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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

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 ;)
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Is this just a nitpick on Tate in particular? That was a side note, and one I don't think you quite got, as I didn't say he was an MRA, just popular among the same sort of people. Which I think you'd have a hard time denying. And my point isn't that the men's rights people don't have legitimate points about how patriarchy also harms men. They do! My point is that for an awful lot of people, those points are a cloak for a deeply emotional backlash against feminism. So I'm less interested in what they claim motivates them than what we can learn from what they actually spend their time and attention on.
    - ZGDUwpqEWpUZ 4y ago
      > just popular among the same sort of people. Which I think you'd have a hard time denying. I'd have a hard time denying it because I have no idea what that "sort of person" is even supposed to be. Is it just people you don't like? I went down the Men's Rights rabbithole because I got sexually assaulted by a woman as a teenager and didn't know how to deal with it. They were the only ones talking about it, and I assure you nobody involved had any interest in relegalizing marital rape. Rather, that seems to be a bit of DARVO given that feminist thinkers like Mary Koss would see happened to me reduced to "unwanted contact". > And my point isn't that the men's rights people don't have legitimate points about how patriarchy also harms men. "Patriarchy hurts men too" is empty handwaving, not a substitute for genuine solutions. Given your little quip - "think of all the men who haven't been murdered as they slept" - I doubt you'll be interested in providing help for men (or boys, as it was) like myself. If that's the feminist line, then it is clear that feminism, to put it mildly, isn't for me.
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.

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 ;)
- wpietri 4y ago
  Is this just a nitpick on Tate in particular? That was a side note, and one I don't think you quite got, as I didn't say he was an MRA, just popular among the same sort of people. Which I think you'd have a hard time denying. And my point isn't that the men's rights people don't have legitimate points about how patriarchy also harms men. They do! My point is that for an awful lot of people, those points are a cloak for a deeply emotional backlash against feminism. So I'm less interested in what they claim motivates them than what we can learn from what they actually spend their time and attention on.
  - ZGDUwpqEWpUZ 4y ago
    > just popular among the same sort of people. Which I think you'd have a hard time denying. I'd have a hard time denying it because I have no idea what that "sort of person" is even supposed to be. Is it just people you don't like? I went down the Men's Rights rabbithole because I got sexually assaulted by a woman as a teenager and didn't know how to deal with it. They were the only ones talking about it, and I assure you nobody involved had any interest in relegalizing marital rape. Rather, that seems to be a bit of DARVO given that feminist thinkers like Mary Koss would see happened to me reduced to "unwanted contact". > And my point isn't that the men's rights people don't have legitimate points about how patriarchy also harms men. "Patriarchy hurts men too" is empty handwaving, not a substitute for genuine solutions. Given your little quip - "think of all the men who haven't been murdered as they slept" - I doubt you'll be interested in providing help for men (or boys, as it was) like myself. If that's the feminist line, then it is clear that feminism, to put it mildly, isn't for me.

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.