and theory than what's apparent "when you browse /MR and you see all of the issues brought under the banner of feminism." Believe it or not, feminism has done a lot of good, including laying the conceptual groundwork for the LGBT and men's rights movements that have followed in its wake.

We can and we should work together. Not only is it the right thing to do, it is strategically necessary. As long as mens rights continues to alienate itself from the very equality movements from which it has arisen, it will continue to be marginalized as a reactionary and extremist backlash. That's a losing strategy.

[–]XFDRaven 0 points1 point2 points 16 years ago* (1 child) | Copy Link

We can and we should work together. Not only is it the right thing to do, it is strategically necessary. As long as mens rights continues to alienate itself from the very equality movements from which it has arisen, it will continue to be marginalized as a reactionary and extremist backlash. That's a losing strategy.

For this, I simply cite Qeraeth's discussion with me. Personal attacks, marginalization, misandry and intellectual dishonesty, all for supporting the idea that Feminism is this good thing. She makes a textbook example of a stereotypical feminist. Why would I ever want to ally myself with such a person? How could such a person possibly be an ally to anyone of /MR? You don't win anything for your cause by inflicting damage upon yourself to make someone from the politically powerful class happy.

[–]Qeraeth -2 points-1 points0 points 16 years ago* (7 children) | Copy Link

Exactly why I'm wasting my time.

And exactly why you're soldiering on valiantly, good sir! To waste your time with yet more words!

What ho? Another Orwell reference!

Words which are plus good only and no words which may be unplus good.

Given your past statements about the evils of "PC"- which itself may be more properly called an Orwell-style neologism, a blanket term devoid of all meaning that is meant to close down ideologically unsound discussion- I'm seriously doubting the sincerity of your commitment to end bigotry.

Your assertion compares feminism to Nazism. Two things.

Be original. Seriously.
Your focus on how feminism has harmed (white, cis) men bespeaks to the very bias against any real equality you truly possess. Feminism's most grievous crimes of ideology were against transgender people and people of colour. Unlike with MRAs, however, there have been very forceful attempts at redressing this within feminism. To wit, the gender studies "Male Studies" seeks to segregate itself from has integrated queer and transgender studies into its curricula.

What you're attempting to say is that one cannot meaningfully discuss the oppression of men by feminism without saying misogynist things as well as plain ol' nasty things about feminism in general.

If that's your opinion, fair enough I suppose. But, ultimately, it's a bit fanciful and always has been. Feminism's sins were against those without political power. White cis men do not, by any stretch of the imagination, fall into that group.

Without irony you'd likely deride every minority group under the sun for "self victimising" (except cis men) and while one's head still spins, you'd just as easily dismiss something empowering or respectful as "political correctness" gone amok (no word yet on what that even means, one is just supposed to accept it on faith.) You deride emancipatory politics at the same time as you embrace it, the sole thread that barely holds these otherwise dissonant thoughts together is the idea that MR is a reaction against feminism. Empirically, this is true, but it is not imbued with the meaning you seek to give it. It's simply part of recent western history where the late 70s and early 80s saw a backlash of the privileged against the gains of the civil rights and women's movements; perhaps best epitomised by Reagan kicking off his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

One could go on. Its status as a backlash movement changes little, however. Politics is politics and in some sense all politics is reacting to something. We define our positions in society relative to others, and how we organise politically is no different.

For a bit of fun, however:

Clearly define your group in such a way as it can be easily differentiated from other groups. (We, the men, are oppressed, and we the MRAs can see the evil wrought upon us)
Determine a politically wealthy objective which the most common people can buy in to, at little to no personal cost to them. (We need to make men equal again because our rights have been taken away.)
Define a boogyman to pin the blame on. (Those rich feminists with all their government funding and their super secret control of the media and education and the government and and and...)
Refine the boogyman's attributes that they might touch upon certain people in the social pool. This begins the incentive to differentiate themselves from the scape-goat group. (We're interested in real equality, real gender equality! Not like feminazis who want special privileges and more rights than us men.)
Villify the scape-goat group by defining those in its group as a kind of socially or morally dirty class. (To quote you: "There is nothing to be gained in interacting with people from hate movements.")
Turn the whole subject into a binary condition: you're one of us, or one of them. (To quote your illustrious person again: "The best way to deal with a feminist is to have nothing to do with them to begin with.")

I'm aware one could then easily invert things again and say it's the story of feminism. "Men are the enemy" etc. But the qualitative difference is simple. In your comments you merely repeat dogma about feminism. Little else. Same old tired fearmongering. Plus a little gravy about the Million Man March that was rather sketchy. One wonders how you view contemporary black activists.

What's comical about Men's Rights Activism, in the main, is that the feminism it criticises is one that in my own varied experience with it, good and bad, does not seem to exist. It's a caricature, a fantasy that seems culled whole from a Rush Limbaugh radio broadcast and... repeated ad nauseam, in the hopes of burnishing its veracity one is to suppose.

It's an old joke, really.

Just like this:

Just like Chairman Mao and Kim Jon Il, etc.

Again, be original. Comparing your political opponents to Nazis and Communists is increasingly the mark of a bankrupt intellect. Trying to delegitimise a political view on the grounds of it being a political view while espousing a political view is also a meta-level of silliness, to be honest.

Really, I want to see something new here! Femidonuts, FemiChristianDemocrats, Femimaoist, maybe? Or how about comparing us to medieval Japanese Kamakura Era daimyo? You know the metaphors would be badass and write themselves. Think of the cred you'd gain for conjuring up new and exciting insults for feminism that breach whole new grounds of creativity and political insight!

Anyway, ::curtsies and returns to her Celtic inspired Goddess rituals and voodoo dolls:: I bid you good night, my lord.

[–]XFDRaven 6 points7 points8 points 16 years ago* (6 children) | Copy Link

Cutting out the personal attacks, the bulk of your response (besides being obtuse or plainly ignoring the point I was trying to get across to Cryptogirl) is that in essence either I am on your side or I am not. In doing so, you've basically validated my points I made earlier about feminism as being any other political movement. You have converted me into a convenient scape-goat, turned the vitriol to 11 and now set yourself up as the clean/pure/exemplary with myself as the other. Essentially this is the very stereotypical feminism that you described as "self criticizing" in your other post (not necessarily your words). So by what measure of insanity would I want to subject myself to this in person? I wouldn't. The best thing I could do were you in front of me and spoke of your opinions on feminism would be to dismiss myself and socialize with healthier individuals.

The fact that you link Cryptogirls' limitations on what I can use to describe feminism within the context that they like to misogyny is a perfect line item example of why a Feminist should be treated like a hazard - anything can be mutated into being misogynist and then attack it. It's a straw man method and it's very inviting for a basic argument even if it's a fallacy.

It is worth stating too: even if it's old, it doesn't make it invalid. Orwellian points and Godwin may be overused, tired and boring, but they are also (usually) very easy to at least get neurons firing on good/bad issues. Understand a position of the person you're discussing some subject with and then you can try to go somewhere; at least it's easier than dealing with a horribly ambiguous initial position. Sadly this backfired with Cryptogirl either being happily ignorant of the paradox created, or the message wasn't at all digestible with any segment of it.

Really, after I have reread your post a few times over, and each time stripping out the personal attacks and rather over-the-top positioning of feminist views as being something far more good than they are, you're really missing the whole of my points and substituting your own ideas. As one simple example the "comparing political opponents to Nazi's and communists." You're falsely stating that I'm declaring fascism to be equivalent to communism while that particular clip you're leveraging from was respective to your statement of feminism being good at self-analysis. The intent, purpose and point of my idea was to express that corrupt governments seldom are the best critics of their bad qualities. Just as one cannot see one's own back, if you're intent on such phrases.

On the subject of the million-man march re: rants, no I never got any hate messages or complaints. To receive any was never even something I considered as most people have been able to understand the intent on differentiate one group that wants equal rights for everyone and then a group that wanted special rights & treatment. It's a very easy test: if you exchange roles and it's still okay, it's equal, if it isn't okay then it isn't equal.

That's as much as I can coherently filter from the personal attacks you've made. As best as I can gather, the bulk of this was a reactionary post to seeing the touchy subject I pitched at Cryptogirl and read into it that I'm an anti-transgender person. If this is the case, please at least extend this much of a courtesy and let me know without snark. Regardless, if Cryptogirl is able to understand the paradox of my previous post it would be a great thing:If you're denied using words like hate, negative, manipulative, etc to describe groups which are hateful, negative and manipulative then you cannot describe those groups. It is being called to describe something, only to have the very language which can describe that thing be prohibited.

It is apparent that you have read through some of my history, so I'm curious that you haven't touched upon one point I also iterate in a "boring" and "unoriginal" manner: If feminism were to actually be egalitarian, MRA would simply not exist.

Edit: lots of editing because Reddit still doesn't have a preview option.

[–]Qeraeth -5 points-4 points-3 points 16 years ago* (5 children) | Copy Link

The best thing I could do were you in front of me and spoke of your opinions on feminism would be to dismiss myself and socialize with healthier individuals.

Mmm hmm...

the personal attacks you've made.

Cutting out the personal attacks,

So, which is it? Personal attacks take away from and obscure an argument or they're fair game to use?

Yes, my comment was overloaded with snark because that's the level of seriousness your conception of political reality deserves to be treated with. In order to make your theory work, you need to speak of feminism as if it's The Feminism: The One and Only. Contiguous and whole, it is one with its own ideology. Yet you provide no examples of this mythical united feminism.

The reality of feminism is that it is diffuse, diverse, largely without the ability to concentrate its power in a focused way, and 'led' (in the loosest sense of the term) by a diverse array of individuals many of whom either don't know each other or don't agree with each other. NOW is not feminism en toto, nor is Ms. Magazine. Nor is the given women/gender studies department at a school representative of every such department everywhere. It is, in many ways, a libertarian's dream. A bunch of self directing, independent social networks that somehow form a theoretical whole.

But the reality is more complex than the theory. Feminism is Feminisms, and so when you say feminism is hate speech- in the tautological way you do (i.e. it's hate because it's hate. QED) one has to ask: which feminism? Whose feminism? When was this feminism? Where was this feminism?

But that complicates your model. It makes things too grainy. Better to pretend that Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, Janice Raymond, Julia Serano, Judith Butler, Lou Sullivan, Mary Daly, Nancy Chodorow, Emi Koyama etc. etc. etc. all said exactly the same things and all agreed, sitting around a big happy table of Unified Feminism to fight Da Man inside their hot pink Death Star.

But the fact is that feminism is as defined by its broad and often acrimonious debates as it is by its commitment to equality. Arguments about what feminism is and who it belongs to rage like an endless fire, and in the last 25 years arguments about what "woman" even is (and "man" and "gender" etc.) have become pressing and urgent.

But all this needs to be suffocated, elided, and ignored. Because you've got a theory, dagnabbit. The theory that there is The Feminism and it is Haet.

The fact that you link Cryptogirls' limitations on what I can use to describe feminism within the context that they like to misogyny is a perfect line item example of why a Feminist should be treated like a hazard - anything can be mutated into being misogynist and then attack it. It's a straw man method and it's very inviting for a basic argument even if it's a fallacy.

Right. Watch this.

... limitations on what I can use to describe Men's Rights within the context that they like to misandry is a perfect line item example of why an MRA should be treated like a hazard - anything can be mutated into being misandrist and then attack it. It's a straw man method and it's very inviting for a basic argument even if it's a fallacy.

In this discussion I have not, admittedly, substantiated why anti-feminism is often misogynist. So I'm not going to hammer that home as it'd require books of its own to explain and simply stick to the fundamental point: Feminism as a Hate Group is simply inaccurate. Period. You would have to show that its many diverse sub-feminisms and collectives are all, all tied together by an ideology of hatred of men that is more or less uniform, enforced from the top down on pain of sanction, and is systematised and unified.

You know, like the dictatorships you keep laughably comparing a diffuse left wing liberation movement to.

You can argue that a particular feminist person is hateful, or a particular collective, group, rally, or whatever is hateful. But there are far too many variables in feminism as a whole for your totalising statement to be taken seriously.

the bulk of this was a reactionary post to seeing the touchy subject I pitched at Cryptogirl and read into it that I'm an anti-transgender person.

I did not say you were.

I said that if mainstream feminism is possessed of sins at many levels of its diverse operations it is transphobia- as well as racism and whorephobia (pursuant to its ongoing battles with sex workers, another issue MRAs give a toss about). And it is these groups to whom people who identify as feminists (though by no means feminism as a whole or all feminists) have done a good deal of harm. This is never a part of MRA criticism of feminism, which is part of the privilege the entire MR movement represents.

If feminism- especially its more organised wing (NOW et al.) and its academic incarnations- has a problem it is largely in its whiteness and middle class perspective, which bedevils it to this day. At least more people are conscious of it and working on it, but it's a struggle. Again, this very complex and painful reality is entirely elided in your 'analysis.'

If feminism were to actually be egalitarian, MRA would simply not exist.

This is, again, tautological.

It assumes a cosmic truth about politics, that if a movement were truly and objectively Good, then no opposition to it would ever appear. This is, in a word, absurd. Every movement, no matter how virtuous, has its foes. Your line of reasoning suggests that if minorities in America were truly egalitarian, the KKK would not exist. Or that if LGBT people were truly egalitarian, the Family Research Council and the WBC would not exist.

It's silly and if that is your idea of a profound philosophical truth I'm sorry to tell you that the drawing board awaits.

To take yet another example it's like saying if only Obama weren't a Socialist Nazi there would be no Tea Party movement.

Reality is more complex. People see what they want to see and react to what they want to see. Sometimes they see a truth. Sometimes they espy a falsehood- in this case, you're in the latter camp. There is no great truth in anything you've said. Feminism could be as egalitarian as the day is long and people threatened by it would organise and coalesce, period.

As a side note:

no I never got any hate messages or complaints.

I... didn't ask if you did.

If you're denied using words like hate, negative, manipulative, etc to describe groups which are hateful, negative and manipulative then you cannot describe those groups.

Sure. If one can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that those are absolutely operative terms. You've not done that. You expect me and everyone to take it on faith that feminism is unitary and built entirely on hatred. You can point to individual examples of said hate, and yet so can I. It does not render the whole enterprise moot. That's also a logical fallacy.

In short you still haven't escaped the trap I outlined in my much funnier previous post:

Trying to delegitimise a political view on the grounds of it being a political view while espousing a political view is also a meta-level of silliness, to be honest.

[–]XFDRaven 8 points9 points10 points 16 years ago* (0 children) | Copy Link

The best thing I could do were you in front of me and spoke of your opinions on feminism would be to dismiss myself and socialize with healthier individuals. Mmm hmm... So, which is it? Personal attacks take away from and obscure an argument or they're fair game to use?

If you're slagging personal insults and attacks about, that isn't a healthy thing. You don't get to pick and choose when to apply it and when not to.

...Yet you provide no examples of this mythical united feminism.

It must be nice to claim to be so fragmented that it's always "not me" or "not my group," but if all of the factions get the benefits from the derived works of a few do not expect me or others to buy into Ala Carte Feminist movements -- this isn't privitize the risk, socialize the rewards. If you want examples of this "mythical feminism," spend some time reading /MR, but picking and choosing what is and isn't feminist to suit your needs and only when it's in your favor is dishonest and nothing more.

This is, again, tautological.

If this is rhetoric, then you are (at least as you're presenting yourself) not recognizing a reaction to a growing list of problems with something. To say that "if Minorities were egalitarian then the KKK would not exist" is misleading nor is it what I said, but if you actually read what I say to mean this then I have some understanding where the communication divide is. Minorities did not come into being as a response to the KKK/Aryn Nation/Etc. Given the prior post's flood of personal attacks it's very hard to not read this as being intentionally misleading.

Teabagger idiocy is irrelevant to this discussion.

Reality is more complex. People see what they want to see and react to what they want to see. Sometimes they see a truth. Sometimes they espy a falsehood- in this case, you're in the latter camp. There is no great truth in anything you've said. Feminism could be as egalitarian as the day is long and people threatened by it would organise and coalesce, period.

This is all kinds of dishonest. I espy a falsehood? You have personally validated most of my point on how feminists operate. Since I am not a blind follower to you, I'm a misogynist. Separate one from the other, turn them into a monster. The entirety of your writing has been dismissive and an attempt to marginalize me; take the monster and then further differentiate. I have not seen the level of marginalization you've applied to me in years, and worse still it's the kind I saw used to dismiss women.

Sure. If one can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that those are absolutely operative terms. You've not done that. You expect me and everyone to take it on faith that feminism is unitary and built entirely on hatred. You can point to individual examples of said hate, and yet so can I. It does not render the whole enterprise moot. That's also a logical fallacy.

If feminism has been about equality, then it should obviously work on men's issues as well. If feminism is not behind the misandrist policies that you see in the UK, Australia and the US among others, who is and why hasn't feminism been treating it as an issue and using it's political power to work against those factors? The principal misunderstanding is that I do not expect you to take it on faith that feminism is unitary and built entirely on hatred. I don't expect anything of you, especially when you've come in to this subreddit and turned it into a grand trolling playground. Were I to actually hope you were neutral to the whole scope of the subject, it would have been lost the instant you started walking through this making personal attacks.

Trying to delegitimise a political view on the grounds of it being a political view while espousing a political view is also a meta-level of silliness, to be honest.

This is misleading, the issues are the political policies which have been put in place by those political views. When people get screwed over by those new policies, they'll react to that. You're now grouping them into an opposing view as if they've always been there.

[–]YouDontPass 3 points4 points5 points 16 years ago (3 children) | Copy Link

[–]Gareth321 7 points8 points9 points 16 years ago* (75 children) | Copy Link

[–]Sandaasu 23 points24 points25 points 16 years ago (60 children) | Copy Link

[–]Gareth321 5 points6 points7 points 16 years ago (51 children) | Copy Link

[–]kanuk876[🍰] 7 points8 points9 points 16 years ago (3 children) | Copy Link

[–]Gareth321 7 points8 points9 points 16 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

[–]kanuk876[🍰] 4 points5 points6 points 16 years ago* (1 child) | Copy Link

[–]Gareth321 1 point2 points3 points 16 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]Qeraeth 0 points1 point2 points 16 years ago (46 children) | Copy Link

It was inciteful.

As I said, I substantiated the comparison. No one's really explaining why it was a bad comparison (i.e. demonstrating how ID differs dramatically from Male Studies [note, not Men's Studies] in so wide a qualitative manner that it's clear I was being needlessly inflammatory.)

She omitted the fact that feminism began as a reactionary movement

Yes and no. It's a little more complicated than that.

As always though, the focus is on feminism's "reaction" to white cis men. Not it's much more troublesome concerns with women of colour, trans people, etc. And that isn't something I omit. I, in fact, mention that very regularly.

men's studies.

Men's Studies has been a part of gender studies curricula for a while now and is indeed maturing like other new additions to the panopoly of gender studies.

Male Studies- i.e. something else entirely- is the political trojan horse. You say "prevent the study" from becoming reactionary, implying it isn't already; yet it has all the hallmarks of being another right wing attempt at trying to promote their worldviews in the academy, like conservative Americans promoting revisionist history or (again) the teaching of ID as possessing equal weight to the theory of evolution.

[–]yangtastic 16 points17 points18 points 16 years ago* (35 children) | Copy Link

It's a bad comparison because the MRA stuff I see cites the Census Bureau and the CDC to explode the myth of the wage gap and the monolithic vision of DV as pure wife-beating, as opposed to the NOW website, which tends to cite more problematic sources, like the "Institute for Women's Policy Research," or the "American Association of University Women." Hell, even the DoJ statistics on DV are shit compared to the CDC numbers if we look even cursorily at the chilling effect of societal expectations of men to "not be a pussy". It's a lot easier to tell some researcher from the CDC that your woman smacks you around than a large Polish watch sergeant.

It's bad because feminism is pure sociology, whereas the MRA stuff I see is interdisciplinary. Try basic economics, as NOW alumnus Warren Farrell did in Why Men Earn More... "If a company could really get the exact same value out of hiring women for 78 cents on the dollar... why wouldn't some company somewhere hire all women, cut their labor costs by TWENTY-TWO PERCENT, and drive their competition out of business?" There's no good answer to the question, and the Census data backs Farrell up. It's marriage and babies, not discrimination, that drive the wage gap. (Of course, according to the American Association of University Women's sample, as reported by NOW, this isn't true. I mean, it's the goddamn Census, but who's counting?) Or try evolutionary biology... What, exactly, is adaptive about wife-beating as a common trait? How is this any way to run a culture OR a species?

As for your naked assertion that the male suicide rate is well known, substantiated by... what, government statistics? They just prove the fact of the matter, which I'm glad you don't dispute. Men kill themselves more in every country except China, and NOBODY GIVES A SHIT. Fuck statistics reflecting the reality; that has no bearing on public awareness. I just Googled "male suicide," and got 2,290,000 hits. Google "female suicide," and I pull up 3,390,000. Consciousness-raising is absolutely in order here. Now, do I think the China numbers are a serious indicator of how much it sucks to be a woman in China? Absolutely. Do I think the numbers will ever be 50-50? Hell no. Men will always kill themselves more than women, and teenage boys even more so. It's not a matriarchal conspiracy, it's testosterone. That doesn't mean we should take it for granted. That doesn't mean we shouldn't care. The Google results indicate that we don't, or at least that our caring is not proportional to our reality.

WHY do men kill themselves more than women? Hey, rich people kill themselves more than poor people. Hmm. HEY, men tend to make more money than women do! I wonder if maybe there's a connection there. I wonder if society's requirement of male financial viability has anything at all to do with the pressure to off oneself. What about poor men? Why don't they kill themselves? Well, who's the poorest of the poor? Oh right, the homeless who are... disproportionately men. Do they need to kill themselves, or are they already casually ground under against their will by the cogs of civilization?

But really, fuck you and your pretense of intellectual superiority and objectivity. Fuck your talk of "white, cis" men. Come back when you accept that "feminism" is no more of a gender-neutral term than "chairman" and you're ready to leave the sociology building and take a walk across campus. Only one question matters:

Are gay men born gay, wired that way, or do they choose and construct that gender identity?

Spin your answer carefully. Talk a whole lot about the effects of environment. Don't make any commitments that might trap you into saying that gender is anything more than a social construct.

In the meantime, the rest of us have seen the cadavers and PET scans. You go on thinking you're so fucking smart and the poor "white, cis" Neaderthals don't know who Judith Butler is, and that millions of years of evolution are all some conservative patriarchal conspiracy.

You have fun with that, now. In the meantime--we're not making this shit up--children are killing themselves.

[–]hopeless_case 10 points11 points12 points 16 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]Feckless 4 points5 points6 points 16 years ago (3 children) | Copy Link

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points4 points 16 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

[–]Feckless 1 point2 points3 points 16 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

Suicide vs. attempted suicide

There are roughly 30,000 suicides in the United States each year, and three-fourths of those are men. But the number of attempted suicides is at least 10 times that, and even that estimate may be low because many suicide attempts are euphemistically classified as lacerations or accidental poisonings when patients receive treatment in hospital emergency rooms. Although suicide rates are lower among women, women lead men two to one in suicide attempts. So, George E. Murphy, M.D., an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis says at least 200,000 women are involved in suicide attempts annually. But he points out that attempted suicide most often is not an attempt to actually end one's life. Its purpose, he says, is to survive with changed circumstances.

"An attempted suicide is not really an attempt at suicide in about 95 percent of cases. It is a different phenomenon. It's most often an effort to bring someone's attention, dramatically, to a problem that the individual feels needs to be solved. Suicide contains a solution in itself," he says.

In attempted suicide, both men and women tend to use methods that allow for second thoughts or rescue. Murphy says that when people intend to survive, they choose a slowly effective, or ineffective, means such as an overdose of sleeping pills. That contrasts to the all-or-nothing means like gunshots or hanging used by actual suicides.

In the past, researchers who looked at the high rate of attempted suicide in women concluded that women were just not as efficient as men at taking their own lives. Murphy calls that "sexist baloney" and points to statistics that show that like men, women who commit suicide most often use guns. However, even as the number of women using the most lethal means increases, the suicide rate in women has slowly declined.

"So it really goes back to the same thing -- that women, when they intend to do it, can be just as effective as men in committing suicide. But they aren't so inclined," Murphy says. -> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/11/981112075159.htm

[–]hopeless_case 0 points1 point2 points 16 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points3 points 16 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

[–]yangtastic 0 points1 point2 points 16 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point2 points 16 years ago* (0 children) | Copy Link

atomicparrot 1 point 12 hours ago[-]

One's identity is linked with their external attributes, as well as their hormones and genes.

Yes, but as social animals - highly social animals with cultural constructs - we shape what it means to be a particular sex. Thats what gender is. Take the gay community for instance - you've got Bears, twinks, leather lovers, queens...all very different interpretations of the male gender. So Bears are big, usually fat and hairy - they tend to have a 'grunge' and 'outdoorsman' sort of thing going, so thats one interpretation of gender but their sex is male ....now Queeny gay guys are super effeminate, they wear flashy clothes, have super exaggerated emotions and personalities ...so thats another interpretation of gender but they're still male. Now it gets tricky, so you can be a gay guy and enjoy sex with bears and queens because you're attracted to their sex no matter how their interpretation of gender

These are really glossed over, but i hope that helps you understand.

As a last example.. this is a male member of the Wodaabe tribe in Africa http://gachara.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/wodaabe-charm-dancer-niger.jpg Thats their culture's ideal of the male gender vs. an American ideal of male gender http://www.westernpostersandprints.com/images/John%20Wayne%20Cowboy%20Poster.jpg They're very different - but they're the same sex

EDIT:

We need something like a successful civilization in which it was not the role of most men to assume a greater amount of risk than most women. Can you furnish me with one?

Certainly - most of history furnishes you with examples of civilizations where most men took as much risk as most women. Lets look at medieval Europe (for a decent primer I'd recommend Hollister's "Medieval Europe: A Short History). Most people were peasants. Peasants shared the toils of farming in kind - there was never a time when peasant women sat around in the peasant hut while the peasant man did all the work. So, for much of their lives men and women shared the same experiences - war is an aberration and even then both male and female peasants would run for the protection of their lords (the notion of a common-man army wasn't born in Europe until much later, so the fighting was done by the top 10% and they certainly didn't represent "most" men)

So, by and large - yea, agricultural societies have shared risk, and if anything women had more risk by virtue of their biology, they lived far shorter lives than men during these times, death in child birth was common.

[–]cryptogirl 4 points5 points6 points 16 years ago (26 children) | Copy Link

[–]yangtastic 3 points4 points5 points 16 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

I appreciate that you bring your game in good faith, crypto, even though I almost always disagree with you.

Here's the thing. If we're literally talking about the same work, just at a lower price, that's not sex discrimination. It's just that a particular demographic is willing to accept a lower wage because the Patriarchy has mind-fucked them or whatever. A company could also hire enough gay male black Jews to make such a discrimination suit more difficult. Maybe it cuts the labor cost advantage to only 18%. That's still enough to rape and pillage your competition.

If the wage gap were true, if equal work REALLY were available for the same pay, people would take advantage of it, and you'd be able to track its impact on the labor market.

As for your overseas stuff, my ears are open, but I'll need to see a source.

[–]cryptogirl 3 points4 points5 points 16 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

I appreciate that you bring your game in good faith, crypto, even though I almost always disagree with you.

Likewise :)

Here's the thing. If we're literally talking about the same work, just at a lower price, that's not sex discrimination.

What I'm actually talking about is a hypothetical company that refuses to hire men (in order to suppress wages, or for whatever reason). That's sex discrimination, and it helps explain why Ferrell's scenario doesn't happen as often as we might expect if such protections weren't in place.

It's just that a particular demographic is willing to accept a lower wage because the Patriarchy has mind-fucked them or whatever.

Mind-fucks aside, I think it's important to note that employers and potential employees do not have equal bargaining power when it comes to wage negotiations, especially when we're talking about low skill occupations. Folks on the edge of poverty generally take what they can get, and don't have the luxury of waiting around till a bet offer comes along. Laying the blame for the wage gap solely at the feet of individual workers ignores the power of employers as a class to define the contours of the labor market.

As for your overseas stuff, my ears are open, but I'll need to see a source.

There's some good stuff here, if you're interested.

[–]kanuk876[🍰] 0 points1 point2 points 16 years ago (23 children) | Copy Link

[–][deleted] 1 point2 points3 points 16 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]cryptogirl 1 point2 points3 points 16 years ago (21 children) | Copy Link

[–]Feckless 3 points4 points5 points 16 years ago (20 children) | Copy Link

I doubt that, just to give some points of data

Women who work part-time earn more money than men that work part time
Single women without children earn more than single men without children

Translation, or what I do think is happening, when women focus on their careers they make more money than men (this is overly happening in NY (and some other big cities) where women on average earn more than men. When a couple has children, more often than not, women stay at home and later get a profitable part time job.

I personally do believe empowering fathers, so to speak, would do more to decrease the wage gap than affirmitve action, that is why I am very suprised feminist do not do more in that direction.

That is kind of the common ground between Fathers right activists and feminists. Just the other site of the coin.

[–]cryptogirl 1 point2 points3 points 16 years ago (17 children) | Copy Link

[–]purplemonkeys 0 points1 point2 points 16 years ago* (1 child) | Copy Link

[–]Makkaboosh 7 points8 points9 points 16 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]shapechanger 4 points5 points6 points 16 years ago (7 children) | Copy Link

No one's really explaining why it was a bad comparison (i.e. demonstrating how ID differs dramatically from Male Studies [note, not Men's Studies] in so wide a qualitative manner that it's clear I was being needlessly inflammatory.)

What you said is:

legitimise in the academy an already dominant cultural conception of manhood that is trumpeted from every other corner of society.

Which doesn't make any sense at all to me. There are pretty clear conceptions of womanhood that I see no more or less often in society than conceptions of manhood, but I admit I have no statistics or such to prove it one way or the other. However, even if we assume you're right, and conceptions of manhood are more widely spread and endorsed, I don't see how it's strictly a positive thing. I would, without a doubt, say that there is far, far more pressure in modern society on men to act "manly" than there is for woman to act "womanly". Females get the slip on a lot of cultural norms; the first example of which that comes to my mind is that a boyish girl is just a tomgirl and not too much to fret about, but a girlish boy means there's something horribly wrong with him, and is almost never acceptable.

[–]Qeraeth 0 points1 point2 points 16 years ago (5 children) | Copy Link

Females get the slip on a lot of cultural norms

Treated in a different way, perhaps, but we do not 'get the slip.' Indeed, for a woman to be masculine and successful in society's view requires something of a tightrope walk where a woman must not be too masculine lest she be understood purely as a 'cold bitch', as well as in touch with her innate femininity so she can still be a good mother or perform other emotional labour.

would, without a doubt, say that there is far, far more pressure in modern society on men to act "manly"

Yes. And why is that the case? Why is anything feminine or womanly anathema to men? Not because it's so awesome or too good for them, but because it is beneath them. At this juncture lies the heart of much homophobia as well- there's a reason gay men are more prominent targets thereof.

but a girlish boy means there's something horribly wrong with him, and is almost never acceptable.

You're exactly right.

Some feminists have been trying to change that. The idea that men must be pressured into one size fits all manhood and that womanhood of any sort be ghettoised by femmephobia is not something that pleases either myself or most of the feminists I personally know.

The very phenomenon you're outlining, in all its myriad incarnations, is actually something that represents the single biggest overlap between men's rights activism and feminism. The trouble is that manliness, in its hegemonic and hypermasculine incarnation, is promoted by a lot of MRAs as an assailed ideal to which male pride must again aspire. Not all, certainly. But it baffles me that this issue, a constant fixture in many modern feminist academic discussions, is seen as something to disprove the veracity of all feminist ideals.

Oppressive systems are funny things. No unequal power system fully and equally rewarded the members of the in-group. Such systems are developed with a diversity of intents, but are not built from the ground up as part of a conscious and ongoing conspiracy. That simply isn't how such systems work and it's precisely why they're clunky and untidy. Many men do very poorly under patriarchy, for reasons listed up and down this thread.

[–]Feckless 1 point2 points3 points 16 years ago (4 children) | Copy Link

Why is anything feminine or womanly anathema to men? Not because it's so awesome or too good for them, but because it is beneath them.

I don't think social pressure works that way. If a boy/man wants to do something unmanly I am sure whe does not do it because "it is a girl thing" he does not do it because he fears societies reaction to him. This comment came over a bit misandric. As if gays don't come out of the closet because "Fucking men is for girls".

The trouble is that manliness, in its hegemonic and hypermasculine incarnation, is promoted by a lot of MRAs as an assailed ideal to which male pride must again aspire.

I don't even doubt this, I see a fair share of traditionalism when looking through MRA groups which means the angry random white men (someone I wouldn't necessarily call MRA), but could you name some (3-4) mainstream MRAs that hold such views?

[–]Qeraeth 4 points5 points6 points 16 years ago (3 children) | Copy Link

This comment came over a bit misandric.

With all due respect you have got to be kidding.

As if gays don't come out of the closet because "Fucking men is for girls".

No. Leaving aside the LGBT intersectionality for a second, the way social pressure works here is that, yes, he fears society's reaction to him. But that knowledge does not exist in a vacuum. He knows he's not supposed to do anything that can be spun as girly, gay, or feminine. To be effeminate or to be otherwise unmanly is unforgiveable because for a man to be 'womanly' is an affront.

The effect is oppressive. But one can't do anything about it if one does not try to understand where it's coming from.

As to why gay men don't come out of the closet, it's for the same reason many LGBT people fear doing so in certain contexts. What I was trying to argue, however, was that the level of homophobia directed against gay men in particular is not an accident. We fetishise lesbian women due to societal objectification of women (they become hate figures once they stop being conventionally heteronormative and attractive, however). But a gay man, even a heteronormative and conventionally attractive one, is seen as betraying his manhood in the worst possible way: potentially making himself "the woman" in sexual relationships. i.e. the one who gets fucked rather than the one doing the fucking.

I apologise for the coarse language and I hope no offence is given, but it's required to make a point about what it is that makes people so uneasy about gay men and lies at the root of much that is homophobic. The pervasive fear of being associated with the feminine is a driving force behind much that is oppressive to men.

It seems unreasonable to say or suggest that it's merely coincidence that femininity is most often what is taboo to men.

but could you name some (3-4) mainstream MRAs that hold such views?

It's a bit hard to determine who is and isn't mainstream in any gender movement. The one that springs to mind right away is Jack Donovan who, while himself gay, has a rather roundabout way of conceiving it and is massively transphobic; he believes feminists are trying to destroy male identity by criminalising traditional manhood. As to others I've seen, the names escape me. Comments on blogs, on Reddit, and so forth, which perhaps you'd write off as not really MRAs (even if some self identified as such). The man who wrote "The Misandry Bubble", whose name also eludes me, is another that comes to mind; how mainstream he is, I don't know.

[–]Feckless -1 points0 points1 point 16 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

It seemed to me you confused the bully with the person that is bullied ("That guy looks like a girl" vs "I don't have long hair because I fear I will be seen as less of a man....sigh").

The fear of the feminine you are describing is something I would describe as a fear of the other. You act as if the only one bullying would be men, yet women hold up those stereotypes as well. And go a little bit back in time and suddenly we have "women don't wear trousers only men do". The way I see it, we had an empowerment, a liberation of women which was a good thing, but now, we (men) want that, too. Well at least I do.

It's a bit hard to determine who is and isn't mainstream in any gender movement.

But doesn't that mean it is a bit unfair to declare that

manliness, in its hegemonic and hypermasculine incarnation, is promoted by a lot of MRAs as an assailed ideal to which male pride must again aspire

I mean look, it isn't that I can't find "crazy radical feminists" in

Comments on blogs, on Reddit, and so forth

but wouldn't it be dishonest if I use those examples to paint most feminists as crazy manhaters by those crazies on the internet?

[–]Qeraeth 6 points7 points8 points 16 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

The fear of the feminine you are describing is something I would describe as a fear of the other.

Generalising the problem will obviate its solutions. Why is it that so much that is taboo to men is that which is labelled "feminine"? That is not a coincidence.

You act as if the only one bullying would be men, yet women hold up those stereotypes as well.

Never said that either. Nor does it disprove what I'm saying.

I've written countless times about how women act as handmaidens of patriarchy. Oppressive/unequal systems require such collusion or else they cannot stand. The legitimacy conferred by such participation is invaluable, and their labour is required to support the system at any rate (lest we forget, women's groups opposed to suffrage were not uncommon in the past, even as recently as the mid 20th Century in Switzerland).

Women participate in policing masculinity too. How does that erase the reality of femmephobia?

I've outlined numerous times how both women and some feminists have participated in the devaluing of the feminine and bought into the patriarchal ideal that masculinity is its superior.

That Faustian bargain made by Second Wave feminists ensured that what actually happened was not liberation. As a woman you have to juggle masculinity and femininity, and stigmas still exist on both ends. Because we still see one as superior to the other and see masculinity as biologically innate to men (and femininity innate to women), what women are experiencing is really a new phase of gender role trouble.

It's not as simple as "we're allowed to be manly now and can do whatever we want!"

but wouldn't it be dishonest if I use those examples to paint most feminists as crazy manhaters by those crazies on the internet?

Everyone here is defending Male Studies which promotes precisely what I was describing. No, not all MRAs think the same, but many tend to take a very oppositional stance to feminism, seeing it as sexist and indeed The Enemy. Moderate or radical, MRA is by and large a revenge fight against feminism, which to my mind makes working on the problems of men a very difficult proposition, to say the least.

This grew out of the idea that feminists were man hating matriarchs, as was promoted regularly in the media. As I pointed out before, the term "feminazi" was not the rebel yell of an oppressed man at a protest rally, but of a fabulously wealthy white male with a radio show and ready access to the powerful.

What I very rarely see are MRAs who really want to work with feminism. I think Gareth is the only one I've met who uses that language.

[–]Feckless 0 points1 point2 points 16 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]Gareth321 1 point2 points3 points 16 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

No one's really explaining why it was a bad comparison

1) Intelligent design is commonly held as an illogical belief. It's used as a derrogatory mechanism for those who don't adhere to academic rigor. Therefore, the comparison equates men's studies with illogical beliefs and poor scientific method.

2) The antithesis of intelligent design is evolution. One adheres to science, one to faith. By equating men's studies to this religious ideology, you set up the false dichotomy of science/religion ~ women's studies/men's studies.

Regarding men's studies within gender studies; I think you and I both know the traditional focus of these course. The neutrality exists in name alone. Once again you tell me the study is reactionary, so I remind you that feminism began as reactionary, and then matured. You should afford men's studies the same respect or you may appear hypocritical.

[–]Qeraeth 2 points3 points4 points 16 years ago (7 children) | Copy Link

I'm sorry, but when one of the first points is to try to equate the concept that men need protection too with intelligent design, it's really hard to see that person as logical going forward.

And I'm sorry but that's not what I said.

I equated "Male Studies" specifically with the intelligent design movement in a way that I substantiated fairly well. I did not equate the protection of men, or the concept thereof with ID and it's quite dishonest to suggest I did. As for any equation of 'protection of men' and 'Male Studies', I also argued against the symmetry of purpose in the two ideas.

I never said men nor masculinity had no place in gender studies. I just argued that "Male Studies" (that thing in particular, as discussed in the article, not the study of men in society in general) is pseudo social science.

[–][deleted] 6 points7 points8 points 16 years ago (6 children) | Copy Link

[–]Qeraeth 2 points3 points4 points 16 years ago* (4 children) | Copy Link

Comparing something intellectual to ID is like comparing something moral/political to Nazism.

That's a rather circuitous Godwin. ::winks:: It is a valid comparison and I did substantiate it well. There is ample reasonable discussion about men's issues; this is, again, very much like right wing Christians who assert that we ought to 'teach the controversy' and that their freedom of speech, etc, is being suppressed. Precisely the same set of tactics that misappropriate the concept of free speech and ignore the fact that what is unscientific doesn't belong in a science classroom (though it can be freely preached elsewhere).

What the "Male Studies" group wants to do is unacademic, but they are very free to avail themselves of the many avenues given in our society to promote a populist vision of macho masculinity as well as to prop up the conventional wisdom of biological essentialism for gender roles. Not to mention the dollops of pseudoscientific nonsense that get wide play in ever major media outlet despite serious doubts from biologists about the applicability of such studies.

I established my points very clearly, I do not feel my comparison to ID was especially emotive in that context. There is a clear similarity in tactics- the attempt to force conservative and already-dominant ideology into the one place that's providing alternative viewpoints, the academy. Just as Christians in certain parts of the country, not content with having a cultural hegemony in their states and regions, must ensure every science teacher is also promoting their views, despite it being the one place that a child might have a chance at learning something new.

So yes, at the end of the day it is about freedom of speech and freedom of thought. Male Studies is superfluous, it's teaching what we're already taught by society about masculinity.

[–]Feckless 0 points1 point2 points 16 years ago (3 children) | Copy Link

Here I find myself in an ideological camp where a group with a different ideology screams "WE HAVE THE RIGHT BELIEVE BURN THOSE BLASPHEMERS!!!11!!!".

To cut to the point

There is ample reasonable discussion about men's issues

I assume this is about the already existant men's studies. The problem I have with men's studies is that it views men primarily through a feminist lens. To cite Franklin

Male Studies will be the study of men and boys that finally tosses aside the feminist lens. To claim - as all the publications do - that Male Studies is superfluous because it's already being done, is to assert that males can only be understood via feminist precepts. It is to claim that feminist perspective is not merely necessary, but sufficient to the study of men and boys.

Which is of course ridiculous. What I also do not understand, is the backlash this course is getting before it even started. You tell us time and time again that feminism is more about feminisms, that feminists are the biggest critiques of feminism that feminism is all about different point of views (and I assume discussion of those) yet add another point of view and suddenly we see tear filled eyes and witness a semi-huge backlash.

Why don't feminist understand this different point of view as a chance to grow? I mean, heck, those guys couldn't be bigger critiques of feminism than you guys already are right? Let us find out why fathers who want to see their kids are not really interested in equality feminism aspires.

What the "Male Studies" group wants to do is unacademic

To add another point. But you know what, women's studies are not necessarily undisputeable. There have been some dubios studies or activism ideas arround and I am pretty sure more than one academic asked themselve "Why do we need women's studies when we have sociology?" (this comes to mind which was linked in the XX post -> http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/viewContentItem.do?contentId=1656209&contentType=Article )

And now straight to the defense:

A Critical Reassessment of Comprehensive Feminist Social Theory [...] This thesis is a critical reassessment of the ontological and normative assumptions of four social theories with specific and clear claims of being feminist. These are Catharine M MackInnon’s Radical Feminism, Anna G Jonasdottir’s Theory of Love Power, Luce Irigaray’s Feminism of Sexual Difference and Judith Butler’s Queer Feminism. [...] ** The thesis concludes that it is highly problematic to do science feministly, but that we do need the critical questions feminists raise in order to reevaluate concepts, theories and research priorities. It is argued that feminist social theories are perhaps most helpful as ideological guidance for political action. **

And here we are again, right on the money. I don't necessarily want to have a oppression-olympics kind of discussion with you, but without a doubt points that are raised by MRAs have a raison d'être and are not adressed by politics and are definately not as "right wing christian" as you want them to be. What I find very telling as your critique that you complain that MRAs see a united feminism as the enemy, ignoring the different feminisms and feminists disagreeing with each other and in the next sentences "Men's Rights = One big bad christian right wing baddy". Because all MRAs have the same opinions and are a large united group....Meh

[–]Qeraeth 4 points5 points6 points 16 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

What I also do not understand, is the backlash this course is getting before it even started. You tell us time and time again that feminism is more about feminisms, that feminists are the biggest critiques of feminism that feminism is all about different point of views (and I assume discussion of those) yet add another point of view and suddenly we see tear filled eyes and witness a semi-huge backlash

This isn't "another point of view." It is, rather, the point of view most prominently expressed about manhood in society. To be a traditionally masculine man is desirable, biology and evolution prove men and women have many predestined roles, etc. These are not marginalised viewpoints, they echo from the mouths of many pundits, columnists, and represent part of the conventional wisdom of many people outside of academia.

What I find very telling as your critique that you complain that MRAs see a united feminism as the enemy, ignoring the different feminisms and feminists disagreeing with each other and in the next sentences "Men's Rights = One big bad christian right wing baddy". Because all MRAs have the same opinions and are a large united group....Meh

I'm glad you brought this up.

The thrust of my critique has been primarily against "Male Studies". What I tried to identify elsewhere are unpleasant trends I have observed in Men's Rights Activism as a whole that either deny reality or identify legitimate problems but propose solutions that only exacerbate the issues at hand.

The other issue is that feminism has a much larger and longer canon of diverse thought than Men's Rights Activism, a relatively small reactionary movement that grew out of the 1980s, does. Many MRAs I've seen, at least on Reddit, identify as liberal. When I make comparisons to right wing movements it is to serve as a wake up call of sorts, to suggest that on certain issues some rather familiar and unpleasant trends keep coming up.

It is the same reason that I compare extremist anti-porn, anti-sex work and transphobic feminists to Fundamentalist Christians (arguments that'd give the men here such relish, I'm sure). It is to act as a warning and say "look at who you're starting to sound like."

My perception of MRA has been that there is a moderate wing and a very radical wing. I haven't seen the branching out of MR into a wide variety of fields like feminism has (which place another lens in front of the feminist one) and lead to things like eco-feminism, Marxist feminism, liberal feminism, queer feminism, womanism, feminist psychology, feminist anthropology, etc. etc. But I'm an outsider and I know my views may be oversimplified- are there various subgroups and organisations I'm missing here?

"Why do we need women's studies when we have sociology?"

Because until fairly recently sociology was male dominated and studied society from a purely male perspective, with little attention given to the other half of the population.

You may now ask, how is this different from gender studies? The answer is that at present gender studies as a whole (which is not all feminist) has many men involved in it writing on these issues. Several of the professors at my college's Women and Gender Studies department are men as well, of various experiences. But is a "feminist" lens as bad as having all women teaching the courses and doing all the writing?

A worthwhile question but I feel that the answer is no for two reasons.

The perspective is not so much feminist as it is socially scientific, particularly drawing from ethnomethodology and phenomenology (which gave rise to social constructivism). While you can certainly argue that social constructivism is academic feminism's BFF, I can't tell you how many times I've seen it used in reactionary ways. It's not an exclusively feminist viewpoint.
In addition to social constructivism the Lens incorporates economics, biology, other understandings of social science (functionalism and so on), etc.

So does feminism undergird many gender studies classes? To a good extent, yes. I don't think this is a bad thing; much of the progress we've made in understanding gender roles (up to and including masculinity and the double binds men find themselves in, their double standards, and their difficulties in this gender system) has come as a result of feminist understanding.

A class that represents a decidedly old fashioned and populist viewpoint on sex and gender is superfluous because it's overrepresented in our socialisation processes and in our culture in general.

The thesis concludes that it is highly problematic to do science feministly, but that we do need the critical questions feminists raise in order to reevaluate concepts, theories and research priorities. It is argued that feminist social theories are perhaps most helpful as ideological guidance for political action.

And thus you're demonstrating what I've said about the discussions going on within feminism and gender studies about their reasons for existing and the good they can do.

I don't even necessarily dispute the claims made in that conclusion. Watching the evolution of gender studies has been quite remarkable. I never said women's studies were undisputeable. All science, social and natural, is disputable. That's one of the characteristics of science, after all. ;) Much that was canon has been disputed, and even thrown out in some places- with more housecleaning to come.

Should Male Studies do the same? Well, what about Men's Studies is really so horrible? I've not heard anyone describe much that's occurred in classes on masculinities except in the vaguest of terms. They say Men's Studies looks at men through a feminist lens. Okay; why is that bad, what does that involve, is it really the only lens, why is it problematic?

[–]Feckless 1 point2 points3 points 16 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

I fail to see the connection between male studies and

This isn't "another point of view." It is, rather, the point of view most prominently expressed about manhood in society. To be a traditionally masculine man is desirable, biology and evolution prove men and women have many predestined roles, etc. These are not marginalised viewpoints, they echo from the mouths of many pundits, columnists, and represent part of the conventional wisdom of many people outside of academia.

Especially

biology and evolution prove men and women have many predestined roles

Maybe you know more about male studies as I do, where did you get that from?

Oh and to cite a fellow MRA on a similar topic:

The nature vs nurture debate is a seemingly endless source of controversy and discussion. Opinions range from biological determinism to the rejection of any meaningful impact by innate factors. This general discussion about what causes human behavior also has a more specific component; namely, how do we raise our children? Are boys boisterous creatures who need a mixture of running wild and strict discipline to become decent men? Or are girls and boys virtually the same, and it is simply our deeply ingrained habitual patterns that program them to take on the same old gender roles as always?

My take on these questions is that we don’t even need to know the answers to be able to raise a child, as long as we are open to whatever is emerging within the child. A young boy may behave like a typical boy, or he may behave nothing like a typical boy. The important task for us as adults is to accept the child, regardless of whether he or she fits into our preconceived notions of how they should behave. If a boy enjoys playing with a doll, do we have the guts to allow him to do so, or do we clearly demonstrate that this behavior is unwanted?

The important thing is that our openness needs to go both ways. Regardless of whether a young boy prefers playing with cars or dolls, the challenge for us is to support him in whatever is the organic development path for him. The same goes for girls of course. Staying open to the fact that each child is an individual, and not automatically a mirror image of what we expect a boy or girl to be, can be a real challenge.

All this said, research indicates that innate gender differences do exist, and that they do affect the behavior of young children. This has been shown several times in the past, and a fresh research report adds even more credibility to this body of knowledge. However, this knowledge about innate gender differences doesn’t really affect the principle I outline above. Treating each child as an individual is the best way to secure that the child gets the kind of socialization process that he or she needs. The end result will likely be that most boys play with cars, since there are genetic and hormonal drivers for this. However, some boys will prefer dolls most of the time, and some boys will want to play with dolls a smaller proportion of time. If we cannot accommodate the needs of these boys (or the girls that prefer playing with trucks), then what kind of people are we?

The ultimate answer to the nature vs nurture debate is as always that both matter. And the way to allow nature and nurture to combine in the most beneficial way for the child is to see the unique needs of each child. -> http://www.pellebilling.com/2010/01/gender-and-child-raising/

I'll adress the rest of your post tomorrow....good night!

[–]Feckless 1 point2 points3 points 16 years ago* (0 children) | Copy Link

My perception of MRA has been that there is a moderate wing and a very radical wing. I haven't seen the branching out of MR into a wide variety of fields like feminism has (which place another lens in front of the feminist one) and lead to things like eco-feminism, Marxist feminism, liberal feminism, queer feminism, womanism, feminist psychology, feminist anthropology, etc. etc. But I'm an outsider and I know my views may be oversimplified- are there various subgroups and organisations I'm missing here?

I am not even sure there is a radical wing as most of those radicals I see fall into the "crazies of the internet" category or traditional men's groups (christian fatherhood something in that direction). Also you have to keep in mind that everything that has to do with men's right is a pretty "new" movement so of course it is not as diverse as feminism as it is not that long arround. And similar to feminism you have the different personas and opinions, the progressive, the conservatives, father's right activists, masculists.

I've not heard anyone describe much that's occurred in classes on masculinities except in the vaguest of terms.

Yet you complain about male studies even though the same can be said about you? You even say you know exactly what is going on even though male studies didn't even start yet.

They say Men's Studies looks at men through a feminist lens. Okay; why is that bad, what does that involve, is it really the only lens, why is it problematic?

To cite you

sociology was male dominated and studied society from a purely male perspective, with little attention given to the other half of the population.

You might understand what the problems could be. I will get more into detail to cite wikipedia:

As a relatively new field of study, men's studies was formed largely in response to, and as a critique of, an emerging men's rights movement - itself a response to perceived advantages brought to women by feminist political action - and as such, has been taught in academic settings only since the 1970s. In many universities, men's studies is a correlate to women's studies or part of a larger gender studies program, and as such its faculty tends to be sympathetic to or engaged in feminist politics.

I could argue that men's studies was a backlash against men's rights which was perceived as backlash against feminism. To give an example on men's studies take Michael Kimmel, taken from an interview on feministing:

He is a Professor of Sociology at SUNY Stonybrook, where he teaches on gender and masculinity, and has taught and lectured all over the world.

Michael Kimmel: I announced to my partner one day that I was going to come and work at the shelter, and she said, "Well you can't. The only reason you even know where it is is that I don't drive a stick-shift, and you can't possibly come to work there." And I said, "I really want to do something about this." And she said, "I have an idea: Why don't you go talk to the men who beat the women up?" And looked at her, like, "Are you out of your mind? I don't want to go talk to them. I don't like them. They beat women up; they're bad guys." And she said, "Look, you have a natural constituency of half the human race. Go talk to them." So that was the moment that I committed myself to working with men. I worked with men who were court-mandated batterers for a while, and when I moved to Santa Cruz, I was a part of the founding of this organization, and then a few years later, I was part of the group of men who founded the National Organization of Men Against Sexism. [...] I still work with NOMAS and with other organizations. I worked as the organizer for this conference that's taking place in November, for campus-based gender equality and anti-violence groups, that will have groups coming in from all over the country and will also include representatives from all the major organizations that work with men on campuses like VMen and Men Can Stop Rape and MVP and the White Ribbon Campaign. [...] So the problem for feminists today is to simply maintain, and to keep their eyes on the prize, and not be seduced into conversations about false issues with people who really don't care about women's lives at all. For example, gender symmetry in domestic violence. I think we have to arm ourselves to have those kinds of conversations so that we can engage with people who say things like that, and somehow move the conversation elsewhere. So take the assertion that women hit men as often as men hit women. Rather than quibbling about it - and anyone who really looks at any data knows that's really not true - but let's just say it is true. You make that argument to me and say, "You know what, women hit men just as much as men hit women," and I'd say, "That's exactly right. And that's why we need to double all the funding nationwide for spousal abuse. We really have to double it, and we should campaign together. Especially because, if we have a whole bunch of better-funded programs for people who have been beaten by their spouses, then more of those men who you think are victims, who are so ashamed to come forward because it so damages their masculinity, will come forward because we'll have a place for them." [...] men haven't stepped up and aren't doing as much housework and childcare as women need them to do in order for women to be able to balance work and family. And my argument here is that the group that has to be embraced by feminism is men - although, I hasten to add that it's not your job. That should be our job. We should be doing that. [...] I think what we have to do is to show people that feminism is a win-win.

Don't you think the perspective that male victims of DV exist and need help is a valid one? Men's studies (at least as taught by Kimmel) does not offer us that perspective. His view is that men can stop violence against women, violence against men he apperently isn't concerned about. That position might be useful for feminism, but certainly it is not to look at male issues.

Or take Michael Flood for example and you get a similar world view. End men's violence, fight against father's groups, the harm of pornography all can be seen in his online mag XYonline.net. On top of that he features radical pro-feminist Julian Real who I really would put in the group of internet crazies ( http://www.reddit.com/tb/a0yz5 ).

This might be about feminism....but not about men.

[–][deleted] 3 points4 points5 points 16 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]hopeless_case 9 points10 points11 points 16 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

[–]kanuk876[🍰] 12 points13 points14 points 16 years ago* (5 children) | Copy Link

No.

Qeeraeth expertly mis-characterizes the need for and focus of an academic study of men's issues. Typical strategy to deflect, deny and ignore men's perspective.

For example:

Men's Studies and studies of masculinity have been a part of gender studies programs for some time.

yeah, studies of masculinity... from a feminist perspective.

If what she implies were true, Warren Farrell's books would not be unique or groundbreaking.

Duh.

I will remind you Farrell was a feminist who, upon listening and respecting men's perspective, was cast out of the feminist fold.

They're chiefly a part of a series of phenomena that have arisen in academia over the last two decades- along with queer theory- that have precipitated the shift from "Women's Studies" to "Gender Studies" or "Women and Gender Studies" (the latter being the title at my own school). But their relative academic novelty is not a reason to discount the value of these approaches.

I'd argue the renaming "women's studies" to "gender studies" reflects a normalization of the female perspective within society. The male perspective has been marginalized and suppressed to such a degree, feminists openly pretend that a male perspective doesn't even exist (let alone warrant investigation).

"Male Studies" is a bit like Intelligent Design

Oh god, here we go...no pun intended. <sigh>

Do I really have to dissect this?

Intelligent design was, er, designed to directly "disprove" evolution.

In rather stark and obvious contrast, many issues covered by "male studies" ignore feminism and are ignored by feminism -- like male suicide, male genital mutilation, the strength and importance of father-child bonds, the glass floor (98% of workplace deaths are men), etc. These issues have no relation to feminism.

Actually, I lied. Feminists do consider the above issues an attack on feminism. Anything not conforming to the feminist meta-narrative of male-oppressor, female-victim is considered a threat to feminism. But I digress.

In the case of the extremist men's rights activists who push "Male Studies" it's an attempt to legitimise in the academy an already dominant cultural conception of manhood that is trumpeted from every other corner of society.

Qeraeth is beating the same old straw-man feminists have been beating for decades: make a grotesque caricature of "men" and then rail against it.

Pathetic.

It's hard to find people more critical of feminism than feminists themselves.

Bullshit.

Ask anyone who's tried to bring a divergent viewpoint into a women's studies class, see if they agree with Qeraeth's claim above.

In sum, critiques of feminism- particularly of Second Wave feminism- are commonplace both in gender studies classrooms and in the literature.

No, feminist critiques of feminism are common place in women's studies programs. Critiques which do not challenge basic feminist assumptions like "gender is a social construct" are common place in women's studies programs.

At what point does Qeraeth's post implode on grounds of intellectual dishonesty alone?

...feminism marginalised women of colour...transexuals... I seriously doubt Male Studies is in any way interested in these far more damaging elements of feminism's less pleasant history.

That's because men's studies is looking at men, not feminism, except where feminism is the root cause of men's issues. Like...

the current issue of men being underenrolled in undergraduate education is not the result of some wave of feminist discrimination in education, as is often implied, but social and economic forces that have just begun to take their toll, so to speak.

Nice deflection.

A lot of the problem boys are having in school is a direct result of feminist accomplishments such as:

many teachers have been taught, and believe, gender is a social construct. These teachers believe energetic fidgeting boys are not acting from a biological imperative. No no, they are acting out a socially programmed "masculine" role. Therefore, correcting their social conditioning, ie: responding to their "choice" to be "disruptive in class", by forcing the boys to take ritalin is acceptable and appropriate.
The preaching of misandry in teacher education. In short, produce teachers who believe favoring girls and discouraging boys is appropriate and acceptable. After all, it's only fair after millenia of patriarchy. Payback, and all that.
re-engineer the grading system in line with girls strengths and boys weaknesses.

I could go on.

Many of these jobs, whether as dangerous as mining or as relatively safe as bus driving, are dominated by men and present themselves as a viable economic alternative to larger groups of men than they do to women.

... present themselves as a viable.... I'd like this Qeraeth to spend some time in a coal mine, or on a garbage collection route, and see how viable those jobs present themselves to any human being. If you ask those men why they do it, they'll tell you it's to support their wife and kids.

Typical feminist tactic to take male sacrifice and recast it as male privilege.

I hope y'all are paying attention; by recasting garbage-collection as a "privilege", feminists lay the groundwork to justify the transfer of wealth from the "privileged" garbage collector to his "victimized" wife in divorce.

In order for us to make the same amount (again, speaking in very general terms here) we're much more under pressure to gain the economic advantage of a college degree.

The gender gap is a lie.

I cannot believe in 2010 the feminists are still trying to convince society that a hotel room cleaner's job is comparable to a coal miner or oil rig-pig in terms of danger and adverse working conditions, and should therefore be compensated the same. Again, I refer you to Warren Farrell.

I'm going to stop here.

Feminist dogma is reaching absurd proportions.

Gareth321 says:

[Qeraeth is usually] courteous and logical in her posts

Courteous, perhaps.

Logical... no.

[–]Gareth321 3 points4 points5 points 16 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

[–]XFDRaven 0 points1 point2 points 16 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

Much of this subject is that Men's issues have been filtered through Feminist ideology. Word play, groupthink and generous editing of actual men's issues get perverted into something that is palatable by Gender studies programs that are based off of Feminist Ideology. She seems to specifically dismiss subjects which disagree with feminism or put it in a bad light, even if it's an important subject.

The value of Male Studies is that it should be a ground-up built program without the need to be politically correct for the sake of not disturbing the Dragon of hypersensitive feminists. If it seeks to generate awareness and improve the quality of life for men, that's going to be a good thing, but it will be done independent of the Women's Studies folks. It may be best to link Qeraeth's false analogy of ID here: The worst that will happen with male studies is nothing of note, the intent is to academically investigate and elaborate on the issues of men which have been marginalized by Feminists as non-issues. The Gender studies groups are effectively saying, "Feminism did it" in the same way bible thumpers claim "god did it."

[–]Bosniac32 0 points1 point2 points 16 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

[–]XFDRaven -1 points0 points1 point 16 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

[–]kanuk876[🍰] 0 points1 point2 points 16 years ago* (0 children) | Copy Link

being able to pull up on-the-spot citations when these people come out of the woodwork

That's definitely important.

In my experience, the next step is to catch their attempt to deflect, deny, and ignore your point.

EG: If you successfully land a point backed by facts and reason, they will never bring it up again in the conversation. Attempts to return to the point will be met with either hostility or discontinuation of the conversation.

If you play the "I make a claim, you have to shoot it down" game, eventually they will spit out something you don't have facts to refute. And then they'll argue your small concession validates the entirety of their position.

I do find it fascinating that for being such a "non-issue," someone such as she is making this a huge deal.

Cognitive dissonance is a bitch. Feminism is a faulty belief system. Those who (a) subscribe to feminism and (b) expose themselves to MensRights issues have a lot of work reconciling facts with feminism's dogma. At the end of the day, they have to either ignore facts or discard/question feminism.

[–]cryptogirl 4 points5 points6 points 16 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

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[–]Qeraeth -1 points0 points1 point 16 years ago (3 children) | Copy Link

[–]Gareth321 3 points4 points5 points 16 years ago (2 children) | Copy Link

[–]XFDRaven -1 points0 points1 point 16 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

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Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992) US Mathematician and Computer Technologist who joined the navy during World War II, where she became the first female Rear Admiral. She was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I calculator, and she developed the first compiler for a computer programming language.

Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909- ) Born in Italy to a Sephardic Jewish family who, together with colleague Stanley Cohen, received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of Nerve growth factor (NGF). She went to work as Giuseppi Levi's assistant, but her academic career was cut short by Benito Mussolini's 1938 Manifesto Della Razza and the subsequent introduction of laws barring Jews from academic and professional careers.

Chien Shiung-Wu (1912-1997) Chinese-born American physicist who radically changed scientific views on the behavior of nuclear particles. She worked on the Manhattan Project (to enrich the uranium fuel). Her nicknames included the “First Lady of Physics” and “Madame Curie of China."

Rosalind Franklin: (1920-1958) English biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer who contributed to understanding the compositions of DNA and viruses. Her most noteworthy work is that on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA which were an important influence on Crick and Watson's 1953 hypothesis regarding the structure of DNA.

Man, Google is hard! Those were like the first 4 results out of hundreds. You could check the Nobel Prize listings too.

[–][deleted] -5 points-4 points-3 points 16 years ago (3 children) | Copy Link

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