Something I noticed in discussions around here that I feel has to be discussed, for intellectual consistency's sake

mewacketergi · 2019-12-19T05:17:00+00:00

You are strawmanning really, really badly here (and I hold no views you seem to ascribe to me here), and also conflating two concepts, which aren't mutually exclusive, and can co-exist in one country -- the feminist moral corruption in academia certainly is bad, but it isn't 100% incompatiable with more gender egalitarianism being practiced by the laypeople in the wider society, since the academia by far isn't the only thing that defines the society, -- there is also a lot of the technological and moral progress, and this tremendous progress achieved in the West (see Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now for figures, if need be) shouldn't be overlooked simply because you are legitimately mad with one aspect of your society.

Edit: Also, please, for the sake of all that is good and holy in the world, please formatting like everyone else.

Edit: Rephrase the body of the commment.

Edit:

P.S. You wouldn't happen to be a sock-puppet account of someone else I argued before, by any chance, /u/Thin-Ant? They also had problems with using Reddit formatting accurately, didn't tolerate dissent and posted to the other "Collective" subreddit.

serpentineeyelash · 2019-12-19T09:41:10+00:00

I agree with your overall point.

You're perhaps constructing a bit of a strawman - I don't think anyone here is saying Western countries are gender-equal - but I get what you mean. Westerners do have a biased perception of non-Western cultures that can be difficult even for anti-feminists to overcome.

Many of us here have limited to no experience of more traditionalist and/or non-Western cultures, due to where we live. We hear a lot of feminist propaganda about some such countries, which is very taboo to question. This is complicated by the fact that there's undeniably some amount of truth in what feminists say - women's roles really are more restricted in more traditionalist cultures. Because I don't have experience on non-Western cultures, I'm often not sure exactly what to believe about those cultures - how much is true about negative treatment of women, and how much is being left out about negative treatment of men.

Generally I'd say women's issues are worse in traditionalist cultures, while men's issues vary in whether they are worse in traditionalist or feminist cultures. So in this limited sense it might be true to say Western cultures are more gender-egalitarian, albeit in a very one-sided way that is full of unexamined hypocrisies, contradictions, and backward steps. But I agree, anti-feminists of all people should try to avoid lazily reinforcing the assumption that Western cultures are genuine in their professed gender-egalitarian values.

I think you've presented plenty of convincing evidence for what I already suspected: feminists are inaccurately portraying non-Western cultures' attitudes on gender, just as they do to Western cultures. I think you are providing a valuable perspective on this.

It seems like every culture has a bias toward seeing other cultures as being brutal patriarchies, as is well-illustrated by this cartoon I posted in your other thread. This has implications for how we should view historical cultures' gender attitudes too. If every culture sees other times and places as brutal patriarchies while seeing itself as a non-patriarchy or woman-protecting patriarchy, that seriously calls into question whether the supposed brutal patriarchy has ever existed.

POSTSCRIPT: I think we critics of feminism need to invent some terminology to distinguish, as I just did, between the real-world traditional so-called "patriarchy", and the more brutal misogynistic patriarchy that is imagined or implied in a lot of rhetoric about other times and places. I'm not sure what is the best term to use to describe that, but for the moment I'm using the phrase "brutal patriarchy".

2019-12-19T10:05:54+00:00

It would be good to look at ways in which men specifically are disadvantaged in these non-Western / developing countries, instead of blanket assuming that every man there is a domineering patriarch and all women are submitted into oblivion, as the stereotypes go.

However, in countries like Iran etc. there are some pretty flagrant legal restrictions of women's rights, such as mandatory wearing of a veil in public, and banning women from sporting venues. And let's not forget Saudi Arabia banned women from driving until very recently, though fortunately, things are progressing on this front.

Maybe the use of terms like gender egalitarian etc. are a bit lazily copy pasted from he mainstream discourse. But I suppose that you could make an argument that you could correlate the term "gender egalitaian" with the extent to which a country has expressed commitment to achieving equality between the genders, as opposed to adhering to traditionalism actively or passively, in which case countries like Sweden and the likes do come up on top. Our criticism would then be that the commitment to gender egalitarianism does not go far enough, as it only looks at the women's side of the equation and tends to overlook the men, or that it's misguided in some ways, I.e. advocating for quota for women, thereby countering alleged unconscious bias with legally mandated overt bias.

Title	Something I noticed in discussions around here that I feel has to be discussed, for intellectual consistency's sake
Author	[deleted]
Upvotes	7
Comments	12
Date	December 19, 2019 5:02 AM UTC (6 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/ecoh9o/something_i_noticed_in_discussions_around_here/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/something-i-noticed-in-discussions-around-here.1202005 https://theredarchive.com/post/1202005

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