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Hollywood_Guy
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22 Sep 2018, 4:16 pm

Well, I hope that you guys here are willing to be cool in this discussion and not get too hostile. Feminism was a movement that once advocated for women's equality to men in many aspects of civil rights. Today, women have had the same civil rights as men in the Western world for many years already. So into modern feminism, it is no longer about equality but about women who want special privileges over men and any man or woman who even suggests that it's not good anymore is called sexist or misogynist.

So, what's bad about wanting to address men's issues as complimentary to women's?

Sometimes it sucks to be a guy, too:

  • There are more men than women of young adult age that have never been with the opposite gender or lose their virginity yet
  • Men's coverage for safety and health issues don't receive as much funding as the same for women
  • ...I can't exhaust right now because you can look the rest up that has been written before. Somebody else on here even did a similar bullet list

What is bad about wanting to focus on men that we are called sexist if we criticize modern feminism? Society has already re-evaluated it's treatment of women and it can do the same for men.



Prometheus18
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22 Sep 2018, 5:12 pm

Feminism had achieved all of its aims by the 1920s. At least in Britain and America. People who still rant about the need for "women's rights" remind me of those Japanese soldiers encountered by American servicemen on isolated Pacific islands in the 60s and 70s who believed that WW2 was still being fought.

The feminist camp actually admitted this: in the 1970s feminist leaders were notorious for telling their followers that owing to the lack of genuine grievances, spurious ones had to be invented.

I can't help thinking that the leaders of the twenty-first century feminist movements are just charlatans leeching of the prestige of movement which was once greatly noble. Their followers on the other hand are primarily gullible students trying to annoy their parents.

Of course the obsession with identity politics is also enormously fortuitous for the multinational corporations who provide the billions to fund it; while the "radical" left focusses its energies on ensuring nobody uses oppressive pronouns, the corporations which plunder the planet and everybody on it, who would otherwise have been its target, are left alone.

The "new" left was the greatest gift the capitalist class ever received.



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22 Sep 2018, 5:16 pm

Sure, but in order to have a fruitful-discussion, you need to be aware of at least a couple of things:

First-Wave Feminism was a good thing for society.

The current Fifth-Wave (or is it Sixth-Wave now?) version of Feminism is destructive to society and family-units.


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cberg
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22 Sep 2018, 5:20 pm

I should reiterate: modern feminism thoroughly ignores the fact that estrogen & testosterone are part of everyone's biology.


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22 Sep 2018, 6:14 pm

Hollywood_Guy wrote:
So, what's bad about wanting to address men's issues as complimentary to women's?
Intrinsically, nothing. It's when:

1. Participants bring up feminism as a direct or indirect cause of all men's issues
2. Participants point to things they don't like about women's behavior.
3. Participants present arguments that female biology - especially their reproductive biology - somehow makes them inferior to males.
4. Participants politicize the issue by using any one particular woman as an example of everything they think is anti-male, anti-conservative, and anti-America.
Hollywood_Guy wrote:
What is bad about wanting to focus on men that we are called sexist if we criticize modern feminism?
This is two separate issues; you can either focus on male issues, or you can focus on female issues. Too many people want to mix the two issues together in a misogynistic mess that serves only to antagonize and polarize participants, and to alienate women.

Keep the discussion solely on men's issues - without castigating, blaming, and alienating women - and the discussion may last longer. It may even reach a consensus conclusion that is beneficial to all, and to not just a few disgruntled men.

But if all you really want to do in a discussion on "men's issues" is cry and whine about being called "sexist" by women, then either man up and take it, or go have your pity-party without me.


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cberg
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22 Sep 2018, 6:20 pm

Well it's sexist when anyone is typecast by gender.


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22 Sep 2018, 6:22 pm

This is basic common sense:

Those who hold the majority of the seats of power run the country.

There's not even close to equal the same number of women in seats of power than men.

Since the 1920s?

That's comical and says all that it needs to say, considering this was a time when women couldn't keep their job if they got pregnant, couldn't have bank credit, couldn't have equal access to job listings, didn't have the right to be paid the same as men, couldn't seek damages for sexual harassment in the workplace, marital rape wasn't a criminal offense, couldn't file a complaint about pay discrimination *until 2009, and couldn't serve on the front lines of the army *until 2013. These are only some of the issues.

For women their lives are undoubtably worse on an institutional level than men, unless a guy wants to play like we're a victim. As a guy, I just see doing so as ridiculous.

For guys our lives are undoubtedly worse on a psychological and emotional level of being expected to shut out our emotions which leads to health complications and an earlier death rate.

Women's issues are institutional, men's issues are psychological which impacts health.



cberg
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22 Sep 2018, 6:25 pm

Having too much power is another of our issues. That doesn't mean such an issue applies to the majority of guys though.


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22 Sep 2018, 6:36 pm

cberg wrote:
Having too much power is another of our issues. That doesn't mean such an issue applies to the majority of guys though.


I might be wrong and come off as a stupid American for saying this -

But, I'd like to add that I think this one may be more of an America problem among the leading countries, since there are other countries that are more developed than we are in this regard.

The United Kingdom had Margaret Thatcher and now Theresa May, maybe not the greatest examples, but I can't even think of one US equivalent. Similarly, Germany has Angela Merkel and there's no US equivalent.



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22 Sep 2018, 6:48 pm

I think we have many examples, just few in politics.


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22 Sep 2018, 6:51 pm

cberg wrote:
Well it's sexist when anyone is typecast by gender.
And how are men typecast? By the Male Archetype.

We must always be strong, independent, short of words, and long on action. We should never back down from a fight, never complain, and always be healthy. We should never stand down from a challenge, and always be willing to take risks. We should be hard workers, good providers, and always ready to sacrifice our own needs and ambitions for the benefit of our families. We should never admit to weakness or sentimentality - each of us should "Be A Man" and hide our feelings, even when one of our family passes away. In fact, we should never show any emotion other than joy or happiness; otherwise, we are seen as either weak and cowardly, or as rage-filled psychopaths.

We must also openly scorn, ridicule, and ostracize any man who shows even the slightest hint of not living up to theses standards.

This Male Archetype is very limiting. It is no wonder we die sooner than women - all that stress of keeping everything bottled in just eats away at us, while treating even the simplest of tasks like the decisive battle in the War On Obscurity tears us down physically. Then we die, and someone else takes our place.

THAT is how we are typecast.


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Spooky_Mulder
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22 Sep 2018, 7:23 pm

cberg wrote:
I think we have many examples, just few in politics.


Which would mean they wouldn't be equivalents to Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May, and Angela Merkel who (I could be wrong) would be the same as a female President which is the highest seat of power.



techstepgenr8tion
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22 Sep 2018, 7:38 pm

I really have to say I'm not wild about the concept of societal power-blocking and basing it all off of that. The one bit of science that's annoyed a lot of people but keeps coming back is the notion of wider male variability. You'll have more freakishly successful and more freakishly unsuccessful men if that's the case. It could very well be that the trouble with the terminology is that the words 'mens' and 'rights' don't do such a hot job of what's being addressed.

If there are miscarriages of justice in the courtroom you would not want that to stand for any sex or ethnicity, especially if and when what happens for one group often metastasizes out and touches other groups. If there are plenty of men whose rights are currently being squashed in various ways by other men then that's something that needs to be addressed. To some extent I think a lot of the economic equal opportunity concepts are meant as a first step toward shrinking gaps of opportunity albeit they're immense.

As for the MRA movement and what's often a reflection against modern feminism I think their purpose is point out situations where things have gotten too dog eats dog and where positions of power, whether judicial, corporate, or institutional, have been used cynically or in avarice. Warren Farrell actually put on the map a variety of concepts that are important such as the question of the low-status jobs, whether we're fighting for 50/50 gender participation in city sanitation and waste or coal mining or whether those were getting lost in the accounting (it seems like this is a point that people across the political spectrum seem to agree was an oversight) as well as highlighting a lot of the sacrifices or areas of highly dangerous work that seemed to remain predominantly male and had concern that this also wasn't quite getting taken into account. There are also cultural issues, like memes meat to deface and deprecate men, and really we don't want to deprecate any group unless we're playing a zero sum game in which case there absolutely is a problem that needs to be addressed and it shouldn't okay when anyone does that about anyone.


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cberg
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22 Sep 2018, 7:41 pm

Spooky_Mulder wrote:
cberg wrote:
I think we have many examples, just few in politics.


Which would mean they wouldn't be equivalents to Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May, and Angela Merkel who (I could be wrong) would be the same as a female President which is the highest seat of power.


There are different kinds of power. Women in the U.S. overall seem more interested in industrial or legal power than political.


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Spooky_Mulder
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22 Sep 2018, 7:58 pm

cberg wrote:
Spooky_Mulder wrote:
cberg wrote:
I think we have many examples, just few in politics.


Which would mean they wouldn't be equivalents to Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May, and Angela Merkel who (I could be wrong) would be the same as a female President which is the highest seat of power.


There are different kinds of power. Women in the U.S. overall seem more interested in industrial or legal power than political.


Well, considering women are flocking into politics today if that was ever true that’s definitely changing.

But, and I may be wrong, it’d seem like the UK and Germany would be more open to women leaders overall than the US since they are more open to female top political leaders. I could be wrong and the views are the same outside of politics, but it seems like sociologically seeing women as leaders would be more advanced overall in those two countries.



cberg
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22 Sep 2018, 8:02 pm

What about Janet Yellen or Ruth Bader Ginsburg? Honestly if you're just thinking in terms of power they're head & shoulders above many heads of state.


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