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>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 (tr

>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
    I never knew that, absolutely hilarious. I find that internet forums are just terrible all around. Moderating is an extremely important but thankless and unpaid job. So (with rare exception) the only people that do it are completely irrational and inept power hungry people with too much time on their hands. In the case of HN the reason moderation is so good is because Dang is actually paid from what I understand. But even on HN the mouth breathers learn the ins and outs of the system and know how to abuse flagging among other things.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Exactly. I think there's a pretty simple answer to this question: > What explains this asymmetry? What explains it is an asymmetrical history: millennia of oppression of women, often violently enforced. E.g., if you read the Iliad, it's basically a who-stole-my-woman story inside a who-stole-my-woman story; at the time, women were pretty close to property with opinions. An easy way to see the through-line to today is the history of "marital rape", where society did not see married women as being able to choose whether or not to have sex with their husbands. That was always the case under English common law, and was not fully outlawed in the US until 1992: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape#Legal_aspect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape#Legal_aspect We may have removed most of the gross legal infrastructure of patriarchy, but the cultural aspects are still only slowly dissolving. We have generations more work to do there. The reasonableness you mention is exactly what amazes me. Think of all the men who haven't been murdered as the slept. And I think this history also explains why the Men's Rights movement is so bonkers. A shift toward fairness is a loss for the people who used to benefit from the unfairness. This has left a lot of men upset that they aren't getting what they feel they are due. Some handle that well, but the ones who don't are going to fight to turn the clock back. And as Corey Robin points, out, reactionaries like that often cloak their efforts in the progressive language of the day. So we end up with "men's rights" as a bizzaro-world mirror of women's rights. And one of their heroes, one with 4 million Twitter followers, getting arrested as an abusive sex trafficker and international pimp.
  - ZGDUwpqEWpUZ 4y ago
    Kindly visit the Men's Rights Movement wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_rights_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_rights_movement Go through the issues in the second section and tell me what Andrew Tate's position was on any of them. Spoiler alert: you can't. Tate was not an MRA, he was a pickup artist. Male feminists also tend to find themselves in trouble, by the way. Michael Kimmel used to play the same game of lumping legitimate issues (suicide/education/family courts) in with incels upset they can't get laid. He had to retire after getting #MeToo'd, heh. Tiresome and predictable. Perhaps I should add a Google Alert for your name ;)
    - 4y ago
- monksy 4y ago
  > /r/twoxchromosomes That is a sub in which nearly every post that rises to this a "my partner/male-acquaintence did x I'm shocked" and it's nothing but a pile on about how "bad men are". Even if not every post is male critical a lot of the positives seem to be shaping on behavior. It hasn't always been radicalized like that, nor has it been focused on that type of content.
- sonjat 4y ago
  As a woman who finally gave up on twoxchromosomes because I felt is was a bit too toxic I somewhat disagree on it not being toxic. It seemed determined to paint women as perpetual victims of toxic men. Ironically it also seemed determined to paint men as bad if they didn't protect women (yes, this is an exaggeration. No, not all and perhaps not even most posts/comments were this way. It just happened enough and it made me angry enough that I decided avoiding that subreddit was best for my mental health)
- at_a_remove 4y ago
  I will disagree with the "reasonableness" with the Suffragettes. They weren't perfect. Two instances seemed unreasonable. First, the bombings. If you don't know about the bombings associated with the Suffragettes well ... The second being the involvement with that White Feather movement. As much as people say "You don't have to put men down to elevate women," that was a prime case of it. And after that we've still got the "boys are stupid, throw rocks at them" T-shirts, the "male tears" cups, the "#killallmen" hashtag, and so on. Maybe all of this just escaped you, I dunno, but now that you have it in front of you, please don't ignore it.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  There have been plenty of nutjob feminists out there; "feminism" is very broad and there is a wide range of variety in viewpoints. Many of these viewpoints are reasonable. Others ... not so much. A few years ago I tried to bring up this issue in the comments section of a paywalled (and fairly small) magazine where I voiced the view that we should move a little bit "beyond feminism" and look more towards gender relations and have a more "holistic" view on things, rather than look only from a female perspective. Not that there's anything wrong with feminism, but you know, it's just one side. In the next article my comment was cited to "demonstrate" that men still had a lot to learn with some disparaging and condescending text. Not the first nor last time I've seen something similar happen. Yes, you can have the occasional constructive discourse on a small scale (such as HN), but bringing the topic to the forefront in the mainstream is difficult, especially as a man. When you do succeed it captures attention for 5 minutes and then we move on and nothing really happens. So ... I gave up. I don't really talk about it much. Why bother? It's like screaming in a void. So what are we left with then if many of the reasonable people have given up? The nutjobs. And now it's even harder to bring these issues up.
TylerE 4y ago
Is it really that hard to understand the difference between a historically oppressed minority and the minority that historically was doing the oppressing?
- badpun 4y ago
  Let's not forget that most white men on Earth were always in the "oppressed" group. In Europe, you were either in the aristocracy, in some semi-privileged class like clergy, or you were working super hard for a living, and sometimes (fairly regularly in some countries, e.g. France) died due to starvation. In America, it was similar - yes, there were some slave owners, but majority of white men were living and working in abhorrent, dickensians conditions in the slums of New York etc. or living a tough, poor and primitve live rural life, while being opressed by nature itself.
- tonightstoast 4y ago
  > the minority that historically was doing the oppressing? Is it so difficult to realize those oppressors are dead and these men weren’t alive in 1920?
  - TylerE 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - ZGDUwpqEWpUZ 4y ago
      https://www.vox.com/2019/5/20/18629644/abortion-gender-gap-public-opinion https://www.vox.com/2019/5/20/18629644/abortion-gender-gap-p...
    - tonightstoast 4y ago
      Please check out the Vox article linked by the other poster. I want to preface with saying I’m pro choice. But are you really going to argue the 5 men and 1 woman that vote to affirm Dobbs is representative of the nation? People (including me) have been complaining about how the court hasn’t had a majority blue nomination since the 50s even though the political pendulum has swung multiple times since then. And grouping every male into the ruling .01% is not a good faith argument.
xg15 4y ago
Depends what the goals of the movements are. Most feminist discussions I've seen acknowledge that "the partriarchy hurts men as well". So highlighting issues like being discriminated as a male single parent or stay-at-home dad would probably find support in feminist spaces: Dealing with them shares the same vision as feminism does, just from the perspective of men instead of women. In contrast, many spaces that are branded as "men's rights" today seem to go for an entire different vision of society, which often looks like a cartoon version of the 50s (if consistent at all). If lots of men find themselves lonely, unfulfilled and unable to find a girlfriend, I think that is a serious issue, but the solution of the "men's rights" groups - that it's the women who have cut back their own goals and ambitions, just so some men they don't even know have a chance to have sex - seems pretty insane to me. Also note, not all women are feminists either. There are plenty of women who have issues with men taking on traditionally feminine roles because they it violates their own conservative worldview. I believe that's where the "Karen" slur originated from.
- javajosh 4y ago
  >, many spaces that are branded as "men's rights" today seem... That's the thing, that's the branding. The left (with Tucker Carlson's help) managed to get everyone to think of a man tanning his balls with any mention of men's rights. This is a major coup for leftist feminists, and a major loss for human rights. Men's rights are human rights. They are father's rights. They are worker rights. It means equal protection under the law, protection from rape and violence, protection from discrimination and threats. These are basic human rights that should be afforded to everyone. This should not be a zero-sum game: to give one group rights you should not take them away from another group! There are plenty of rights to go around and they won't run out.
  - hezralig 4y ago
    The issue with branding isn't the lefts. The issue is that many incel communities call themselves men's rights activists. The left, however, has a compassion problem with men. It seems like very few people actually want to engage in a healthy way in left oriented spaces whereas the right actually talks to young men and offers them advice over a range of topics that a lot of boys feel most insecure about. I think that is something that needs to be addressed otherwise grifters such as Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate will continue to infiltrate spaces of 12 year old boys, with innocuous seeming lifestyle advice. The advice I see given most frequently to boys and young men by lefties seem irrelevant to their actual interests at best or patronizing at worst (e.g. "Don't rape/make the world a better place"). I rarely see advice on how to engage with their own masculinity in a way that isn't harmful. It feels like the gut reaction of a lot of people is to conveniently label boys as assigned evil at birth rather than to guide them and unpack how interactions with peers, girls, or society work. This isn't feminists ruining young men, it is society failing to have adequate role models and show compassion to young me.
danaris 4y ago
I'm not familiar with r/askafeminist (or any other part of Reddit, really), but from what I've seen, the mirror "equivalent" to MRAs more generally is radical feminism, or radfems. For those who are unfamiliar, the basic tenet of radical feminism is that the source of women's oppression is the patriarchy (OK so far, if reductionist), which is run by and for men (broadly true), and thus men are all inherently bad (whoops that's where they lose me). In many cases, it's an ideology that ends up repeating many of the aspects of Christian fundamentalist patriarchy, just from a different angle: men and women are fundamentally different; biology dictates your role in society; etc.
- watwut 4y ago
  Radfems I have seen were significantly less hateful then what I found on Redpill or MRA subs. It is not that some of them were not hateful or mocking men, but the levels and amount of it were much different.

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
  I never knew that, absolutely hilarious. I find that internet forums are just terrible all around. Moderating is an extremely important but thankless and unpaid job. So (with rare exception) the only people that do it are completely irrational and inept power hungry people with too much time on their hands. In the case of HN the reason moderation is so good is because Dang is actually paid from what I understand. But even on HN the mouth breathers learn the ins and outs of the system and know how to abuse flagging among other things.
wpietri 4y ago
Exactly. I think there's a pretty simple answer to this question: > What explains this asymmetry? What explains it is an asymmetrical history: millennia of oppression of women, often violently enforced. E.g., if you read the Iliad, it's basically a who-stole-my-woman story inside a who-stole-my-woman story; at the time, women were pretty close to property with opinions. An easy way to see the through-line to today is the history of "marital rape", where society did not see married women as being able to choose whether or not to have sex with their husbands. That was always the case under English common law, and was not fully outlawed in the US until 1992: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape#Legal_aspect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape#Legal_aspect We may have removed most of the gross legal infrastructure of patriarchy, but the cultural aspects are still only slowly dissolving. We have generations more work to do there. The reasonableness you mention is exactly what amazes me. Think of all the men who haven't been murdered as the slept. And I think this history also explains why the Men's Rights movement is so bonkers. A shift toward fairness is a loss for the people who used to benefit from the unfairness. This has left a lot of men upset that they aren't getting what they feel they are due. Some handle that well, but the ones who don't are going to fight to turn the clock back. And as Corey Robin points, out, reactionaries like that often cloak their efforts in the progressive language of the day. So we end up with "men's rights" as a bizzaro-world mirror of women's rights. And one of their heroes, one with 4 million Twitter followers, getting arrested as an abusive sex trafficker and international pimp.
- ZGDUwpqEWpUZ 4y ago
  Kindly visit the Men's Rights Movement wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_rights_movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_rights_movement Go through the issues in the second section and tell me what Andrew Tate's position was on any of them. Spoiler alert: you can't. Tate was not an MRA, he was a pickup artist. Male feminists also tend to find themselves in trouble, by the way. Michael Kimmel used to play the same game of lumping legitimate issues (suicide/education/family courts) in with incels upset they can't get laid. He had to retire after getting #MeToo'd, heh. Tiresome and predictable. Perhaps I should add a Google Alert for your name ;)
  - 4y ago
monksy 4y ago
> /r/twoxchromosomes That is a sub in which nearly every post that rises to this a "my partner/male-acquaintence did x I'm shocked" and it's nothing but a pile on about how "bad men are". Even if not every post is male critical a lot of the positives seem to be shaping on behavior. It hasn't always been radicalized like that, nor has it been focused on that type of content.
sonjat 4y ago
As a woman who finally gave up on twoxchromosomes because I felt is was a bit too toxic I somewhat disagree on it not being toxic. It seemed determined to paint women as perpetual victims of toxic men. Ironically it also seemed determined to paint men as bad if they didn't protect women (yes, this is an exaggeration. No, not all and perhaps not even most posts/comments were this way. It just happened enough and it made me angry enough that I decided avoiding that subreddit was best for my mental health)
at_a_remove 4y ago
I will disagree with the "reasonableness" with the Suffragettes. They weren't perfect. Two instances seemed unreasonable. First, the bombings. If you don't know about the bombings associated with the Suffragettes well ... The second being the involvement with that White Feather movement. As much as people say "You don't have to put men down to elevate women," that was a prime case of it. And after that we've still got the "boys are stupid, throw rocks at them" T-shirts, the "male tears" cups, the "#killallmen" hashtag, and so on. Maybe all of this just escaped you, I dunno, but now that you have it in front of you, please don't ignore it.
Beltalowda 4y ago
There have been plenty of nutjob feminists out there; "feminism" is very broad and there is a wide range of variety in viewpoints. Many of these viewpoints are reasonable. Others ... not so much. A few years ago I tried to bring up this issue in the comments section of a paywalled (and fairly small) magazine where I voiced the view that we should move a little bit "beyond feminism" and look more towards gender relations and have a more "holistic" view on things, rather than look only from a female perspective. Not that there's anything wrong with feminism, but you know, it's just one side. In the next article my comment was cited to "demonstrate" that men still had a lot to learn with some disparaging and condescending text. Not the first nor last time I've seen something similar happen. Yes, you can have the occasional constructive discourse on a small scale (such as HN), but bringing the topic to the forefront in the mainstream is difficult, especially as a man. When you do succeed it captures attention for 5 minutes and then we move on and nothing really happens. So ... I gave up. I don't really talk about it much. Why bother? It's like screaming in a void. So what are we left with then if many of the reasonable people have given up? The nutjobs. And now it's even harder to bring these issues up.

TylerE 4y ago

Is it really that hard to understand the difference between a historically oppressed minority and the minority that historically was doing the oppressing?

badpun 4y ago
Let's not forget that most white men on Earth were always in the "oppressed" group. In Europe, you were either in the aristocracy, in some semi-privileged class like clergy, or you were working super hard for a living, and sometimes (fairly regularly in some countries, e.g. France) died due to starvation. In America, it was similar - yes, there were some slave owners, but majority of white men were living and working in abhorrent, dickensians conditions in the slums of New York etc. or living a tough, poor and primitve live rural life, while being opressed by nature itself.
tonightstoast 4y ago
> the minority that historically was doing the oppressing? Is it so difficult to realize those oppressors are dead and these men weren’t alive in 1920?
- TylerE 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - ZGDUwpqEWpUZ 4y ago
    https://www.vox.com/2019/5/20/18629644/abortion-gender-gap-public-opinion https://www.vox.com/2019/5/20/18629644/abortion-gender-gap-p...
  - tonightstoast 4y ago
    Please check out the Vox article linked by the other poster. I want to preface with saying I’m pro choice. But are you really going to argue the 5 men and 1 woman that vote to affirm Dobbs is representative of the nation? People (including me) have been complaining about how the court hasn’t had a majority blue nomination since the 50s even though the political pendulum has swung multiple times since then. And grouping every male into the ruling .01% is not a good faith argument.

xg15 4y ago

Depends what the goals of the movements are. Most feminist discussions I've seen acknowledge that "the partriarchy hurts men as well". So highlighting issues like being discriminated as a male single parent or stay-at-home dad would probably find support in feminist spaces: Dealing with them shares the same vision as feminism does, just from the perspective of men instead of women. In contrast, many spaces that are branded as "men's rights" today seem to go for an entire different vision of society, which often looks like a cartoon version of the 50s (if consistent at all). If lots of men find themselves lonely, unfulfilled and unable to find a girlfriend, I think that is a serious issue, but the solution of the "men's rights" groups - that it's the women who have cut back their own goals and ambitions, just so some men they don't even know have a chance to have sex - seems pretty insane to me. Also note, not all women are feminists either. There are plenty of women who have issues with men taking on traditionally feminine roles because they it violates their own conservative worldview. I believe that's where the "Karen" slur originated from.

javajosh 4y ago
>, many spaces that are branded as "men's rights" today seem... That's the thing, that's the branding. The left (with Tucker Carlson's help) managed to get everyone to think of a man tanning his balls with any mention of men's rights. This is a major coup for leftist feminists, and a major loss for human rights. Men's rights are human rights. They are father's rights. They are worker rights. It means equal protection under the law, protection from rape and violence, protection from discrimination and threats. These are basic human rights that should be afforded to everyone. This should not be a zero-sum game: to give one group rights you should not take them away from another group! There are plenty of rights to go around and they won't run out.
- hezralig 4y ago
  The issue with branding isn't the lefts. The issue is that many incel communities call themselves men's rights activists. The left, however, has a compassion problem with men. It seems like very few people actually want to engage in a healthy way in left oriented spaces whereas the right actually talks to young men and offers them advice over a range of topics that a lot of boys feel most insecure about. I think that is something that needs to be addressed otherwise grifters such as Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate will continue to infiltrate spaces of 12 year old boys, with innocuous seeming lifestyle advice. The advice I see given most frequently to boys and young men by lefties seem irrelevant to their actual interests at best or patronizing at worst (e.g. "Don't rape/make the world a better place"). I rarely see advice on how to engage with their own masculinity in a way that isn't harmful. It feels like the gut reaction of a lot of people is to conveniently label boys as assigned evil at birth rather than to guide them and unpack how interactions with peers, girls, or society work. This isn't feminists ruining young men, it is society failing to have adequate role models and show compassion to young me.

danaris 4y ago

I'm not familiar with r/askafeminist (or any other part of Reddit, really), but from what I've seen, the mirror "equivalent" to MRAs more generally is radical feminism, or radfems. For those who are unfamiliar, the basic tenet of radical feminism is that the source of women's oppression is the patriarchy (OK so far, if reductionist), which is run by and for men (broadly true), and thus men are all inherently bad (whoops that's where they lose me). In many cases, it's an ideology that ends up repeating many of the aspects of Christian fundamentalist patriarchy, just from a different angle: men and women are fundamentally different; biology dictates your role in society; etc.

watwut 4y ago
Radfems I have seen were significantly less hateful then what I found on Redpill or MRA subs. It is not that some of them were not hateful or mocking men, but the levels and amount of it were much different.