Just joined this subreddit. I did so because I often get frustrated with the sexism that goes on against men from women who either do not think they are being sexist at all. Know they are being sexist but don't care because we have it coming or women have endured it for centuries and so we should suck it up. Or the scary few women who know they are being sexist but think women are superior to men.
This frustrates me no end. If a man complains it is not only dismissed in your local gathering, work etc but by society as a whole.
Three adverts here in the UK are a case. The first about a cleaning product that is labelled so good 'even a man can use it' and shows the man in the advert basically being stupid and the woman smart.
The second advert shows a woman who gets annoyed at her man whilst sitting on the couch where he is frankly doing little to aggravate but she pushes a button and he is ejected off the couch out the window and into a tree. I think this is from a PMS product.
The third advert for a well known pharmacist here shows two women with obvious colds meeting in the streets talking about how busty they are and getting on in life then one mentions her poor husband is back at home in bed with a col. The point being women get on with colds and men just collapse. Classic manful statement.
All of these adverts have received complaints. None were uphold and the first advert received thousands of them
I realise I am already starting to blather so shall get onto my main point.
I am basically trying to show how I too am truly fed up with the injustice that women can be sexist towards men. Yet at the same time I have some issues with this very subreddit.
Here is why. I don't like feminism. I am not against women's rights, quite the reverse. I am for equal rights. And Feminism had a very important role in the 60's and further back to help women make a step towards achieving equal rights. But in that time it has changed. It has become more of a them against us. and in extreme cases women are superior to men.
This has not helped eves of the sexes. It has created divisions. It has lead to the 'all men are bastards' attitude.
I am worried that a men's rights subreddit could lead to the same. A them and us attitude. I believe in equality for all. Equal but different. A coming together to achieve equal rights for all. to stamp out prejudice whatever the side.
If I saw a man being sexist I would pull him up on it. Likewise if saw a woman being sexist I would do the same.
That said I understand the growing frustrations many men have against the double standards. the throwaway sexist comments from women and the seeming institutional backing of this.
I would just rather women and men could come together to address these problems rather than creating sides and battle lines.
[–]girlwriteswhat 9 points10 points11 points (12 children) | Copy Link
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[+]white_cloud [recovered] (8 children) | Copy Link
What do you mean by this? Male disposability and the indifference to male suffering is a cultural issue. It can be changed by educating people. This is one of the main goals of the MRM.
[–]girlwriteswhat 5 points6 points7 points (6 children) | Copy Link
[+]white_cloud [recovered] (5 children) | Copy Link
I really respect your opinions. I learn a lot by reading you. You've said a lot that is true even in this comment. But I wonder about the biological argument for women being more valuable to society. I wonder how this applies in today's culture.
Because what I see is a society filled with a bunch of Lady Gaga clones, women who are fucking and sucking through their 20s and 30s with no care whatsoever for having babies. They use every means available to avoid having a baby, even going so far as to kill the baby if other means fail. How can you say that society values women because they have babies, when so many of today's most highly valued women (young women in their 20s) do not have babies and have no interest in having babies?
What I see is a society that values women because people have been socialized to think of women as these innocent, weak, defenseless creatures that need our help. I don't think it has anything to do with them having babies. We are way past the point where that kind of biological determinism applied to the way our society works.
The lifeboat analogy that you use often, the justification for that is different today than it was decades ago. It might have been true decades ago, that women were given lifeboats because of their value as baby-makers for society. But today, I think if women are given lifeboats, especially young women, it's not because they have the ability to make a baby, it's because people see them as weak, cute things and want to protect weak, cute things like they would want to protect an abandoned puppy. I think that's where we are as a culture.
I think that technology and overpopulation has eliminated women's inherent value as baby-makers. We don't need more babies, and as a culture we have recognized this for at least 50 years. We are not in survival mode as a species, needing all the women to pop out dozens of babies to ensure our survival. Whenever we as a species stopped needing women to have so many babies to ensure our survival, that's when women's value stopped being based on their ability to have babies and became more about women's value as cute, weak, defenseless creatures that need protection.
At least, that's my theory based on what I see in our culture today. I don't actually think that women are weak, defenseless creatures. But I think that our society, due to the way that people are socialized, encourages this view of women. And I really believe that feminism, for all their talk about how they think women are just as strong as men and can do anything a man can do, I think that feminism has not done a damn thing to eliminate this notion of women as vulnerable, because it helps women. Women get help for being seen as vulnerable.
[–]girlwriteswhat 4 points5 points6 points (4 children) | Copy Link
[+]white_cloud [recovered] (3 children) | Copy Link
Well said. My basic point was that in modern society, it seems to me like the advantages that women have, the privileges that women have, the special treatment that women get, is based a lot more on society's perception of women as being vulnerable rather than women's value as baby-makers. Women get benefits because society wants to protect them. I don't disagree that at one point in the past, women's value was strongly tied to having children, and perpetuating families and societies through those children. I just think that at this late point in the devolution of our culture, that aspect of women's value has been de-emphasized to such an extent that I'm not sure it even motivates much of male behavior towards women, at least in post-modern western societies.
Think about the life boat scenario that you use often. I said this before, but I'll repeat it because I think it has a lot of truth to it. I have no doubt whatsoever that if men and women were on a sinking ship, men of today would give life boats to the women first. No doubt about that. Some disgruntled egalitarians might protest this, but I think that the instinct of most men, even younger men, would be to help the women first. The issue though, is why they would do this. What is really motivating that behavior? I do not think it has anything to do with who has the ability to give birth to children. I think the men would give the women life boats simply because they see the women as vulnerable, more vulnerable than the men, and therefore deserving of help.
That's why I took issue with your original comment that society will always see women as more valuable than men, based on women being able to give birth. I actually don't think that this is the main reason why women are seen as more valuable than men in today's culture. I think it has more to do with women being seen as vulnerable, and needing of help. I think that's where the special treatment that women gets comes from.
And that issue, I believe, is due to cultural conditioning. Women are not necessarily more vulnerable than men. In general, women's bodies do not develop the same type of musculature as men's bodies, but that is the only difference when it comes to vulnerability of males vs. females. Men are as vulnerable as women in every other way. And some men are more physically vulnerable than some women. I am about 140 lbs. and very thin. Many women are physically stronger than me, I am sure. I am just as vulnerable, physically, emotionally, as any woman. But as a man, I don't get any benefit from being seen as vulnerable. I only get ridiculed. So I hide my vulnerabilities as best as possible. Women get innumerable benefits from being seen as vulnerable. They get protection and help, from the government, the courts, police, other women, random males, males among their friends/family.
I think this is all due to cultural conditioning. We could just as easily condition people to value men's contributions to society more than women's. We could just as easily condition people to see men as equally in need of help. It would take decades of programming, but it could be done. We could even get to a point where women are conditioned to give men the life boats, if women have been programmed to value men's contributions to society to such an extent that they think that those men deserve to be saved first.
We just don't do that as a culture. We don't tout men's contributions as a gender. If a woman invents something, it's touted as a big deal. Anything important that a woman does is touted as being an accomplishment for women as a gender and given to us as a reason why we should value women.
But when a man invents something, it's like his gender is erased. No one ever touts the male gender for important things that individual men do. But if we did, if we consciously set out to laud the male gender for all of the important contributions to society that individual males make (like we do for women), then I think that gender relations would be quite different, and society would value men much more than they do.
I guess I'm trying to weave two arguments here. I'm talking about society valuing women because women are seen as vulnerable, but I'm also talking about society not valuing men as much as they should based on men's contributions to society. I think that these two phenomenon are related, but they are not exactly the same argument. It's two different arguments.
I guess the broader point is that these are due to cultural campaigns to encourage a specific type of thinking. It didn't just arise spontaneously. People make choices about what is important to talk about in our culture. Over the last 50 years, we have a culture that has basically made men's contributions as a gender invisible, while at the same time trumping up women's contributions as a gender. I keep emphasizing as a gender for men because it's different to acknowledge the contributions of a man or of men and to acknowledge the contributions of men specifically as a gender. You'll notice that usually when women's contributions are acknowledged, there is an almost political undertone to it. It is about acknowledging women as a group. But men are often acknowledged as individuals or as members of a non-gendered group like a "team".
We also have as a culture, allowed the patriarchal ideas about female vulnerability to persist, right alongside the completely contradictory idea about how women are strong and empowered. This has happened because no one has challenged it enough to break it. Feminism has cynically exploited the patriarchal idea of female vulnerability to obscene levels, using it to gain innumerable advantages for women. While at the same time, claiming that women are strong enough to do anything that a man can do.
Basically, women need to start acknowledging the contributions of men more, and appreciating men more, and stop acting like everything has to be about acknowledging women. They also need to either be the strong, empowered women that they claim they are, or be the vulnerable kittens that they default into whenever it serves them to do so. Men also need to start acknowledging other men, and stop acting like life is about fucking over your fellow males in order to get some female attention (there's another animal behavior, but we don't have to act like animals).
I disagree that women are no longer valuable to society. I think that men and women are equally valuable. The male and female are equally valuable components to any society. Male and female energies are present in all life. I think that we all have aspects of male and female to us. Obviously we each have a specific gender that is based on our genitalia, but we each also have aspects of male and female energy that forms the basis for our personalities and our souls.
I like talking with you. You sound sincere. There is so much insincerity online and on reddit in particular.
[–]girlwriteswhat 2 points3 points4 points (2 children) | Copy Link
[+]white_cloud [recovered] (1 child) | Copy Link
I see what you are saying here. I could probably say a lot more here, but I really can't collect my thoughts on this right now.
It's worse than that actually. They weren't even talking about men as part of this. There was no discussion about putting men back to work. It was all about putting Americans back to work. If something affects men, they take the gender out of it and don't even acknowledge that it is about men. But when something affects women, they openly talk about helping women.
There were some clever feminists in academia who realized early on that "shovel-ready" jobs meant mostly jobs for men, so they sent letters of protest to the White House to lobby for the inclusion of more spending for women's jobs, which they got from a Democratic administration and Democratic Congress, always eager to please the women's lobby. The irony is that this may have watered down their bill, making the stimulus bill less effective at helping the economy, and this weak economy may contribute to the defeat of Barack Obama in the 2012 election (and the loss of the U.S. Senate for the Democrats).
But there was no public discussion by the drafters of this legislation about how we need to create jobs for men, to help men, who have suffered the majority of the job losses in the recession. And I really wonder if the people crafting this legislation even thought about the gender of the people who would be helped by the bill. It may have never even occurred to them that the majority of the job creation would go to men. But leave it to the feminists, who are always thinking about everything in specifically gendered terms, to raise the issue of how a bill designed to help the economy, without regard to gender, should be made equitable to women just because.
Imagine if men did that. Imagine if men looked at every issue and asked how this affects men, and wouldn't support something unless it helped men. That's what a real "patriarchy" would look like. We are so far from anything resembling that type of society it is unreal. But that is precisely what a large and influential lobby group does for women.
I have said before that when women talk about how legal restrictions on abortion is a War on Women, men should reference how the 30-year-long decline in American manufacturing jobs is a War on Men, if for no other reason than to show the absurdity of both phrases (and to show how narcissistic the former phrase really is). After all, the vast majority of manufacturing job losses occurred to men. But I can virtually guarantee you that reference to the decline in manufacturing jobs as a War on Men has never been uttered in our public discourse. No one has ever referred to the decline in manufacturing jobs as a War on Men, even though it would be just as accurate to call it that as it would be to call abortion restrictions a War on Women (which is a major feminist slogan that they use all the time when talking about new abortion laws).
I think that's what we need to do though. We need to start talking in those terms about things that affect men. Because otherwise, men are just invisible and people think that the only plight is occurring to women.
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