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The fact that you need to apologize and explain why you care about issues that might affect men is telling in and of itself. The American Zeitgeist around gend

The fact that you need to apologize and explain why you care about issues that might affect men is telling in and of itself. The American Zeitgeist around gender issues is distorted to dehumanize men and alienate anyone who even dares to recognize this fact. I'm a pretty hardcore liberal and I I'm totally astonished on a daily basis at the hate in vitriol directed at men that go without comment, let alone castigation that it deserves. As for the rest of your post, absolutely. I love being a dad and it's a shame that our society doesn't seem to care much about father's apart from being a provider of money. Every man should be aware that if things go south and their marriage that their children could be taken away from them and they will be vilified if they try to get them back. You will not get sympathy from your friends or family or from the public at large. He will be fighting the tide.

afavour 4y ago
> The American Zeitgeist around gender issues is distorted to dehumanize men and alienate anyone who even dares to recognize this fact. I'm conflicted about that. Not denying that what you've said is true but I specifically chose the term "red pilled" because there are huge toxic (predominantly online) communities that are openly misogynistic. e.g. in theory I'd like and participate in the "men's rights" subreddit, in reality it's a pit of toxicity. Some of the frustration there is justified (family law definitely seems biased against fathers) but the result is not positive. I'd also add: a lot of this societal pressure against men being accepted as stay at home parents comes from men.
- LightHugger 4y ago
  Just like how a lot of the societal pressure causing womens issues comes from women. There's no difference between genders in this aspect. Though for some reason, i see some feminists trying to blame men exclusively for men's problems. I have never seen a man blaming women for all women's issues the same way.
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - ponow 4y ago
      Bull.
      - mschuster91 4y ago
        Do you have factual information backing your statement? I have, to take the two dominant Christian fundamentalist interpretations: - for Mormonism: "Numerous Prophets have instructed that a Mormon woman’s place is in the home. Only Federal anti-discrimination laws, which the Church vigorously opposed, and the threat of Federal prosecution, forced the Church in 1970s to stop terminating female employment upon the birth of her first child. While no longer as clearly directed from the pulpit, a women’s place in Mormonism remains very different than that of a man. Even into the 1980s, President Kimball reiterated that “…a mother’s place is in the home!” The idea of complementary spheres for men and women rules Mormon doctrine and is the answer to almost every question about the lack of power for women in the church." [1] - for the Southern Baptists: "A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation." [2] This is what these religions teach about women, there is no denying or whitewashing that. [1] https://www.mormonstories.org/truth-claims/mormon-culture/women-in-mormonism/ https://www.mormonstories.org/truth-claims/mormon-culture/wo... [2] https://bfm.sbc.net/bfm2000/report-of-the-baptist-faith-and-message-study-committee-on-article-xviii/ https://bfm.sbc.net/bfm2000/report-of-the-baptist-faith-and-...
        Beltalowda 4y ago
        There's a lot of religious things written down that many people don't really follow in practice. Are there various religious views that don't view women as I would like to? Sure. But it's quite a leap to "literally brainwashed from birth that women's purpose is to be docile broodmares". And quite a few religious women want to be house-makers. Do I personally think that's a rather outdated view of what it means to be a woman? Sure. But it's not my life to live and the women's choice. Let's assign some agency to these women and allow them to live their lives as they see fit before claiming they're "brainwashed". "Being able to make my own choices just like men" is kind of the point of feminism, no?
- eropple 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - ZGDUwpqEWpUZ 4y ago
    In my experience, what you're saying is complete nonsense. Feminists spend much more time lying about men's issues than they do attempting to meaningfully rectify them. Even a simple statement like "boys are falling behind in education" can get you implicated as a misogynist. Here's a lovely pull-quote from a recent report, The State of UK Boys: > There's often an underlying assumption that boys should be attaining higher than girls, and if girls attain higher, then that's a problem. - Louise Archer I could give examples on a range of issues: from suicide, discrimination in the court system, domestic violence/sexual assault. There's a set of knee-jerk responses (e.g. men only commit suicide more due to firearms/violence) that simply aren't true (men also die more from intentional overdoses). For each and every thing MRAs complain about, there's a knee-jerk, half-baked, feminist reaction.
    - afavour 4y ago
      > Feminists spend much more time lying about men's issues Not sure if there’s a name for this fallacy but you see it all the time: attributing the opinions/actions of an extreme minority to a whole group. No denying there are some feminists about there spending all their time lying about men’s issues but feminists as a whole don’t. Same applies almost every time someone says “leftists”, “the right wing” etc etc etc
      - gjsman-1000 4y ago
        What do you call the fallacy, which I have seen increasingly online, where someone defines something as being an "extreme minority" when it actually isn't, and then claims the other person committed a fallacy because of that?
        commandlinefan 4y ago
        OP appears to be committing the "motte and bailey" (fallacy?) himself.
- spacemadness 4y ago
  Yes, just as anti-feminist/pro-patriarchy behaviors can easily come from women. It’s part of our cultural programming and its very hard for people to sidestep that without a lot of self analysis.
- Swizec 4y ago
  > I'd also add: a lot of this societal pressure against men being accepted as stay at home parents comes from men. Funnily there’s also research showing that a lot of gender discrimination towards women comes from women. Perhaps as a social species we all try to keep our group from straying too far from core values.
- javajosh 4y ago
  >in theory I'd like and participate in the "men's rights" subreddit, in reality it's a pit of toxicity. Indeed, but so is the equivalent feminism subreddit (try "r/askafeminist" for example). And yet "women's rights" don't have the same stigma as "men's rights". What explains this asymmetry? Why is it some movements get defined by their extremists, and others don't? >: a lot of this societal pressure against men being accepted as stay at home parents comes from men. Really? Maybe its the company I keep, but I've never felt judged by other men when I share I love caring for my kids. If anything, I get a lot of smiles and nods irl and supportive comments online. If someone like Andrew Tate gave me shade about it, I'd take it as a reason to pity him. It takes a special kind of asshole to throw shade on a father who loves his kids, and who's kids love him.
  - dumpsterlid 4y ago
    [dead]
  - afavour 4y ago
    I’d argue that women’s rights, from Suffragettes on, has a widely documented history of… reasonableness, for want of a better term. Men’s Rights doesn’t yet. It’s a much newer movement, things may change. But right now I’m struggling to think of the sane, sensible organisations out there promoting men’s rights. I’d also question whether /r/askfeminists is “the equivalent”. It has 100k followers, /r/twoxchromosomes has 13 million followers and from a brief read through doesn’t feel like a particularly toxic place, despite discussing feminism/women’s issues. Maybe the key here is that women’s issues are mainlined into general conversation while men’s issues are sidelined to their own area where toxicity breeds.
    - kneebonian 4y ago
      part of the problem with '/r/twoxchromosomes' is that no moderator of the sub actually has two x chromosomes, which introduces a new and separate dynamic.
      - friedman23 4y ago
- marcusverus 4y ago
  > I'd also add: a lot of this societal pressure against men being accepted as stay at home parents comes from men. Maybe men are just more vocal about their opinions regarding stay-at-home dads? Women may not exert "societal pressure" against stay-at-home men, but they're ~30% more likely to divorce them than working men (a 3.3% chance of divorce in a given year vs. 2.5%)[0]. > For marriages formed after 1975, husbands’ lack of full-time employment is associated with higher risk of divorce, but neither wives’ full-time employment nor wives’ share of household labor is associated with divorce risk. Expectations of wives’ homemaking may have eroded, but the husband breadwinner norm persists. [0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0003122416655340 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0003122416655340
  - triceratops 4y ago
    An unemployed (not by choice), frustrated guy can't be fun to be married to. I could see it causing problems in the relationship. Lo and behold, in the paper they say this too: "It is possible that husbands’ less than full-time employment is associated with marital disruption more strongly than wives’, not because of gendered interpretations of lack of full-time employment, but because husbands’ part-time employment or nonemployment is more likely to be involuntary. Involuntary nonemployment may negatively affect marriages more strongly than voluntary nonemployment, by affecting outcomes like partners’ mental health. It is not possible to evaluate this perspective with the current data, because voluntary specialization by men in unpaid labor is rare: in 2012, only about one-fifth of stay-at-home fathers were home primarily to care for the family (Livingston 2014). Future research is needed to explore the experiences of deliberately nontraditional households, although their rarity illustrates the consistency of the male-breadwinner norm."
  - sharkjacobs 4y ago
    > Women may not exert "societal pressure" against stay-at-home men I'm not sure that the study supports this. I think that the terms "stay at home dad" and "stay at home man" implies a male spouse who stays at home to do unpaid housework or child rearing instead of working a full time job. The study seems to say that, for men, being unemployed is positively correlated with divorce risk, but that doing a larger share of household labor is not. Not all unemployed men are "stay at home" men.
- Clent 4y ago
  There are some men's right subreddits that do not have allow the self-pity but they do not make it to the front page. I will not share specific subreddits for the sanity of the moderators but they are out there that focus on men's mental health specifically. Toxic Masculinity is men on men hate.
  - chowells 4y ago
    "Toxic Masculinity" is an idea created by men's groups [1] to describe the stresses on them that make them unhealthy and come from some cultural ideal of manhood. It was literally created by men as language to separate discussion the good parts of societal expectations from the damaging parts. A large number of people (that is, everyone who wants to talk about it sincerely) still use precisely that meaning. It's only those people who look for every reason to get upset who willfully misinterpret it as an insult on the concept of masculinity. "Toxic masculinity" is men examining themselves and seeking to reject the parts they don't like. There's no hate involved at all. The whole thing is an exercise in self-expression and self-determination. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythopoetic_men%27s_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythopoetic_men%27s_movement
    - Eumenes 4y ago
      I don't know a single man that uses or embraces that term. It seems to be used exclusively by arm chair psychiatrists or terminally online twitter people.
      - afavour 4y ago
        I use it. HTH.
    - broken_mind 4y ago
      It's irrelevant how the term was born. It's relevant how it ia used now: and it's never used in good faith. Can you tell me part of masculinity that are not toxic, based on modern feminist thought?
- vhcr 4y ago
  Check out /r/MensLib/
- thrownawaydad 4y ago
  "but the result [of men's rights subreddits/etc] is not positive" For me, it was positive. When you're going through personal hell, there's a lot to be said for having others in the situation to commiserate with. Do many of the guys there sound like jerks? Sure. Maybe they even are--or maybe they're just blowing off steam in the face of a horrible situation. I think it's often the latter. One side effect of carefully banning forums that (truly) support men is that we're left with an environment where most places that might seem to be "help" are actually dedicated to gas-lighting and castigating men in this situation. This has created a vacuum where some rather dubious looking options are actually the best available. May the gods bless my MRAs and the guys at my local dive bar. Without them, I wouldn't have made it.
gjsman-1000 4y ago
Sharing my thoughts, a recent idiom I ran across that I increasingly find useful in situations like this is "two things can be true at once." There can be people who are extremely misogynistic - but they can also have completely valid concerns and grievances that make them feel that way. "They might be idiots at best, but they might have decent reasons why they got there." Just ask any dad who has lost his children, wife, and property to an actually-false claim of domestic abuse. Ignoring those grievances, under the hope of trying to avoid giving them any respect, I believe risks actually increasing the number of misogynists because it doesn't address the underlying hurt that many of them may be experiencing, or the cause that will keep repeating itself.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  A similar thought I find helpful to internalize is that "hurt people hurt other people". That is to say, many victims are themselves assholes and abusive. It is important to remember that fair justice should be extended to all people, independence of their individual moral or sympathetic valence. It cuts both ways. Despicable people deserve a fair treatment, and victims themselves must be held accountable for their actions.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
> The American Zeitgeist around gender issues is distorted to dehumanize men and alienate anyone who even dares to recognize this fact. I must be living under a rock then — this Zeitgeist you talk of is alien to me. I am a male who does not feel in any way dehumanized, nor have any of my male friends expressed as much.
- bobkazamakis 4y ago
  [flagged]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- broken_mind 4y ago
  Good for you! I've never noticed this thing so it doesn't exist. Pure and simple internalized misandry.
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    Doesn't exist. Zeitgeist. There's a pretty broad strata between those two.
isthisthingon99 4y ago
I had the same reaction to his first sentence. Why do you need to say that?
- draw_down 4y ago
  [dead]

afavour 4y ago

> The American Zeitgeist around gender issues is distorted to dehumanize men and alienate anyone who even dares to recognize this fact. I'm conflicted about that. Not denying that what you've said is true but I specifically chose the term "red pilled" because there are huge toxic (predominantly online) communities that are openly misogynistic. e.g. in theory I'd like and participate in the "men's rights" subreddit, in reality it's a pit of toxicity. Some of the frustration there is justified (family law definitely seems biased against fathers) but the result is not positive. I'd also add: a lot of this societal pressure against men being accepted as stay at home parents comes from men.

LightHugger 4y ago
Just like how a lot of the societal pressure causing womens issues comes from women. There's no difference between genders in this aspect. Though for some reason, i see some feminists trying to blame men exclusively for men's problems. I have never seen a man blaming women for all women's issues the same way.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - ponow 4y ago
    Bull.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      Do you have factual information backing your statement? I have, to take the two dominant Christian fundamentalist interpretations: - for Mormonism: "Numerous Prophets have instructed that a Mormon woman’s place is in the home. Only Federal anti-discrimination laws, which the Church vigorously opposed, and the threat of Federal prosecution, forced the Church in 1970s to stop terminating female employment upon the birth of her first child. While no longer as clearly directed from the pulpit, a women’s place in Mormonism remains very different than that of a man. Even into the 1980s, President Kimball reiterated that “…a mother’s place is in the home!” The idea of complementary spheres for men and women rules Mormon doctrine and is the answer to almost every question about the lack of power for women in the church." [1] - for the Southern Baptists: "A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation." [2] This is what these religions teach about women, there is no denying or whitewashing that. [1] https://www.mormonstories.org/truth-claims/mormon-culture/women-in-mormonism/ https://www.mormonstories.org/truth-claims/mormon-culture/wo... [2] https://bfm.sbc.net/bfm2000/report-of-the-baptist-faith-and-message-study-committee-on-article-xviii/ https://bfm.sbc.net/bfm2000/report-of-the-baptist-faith-and-...
      - Beltalowda 4y ago
        There's a lot of religious things written down that many people don't really follow in practice. Are there various religious views that don't view women as I would like to? Sure. But it's quite a leap to "literally brainwashed from birth that women's purpose is to be docile broodmares". And quite a few religious women want to be house-makers. Do I personally think that's a rather outdated view of what it means to be a woman? Sure. But it's not my life to live and the women's choice. Let's assign some agency to these women and allow them to live their lives as they see fit before claiming they're "brainwashed". "Being able to make my own choices just like men" is kind of the point of feminism, no?
eropple 4y ago
[flagged]
- ZGDUwpqEWpUZ 4y ago
  In my experience, what you're saying is complete nonsense. Feminists spend much more time lying about men's issues than they do attempting to meaningfully rectify them. Even a simple statement like "boys are falling behind in education" can get you implicated as a misogynist. Here's a lovely pull-quote from a recent report, The State of UK Boys: > There's often an underlying assumption that boys should be attaining higher than girls, and if girls attain higher, then that's a problem. - Louise Archer I could give examples on a range of issues: from suicide, discrimination in the court system, domestic violence/sexual assault. There's a set of knee-jerk responses (e.g. men only commit suicide more due to firearms/violence) that simply aren't true (men also die more from intentional overdoses). For each and every thing MRAs complain about, there's a knee-jerk, half-baked, feminist reaction.
  - afavour 4y ago
    > Feminists spend much more time lying about men's issues Not sure if there’s a name for this fallacy but you see it all the time: attributing the opinions/actions of an extreme minority to a whole group. No denying there are some feminists about there spending all their time lying about men’s issues but feminists as a whole don’t. Same applies almost every time someone says “leftists”, “the right wing” etc etc etc
    - gjsman-1000 4y ago
      What do you call the fallacy, which I have seen increasingly online, where someone defines something as being an "extreme minority" when it actually isn't, and then claims the other person committed a fallacy because of that?
      - commandlinefan 4y ago
        OP appears to be committing the "motte and bailey" (fallacy?) himself.
spacemadness 4y ago
Yes, just as anti-feminist/pro-patriarchy behaviors can easily come from women. It’s part of our cultural programming and its very hard for people to sidestep that without a lot of self analysis.
Swizec 4y ago
> I'd also add: a lot of this societal pressure against men being accepted as stay at home parents comes from men. Funnily there’s also research showing that a lot of gender discrimination towards women comes from women. Perhaps as a social species we all try to keep our group from straying too far from core values.
javajosh 4y ago
>in theory I'd like and participate in the "men's rights" subreddit, in reality it's a pit of toxicity. Indeed, but so is the equivalent feminism subreddit (try "r/askafeminist" for example). And yet "women's rights" don't have the same stigma as "men's rights". What explains this asymmetry? Why is it some movements get defined by their extremists, and others don't? >: a lot of this societal pressure against men being accepted as stay at home parents comes from men. Really? Maybe its the company I keep, but I've never felt judged by other men when I share I love caring for my kids. If anything, I get a lot of smiles and nods irl and supportive comments online. If someone like Andrew Tate gave me shade about it, I'd take it as a reason to pity him. It takes a special kind of asshole to throw shade on a father who loves his kids, and who's kids love him.
- dumpsterlid 4y ago
  [dead]
- afavour 4y ago
  I’d argue that women’s rights, from Suffragettes on, has a widely documented history of… reasonableness, for want of a better term. Men’s Rights doesn’t yet. It’s a much newer movement, things may change. But right now I’m struggling to think of the sane, sensible organisations out there promoting men’s rights. I’d also question whether /r/askfeminists is “the equivalent”. It has 100k followers, /r/twoxchromosomes has 13 million followers and from a brief read through doesn’t feel like a particularly toxic place, despite discussing feminism/women’s issues. Maybe the key here is that women’s issues are mainlined into general conversation while men’s issues are sidelined to their own area where toxicity breeds.
  - kneebonian 4y ago
    part of the problem with '/r/twoxchromosomes' is that no moderator of the sub actually has two x chromosomes, which introduces a new and separate dynamic.
    - friedman23 4y ago
marcusverus 4y ago
> I'd also add: a lot of this societal pressure against men being accepted as stay at home parents comes from men. Maybe men are just more vocal about their opinions regarding stay-at-home dads? Women may not exert "societal pressure" against stay-at-home men, but they're ~30% more likely to divorce them than working men (a 3.3% chance of divorce in a given year vs. 2.5%)[0]. > For marriages formed after 1975, husbands’ lack of full-time employment is associated with higher risk of divorce, but neither wives’ full-time employment nor wives’ share of household labor is associated with divorce risk. Expectations of wives’ homemaking may have eroded, but the husband breadwinner norm persists. [0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0003122416655340 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0003122416655340
- triceratops 4y ago
  An unemployed (not by choice), frustrated guy can't be fun to be married to. I could see it causing problems in the relationship. Lo and behold, in the paper they say this too: "It is possible that husbands’ less than full-time employment is associated with marital disruption more strongly than wives’, not because of gendered interpretations of lack of full-time employment, but because husbands’ part-time employment or nonemployment is more likely to be involuntary. Involuntary nonemployment may negatively affect marriages more strongly than voluntary nonemployment, by affecting outcomes like partners’ mental health. It is not possible to evaluate this perspective with the current data, because voluntary specialization by men in unpaid labor is rare: in 2012, only about one-fifth of stay-at-home fathers were home primarily to care for the family (Livingston 2014). Future research is needed to explore the experiences of deliberately nontraditional households, although their rarity illustrates the consistency of the male-breadwinner norm."
- sharkjacobs 4y ago
  > Women may not exert "societal pressure" against stay-at-home men I'm not sure that the study supports this. I think that the terms "stay at home dad" and "stay at home man" implies a male spouse who stays at home to do unpaid housework or child rearing instead of working a full time job. The study seems to say that, for men, being unemployed is positively correlated with divorce risk, but that doing a larger share of household labor is not. Not all unemployed men are "stay at home" men.
Clent 4y ago
There are some men's right subreddits that do not have allow the self-pity but they do not make it to the front page. I will not share specific subreddits for the sanity of the moderators but they are out there that focus on men's mental health specifically. Toxic Masculinity is men on men hate.
- chowells 4y ago
  "Toxic Masculinity" is an idea created by men's groups [1] to describe the stresses on them that make them unhealthy and come from some cultural ideal of manhood. It was literally created by men as language to separate discussion the good parts of societal expectations from the damaging parts. A large number of people (that is, everyone who wants to talk about it sincerely) still use precisely that meaning. It's only those people who look for every reason to get upset who willfully misinterpret it as an insult on the concept of masculinity. "Toxic masculinity" is men examining themselves and seeking to reject the parts they don't like. There's no hate involved at all. The whole thing is an exercise in self-expression and self-determination. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythopoetic_men%27s_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythopoetic_men%27s_movement
  - Eumenes 4y ago
    I don't know a single man that uses or embraces that term. It seems to be used exclusively by arm chair psychiatrists or terminally online twitter people.
    - afavour 4y ago
      I use it. HTH.
  - broken_mind 4y ago
    It's irrelevant how the term was born. It's relevant how it ia used now: and it's never used in good faith. Can you tell me part of masculinity that are not toxic, based on modern feminist thought?
vhcr 4y ago
Check out /r/MensLib/
thrownawaydad 4y ago
"but the result [of men's rights subreddits/etc] is not positive" For me, it was positive. When you're going through personal hell, there's a lot to be said for having others in the situation to commiserate with. Do many of the guys there sound like jerks? Sure. Maybe they even are--or maybe they're just blowing off steam in the face of a horrible situation. I think it's often the latter. One side effect of carefully banning forums that (truly) support men is that we're left with an environment where most places that might seem to be "help" are actually dedicated to gas-lighting and castigating men in this situation. This has created a vacuum where some rather dubious looking options are actually the best available. May the gods bless my MRAs and the guys at my local dive bar. Without them, I wouldn't have made it.

gjsman-1000 4y ago

Sharing my thoughts, a recent idiom I ran across that I increasingly find useful in situations like this is "two things can be true at once." There can be people who are extremely misogynistic - but they can also have completely valid concerns and grievances that make them feel that way. "They might be idiots at best, but they might have decent reasons why they got there." Just ask any dad who has lost his children, wife, and property to an actually-false claim of domestic abuse. Ignoring those grievances, under the hope of trying to avoid giving them any respect, I believe risks actually increasing the number of misogynists because it doesn't address the underlying hurt that many of them may be experiencing, or the cause that will keep repeating itself.

s1artibartfast 4y ago
A similar thought I find helpful to internalize is that "hurt people hurt other people". That is to say, many victims are themselves assholes and abusive. It is important to remember that fair justice should be extended to all people, independence of their individual moral or sympathetic valence. It cuts both ways. Despicable people deserve a fair treatment, and victims themselves must be held accountable for their actions.

JKCalhoun 4y ago

> The American Zeitgeist around gender issues is distorted to dehumanize men and alienate anyone who even dares to recognize this fact. I must be living under a rock then — this Zeitgeist you talk of is alien to me. I am a male who does not feel in any way dehumanized, nor have any of my male friends expressed as much.

bobkazamakis 4y ago
[flagged]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
broken_mind 4y ago
Good for you! I've never noticed this thing so it doesn't exist. Pure and simple internalized misandry.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Doesn't exist. Zeitgeist. There's a pretty broad strata between those two.

isthisthingon99 4y ago

I had the same reaction to his first sentence. Why do you need to say that?

draw_down 4y ago
[dead]