I was inspired to write this post after reading a post a couple of days ago. It was a self post where OP was wondering how other men dealt with the fact that many women looked at him with fear and mistrust. I also was inspired to write about this subject because of some various comments on multiple posts.

What I want to talk about is how to not to develop a victim mentality. I have spent a lot of time working in the social justice and racial justice field, and while I support a lot of the ideas, I can’t support the movement fully because it denies in what in my opinion is common sense. That is, the world is shit. Rather, the world is a blank slate, but society is pretty shitty on a general level. Once you consider yourself a victim, every little incident that happens you rationalize as happening to you because of your victim status.

I really like this sub, and I don’t want it to turn into the type of movement that feminism has become. Modern feminism is the way it is because feminist consider themselves victims every day. In everything that happens to them, they try to relate how it is the patriarchy that is harming them. It is a useful tool for them because they can tell themselves that the patriarchy is the reason they didn’t get a raise, or they didn’t get a job they wanted.

This is the case with many social justice movements. The environment becomes a stagnant ideological pool of ideas. The real problem for modern feminism is that they won. You see, women really did face a good amount of hurdles in the past. It is silly to say that they had no power because it shows no understanding of power structures, but they obviously did not have access to a lot of professional service sector jobs. That all changed. Now women have the upper hand in most of the professional world. They are experiencing what I like to call the March of Dimes effect. If your whole movement is centered on one problem, what do you do when that problem is solved? When March of Dime’s problem was solved they switched to a new problem. Feminism on the other hand can’t. What they did instead is start seeing problems everywhere. They changed their problem from fighting institutionalized sexism (things like disenfranchisement) to the impossible problem to solve of stamping out bigotry totally.

When I see posts like the one I mentioned at the beginning or the post about a week back about the man who claimed he was fired for being man working in the child services industry, I start to wonder if this movement is moving in that direction. For the most part, most comment just accepted that he had been fired for his genitalia. That might be the case, but when you have over hundred comments just circle-jerking about how awful feminism is, it harms us more than it could ever harm feminism. If we just accept that the poster was fired for being male because it fits our preconceived notions, are we any better than the feminist who automatically assume Adria Richards was fired for speaking out against sexual harassment. I would never say that a member of our community couldn’t post about something happening in their life they felt was an MR issue, but the discussion should be constructive and center on how to change things. Once you make your identity as someone who is acted-upon instead of one who acts, you lose the ability to control what goes on around you. That victim mentality becomes an excuse for everything in your life. You won’t change feminist. They have a vested interest in maintaining the myth they are an oppressed minority. The good news is that most people aren’t feminist. If this movement is to be successful, mens rights activist need to focus less on people like the Swanson women and more on the institutional systems that oppress men. You are never going to convince the media to stop portraying men in unhealthy ways, but we can lobby our governments to make sure men have access to their children, fight the damage that the prison does to men including the institutional acceptance of rape in prison, and fight the institutional redefining or rape to make sure it includes the rape of men rather than purposefully excluding it.

Thoughts?