Hello, everyone! My previous post was my first post on this subreddit, and I would like to clarify that the writer I discussed was based in New York and a comedian. I would like to apologize if I came off as saying that men and women don’t need each other, because they definitely do. I will say that as far as I’m concerned,  there is no “male role or identity” to be deprived of, in response to one comment talking about emasculation, and that we could use the term weakening instead, because there is no feminine equivalent. 

Personally, I see masculinity and feminism as two peas in a pod, bread and butter, and that feminists actually reinforce and enforce masculinity on men whenever it suits them, such as men being the only protectors and providers while women (most, not all, a lot of women do) don’t reciprocate. 

I would also like to clarify that there is a difference between maleness and masculinity, which is that maleness is biological, while masculinity is social. Maleness is just the “characteristic, state or condition of being male” while masculinity is “Having the qualities stereotypically associated with men”, lifted from Wiktionary. Same thing with the difference between femaleness, a biological construct, and femininity, a social one. People try to conflate maleness and masculinity as the same, which is a category mistake.

Maleness and femaleness are fixed, while masculinity and femininity are malleable; they change over time and cultures, such as men in America who see other men sitting down in bathrooms as effeminate, while men in Germany don’t see it that way and 62% of them do it all the time or most of the time as a standard rule of hygiene according to YouGov’s data. One third of male adults experience gynecomastia and a lot of them get surgery for it because they see anything considered or realized as feminine as a weakness, despite the fact that women tend not to mind it and the condition is very benign; it also tends to go away over time through exercise or just natural puberty. 

I understand that men need an identity to latch onto, because my country’s (USA) culture does not do a good job providing an exemplary role model for them to follow outside of “healthy masculinity” and “toxic masculinity” (words they would never use for femininity) and I struggled for a while myself to find an identity that defined me. 

But the purpose of this subreddit is to not only talk about men’s rights from a leftist perspective, but also to decouple the idea that men must be masculine or do a male sex role like protection in order to be seen as human beings. However, there are some men, on the r/MensRights subreddit and even this one, who just say the same thing that conservative men do, “Embrace masculinity, reject modernity”. I feel this is not helping men at all, because we have tried masculinity, tried to protect and provide, and it has gotten us nothing but a double burden in the last four centuries, both physically and mentally. 

Now then, enough of my rambling and moving on to the topic of today’s post: What are your thoughts on this Wikipedia article talking about the history of women arguing that they are morally superior, yet equal to men? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_superiority

I would also like to know your thoughts on feminists saying that the modern feminist movement started with Mary Wollstonecraft, despite numerous women writers like Christine de Pizan (The Book of the City of Ladies, 1405), Moderata Fonte (The Worth of Women, 1600), and Lucrezia Marinella (The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, 1600) saying the same things about men that a lot of progressive women are saying [today](chrome://external-file/I%20Hate%20Men.pdf)?