Equity or equal victimhood?

Blauwpetje · 2025-06-23T13:57:41+00:00

In a way you have a point. But it simply isn’t easy.

Once you’re talking about male advocacy, it’s soon about things that men have troubles with, and especially where there’s injustice against men.

And where our society, especially leftist and liberals who otherwise are closest to us, misses all dynamics even seriously discussing a sensible policy for men, talking about our issues soon gives the impression of an endless litany about what goes wrong and how hard our lives are. But is there a sensible alternative?

Neither do I see any alternative in putting class issues first, hoping that animosities like between black/white, men/women etc, then will disappear by themselves. That won’t work and just will shove things under the carpet.

But if you have more positive ideas about addressing men’s issues, just post them here and do it regularly. Then posts like these won’t be necessary anymore.

Enzi42 · 2025-06-23T14:36:01+00:00

I do understand what you're saying, but I think there is some nuance to be had here. There is a razor thin (and quite subjective!) line between trying to advocate for oneself and playing victim, and it is not always easy to walk.

Making things even more complicated (and really this is my main point), we live in a society where victimhood has become a potent social currency. If you can prove that you or your social group has suffered a systemic injustice, then you stand to gain a "reward" of sorts in addition to people actually caring about the original problem.

Worse, the above social situation is accompanied by a disdain for anyone deemed to be part of an "oppressor class" no matter how innocent they are. That means disgust or even cruel glee at their cries for help with their problems and overall lack of empathy.

So not only do you have men trying to advocate for ourselves while walking the line between victimhood and frank statements of problems, there is also a deep temptation to assure everyone we are victims too in order to obtain the same support or at least to alleviate the pointing finger of being some mythical oppressor.

SpicyMarshmellow · 2025-06-23T15:28:58+00:00

How do we achieve equal treatment without raising awareness of how we are treated unequally? How do we do this without framing it as victimhood?

My personal top male issue is inequality in the realm of domestic/sexual violence and abuse. How does this get addressed without talking about men as victims of these issues? Women didn't spur society into action on these issues by not framing themselves as victims.

And if the issue is specifically that there's a double-standard where a man seen as a victim is viewed with contempt, while a woman seen as a victim prompts empathy and action... that's pretty fucked up and really needs to change, right? Does avoiding framing of men as victims help us change that, or just reinforce it?

Logos89 · 2025-06-23T15:17:23+00:00

If men aren't treated as well as they 'should be" in the areas you listed, what would you call them? This post strikes me as attempting to gain the appearance of moral virtue by endlessly splitting hairs.

Unhappy-Jaguar-9362 · 2025-06-23T15:58:28+00:00

Have you read Rene Girard, The Scapegoat? And any of his other writings on mimetic desire? Might be an interesting angle on this dynamic of competing victimologies. In cases like we see in postmodern leftist feminism, the victim ends up using their victimhood to gain power over the hierarchy which relies on scapegoating to maintain order, but in doing so ends up restoring the mechanism it unveiled.

AlphaSpellswordZ · 2025-06-23T20:21:39+00:00

I completely agree. I think the problem is the mainstream left doesn’t want to do away with victimhood so many feel we have to play the game

Sydnaktik · 2025-06-23T14:01:55+00:00

As someone invested in honest discussion around men’s issues, I’ve noticed a growing concern: the suspicious use of AI, particularly ChatGPT, to generate content in spaces like this.

I’m not against tools that help clarify thoughts, especially on complex topics. But there’s a clear difference between assistance and outsourcing. Too many posts now read like polished essays—well-structured, emotionally neutral, and oddly disconnected. It raises the question: are we engaging with people or just algorithmic composites?

This matters because advocacy—real advocacy—requires authenticity. We’re not here to perform insight or win rhetorical points; we’re here to connect over real, lived experience. That connection gets lost when we rely too heavily on AI to speak for us.

Use tools if needed, but be upfront. If we’re not showing up as ourselves, we risk turning this space into just another curated feed, rather than a place where something real can happen.

"AKA: Write a reply to the original post on the topic of the suspicious use of ChatGpt to write content. Use the same tone and structure as the OP"

Ok-Acanthisitta-8145 · 2025-06-23T16:37:46+00:00

100%. I was terrorized by my mom and failed by my mopey drunk dad. It would be very easy for me to sit in justified resentment about how she was mean (she was), how the system failed me so many ways (it did), and in some ways, sure, if I were to not do so well in life, it would be somewhat expected given my background. But what has motivated me more than anything else is a desire not to become her - not to have really good excuses to do the same behaviors, but to change.

My mom and dad both made the same mistake: they kept waiting to be rescued. While they never said it out loud, their actions and their general demeanor shouted it: "it is not on me to learn how to love myself and parent myself. No, I will sit here, wasting away, hoping someone will see my misery and make it all better. It's all too hard."

Every day we sit here making up excuses, we fail our inner child the same way we were failed, and we fail the children of the future too. If our needs are not being prioritized, then love means making our needs a priority.

maarkk321 · 2025-06-23T18:27:47+00:00

I think that we have to think first of all how privelage or advantages materialize in the socioeconomic word and social world in general, especially in relation to victimhood (in the social media age as the perfect marketing tool).

Intersectionality helps to debunk a lot of myths about victimization and victimhood, if you add class and race and especially context over privilege, since the advantage of being a rich white women can only exist as an ideal through actual materialistic advantages in relation to the disadvantage for example of a poor black women or male mexican construction worker (in a european context it could be a poor male eastern european worker in Germany who sends money back to his wife in Romania, both Germans and Romanians are white, both the worker and his wife are screwed over by politicians and corporations, so context is always important especially in its relations and proportions).

My sole problem here with reddit is and I do not want to sound like a neoliberal who externalizes individual <-> collective guilt and individual <-> collective responsibility on the 99%, but if you start to analyze every problem in your life on the scale of social scientific theories, you probably will get crazy.

The big problem with misanthropy nowadays (being misandrie or misogyny) is that an awful lot is materializing (or better said, idealizing) and discussed in the hyper-individual digital world, where individual stories are collectively shared, but often consequently being commodified with some kind of interest and profit orientation. All these gurus and guides selling people a way to find a true inner self is the true perversion of any ideology, but in this case being feminist or male advocates, nowadays #PostModernCapitalism . Feminism and LGBTQ rights have become an industry, at latest since we have ESG scores in finance and big corporations sponsoring pride marches. With male advocacy you have the problem, that it is hijacked by guys like Andrew Tate, building a pyramid scheme on it.

All egalitarian movements, that truly think of themselves like that, should start cooperating and looking for a common ground or capitalism will turn everything they ever believed in into a commodity. Back, when the left was all about class, and I say that deliberately provocative and exaggerated, the workers would unite and fight against the oppression and not cry about their perception of victimhood.

eldred2 · 2025-06-23T23:34:54+00:00

You can't achieve equality while the majority of people deny that inequality exists.

ForwardCommercial670 · 2025-06-23T12:21:02+00:00

Define equity?

The problem I have with this term is that it's subjective.

The second issue is that you can't tie equity to economics without some merit system or else you'll wind up with sentiments felt in socialist regimes where the high producers will gradually decrease their margins as they realize the low production workers are receiving the same pay as they are.

So keep in mind this system being proposed needs to make room for the human condition.

Also... Equality must be equal inputs only.

Equal outputs is what you're describing as one of your bi-conditionals; which is also, objectively, a false dichotomy.

QuantumPenguin89 · 2025-06-24T06:06:12+00:00

Unfortunately, I've noticed a concerning trend in this sub toward par victimhood rather than aspirational egalitarianism.

I hope you go and make similar threads in forums where women's issues are discussed. I'd love to read those threads. Surely you don't consider this a problem only when men are discussing men's issues.

As for whether one's political stances sexually attract women, I'd suggest not basing your entire life and outlook on what appeals to the opposite sex, that's more pathetic than a victimhood mentality.

webernicke · 2025-06-23T16:16:32+00:00

Nobody feels better as a victim, and nobody is attracted to someone who is a victim.

Citation fucking needed. Victimhood is power in modern discourse. That's why men's activists have so much trouble gaining a foothold in the gender dialogue--because feminists know that to acknowledge that men are victims (and victims of women, in particular) is to cede some of their power and jeopardize the bedrock narrative of their entire ideology.

And the bullshit of it is, men REALLY ARE VICTIMS as evidenced by the increasingly undeniable boatload of statistical data that men, practically everywhere in the world, are suffering at levels that would be considered a humanitarian crisis if applied to any other demographic group. And that's true, whether we puff our chests out and bootstraps our way out or not.

The only ones that are served by this denial of male victimhood are the ones responsible for and/or benefitting from men continuing to shut up and take their oppression like good little drones.

GTFOHWTS

7evenCircles · 2025-06-23T18:30:31+00:00

You're correct. It's just going to be perceived as aggression.

Donovan_Volk · 2025-06-23T12:13:21+00:00

Hi there, thanks for this post. I've been reading a few weeks but have not commented so far, due to many of the reasons you've outlined.

The world, and not just this forum, does appear to have a strange relationship to victimhood today, with the desire to be seen as or even to be a victim rather emphasised over material improvements. Have we become so pessimistic about the prospect of real change that mere pity is all we reach for?

I believe that demonisation of and scapegoating of men is a real block to success on the left today. Nobody whose struggling to pay bills wants to be told they are the source of all the problems in the world, and they are offered no solutions from this sort of thinking. Fundamentally we need to shift the emphasis and tell an entirely different story, one about solidarity, about working people overcoming differences and learning to work across identity lines again.

BloomingBrains · 2025-06-23T20:02:56+00:00

Concern trolling in its purest form. OP basically says "hey guys, I agree with you but you need to stop being victims".

How are we even supposed to talk about problems without being victims? Thats the definition of the word victims.

Answer: there isn't. OP just wants us to shut up and is using pseudo-intellectual buzz words like "epistemological" to disguise that fact.

Dumkinni_ · 2025-06-23T22:16:23+00:00

I definitely agree with this post.. i don’t have much to add, but I’ve noticed a lot of posts have been leaning into “women have it better/easier” territory. Maybe i’m just misinterpreting, but we all have our problems so i’m just a little concerned about this sub

Objective_Loquat_447 · 2025-06-28T15:10:22+00:00

Edit: I wrote a long comment but deleted bc I think it was too dickish, sorry OP. Basically my critique is that, as a history PhD, I've had way to many arguments with philosophy phds who think the secrets to the ills of our society lie is some peculiar intellectual formulation. Be it blank slatism, analysis of power dynamics, or here, victimology. Sometimes it's even adjacent to historically spurious anti-marxism and Frankfurt school Judeo-Bolschevism paranoia (tho I will be clear I make no accusations of anti-semitism here). I just don't buy that this all comes down to a flawed intellectual approach to the world. Human history and society are more complicated than even the densest philosophy texts.

And ultimately, everyone is, in fact, a victim of something. The fact that it's unattractive to admit it doesn't make it not true. I agree that assigning people and voices worth based on their perceived victimhood is a dead end. But we can't deny it just because we want to be individualist cowboy strong men. We have to act within our social context, and we have to understand our multifaceted places in those social contexts in order to do so. Sometimes that means acknowledging where we are, relatively, powerless

Ancient-Accountant99 · 2025-06-23T14:30:07+00:00

this sub is my 13th reason

Razorbladekandyfan · 2025-07-01T18:17:15+00:00

Concern trolling. Men are treated as disposable subhumans, yet the biggest issue is "victimhood."

Rare-Discipline3774 · 2025-06-26T01:01:36+00:00

It is true that men are, and have always been, systemically oppressed.

Men have been denied that fact, only to be called oppressors by people engaging in historical revisionism in order to oppress men further.

The very idea of modern traditional masculinity is something completely made up by feminists, and began in the 50s, with the first usage of the term itself in the 80s.

One cannot afford to be mindful of other groups when those other groups insist upon lies and gross manipulations of history to promote misandry and other anti male sexism.

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