Need help clarifying ideas

SpicyMarshmellow · 2024-08-05T17:03:13+00:00

A man touching a women is considered inappropriate, but a women touching a man is considered lucky.

Feminists don't explicitly endorse this, but they implicitly do. They hyperbolize instances of men touching women non-consensually, and marginalize instances of women touching men non-consensually. They do this in order to skew statistics in a way that gives women power over men.

They will claim that a man being considered lucky when it happens to them is an instance of how the patriarchy hurts men, too. But in the same breath, they will ruthlessly defend the position that it's worse when it happens to women and it happens to women more, and if any men are hurt by this narrative, they need to suck it up and take it like men for the sake of protecting women. So in the end, it's the same message just delivered differently.

Many will even openly state that any man who claims to be a victim is actually outing themselves as an abuser, because it can be safely automatically assumed they're engaging in DARVO. They will still constantly repeat statistics put together by a woman who has famously asserted throughout her long and influential career that men cannot be raped, and research methodology should exclude men from being counted as rape victims. And they will use those statistics as proof that while women can sexually assault men in theory, the reality of the issue is it's something men do to women.

What exactly is considered patriarchy here?

Speaking just for myself on this one. It is a fact that positions of institutional power have been mostly occupied by men globally throughout history. That can be labeled patriarchy; a society where power is held by patriarchs.

Feminism interprets this fact as evidence that men monolithically conspired amongst themselves to subjugate women for their own benefit. This is where feminism and I part ways on the subject of patriarchy. Theirs is a gender essentialist view. To say that all of human history is characterized by men participating in a near-universal conspiracy to oppress women is to say that men are innately evil. How could such a thing be true otherwise?

Alternatively, patriarchy is easily explained as a natural consequence of past material conditions. Before modern medicine and agriculture, most human beings lived agrarian lifestyles, which requires a steady supply of children in order to be sustainable. Farming was brutal work, and if you didn't have kids ready to start taking on the heavy lifting when your own youthful vitality began to fade, you would probably die. But infant and childbirth mortality rates were very high. This meant women had to be pregnant a lot through their prime years, and preferably not wrestling livestock at the same time. Travel was also very dangerous and physical. So it naturally fell to men to be the ones who took care of business and represented the family away from home.

They also avoid talking about various benefits and other forms of power that women have enjoyed throughout history. For example: Any woman in a rich, powerful family has always been more powerful than the average man. Class has always universally superceded gender in power dynamics. Elderly women have traditionally commanded a great deal of respect and power within their families, and matriarchs of successful families can be dominating presences in their local communities, unofficially superceding official titles. A queen or princess or mob boss's grandmother may not be the one directly giving orders or making laws... but pissing her off may be a bigger mistake than pissing off the king or mob boss himself.

And with the phrase "patriarchy also hurts men too" isnt this still correct because the same mechanism of patriachy that say women cant work were alsonthe same ones that told men to be the providers and to go die for king and country or be shamed.

You'll see plenty of talk about that around here. If you've been lurking, it's hard to imagine how you could miss it. We're explicitly Left-Wing Male Advocates for a reason. Because we recognize that conservative views on gender are fucked, too.

luciolover11 · 2024-08-05T21:43:18+00:00

Patriarchy is a very nebulous term that people change the meaning of to fit whatever their current argument is. Patriarchy, as I would define it, is a system in which men as a social group hold political power over women. In a democracy, where politicians are beholden to the will of the voters, no gender faces political oppression. (As in, having more power to influence the laws and governance of a country compared to other genders.) This is very apparent if you look at where abortion was banned in the US. It wasn’t states with men in governance, it was states where the majority of voters were anti-abortion. Even if the governors of those states were women (Iowa for example), all that matters is how the voters view abortion. So by that definition, it’s pretty obvious to me that in functional democracies, there’s no patriarchy.

If you define patriarchy as a system that oppresses women, sure, we live in a patriarchy. But the system oppresses men too. Does that mean it’s also a matriarchy? You see why this definition doesn’t really make much sense?

A lot of people also use gender roles/patriarchy interchangeably, which I don’t understand. They’re two completely different subjects. Proving the existence of gender roles isn’t the same as proving the existence of patriarchy.

SpicyMarshmellow · 2024-08-05T17:04:22+00:00

A man touching a women is considered inappropriate, but a women touching a man is considered lucky.

Feminists don't explicitly endorse this, but they implicitly do. They hyperbolize instances of men touching women non-consensually, and marginalize instances of women touching men non-consensually. They do this in order to skew statistics in a way that gives women power over men.

They will claim that a man being considered lucky when it happens to them is an instance of how the patriarchy hurts men, too. But in the same breath, they will ruthlessly defend the position that it's worse when it happens to women and it happens to women more, and if any men are hurt by this narrative, they need to suck it up and take it like men for the sake of protecting women. So in the end, it's the same message just delivered differently.

Many will even openly state that any man who claims to be a victim is actually outing themselves as an abuser, because it can be safely automatically assumed they're engaging in DARVO. They will still constantly repeat statistics put together by a woman who has famously asserted throughout her long and influential career that men cannot be raped, and research methodology should exclude men from being counted as rape victims. And they will use those statistics as proof that while women can sexually assault men in theory, the reality of the issue is it's something men do to women.

SpicyMarshmellow · 2024-08-05T17:03:13+00:00

A man touching a women is considered inappropriate, but a women touching a man is considered lucky.

Feminists don't explicitly endorse this, but they implicitly do. They hyperbolize instances of men touching women non-consensually, and marginalize instances of women touching men non-consensually. They do this in order to skew statistics in a way that gives women power over men.

They will claim that a man being considered lucky when it happens to them is an instance of how the patriarchy hurts men, too. But in the same breath, they will ruthlessly defend the position that it's worse when it happens to women and it happens to women more, and if any men are hurt by this narrative, they need to suck it up and take it like men for the sake of protecting women. So in the end, it's the same message just delivered differently.

Many will even openly state that any man who claims to be a victim is actually outing themselves as an abuser, because it can be safely automatically assumed they're engaging in DARVO. They will still constantly repeat statistics put together by a woman who has famously asserted throughout her long and influential career that men cannot be raped, and research methodology should exclude men from being counted as rape victims. And they will use those statistics as proof that while women can sexually assault men in theory, the reality of the issue is it's something men do to women.

What exactly is considered patriarchy here?

Speaking just for myself on this one. It is a fact that positions of institutional power have been mostly occupied by men globally throughout history. That can be labeled patriarchy; a society where power is held by patriarchs.

Feminism interprets this fact as evidence that men monolithically conspired amongst themselves to subjugate women for their own benefit. This is where feminism and I part ways on the subject of patriarchy. Theirs is a gender essentialist view. To say that all of human history is characterized by men participating in a near-universal conspiracy to oppress women is to say that men are innately evil. How could such a thing be true otherwise?

Alternatively, patriarchy is easily explained as a natural consequence of past material conditions. Before modern medicine and agriculture, most human beings lived agrarian lifestyles, which requires a steady supply of children in order to be sustainable. Farming was brutal work, and if you didn't have kids ready to start taking on the heavy lifting when your own youthful vitality began to fade, you would probably die. But infant and childbirth mortality rates were very high. This meant women had to be pregnant a lot through their prime years, and preferably not wrestling livestock at the same time. Travel was also very dangerous and physical. So it naturally fell to men to be the ones who took care of business and represented the family away from home.

They also avoid talking about various benefits and other forms of power that women have enjoyed throughout history. For example: Any woman in a rich, powerful family has always been more powerful than the average man. Class has always universally superceded gender in power dynamics. Elderly women have traditionally commanded a great deal of respect and power within their families, and matriarchs of successful families can be dominating presences in their local communities, unofficially superceding official titles. A queen or princess or mob boss's grandmother may not be the one directly giving orders or making laws... but pissing her off may be a bigger mistake than pissing off the king or mob boss himself.

And with the phrase "patriarchy also hurts men too" isnt this still correct because the same mechanism of patriachy that say women cant work were alsonthe same ones that told men to be the providers and to go die for king and country or be shamed.

You'll see plenty of talk about that around here. If you've been lurking, it's hard to imagine how you could miss it. We're explicitly Left-Wing Male Advocates for a reason. Because we recognize that conservative views on gender are fucked, too.

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