Why so much hostility towards feminism? Shouldn't we work to coexist rather than hate?

iainmf · 2024-09-03T19:41:31+00:00

Here is a big list of things the feminist movement has done that harms men:

https://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/9v6tqj/a_list_about_feminism_misandry_for_anyone_who/

In terms of being intentional, there's a great paper called 'The Feminist Case for Acknowledging Women's Acts of Violence' which describes how the feminist movement used a 'strategy of containment' to hide female perpetrators of violence (and therefore male victims). The paper explains how the feminist movement wanted to keep control over the domestic violence narrative for political reasons. Including ensuring they get funding. In other words they intentionally minimised male victims of domestic violence.

Erin Pizzey, who founded the world's first domestic violence shelter, tells a similar story when she tried to explain that men were victims of domestic violence.

Current_Finding_4066 · 2024-09-03T20:02:54+00:00

What is abundently clear is that feminist do not seek equality.

Ask them why are they fighting against laws criminalizing rape perpertrated by women.

raspherem · 2024-09-03T20:21:43+00:00

You lose your privileges when you want to be unconditionally equal which is not what feminists want. They want to be conditionally equal to men who they find desirable which are barely 5% men which is not equality.

DepartureFriendly303 · 2024-09-03T20:45:15+00:00

Maybe a good start would be to drop the label "feminist". If all you want is equality for the sexes then a better label would be "egalitarian". That word literally means equality unlike the word feminism. Many here on this sub have suffered at the hands of feminists and occasionally we see "feminists" here either to troll or pretend to reach out or pretend to be curious.

On the odd occasion we get the genuine attempt to reach out and one such user did so back in April. She was even considering dropping the feminist label entirely and this is the usual position of those who really want to reach out. They usually turn out to be egalitarians and end up adopting this label instead.

Punder_man · 2024-09-03T21:31:52+00:00

Well Op,

The problem here is how feminism and feminists portray themselves as "A movement for equality" and how anyone who dares to criticize them must be "Anti-equality"

Or how they proclaim: "Feminism is for men too!"

But their words, do not match with their actions.
Time and time again we see feminists working to benefit women at the expense of men or pushing for rights / protections for women but not for men.

Feminists created the Duluth Model of Domestic Violence, a model which is still in use today.
Their model ASSUMES than in ALL cases of domestic violence involving a man and a woman, the man is ALWAYS the aggressor and the woman is ALWAYS the victim..

This is direct discrimination against men to fit an agenda rather than being based upon facts and evidence.
It has also all but erased male victims of domestic violence from the statistics after all.. you can't be a victim if you are always assumed to be the abuser.. which in turn leads MANY men who are victims of abuse at the hands of women who reach out for help being slapped back and told "She obviously hit you back in self defense" or "What did you say or do to make her angry?" or worse they are arrested and told "You are the abuser, you have to take anger management classes"

This is very real, very clear harm caused by FEMINISTS

Feminists also petitioned the UN to have Female Circumcision reclassified as "Female Genital Mutilation" and for it to be outlawed..
But surprisingly.. for a movement that claims to be about "Equality" and "For men too" they did not also ask the UN to extend the same protection to men..
Anytime we bring this up the conversation gets de-railed by feminists yelling "FGM is WORSE than male circumcision" once again proving that they don't want "Equality" or "To help men too" but rather they want special rights and privileges for women. This is despite Infant Male Circumcision happening at MUCH higher rates than Female Circumcision..
We aren't even allowed to call Male Circumcision "Genital Mutilation" because then they might have to agree that men deserve the same protections to.

Next, Instead of accepting that false rape accusations DO happen feminists instead insist on minimizing them by saying "They are actually very rare..." or trying to downplay how men who are falsely accused are treated or how their lives can be completely ruined..
Does this sound like a movement for "Equality" or "For men too" to you?
Adding onto this, feminists have fought for years to carefully doctor the definition of "Rape" in many countries to make the crime gender coded as a crime that ONLY men can commit.

In many countries Rape can only occur when Person A is penetrated by Person B's genitals without consent..
This implicitly implies that the rapist is only ever a man
Men can rape women, Men can rape Men..
But women can't rape men and women can't rape women.

So I ask you OP.. does all this sound like a movement for "Equality" to you..
How do you expect us to work with a movement that only sees those of our gender as "Part of the problem"?

ElevatorPossible4331 · 2024-09-03T20:54:54+00:00

Feminists hate men, they openly say so. You can't be a feminist if you are not hating men. What kind of question is that?

Current_Finding_4066 · 2024-09-03T20:01:08+00:00

I am tired of this question. It has been asked before. Browse the answers there

PriorityAsleep2193 · 2024-09-03T20:42:45+00:00

Just become a man, get married, go to work, have kids, get divorced and move out of the house and see what starts happening to you from there.

That will tell you everything you need to know about how women, courts, solicitors, the police, government are not quite so favourable toward men.

You'll realise you're completely fucked, even if viewed by many as "an average, hard working, good dad"

Statistics will only get you so far. Lived experience is the reality.

Wylanderuk · 2024-09-03T23:52:44+00:00

Blah, blah, feminism good, you don't understand, blah, blah, don't blame feminism for what its done, bullshit, bollocks Not All Feminists Are Like that. Ignore your own eyes and experiences and decades of feminist thought and actions.

Frankly take this pile of shite and shove it.

jessi387 · 2024-09-03T20:29:19+00:00

Do you research and you will see feminism was never about equality. Their sole aim has been to exploit men so that we can expand the privileges available for women. Just cuz your friend calls herself a feminist and believes in “equality” doesn’t mean that’s what it’s about

Tiny-Fall-4040 · 2024-09-03T20:22:17+00:00

I no longer support feminism. Feminists no longer hate sexism, they hate men. Note that being antifeminist is not the same as being anti-women's rights. Feminists like calling everything they don't like patriarchal and will mock men. Feminism has gone far-left.

mr_ogyny · 2024-09-03T22:09:04+00:00

A core part of feminism is the belief in the patriarchy theory.

Individual feminists like yourself may be fine but influencial feminists who have power, are not.

'The movement has since struggled to address women as perpetrators. It has historically deployed a "strategy of containment" to respond to women as perpetrators.' (In regards to domestic abuse)

'Where men are victim-survivors, they are less likely to experience a pattern of abuse, it is more likely to be a one-off incident. Some men and boys report that when they have been a victim-survivor of abuse it does not have the same impact and cause the same sense of fear. A large proportion of male victim-survivors have been in same sex relationships so that the perpetrator is male (adding to the gendered nature of VAWG). When women are the perpetrator there is substantial evidence to support the case that it is after being a victim-survivor in the relationship themselves and have sustained prolonged domestic abuse (Women’s Aid, 2018).'

'More than 130 signatories including the writer Gloria Steinem and notable women's rights organizations have published an open letter in support of the actor Amber Heard, who lost a defamation suit against Johnny Depp, her former husband, in June this year.'

63daddy · 2024-09-03T22:27:00+00:00

Feminists have lobbied for and won many policies that discriminate against men, including affirmative action, WEEA, VAWA, women owned business advantages, title IX biases and more. NOW, the largest feminist organization has actively stood on the way of equal presumption of joint custody laws.

The feminist goal to advantage females over males directly opposes the MRA goal of equal rights. Many of the inequalities men face (that the MRM wants to make equal) are a direct result of feminist efforts.

DecrepitAbacus · 2024-09-03T22:48:04+00:00

A lot of us are suffering right now. Jobs are getting harder to attain. Inflation is hitting us like a bus. Hell, I'm teetering into homelessness with each passing day. So many people have been left unhappy and lonely. In fact, rates of loneliness have been at an all time high for both genders.

Women have been gaining in power and influence for decades and these issues continue to worsen. Ever wonder why?

TrilIias · 2024-09-04T02:29:31+00:00

Can you provide evidence that feminists, at large, intend to harm men? That their end goal is a matriarchy? As a feminist I don't hate men at all nor am I someone who wants matriarchy. I just want equality.

A lot of casual feminists, presumably including you, aren't really the problem, nor are you representative of feminism. We get posts like this often, so forgive me for quoting a response by one of the most well-known MRAs, Karen Straghan:

"So what you're saying is that you, a commenter using a username on an internet forum are the true feminist, and the feminists actually responsible for changing the laws, writing the academic theory, teaching the courses, influencing the public policies, and the massive, well-funded feminist organizations with thousands and thousands of members all of whom call themselves feminists... they are not "real feminists".

That's not just "no true Scotsman". That's delusional self deception.

Listen, if you want to call yourself a feminist, I don't care. I've been investigating feminism for more than 9 years now, and people like you used to piss me off, because to my mind all you were doing was providing cover and ballast for the powerful political and academic feminists you claim are just jerks. And believe me, they ARE jerks. If you knew half of what I know about the things they've done under the banner of feminism, maybe you'd stop calling yourself one.

But I want you to know. You don't matter. You're not the director of the Feminist Majority Foundation and editor of Ms. Magazine, Katherine Spillar, who said of domestic violence: "Well, that's just a clean-up word for wife-beating," and went on to add that regarding male victims of dating violence, "we know it's not girls beating up boys, it's boys beating up girls."

You're not Jan Reimer, former mayor of Edmonton and long-time head of Alberta's Network of Women's Shelters, who just a few years ago refused to appear on a TV program discussing male victims of domestic violence, because for her to even show up and discuss it would lend legitimacy to the idea that they exist.

You're not Mary P Koss, who describes male victims of female rapists in her academic papers as being not rape victims because they were "ambivalent about their sexual desires" (if you don't know what that means, it's that they actually wanted it), and then went on to define them out of the definition of rape in the CDC's research because it's inappropriate to consider what happened to them rape.

You're not the National Organization for Women, and its associated legal foundations, who lobbied to replace the gender neutral federal Family Violence Prevention and Services Act of 1984 with the obscenely gendered Violence Against Women Act of 1994. The passing of that law cut male victims out of support services and legal assistance in more than 60 passages, just because they were male.

You're not the Florida chapter of the NOW, who successfully lobbied to have Governor Rick Scott veto not one, but two alimony reform bills in the last ten years, bills that had passed both houses with overwhelming bipartisan support, and were supported by more than 70% of the electorate.

You're not the feminist group in Maryland who convinced every female member of the House on both sides of the aisle to walk off the floor when a shared parenting bill came up for a vote, meaning the quorum could not be met and the bill died then and there.

You're not the feminists in Canada agitating to remove sexual assault from the normal criminal courts, into quasi-criminal courts of equity where the burden of proof would be lowered, the defendant could be compelled to testify, discovery would go both ways, and defendants would not be entitled to a public defender.

You're not Professor Elizabeth Sheehy, who wrote a book advocating that women not only have the right to murder their husbands without fear of prosecution if they make a claim of abuse, but that they have the moral responsibility to murder their husbands.

You're not the feminist legal scholars and advocates who successfully changed rape laws such that a woman's history of making multiple false allegations of rape can be excluded from evidence at trial because it's "part of her sexual history."

You're not the feminists who splattered the media with the false claim that putting your penis in a passed-out woman's mouth is "not a crime" in Oklahoma, because the prosecutor was incompetent and charged the defendant under an inappropriate statute (forcible sodomy) and the higher court refused to expand the definition of that statute beyond its intended scope when there was already a perfectly good one (sexual battery) already there. You're not the idiot feminists lying to the public and potentially putting women in Oklahoma at risk by telling potential offenders there's a "legal" way to rape them.

And you're none of the hundreds or thousands of feminist scholars, writers, thinkers, researchers, teachers and philosophers who constructed and propagate the body of bunkum theories upon which all of these atrocities are based.

You're the true feminist. Some random person on the internet."

TrilIias · 2024-09-04T03:21:14+00:00

Consider this my response to the MRA section of the video you linked to:

MRAs are wrong to criticize feminism for the male-only draft, because the draft was created by men and the patriarchy, not feminists.

First of all, MRAs do not criticize feminism for creating the male-only draft, we know that the male-only draft has existed across cultures for millennia before feminism came about. I know you may not be aware, but we get in fights with traditionalist conservatives about as much as we do with feminists. We don't think that men's issues only started with feminism, we know they've been around longer.

What we do criticize feminism for, related to the draft, is twofold:

A. Framing the male-only draft as an example of patriarchy. You mean to tell me that the patriarchy, generally understood to mean the system created by men for the express purpose of prioritizing men's needs and interests above those of women (and children), intentionally created institutions that exclusively targeted men for the role of disposable cannon fodder? If this is what "patriarchies" do, then I do not accept that patriarchy results in male privilege, in which case "patriarchy" is a retarded term that seems incapable of describing the system it's meant to refer to.

B. Men had suffrage in large part due to their obligations to the state, not only meaning conscription, but also civil conscription (such as mandatory bucket brigades). The feminists who were demanding suffrage had every opportunity to accept some comparable level of obligation for women, but they did not. What's more, feminists have worked for decades to erase elements of history from the public consciousness, including that male-only conscription was part of the justification for men receiving the vote before women. Feminists have worked to convince the public that men just withheld the vote from women because men wanted their privilege. Never mind that men were actually more likely to support women's suffrage than women were themselves, or that a reason more women opposed women's suffrage rather than supported it was because women didn't want to bear ay sort of legal obligation comparable to conscription.

"It's a patriarchal person who sends men off to war."

There's no basis for this, it's hard to provide a more detailed response when there's no argument provided to reinforce this bare assertion. I guess I'd point you to the study that found that European queens were more likely to wage war than European kings.

Also, the draft goes back to the American Revolution? Really? Maybe our exact American legislation goes back about that far, but America didn't invent conscription, or even male-only conscription, which has been around for about as long as there have been nations with militaries.

Huitzil37 · 2024-09-04T02:20:16+00:00

Feminism is wrong. it's incorrect. the foundational assumptions it is built on -- that to be a woman is to be unsafe, men are threatening and women are victims, that bad things happen more to women because men do not care enough about women's safety-- are the beliefs of sexism and the opposite of the truth.

It doesn't matter if they truly in their heart of hearts want equality. They're completely wrong about everything and anything they do is destructive. The only "positive" things feminism can claim are "we took a non-gendered issue and made it into a gendered issue and prevented men from being helped with it." That's the only "good" feminism can do when it cannot see reality.

Imagine a movement of people who wanted to use astrology to make the world a better place. Every single one of them might have a pure and Messianic love for all humanity and desire nothing but the best for everybody. That doesn't matter for shit, what matters is that astrology isn't fucking real and anyone who tries to use astrology to make a more fair and just society is going to fail and break anything they touch.

AllGearedUp · 2024-09-03T20:51:45+00:00

I think I agree with you generally. I don't even think we should have terms like feminism. Caring about a person's well being shouldn't have anything to do with their gender, these terms get mixed together unfairly at times, and the whole thing encourages generalizations.

In fact, I don't really even know what feminism means anymore. There are some perpetually online and perpetually offended people that make their views very easy to guess. But I can also see that certain people may use the word only to mean they advocate for the fair treatment of women. So it's not that useful.

We should be putting our efforts to the most effective methods of alleviating suffering, no matter the gender. If it's the middle east, there's a lot more work to be done for women. If it's the first world, both genders face forms of discrimination.

EatTomatos · 2024-09-03T21:10:18+00:00

I'm a millennial, and I've never denied the fact that men historically are the pro generators of many hypocritical systems and criminal ways of thinking; that have created a patriarchy with a negative connotation. But I've find it hard to "identify" as a feminist for various reasons. Also I've been an ally to other movements like lgbtq, and have friends in groups like that. But when it comes to feminists, while I agree with what men have done, afterwards it gets to a point where I ask, where do we go from here, do I get the same benefits as feminists do or is there something I need to achieve first? And the reality of it, is I've never seen any sort of community revolving around that; unlike lgbtq which is now an actual "part" of my life. And as a millennial, I find that it even more difficult to socialize with women now, because I remember even my geriatric millennial friends are leagues more socialiable. And I've gotten to a point where I've acted with both masculine structures(within reasonable limits) and feminine structures, and I even found that by being primarily feminine, I end up getting treated "lower" in female hierarchy. So I honestly don't understand how to interpret feminisim movements in a practicle way. And in terms of the LGBTQ community, I have had rough patches too where I've been mistreated, but many of them are fairly forgiving towards me.

Title	Why so much hostility towards feminism? Shouldn't we work to coexist rather than hate?
Author	bavcccccuppp
Upvotes	0
Comments	84
Date	September 3, 2024 4:47 PM UTC (1 year ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/1f84snw/why_so_much_hostility_towards_feminism_shouldnt/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/why-so-much-hostility-towards-feminism-shouldnt-we.1529283 https://theredarchive.com/post/1529283

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