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It's sad to me that the social discourse on gender has become so combative. I think many people on all sides of the debate feel like feminism is a zero-sum move

• Zelphyr 7y ago
  I'm curious what about that piece you thought was combative? My reading of it simply points out that women cry more than men in this day and age. To me, it would be stating the obvious were it not for the contrast to the ratios in past ages but, still, not really combative or anti-feminist.
  • NickM 7y ago
    I didn’t think this particular piece was combative at all; I was just commenting more generally on the state of society. I actually thought this piece gave a really good supporting example of the point I was trying to make in my comment.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• rjkennedy98 7y ago
  Its not so much as zero-sum but essentially schizophrenic. On one side we have a culture of extreme sexual liberation, with the media, hookup culture, and the porn industry, and on the other side we have the yes-means-yes, firings for touching a women's back (Garrison Keillor), special legal proceedings for sexual assault accusers, ect. How is anyone supposed to navigate a culture as complex as this?
  • ameister14 7y ago
    Just want to point out that this is a misuse of the word schizophrenic; if you are going to link extreme swings to a psychological disorder, the one you're likely looking for is bipolar. Simplifying it, schizophrenia is when you see and hear things that aren't there.
    • FisDugthop 7y ago
      Foucault would politely disagree; he used "schizophrenic" (literally, "a mind split into pieces") to describe the way that (post)modern society uses symbols and signs to point at cultural features, without actually understanding how those cultural features interact. In such a society, the signs themselves, and they way in which they chain into each other, become the primary meanings, replacing the cultural features entirely. The parent reasonably points out two families of sign-chains and sketches how they conflict by emphasizing how the signs espouse conflicting opinions on male sexuality.
      • ameister14 7y ago
        Foucault would probably disagree for more reasons than that; specificity and certitude in regards to psychiatric illnesses or how they are described wasn't exactly something he jived with
  • minikites 7y ago
    It's actually pretty easy: do you have consent from the other person for your actions affecting them? That's really all there is to it.
    • bsagdiyev 7y ago
      Not really. There have been cases of people regretting what they did and retroactively revoking consent, leading to trouble for the other person. It isn't as easy as you make it out to be.
  • majormajor 7y ago
    There's a wide gap between hooking up with someone who you were messaging on Tinder and touching people at work... Porn and other media content are even more obviuously not real...
  • amyjess 7y ago
    The key word here is "consent". Sex is fine. Hell, sex is great! Just don't do it with someone who doesn't want to do it with you.
• bsanr2 7y ago
  I don't know how related this is to the article, but your point is true. As an example: it's been posited that a portion of the gender wage gap is due to the average height difference between men and women. Why? Because there's also a "height wage gap" between tall and short men, to the tune of thousands of dollars a year comparing either side of 1SD from the the mean. By not taking wage gaps seriously (because they're largely spoken of in terms of gender and race), short men are robbing themselves of a payday, and tall men lose out on the social stability that more equitable pay would bring. Inequity doesn't just affect any particular group; its mere existence changes the way we think about what's fair and tolerable.
  • cookieswumchorr 7y ago
    that's an interesting thing. Other than perception, could it be a social strata thing? Kids who's parents are better off get a healthier diet (or, in poor places, just more food). This affects how they grow
  • bluntfang 7y ago
    Is it possible that the heigh wage gap exists due to larger people requiring more resources to exist? It costs extra money for a tall person to get the required calories. It costs extra money for tall people to be comfortable on airlines. I'm not saying this to be true, but it's a fact that larger people require more resources, especially in a globalizing environment where resources are created for the average human and outliers are having a tougher time just existing? I don't expect anyone to really take this seriously, and I don't want to equate this to the struggle of being non-cis-white-male.
    • sullyj3 7y ago
      If this were the entire explanation, why wouldn't you just expect equal wages and tall men to be slightly more worse off?
      • bluntfang 7y ago
        I think this begs the question "why is there a wage gap between genders?"
• minikites 7y ago
  People who misunderstand feminism tend not to realize or understand all of the ways patriarchy hurts men (this article showing a prime example).
• jayko 7y ago
  In theory.. But in practice, when men are trying to acquire more resources for other marginalised men e.g shelters for male victims of domestic abuse, who is lobbying against them? Feminists.
• IfOnlyYouKnew 7y ago
  As a contrast, I am continually baffled by people that feel threatened by feminism (or anti-racism etc.). It's bloody obviously that we don't live in a zero-sum regime, what with productivity and living standards continually rising for hundreds of years with no corresponding rise of poverty elsewhere. I've been to quite a few feminist protests because my partner works at an NGO, and not once was I treated badly or accused of anything, even though I am often one of few men among many women. It's probably a specific mindset, where you do see one group of people with responsibility, but do not extend that to guilt of any individual (unless they give reason). This way of thinking, which probably comes natural to a German like me, seems to be alien to those men opposing feminism.
  • NickM 7y ago
    It seems like we generally agree. I am a man and I do consider myself a feminist. My intent was not an all to criticize feminism, but rather to lament how much of an “us vs them” issue that feminism has become for many feminists and many non-feminists alike.
  • deleted 7y ago
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  • hner1720 7y ago
    > I am continually baffled by people that feel threatened by feminism I was just having a conversation last night about this exact topic with my best friend. We are both very progressive, and other topics we talked about were the mounting need for UBI, higher education reform, The problems with our current welfare model and a need for a massive pay down on Infrastructure. All the same I feel the need for a fresh account to say this, and that shows a problem with the movement right away. So, in the spirit of open discourse, let me try to enlighten you as to why people feel this way, at least in my experience. I have no citations as I’m mostly reiterating the sentiments I’ve gathered from others. I would say that the fear of feminism makes way more sense if you slide down the income ladder. If you are a straight male who works a job near the poverty line, feminism seems like it’s already handed out a big advantage to your female peers. If you are a poor women, you have substantially more viable options to increase your lot in life and generally a lot more support. The big winners of our current “patriarchy” are only rich men, and it seems like feminism only enhances the advantages they have. Women get a lot of benefits from being on the receiving end of the courtship game, and yet feminism somehow frames that reality as a negative(I get “harassed” by men wolf-whistling at me in the street). Examples of unspoken advantages of women/grievances of men at this income bracket: women seem to be able to find work much more easily than men, and they generally seem to be given more leeway in general. This seems a second order effect of men being demonized by many groups and because feminism’s fight for sexual liberation of women has resulted in many less women being reserved with who they sleep with. The result is that ethics be damned, male bosses want to hire females more. But because of the sexual dynamic of women seeking a provider and the social demonization of men/tribalization of women, women bosses have either no preference or prefer women also. it’s no secret that more women are graduating from college than men and that primary/secondary education is better suited for females, and yet it feels like things are just continuing to favor women more and more. Women just get a lot more attention in general, and as a result tend to have better self esteem. People frequently tend to stick up for women and trample men. As a result, females’ egos on average seem to be much more inflated, making dating very difficult for low income men who generally receive little to no encouragement and most attention they get is negative. Meanwhile men suffer in the shadows with high rates of suicide and depression, and US society would rather focus on taking away guns than making people not want to kill themselves or others. The biggest irony is that sex and having an SO are pretty well known to be a fairly common part of living a happy, fulfilling life. And yet when men complain about their inability to successfully court women, they are typically lambasted and called names. Hell “nice guy” is basically a pejorative now. This further drives home the feeling that society really doesn’t care about men. The incel community didn’t used to be anywhere as toxic as it is now, and it seems it was largely driven there by bullying. While we are talking about bullying, men are almost always expected to be able to deal with bullies alone(unlike women who are typically given attention and empathy about bullies), and there is a pretty strong dynamic of females wanting the attention/courting of bullies. Feminism has fought hard for men to realign their expectations about women, yet there seems to be nothing done at all to change women’s expectations of men.If anything Hollywood and pop culture is full of roided up men with objectively unnatural physiques who live unattainable lifestyles and ridiculously wealthy bad boys who seem to make a sport of unethical behavior. Women are, generally speaking, the ones who call the shots in a relationship if you are poor. Wealth as a proxy for ability to give care/attention drives this. If you are a low earning male, you are seemingly much more likely relative to a women of the same income to be subject to a lot of unsavory behavior from females, partially because women who are emotionally stable are typically shooting for someone who brings home the bacon, and partially because women perceive the weakness of your position and use it against you. the latter happens to both men and women, but generally speaking there are no social brakes on women abusers like their are on men, who are truly demonized for perceived abuse. I think this problem is hidden to a lot of more wealthy feminists because of the perception that wealthy men(or the people they are courting) are portrayed to be shitty, see pop culture. Women can essentially decide unilaterally to have kids, and then they get support from the government. They get a chance to raise someone to take care of them, and all of the psychological benefits of Child-care. Meanwhile, if you are subject to abuse as a male you have virtually no support network and will find even getting people to side with you difficult. Feminism targets the social problems observed fairly high up the income/privilege ladder, and seems to be against making any kind of concessions. I think good places to start trying to tackle these problems would be for feminists to spend much more effort demonizing the portrayal of unnatural, anti-social men in the media. I think a $1000/month UBI would make the biggest immediate impact, as men almost certainly wouldn’t feel like they were getting shafted by society so badly, and women might not be so preoccupied with finding a provider. Probably most controversial and unrealistic, I think that to pair with Planned Parenthood we should have public gyms that also facilitate the supervised use of steroids. Having sex constantly without pregnancy is no more natural than benching 600+ pounds, both are, outside of rare cases, the result of exogenous sex hormones, yet we hand out estrogen to women to fulfill the sexual fantasies of men, but make it illegal (unless you have a bunch of money) for men to get their sexhormones to match women’s sexual expectations.