How does misandry hurt men in the same ways misogyny hurts women?

ElectionOver4Hours · 2022-09-01T08:32:39+00:00

Well, main issues I find is that society hates men so much that bringing up male issues gets you branded a sexist and extremist and people get very angry.

What issues?

Well, in the UK, 75% of homeless are men. 75% of suicides are men. Only 40% of high school graduates are men.

Less men pass school, university, STEM, PhDs, every form of education.

90%+ workplace deaths are male, men get custody (this one I'm not sure of exact number) 14% of the time, etcetcetc.

Bring up any of these and people go insane.

If women maybe earn 1-3% less people go ballistic and there are entire movements (fair enough ).

Women are 50% more likely to pass school? 'Oh, it's cos men are lazy, stupid, violent, cos they don't appreciate things, they're somehow inherited laziness from ancient male rulers (cos 99% of the male population in history also never had rights, they were simply tools of war and labour)'

Name a make issue and people get angry you care about men. I also care for women. And children. I care for everyone. But men suffer and helping them is somehow seen as a bad thing and people will use all sorts of mental gymnastics and insults to justify not helping

BloomingBrains · 2022-09-01T08:15:30+00:00

men are the ones who only allowed men to fight for the longest time

Wrong. You should look up the white feather society. Its a pretty disgusting and fairly recent historical example of women encouraging men to die in wars.

And to say that "men made the draft" is equally incorrect because it assumes that men have been the only ones running society forever. In reality, women had just as much influence over society, they just influenced it from a less obvious position of power: the household. They were the ones raising kids and shaping the minds and beliefs of the next generation. They were also the ones dictating the terms on which males could sleep with them (i.e. only real men like "brave warriors" for example). Contrary to popular opinion, most of human history was not a rape fest against women, and they mostly decided who their partners would be. Meaning that criteria would become the standard of "manliness", like for example, dying in wars.

Yes, women were also oppressed and treated as birthing machines, but men were treated as dying machines.

I know which one I'd rather be.

Pasolini123 · 2022-09-01T09:44:57+00:00

The most popular responses I’ve heard are the draft and war but men are the ones who only allowed men to fight for the longest time and only allowed women to be nurses or work in the factories back home and are also the ones (mostly) who put the draft into place.

Already this statement is quite misandric,apart from being simplistic and anti-intellectual. (I know that's just a quote, so I don't blame you.)

Phenomena like war are a product of many different socio-historical and political factors, which you can't reduce to the gender dynamics. This is why women in power have never been better. There were few of them throughout history, but they were just as eager to start wars (if not even more so, as one study claimed).

The idea that the terrible death of hundreds and thousands of innocent men is somehow less important, because people who caused them suffering also were men, is a stupidity only our feminist times could produce.

But maybe the most abominable argument is the one that: "men didn't let women fight". Yes, I know that women have been kept in a golden cage and that the protection men wanted to give them, ended sometimes with them having less rights and being second class citizens. Nevertheless it seems to me quite cruel to blame men for holding women back from suffering, killing and dying.

I live in Poland, so quite close to the war in Ukraine. This war has awoken discussions about conscription, mobilization, draft in whole Europe. Including my country. Most young men here are pretty much against the idea of forcing people to fight and die. And they're quite often pissed off, that the equality between the sexes ends as soon as shit hits the fan.

But as always in such discussions you'd also have some "armchair generals" bragging about their willingness to fight. Even if in a minority and massively downvoted on reddit :)

Those men (or quite often boys) have usually a very simplistic vision of war, so when discussing with them I quite often make fun of their bombastic utterances. But deep down in my heart, I sometimes feel sorry for doing so. And for them. I do it only because I think it would serve them better not to be too idealistic about such things.

Though I've seen it many times,on different occasions, that whenever some danger is coming near (not only war), many men feel the urge to protect women, children, older people. I don't want anybody to be forced to it. And I think that's one of the major points of male advocacy. But the fact that we are nowadays turning this quality or even a virtue of many men against them, is outright perverse.

AskingToFeminists · 2022-09-01T10:10:46+00:00

Answer in 2 parts. Part 1/2

I'll talk a bit about a domain I have some knowledge in : domestic violence.

First thing first, domestic violence against women has been condemned for a long while. Even at the time where some amount of violence was normalized in the couple (and realize that it was a time where some amount of violence was much more common everywhere), you can find laws condemning the abuse of women only. On the other hand, the abuse of men often resulted in the men themselves being further shamed or condemned by their society.

We agree the past was crap, but it was crap to everyone, and it's not particularly clear if it was better for the average man or the average woman. A thing that is not often mentioned.

That it is not often mentioned in and of itself is a sign of the atmosphere of misandry ambiant in our society. We're all ready to hear about mennhurting women and to condemn for that, but dare suggest that women abuse men and oh gosh what have you done. Here comes the defensiveness and the accusations.

Now, if we move on to our modern view of DV, we need to start at the beginning, with the opening of the first battered women shelter by Erin Pizzey, in the 70s in the UK.

She was from a family with abusive parents, and went on to try and help a woman that was in an abusive relationship, and kept going. She soon realized that most of the women she helped were just as violent as the men they were fleeing.

She tried to draw attention to that, and to open battered men shelters too. She didn't receive any of the help she did for women, and in fact, received death threats by feminists that escalated so much that she ended up having to flee the UK.

It's at that time that feminism moved to take control of her initiative and similar ones as well as the discourse and research on DV. They made sure to only ever investigate women battered by men, and men battering women. One day, a feminist researcher, challenged on that point, said that it was done so because anyway, it wouldn't change the result. Dared to prove it, he investigated fairly, asking women if they battered men, and men if they were battered by women. He found out that when you investigate fairly, you find actual gender symmetry in the numbers and motives. His name was Murray Strauss. Naively, like a good scientist, he reported his findings, thinking they would be embraced, and found himself attacked in all sorts of manners for it.

Many years later, after pursuing doing good science, he published a paper describing the various threats, intimidation tactics and other strategy that have been used against him and his peers :

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233717660_Thirty_Years_of_Denying_the_Evidence_on_Gender_Symmetry_in_Partner_Violence_Implications_for_Prevention_and_Treatment

And despite those interferences, some honest researchers kept doing a good job, and the biggest meta-analysis ever performed on DV was published :

https://domesticviolenceresearch.org/

With findings such as :

Overall, 22% of individuals assaulted by a partner at least once in their lifetime (23% for females and 19.3% for males)
Rates of female-perpetrated violence higher than male-perpetrated (28.3% vs. 21.6%)
Among large population samples, 57.9% of IPV reported was bi-directional, 42% unidirectional; 13.8% of the unidirectional violence was male to female (MFPV), 28.3% was female to male (FMPV)
Male and female IPV perpetrated from similar motives – primarily to get back at a partner for emotionally hurting them, because of stress or jealousy, to express anger and other feelings that they could not put into words or communicate, and to get their partner’s attention.

Meanwhile, feminists kept exploiting their dominant position in the field, and created what is now the worldwide dominant model for DV, the Duluth model, which treats DV as something done by men to women, on motives of seeking power and control.

About this model, it's creator, Ellen Pence, in her book "lessons from Duluth", around page 28-29

"The Power and Control Wheel, which was developed by battered women attending women's groups, was originally a description of typical behaviors accompanying the violence. In effect it said, "When he is violent, he gets power and he gets control." Somewhere early in our organizing efforts, however, we changed the message to "he is violent in order to get control or power." The difference is not semantic, it is ideological. Somewhere we shifted from understanding the violence as rooted in a sense of entitlements to rooted in a desire for power. By determining that the need or desire for power was the motivating force behind battering, we created a conceptual framework that, in fact, did not fit the lived experience of many of the men and women we were working with. Like those we were criticizing, we reduced our analysis to a psychological universal truism. The DAIP staff—like the therapist insisting it was an anger control problem, or the judge wanting to see it as an alcohol problem, or the defense attorney arguing that it was a defective wife problem—remained undaunted by the difference in our theory and the actual experiences of those we were working with. We all engaged in ideological practices and claimed them to be neutral observations.Eventually, we began to give into the process that is the heart of the Duluth model: interagency communication based on discussions of real cases. It was the cases themselves that created the chink in each of our theoretical suits of armor. Speaking for myself, I found that many of the men I interviewed did not seem to articulate a desire for power over their partner. Although I relentlessly took every opportunity to point out to men in the groups that they were so motivated and merely in denial, the fact that few men ever articulated such a desire went unnoticed by me and many of my coworkers. Eventually, we realized that we were finding what we had already predetermined to find. The DAIP staff were interpreting what men seemed to expect or feel entitled to as a desire. When we had to start explaining women's violence toward their partners, lesbian violence, and the violence of men who did not like what they were doing, we were brought back to our original undeveloped thinking that the violence is rooted in how social relationships (e.g., marriage) and the rights people feel entitled to within them are socially, not privately, constructed"

Yet, it's still the model enforced by feminists throughout the world, including the UN, in spite of all the data.

AvoidPinkHairHippos · 2022-09-01T08:38:17+00:00

Hi OP

The fact that you're asking this question to this sub, and asking it in a good faith way deserves recognition and credit. I want to thank you for being open minded, and welcome to our community. If you've any follow up questions, hmu.

Now to answer you question, I will go over numerous areas. Note that this is not a comprehensive list*:

In jobs:

why do you think they care alot about smashing the glass ceiling, but not the glass floor?

Or to put it another way: How do you feel about equalizing the gender ratio of so called bad jobs (ie. Those that are dirty, dangerous, physical or manual, socially isolating, risky.... Think of miners, taxi drivers, truck hauler, construction worker, infantry soldier, moving company) instead of just equalizing the ratio for so called good jobs (ie. STEM or business and political leadership roles) ?

Additionally, how many high profile Western feminists seriously advocate to reforming any of the below, from an explicitly anti-misandrist perspective.... How many can you name?

In health:

mental health (ie, suicide rate)
substance abuse
workplace injury & fatality rates
work-related long term health effects (ex: underground miners, taxi or truck drivers, construction workers)

In criminal justice:

treatment of female to male domestic violence
custody cases
police brutality victims
incarceration rate

In social roles:

time spent stuck at work (vs spending quality time with family/kids)
homelessness
male conscription/mandatory military service
lower graduation rates, higher truancy

After searching for them, I could only find 3. And guess what: all 3 have been ostracized by Western feminists:

Cassie jaye (director of a feminist doc, then a pro gay rights doc, then finally a male issues doc)
Erin pizzey (founder of the very first and largest DV shelter in the world)
Christina Sommers (author of book promoting boys' schooling and upbringing in a non misandrist way)

What does that tell you about this ideology?

*If you wish, we can discuss other examples of their double standards for:

gendered slurs
treatment and funding of male IPV victims vs female IPV victims
Body Autonomy opposition

vegano-aureo · 2022-09-01T10:25:05+00:00

I think it is a good thing you come asking with an open mind. A problem I see is that you bought into this ideology of blaming groups for their own problems.

This is a tactic that is used to minimize problems that people don't care about. I have seen this hugely after studies showed that women engage in more slut shaming than men. Every misogynist jumped on that and tried to shut down important discussions about slut shaming with " they are doing it to them selves so why should I care". The same way republicans try to shut down black lives matter with black on black crime statistics.

This line of thinking is not productive. Men still participate in slut shaming and it is still an important issue just like black lives matter being important too.

If you are genuinely interested I would point you to things you can research yourself.

Look at stats of school grades and educational outcomes between men and women in the west. There is a growing disparity that hasn't been addressed now for decades.

You might have already seen stats on black people receiving longer sentences for the same crime. People have been talking about this for years and with good reason. Than look at what these same studies reveal about gender differences which is for some reason never addressed.

When it comes to domestic violence which is culturally framed as a problem of wife beating. Research the term gender symmetry. It paints a completely different picture and has been the scientific consensus among domestic violence researchers for decades.

When it comes to sexual violence research the legal definition of rape and contrast it with the term made to penetrate which is revealed to be a shockingly common occurrence in our society.

The List goes on but after researching these things try talking to people about it. You will find people either being completely surprised or becoming openly hostile. I have seen people even gas lighting me. Me having experienced some of these things myself and they trying to convince me I have been imagining it the whole time and every body else as well.

RockmanXX · 2022-09-01T08:49:15+00:00

Misandry is bad for everyone's mental health. No boy needs to hear how he is born wrong or that he has inherited the "patriarchal sins" of his father and its also bad for Women to have such a toxic frame of reference of what Men are.

but men are the ones who only allowed men to fight

"Allowed"? Men&Boys were FORCED to fight against their will! NO one wants to go to war and die and women were/are given the PRIVILEGE to not die in wars.

and are also the ones (mostly) who put the draft into place.

"Men" are not a hivemind. Just because some asshole created the draft doesn't mean ALL men are collectively responsible for it! This "Men did it to themselves" Feminist logic boils my blood!! If a Woman slut shames another Woman, is it not misogyny? Is it only misogyny when men slut shame? Women are also a part of Society. They have sons, brothers,husbands&fathers, Women have an influence in whether draft is culturally accepted or not.

RhinoNomad · 2022-09-01T17:02:18+00:00

Well I have a couple issues with this framing, specifically:

The most popular responses I’ve heard are the draft and war but men are the ones who only allowed men to fight for the longest time and only allowed women to be nurses or work in the factories back home and are also the ones (mostly) who put the draft into place

This type of thinking that those who oppress you have to be different than you in the same way that they oppress you needs to go. It's a product of this "us vs them" mentality that doesn't capture the reality of oppression. Men can be oppressed by other men because they are men by other men. For examples, you can look at nearly any genocide in the middle east/eastern europe in the last couple of centuries. Adam Jones has a great piece on the Srebrenica genocide that shows how de-masculinization by rape, sexual assault and castration was specifically used as a method of terror to oppress men.

Lastly, why does misandry have to hurt men in the same way that misogyny hurts women. Does it give it more legitimacy if it does because if you think so, they maybe you should think a little harder about why you think that.

ugavini · 2022-09-01T14:20:51+00:00

It doesn't hurt men in the same ways. It hurts men in different ways.

There are many things that disproportionately affect women. There are other things that disproportionately affect men.

It doesn't matter that they aren't the same. And it's very subjective as to which is worse. It doesn't really matter.

Blauwpetje · 2022-09-01T13:39:33+00:00

Take your time for this.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/2020-update-for-every-100-girls-part-i/

ExMuzzy · 2022-09-01T17:06:37+00:00

When you have misandrists like Mary P. Koss behind statistics, who believe men cannot be raped, we end up with a lack of shelters for men because they appear unnecessary from given data.

Women's organisations have been doing similar things in the UK by insisting that the significant majority of abuse victims are female. As a result, men's shelters are lacking and men were left to stay in abusive households, on the street, live in their cars or even suicide. Women's Aid recently petitioned against funding for gender neutral abuse organisations on the basis that it would reduce resources for women.

sorebum405 · 2022-09-01T12:42:42+00:00

In what ways exactly are you saying that misogyny hurts women.I can't actually answer your question if I don't know what you mean.

boomboxspence · 2022-09-01T20:37:57+00:00

Men are more likely to be killed.

ohmygod_jc · 2022-09-01T23:57:41+00:00

Men can be misandrist, just like women can be misogynistic. This thread sort of shows why i dislike either word, and would rather just call it sexism or gender discrimination. Trying to to figure out if only men being allowed in the military is sexist against men or women is a pointless exercise to me.

a-man-from-earth · 2022-09-02T03:57:06+00:00

Misandry hurts more when it is denied to even exist, or when it's downplayed even when it does get acknowledged.

vtj · 2022-09-01T23:12:33+00:00

Thanks for the question. I am going to assume a broad meaning of misogyny and misandry, which includes not just outright hate, but any kind of gendered prejudice, and I will point to some common prejudices that harm men.

But before that, I would like to point out a very common misconception about sexist prejudice, which you apparently share: people often imagine that the prejudice against one gender is mostly perpetuated by the opposite gender: men being mostly prejudiced against women and vice versa. But this isn't how prejudice works: prejudice is not something we deliberately create to feel better about ourselves or to put others down, it is rather something we subconsciously absorb from early childhood by being exposed to the society and culture in which we are brought up. Boys and girls are brought up in the same culture, exposed to the same influences, and mostly end up with very similar prejudices.

Thus, your argument that male-only draft cannot be an outcome of misandry since it was enacted by men is flawed: men are affected by misandrist prejudice just as women are. Besides, it's not like women were ever clamoring to be included in the draft, were they? Until quite recently, men and women in most cultures were living under the misandric assumption that female lives are too precious and women too fragile to be exposed to the dangers of frontline fighting.

By the way, sometimes people talk of "internalized misogyny" to refer to misogyny expressed by women, apparently assuming that men are misogynist by their very nature, while women have to internalize it from a misogynist society. I disagree with this view, and I see no reason to assume that women's "internalized misogyny" is in any way fundamentally different from the "normal misogyny" perpetuated by men.

Anyway, to actually answer your question, here are some examples of sexist prejudice that harms men:

The "hyperagency" prejudice that men have power over their lives (and hence are to blame for anything bad that happens to them) while women are passive sufferers (and hence their problems are blamed on society). I wrote a very long post about this in another sub, which I will not repeat here. I'll add that there is actual research demonstrating how people (both men and women) are viewing identical conflict scenarios differently when the gender of the aggressor and victim changes (I also posted about this here and here), with male aggressors being seen as "more guilty" and female victims as "more traumatized".
The prejudice that men are obsessed with sex, and always consenting to it. Pretty much any story of a female sexual predator commiting statutory rape with an underage boy invites comments (from men and women alike) that the victim should somehow count himself lucky. Also, society tends to interpret any display of male affection in a sexual way: a man hugging a child is suspected of being a pedophile, a man hugging another man is suspected of being gay, a man smiling at a female coworker is seen as a creep. The idea that "men only think of sex" makes it basically impossible for men to express any non-sexual positive affection, which might contribute to men's social isolation and mental strain.
The prejudice that only men commit sexist discrimination, and that all such discrimination victimizes women. This might have been the case in the past, where most positions of power were held by men, but recent reseach suggests that sexist discrimination against men is a reality, and in some domains the norm (this, this, this or this paper).

Grow_peace_in_Bedlam · 2022-09-02T04:24:14+00:00

Thanks for your good faith question. I appreciate your presence here and open-mindedness.

At the same time, I would like to push back against the idea that the draft is not gender-based violence on the grounds that it was implemented by men. Did you know that female genital mutilation is done to women and girls almost entirely by women, and that a study on Sudanese men's attitudes towards FGM showed that those men preferred intact women (thus firmly belying the the notion that the women who perform FGM on others are just doing the patriarchy's bidding and therefore it is still men's fault)? Yet international organizations have no problem recognizing it as gender-based violence.

An issue can be a gender issue if it exclusively or disproportionately affects one gender; it is not necessary for the issue to be inflicted on one gender by the other, or even to be inflicted on the gender because they are that gender. The Istanbul Convention (i.e. the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence) recognizes this dual definition in regard to violence against women, and I would strongly advocate for applying the same approach to men's issues, since it looks at who's affected regardless of the sex of the perpetrators and removes the need for explicit intention to consider an issue a men's issue as long as it disproportionately affects men. Unfortunately, international organizations seem unwilling to treat men's issues as such unless intentions are made very explicit, all while taking a flexible approach about what constitutes a women's issue. I want the same approach applied to both.

griii2 · 2022-09-02T11:40:54+00:00

One example is body shaming. Body shaming hurts men in the same way it hurts women. one difference though is that body shaming against men is mostly considered normal.

hendrixski · 2022-09-02T13:25:14+00:00

but men are the ones who only allowed men to fight for the longest time

This sounds like a faith-basaed argument. Some facts to snap you back to reality and dispell this bullshit:

You're on a forum where lots of men are involved in political activism to allow women to be drafted, too.
Talk to women don't assume what they want. If you talk to women you'll find that many many women are against fighting in war... Especially against their consent. It's not"men", it's also women who actively work to maintain the status quo of men being in combat instead of women.
The politicians that send young men to war are both men and women. They didn't do it because it benefits men. They did it because it benefits the capital investment of the men and women of the capitalist class.

Etc.

Hope you stop preaching flasehoods now.

Relative_Pangolin_92 · 2022-09-01T16:52:45+00:00

I don't consider the draft a misandry vs. misogyny issue. It's a class issue. The wealthy and the powerful instituted a draft on the working class.

DouglasMilnes · 2022-09-02T01:13:53+00:00

Who says misandry does hurt in the same way? Why are you only interested in ways in which the two similar types of hatred hurt in the same way; do you think men and women are the same?

LakiL_ · 2022-09-05T21:48:30+00:00

Well, misandry is not a crime, it's seen as ok by the media and general population.

Misogyny is a crime. It is seen as absolute evil by pretty much everyone. The problem is that anything that harms a woman is misogyny. (Even things that are controlled by women, such as schools) Imagine if we applied that for men...

RedCascadian · 2022-09-03T19:30:51+00:00

The number one way I'd say is through apathy.

You know how conservatives tend to not give a shit about gay or trans issues until their son or daughter comes out of the closet?

A lot, not all, but a lot, don't really even think about what happens to men who aren't the most privileged until something impacts a close friend or relative in a dramatic way. It's just not even on their radar.

LakiL_ · 2022-09-05T21:54:00+00:00

And also, people saying that misandry doesn't exist. It is often compared to "reverse racism" but it's completely different. A man coming forward to talk about being sexually assaulted is instantly dismissed and laughed at. I know this because it happened to me. So yeah when people despise me when I talk about being an anti feminist, I see them as the same people that laughed at me when I tried to tell them about my sexual assault. And yes, these people were my proud feminist coworkers, who prefer to side with the abuser.

Title	How does misandry hurt men in the same ways misogyny hurts women?
Author	Automatic_Biscotti31
Upvotes	34
Comments	108
Date	September 1, 2022 7:43 AM UTC (3 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/x31gpl/how_does_misandry_hurt_men_in_the_same_ways/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/how-does-misandry-hurt-men-in-the-same-ways.1130508 https://theredarchive.com/post/1130508

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