When it comes to intersectionality and the oppressed versus oppressor dichotomy. To be honest it would be hard to ignore injustices men face because of the gender.

Entheuthanasia · 2024-09-08T19:41:21+00:00

* victim-blaming: “men do it to themselves”

* downplaying: “it's rare”, “it's nothing compared to what women go through”

* spinning everything to fit the women-as-victim model/patriarchy theory: “actually that's benevolent sexism” (™)

* plain old indifference (a.k.a the honest answer underlying most of the above): “why would I give a shit about men's issues lol”

henrysmyagent · 2024-09-08T19:45:02+00:00

It is difficult to have this conversation with folks because all that most people see are men at the absolute pinnacle of power and influence.

But that is a tiny minority of men. The vast majority of men spend their whole lives toiling at the bottom base of the social pyramid without any power or influence whatsoever.

Talk of intersectionality often breaks down when trying to include men at the bottom of life who are clearly oppressed while separating out the men at the top who are doing most of the oppressing.

Karmaze · 2024-09-08T18:05:30+00:00

My personal opinion is that there's a critical flaw with thought on the left that creates a very real vulnerability to these ideas, and it incentives them, especially for people with power.

The core argument of leftism, I believe, is reclaiming the essentially stolen value of ones labor that makes up capitalist profit. Fair enough. But what if this stolen value isn't just in the hands of the owners. What about the managers, the bureaucrats? Because as far as I can tell, there's a lot of stolen value there as well.

My argument is that these ideas exist so we don't make the distinction essentially that working/waged men don't have the advantages that salaried/managerial men do. And frankly, maybe we should consider the former an oppressed and protected class.

I'm older, so I can tell you that these ideas were a lot rarer before the last decade or so. They were still around, but largely limited to academia and pedagogy (which is still a big issue), they only blew up between say, 2008 and 2014-ish, and that's when things really went out of control.

Because it's always the same thing. Our in-group should be above reproach. And it's not always gendered,to be clear. But challenging the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy when it comes to gender especially, opens the door to challenging these other facets....class at a lower level and in-group/out-group distinctions and power dynamics.

Burning_Burps · 2024-09-08T23:44:59+00:00

I agree overall with your post, except for the section about trans men.

In my experience, as soon as I started passing, my problems became invisible to the trans community and to the left. Trying to talk about my struggles only ever leads to being mocked, belittled, shut down, and told I have it easy because I supposedly now have "male privilege."

Progressive spaces are supportive of trans women. They are more often than not openly hostile to trans men.

henrysmyagent · 2024-09-08T19:44:47+00:00

It is difficult to have this conversation with folks because all that most people see are men at the absolute pinnacle of power and influence.

But that is a tiny minority of men. The vast majority of men spend their whole lives toiling at the bottom base of the social pyramid without any power or influence whatsoever.

Talk of intersectionality often breaks down when trying to include men at the bottom of life who are clearly oppressed while separating out the men at the top who are doing most of the oppressing.

StandardFaire · 2024-09-08T20:29:17+00:00

It’s almost as if the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy is too simplistic to describe the vast majority of relationships between social groups (not economic groups, in which there is both a clear historical and current advantage that the rich have over the poor)

ManWithTwoShadows · 2024-09-09T03:51:27+00:00

How do some people on the left do it?

By applying confirmation bias.

There's one simple sentence that every male advocate should memorize: "People can be privileged in some ways and unprivileged in other ways."

If someone says male problems are caused by other men, you can tell them it doesn't matter because those problems should still be criticized.

If they say you shouldn't expect women to care about men's issues, you can tell them you'll keep expressing your opinion even if they don't care.

Grand-Juggernaut6937 · 2024-09-09T13:06:08+00:00

The entire issue with “intersectionality” is that it only cares about the intersections of a few narrow traits.

It puts people and systems into extremely narrow boxes and places one attribute over another in every scenario. Women are always more oppressed than men, black people are always more oppressed than white, poor people are always more oppressed than rich people.

This kind of thinking completely ignores edge cases. If a black/female/poor manager fires a person for no reason other than being white/male/rich then intersectionality completely ignores it. In fact its defenders will say that no such event has ever taken place, whereas the opposite happens so often as to be a worldwide crisis.

_name_of_the_user_ · 2024-09-08T19:31:23+00:00

The biggest problem with feminism is the fact that they see men and women in the oppressor/oppressed dichotomy. And they see men's rights advocates as wanting to flip that dichotomy instead of erasing it. Men and women have never been in an oppressor/oppressed relationship, it's always been give and take.

PoC and white people have had a clear oppressor/oppressed relationship with slavery. Poor and rich have a similar relationship. But men were never a class above or below women, we were treated similarly good and bad, just differently.

Independence_soft2 · 2024-09-09T00:45:22+00:00

You lost me at intersectionality, Christina Hoff Sommers was right, it only protects extremists.

iainmf · 2024-09-12T05:18:55+00:00

Equalitarianism: A Source of Liberal Bias

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325033477_Equalitarianism_A_Source_of_Liberal_Bias

Abstract

Recent scholarship has challenged the long-held assumption in the social sciences that Conservatives are more biased than Liberals, yet little work deliberately explores domains of liberal bias. Here, we demonstrate that Liberals are particularly prone to bias about victims’ groups (e.g. Blacks, women) and identify a set of beliefs that consistently predict this bias, termed Equalitarianism. Equalitarianism, we believe, stems from an aversion to inequality and a desire to protect relatively low status groups, and includes three interrelated beliefs: (1) demographic groups do not differ biologically; (2) prejudice is ubiquitous and explains existing group disparities; (3) society can, and should, make all groups equal in society. This leads to bias against information that portrays a perceived privileged group more favorably than a perceived victims’ group. Eight studies (n=3,274) support this theory. Liberalism was associated with perceiving certain groups as victims (Studies 1a-1b). In Studies 2-7 and meta-analyses, Liberals evaluated the same study as less credible when the results concluded that a privileged group (men and Whites) had a more desirable quality relative to a victims’ group (women and Blacks) than vice versa. Ruling out alternative explanations of Bayesian (or other normative) reasoning, significant order effects in within-subjects designs in Studies 6 and 7 suggest that Liberals believe they should not evaluate identical information differently depending on which group is portrayed more favorably, yet do so. In all studies, higher equalitarianism mediated the relationship between more liberal ideology and lower credibility ratings when privileged groups were said to score higher on a socially valuable trait. Although not predicted a priori, meta-analyses also revealed Moderates to be the most balanced in their judgments. These findings indicate nothing about whether this bias is morally justifiable, only that it exists.

Snoo82945 · 2024-09-12T21:55:30+00:00

Weaponized victimhood contests.

Title	When it comes to intersectionality and the oppressed versus oppressor dichotomy. To be honest it would be hard to ignore injustices men face because of the gender.
Author	Vegetable_Camera50
Upvotes	92
Comments	22
Date	September 8, 2024 5:27 PM UTC (1 year ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/1fc37eh/when_it_comes_to_intersectionality_and_the/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/when-it-comes-to-intersectionality-and-the.1529826 https://theredarchive.com/post/1529826

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Equalitarianism: A Source of Liberal Bias