[meta] PSA: This subreddit is losing touch and propagating itself as irrational, rather than promoting equality and fair treatment there's a growing tone of needing to lower the status of women rather

Tyrien · 2013-03-02T20:44:23+00:00

So you want this sub to ignore the ways the feminism is infringing on mens rights and dignity and erasing male abuse and problems and to focus on feminist goals instead?

OThomson · 2013-03-02T22:14:46+00:00

An /AMR subscriber telling us whats wrong with /MR shit just got real in here.

Thievishmetal69 · 2013-03-02T22:30:22+00:00

Fuck all of you, you're all batshit and cannot understand a world beyond black and white, us or them. You guys bitch about wanting equal treatment but cannot do so without bitching about women getting better treatment.

Do I even need to address how stupid this is.

Seriously. If this subreddit really wanted equality then it wouldn't focus on labelling feminists feminists and citing how feminists are crazy, irrational, or work to suppress the rights of men. It would focus on how society as a whole revolves around dated concepts and needs to realign itself to properly treat people of all genders equally.

The Men's Rights subreddit is a place for those who wish to discuss men's rights and the ways said rights are infringed upon.

/r/egalitarian is here, cya, you fucking concern trolling piece of shit.

LAMFF · 2013-03-02T23:35:55+00:00

Concern troll! No thank you for your concern. Men are angry and need a place to voice that anger. If you don't like certain links, don't click on them. The day the men in this subreddit stop worrying about what feminist bloggers think about them and start doing what they want, is when this movement will start gaining traction.

AnnArchist · 2013-03-02T20:36:36+00:00

If the community accepts tighter moderation controls I'd love to see them implemented.

We don't need WBB posts here at all. Ever. We know women do bad shit. We don't need to constantly circle jerk about it. Some woman murders her husband.... that belongs in /r/wtf or /r/womenbehavingbadly - its only a mensrights issue when she successfully argues that she was a battered woman or when she gets a lighter sentence.

We don't need FB / Twitter/ Myspace / Tumbler posts here. Put those @ /r/tumblrinaction or /r/MensRants

I'm all for removing those two types of posts. If you can convince the mods to do so, please have at it.

Convince em in /r/MensRightsMeta/ and we can bring it here.

Riesea · 2013-03-02T22:06:20+00:00

And in this issue of concern trolling weekly...

baskandpurr · 2013-03-02T22:35:38+00:00

Is this post about the one thread? Surely your view that MR is irrational needs more basis than people disagreeing with you in one thread?

Obviously you and a number of people have different opinions on that topic. While you did get lots of downvotes, you also got a debate. That is something MR provides and subs like /r/feminsim and /r/SRS do not allow. Debate means that not everybody will see things your way, or my way. I think that's a sign of a healthly attitude.

rg57 · 2013-03-03T02:02:59+00:00

"You guys bitch about wanting equal treatment but cannot do so without bitching about women getting better treatment [than men]"

Yes, that's right. Who else is going to do it? Until there is a movement actually dedicated to gender equality, the feminist movement does need to be offset by a men's movement.

Regarding the paternity testing, it seems like something that should be done for the benefit of the child, regardless of the parents. Each of us benefits from knowing our genetic history. It's seems very wrong that some children have access to that medically-useful information, and others are treated as if they just popped into existence from the ether. It's not right.

Also, while I have no intention of becoming a parent, I imagine that if I had spent 15 years raising a child I thought I had a close genetic connection to, only to find that we were genetically unrelated, and that someone I loved KNEW that and did not tell me, the depth of that deception would devastate me, and cause lasting harm to the relationship I had with the child I was raising. Why should a child have to be subjected to such turmoil, when it can be avoided?

Further, as a skeptic, I think nothing good comes from wilful ignorance.

Thievishmetal69 · 2013-03-02T22:09:28+00:00

I'm a subscriber to both [5] /r/MensRights and [6] /r/againstmensrights.

Yea I'm calling concern troll.

A regular poster to /r/feminism, and /r/againstmensrights takes issue with men discussing their rights.

Shocking.

Why don't you fuck off.

BadAtThisGame · 2013-03-02T20:42:42+00:00

I'm compeled to say that I support rational, educated discussion. However, when you make sweeping generalizations like:

Fuck all of you, you're all batshit and cannot understand a world beyond black and white, us or them. You guys bitch about wanting equal treatment but cannot do so without bitching about women getting better treatment.

I can understand you're upset, but the exceptions don't necessarily make the rules. I think that cooler heads will prevail.

memymineown · 2013-03-02T22:03:27+00:00

Please go to hell.

If you don't like what people post or comment here then downvote them or comment on them.

If you feel the subreddit is losing quality then start posting interesting things and help to create a better atmosphere. Complaining about what other people say doesn't do that.

Don't make annoying posts about how you don't like what some anonymous person said on the internet. Do something positive instead.

C0CKPUNCHER · 2013-03-02T22:21:15+00:00

You are substituting an attack for an argument.

jolly_mcfats · 2013-03-02T21:50:05+00:00

First: I think the amount of downvoting you recieved was excessive and bad rediquette. I think that downvoting is fine, but after somewhere between 0 and -2, disagreement has been registered adequately for an opinion that just differs. I personally don't downvote unless I think the comment is ignorant, offensive, or trollish, which none of yours were. I'm not a huge fan of the karma system, and your issue is illustrative of why.

I do think it is very odd that you view the particular discussion as an attempt to lower women though. At stake: women who cuckolded their husband's FEELINGS vs men being entrapped into providing for a strangers child for 18 years. Everyone arguing against you really seemed to just be arguing that the men mattered, and that making a test BEFORE ASSIGNING LEGAL OBLIGATION TO PROVIDE would eliminate a lot of the bad feelings/accusatory atmosphere surrounding the tests. I think you are mischaracterizing the resistance you encountered. And I think that maybe you should ask yourself if maybe there is a little bit of gynocentricity in the premise of your argument.

So, I'm sorry you got karma-dinged, and that one redditor attacked you for posting something in againstmensrights. But I think that you are representing yourself as someone interested in thoughtful dialog, while not listening to what your fellow conversationalists are saying. And it's only the bad karma that you recieved that is causing me to give you a pass on what is essentially throwing a temper tantrum with this post. I think most of us have posted something polite and reasoned elsewhere on reddit, only to be hit with -30-60 karma in an hour, and - it's very hard not to take it personally, even when you school yourself not to care about karma. So I do view this post with empathy. But I don't think you are going to be very proud of it in a week.

Nomenimion · 2013-03-02T21:25:45+00:00

I don't want to lower women -- except for the ones who abuse the legal system.

marauding-lunatic · 2013-03-03T04:19:02+00:00

That thread is about beinging fairness to men. What does it even have to do with "lowering the status of women?" They're talking about men's right to make sure that their son is genetically theirs. I don't know how you went from that to trying to bring women down.

Thievishmetal69 · 2013-03-02T22:28:18+00:00

Quit cluttering our sub with your concern trolling garbage.

I prefer misandrists/feminists who openly hate men as opposed to snake in the grass types like you.

DIAF

torrentfox · 2013-03-03T19:24:24+00:00

Meta posts go in /r/mensrightsmeta. Aside from that, there have been posters who've voiced legitimate concerns about the sub and about the movement.

Fuck all of you, you're all batshit and cannot understand a world beyond black and white, us or them. You guys bitch about wanting equal treatment but cannot do so without bitching about women getting better treatment.

And you are not one of them.

2013-03-03T20:19:40+00:00

Feminist concern troll. Go burn in hell. Or better yet, talk to fellow feminists about you "GENUINE" concern for gender equality, because they are sure as hell enjoying their female privilege. On second thought, just burn in hell.

kempff · 2013-03-02T20:39:37+00:00

propagating itself as irrational

English much?

Anyway TL;DR Backed into spur of rebar while running backwards at full speed, got butthurt, now I'm accusing the construction company of not being nice to me

Super_Duper_Mann · 2013-03-02T22:03:09+00:00

I completely agree with you.

One of the most telling elements of this is the "news" posts like the one on which you commented; stories in which men are victims or survivors of some type of crime or injustice, or success stories in which injustice is overcome.

These types of posts are frequent in /r/feminism as well, focusing on stories in which women are victims or survivors of some type of crime or injustice, or success stories in which injustice is overcome. The major difference between the two can be seen in how the posts are titled.

90% of the people here will gladly tell you about how all feminists want nothing more than to convince the world that men are evil criminals. Yet let's look at the way that those posts are titled, right now, as I write this:

These are just 4 of the articles that I found on the first/second page that link to external sites. There are more, all titled similarly - either a direct copy of the original headline, or a copy with an addendum to link it to a feminist concept.

Whether or not you believe in the legitimacy of those challenges is irrelevant to my point, which is about the language used when discussing them.

This creates a tone that accomplishes two objectives; it communicates that women are suffering, and makes clear the ways in which they are suffering.

Let's examine 4 posts from the frontpage of /r/mensrights.

Again, these are just the ones that were up at the time of writing this. The way that these posts are created present a very different narriative, one that contributes to the circle-jerky, groupthink issue that the OP here is talking about.

1) The first article is very needed here - it speaks to the challenges that men face in paternity and child support situations, and raises the fact that there is a legal/political debate that should be had about paternal responsibility. However, the post doesn't include the original headline, and construes the situation as a cut-and-dry case of involuntary fatherhood. In reality, the news is that the man has made a claim, and a lawsuit is underway - not that a man has definitely become an involuntary father as a direct result of his girlfriend's actions. Overall, though, this article is in the right place and should be here. There was no reason to write a new headline for the post.

2) This post makes two mistakes. Firstly, it attributes the claims of one person that identifies as a feminist to all feminists. Anyone here can tell you that each MRA is different, and not all MRA's are alike. Yet instead, the author of that post (and many of the commentors) are happy to attribute the ideas of one person to an enormous, varied, and diverse movement. Secondly, the post quote-mines. Immediately before the author writes the line that is quoted, she notes that "she is speaking strictly from her own personal experience." She explicitly states that this is her personal opinion. However, the OP had no problem ignoring this fact, and literally saying in the title that the opinions therein were representative of all feminists. I personally disagree with that article on many levels, but I find it to be well-written and interesting, worthy of discussion. That discussion cannot be had when the OP tells us what we should think about the article before we even begin to read it.

3) Same problem here - right of the bat, we're told that the article is silly.

4) This is the right way to do it. Original headline, source, and a point that is relevant to MRA and the article at hand. Sadly, posts like this are rare here and garner little discussion.

The takeaway is that the manner in which posts are made here in the MRA sub serve a hivemind mentaility. They tell us what to think about the article before we read it, they wash over key facts, and they misconstrue situations.

Most importantly, they consistently are phrased in ways that portray women as perpetrators, rather than men as victims or survivors. That's not to say that women aren't perpetrators, but it creates an overall tone of "Women are Bad" rather than the far more productive and accurate tone of "Men's Rights are being infringed upon." That doesn't help ease the detractors at /r/againstmensrights who insist that all MRA's are misogynists. If we sit here and circle-jerk about how women attack men all the time and how feminists are out to destroy MRA's we're not going to get anything done. The world is not made up of feminists. It's made up of people who don't know everything. Teach them. Let this sub serve not as an opposing force, but as a source of information and assistance. That's the solution. Focus on the solutions, people.

Edited for formatting at 5:07pmEST

Comments