A new strategy for communicating the goals of men's rights and addressing the hurdles put in place by feminist ideology

Hadashi_blacksky · 2018-11-27T07:14:08+00:00

The major issue with the MRM is the common practice of consolidating mens issues, and attempting to argue them all at once.

For example; the men's rights marches. Recently there was a Mens Rights March in Victoria, Australia. I predicted the outcome far in advance that the MRAs would be painted in a bad light, but they went ahead with it anyway, and my predictions were realized. When you group all of men's rights issue together, you weaken all the individual issues, and subject the whole movement to dismissal.

A new strategy needs to be individual issues fight for individually. The media will always have a hard time calling people who are protesting against infant male circumcision "sexist". But you combine anti-circumcision with even one more MR issue, no matter how correct we are, two separate mens rights issues combined will always be dismissed as men whining.

i.e

A March ONLY for protesting infant male circumcision.

A march ONLY for protesting the lack for due process in rape cases.

A march ONLY for fathers rights

And if anyone tries to talk to you at these events about wage gap or something else unrelated, you DO NOT engage, and you stick to the one issue at hand.

And this is the same for one on one conversations. Never say to someone that you're a MRA. Tell them you're against circumcision of infants. That's you believe in due process. That you believe in equality in family courts. Argue each topic individually.

heavy-boots · 2018-11-27T06:54:49+00:00

To be honest, feminism as an ideology - like most identity politics - worms it's way into people's identities, so often if you attack the ideology you're attacking someone directly.

I rarely directly attack feminism in my arguments unless I'm talking about feminist nonsense like the idolisation of the suffragettes (who were terrorists). Mostly I try to talk about the issues that affect men, but because gender rights have been the domain of feminism for so long even the idea that men might be disadvantaged compared women in some respect is just fundamentally counter to the idea of feminism.

Any argument you make contrary to the 'man bad women good' attitude is counter to feminism, and is going to offend someone who's identity is based on it.

DignifiedAlpaca · 2018-11-27T12:38:21+00:00

I think one of the biggest problems is that feminism in the modern day has come to be almost entirely dominated by ideologues, so the framework that most feminists are using to form their conception of the world is so limiting and removed from reality that it makes them difficult to communicate with about men's issues.

Feminists nowadays tend to view gender issues with the conception that men are privileged and women are oppressed. But this sets up a false dichotomy where men's issues tend to be seen as trivial compared to women's and therefore barely worth talking about. I mean, it sounds silly to have a "privileged" man talking about how bad his gender's issues are to an "oppressed" woman... the whole privileged vs. oppressed thing frames the argument in such a way as to create an unspoken assumption that none of the issues men face could possibly be that big of a deal. It is nearly impossible to get through to a person who is blinded by this faulty assumption.

The feminist movement wasn't always this blinded by ideology. Here in the United States, back in the 60's and 70's at least, a lot of mainstream (not radical) feminists were more likely to use terminology like "the feminine mystique" and "the masculine mystique" to refer to women's and men's issues, respectively. This didn't set up a dichotomy between the two, but instead created a very simple framework where women have issues and men have issues. This allowed for a much less restrictive range of thought, which made it a lot more practical for conversations between MRA's and feminists to take place.

As an example, here is a series of videos of a lecture that took place between Dr. Herb Goldberg (one of the biggest leaders in the men's rights movement at the time) and Betty Friedan (one of the biggest leaders in the feminist movement at the time): https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1B22A46C807E14DB

Such a thing would be nearly impossible today... Imagine Warren Farrell trying to reach out to Linda Sarsour to get her to agree to an honest public conversation on how the men's rights and feminist movements could work together to solve each other's problems... He would never be able to get through the ideological brick wall.

The most extreme position on a political issue is almost always the hardest position to defend, and the leaders of successfull extremist movements tend to realize this. They realize that in a straightforward, honest debate using only facts and logic, they are pretty much guaranteed to lose. That is why they come up with these extremely thought-limiting frameworks like the whole privileged vs. oppressed thing. It is designed to prevent adherents of the ideology from being able to think outside the box. Or really, to prevent them from thinking at all. The ideology lays out a ridiculously simplistic narrative that seems true on its surface if you don't think it through too hard. People who have good critical thinking skills are less likely to fall for the ideology, but there are enough people out there who don't bother to question ideas like this and therefore blindly fall into the trap. Especially once it has a sufficiently large number of followers: the adherents will reason with themselves that the ideology has to be true, or else that would mean that all the thousands or even millions of other people following the ideology are being duped. It's especially believable when there are "experts" in fringe departments in academia pushing the ideology as if it were scientific fact.

So while I think there definitely are some things that we could do to make ourselves more warm and welcoming to feminists so that more of them will be willing to hear us out, I think it is an even tougher challenge to figure out how to break through their ideology to allow them to actually think about what we are saying as opposed to just writing us off since what we say doesn't conform to their oversimplified view of the world.

You would think it would be as simple as just explaining to them what I have written here and therefore snapping them out of it, but unfortunately the clever people who come up with these ideologies have a trick built in to keep it from being that easy.

In order to prevent adherents of the ideology from having extensive conversations with people outside of the ideology who could possibly convince them that it isn't true, the ideology teaches that anyone who isn't a believer is a bad person who must be avoided.

In modern ideological feminism's case, the idea put into their heads is that anyone who dares to question the ideology must obviously be a misogynist, or else why would they be questioning any part of the movement for women's rights? And then since they are taught to react hysterically to even the slightest suggestion of sexism / racism / etc. instead of hearing out what the person has to say, they have to immediately cut all ties with that person... thus making it nearly impossible to reason with ideologically possessed feminists. This also plays out when they ban people from their subreddits for having even the slightest disagreement with their ideas. I am guessing that many of them legitimately believe that they are banning sexist saboteurs from their subreddit when in reality a lot of us just want to have a sincere conversation about the issues.

Obviously though, not all feminists are ideologically possessed like this. We have some feminists on this subreddit who come on here and listen to what we say and are able to have a reasonable discussion without any trouble. But sadly, it seems like this kind of ideological thinking has become extremely commonplace in the modern feminist movement. It's really like a form of brainwashing if you think about it.

So that's why I think the biggest issue is trying to figure out how to break them out of the ideological aspect of it so that they are actually able to consider opposing ideas.

Title	A new strategy for communicating the goals of men's rights and addressing the hurdles put in place by feminist ideology
Author	heavy-boots
Upvotes	15
Comments	6
Date	November 27, 2018 6:11 AM UTC (7 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/a0s4t1/a_new_strategy_for_communicating_the_goals_of/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/a-new-strategy-for-communicating-the-goals-of-mens.1183608 https://theredarchive.com/post/1183608

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