5 ms·

Imo I think this comment would have had more weight behind it for me before recent political events and before Roe vs Wade was overturned. I don’t believe in ea

Imo I think this comment would have had more weight behind it for me before recent political events and before Roe vs Wade was overturned. I don’t believe in easy answers and I don’t claim to be able to experience life from the other gender, but cat calling is still common in the US. Women still get payed significantly less than men. Women still have much higher risks of sexual assault. We just decided to roll back constitutional protections for abortion something that imo is critical for women’s ability to exist as equal citizens. I don’t think we’ve pendulum swung somehow past equality. Obviously something has gone wrong for men in the US. Stats around education, depression, and suicide make that hard to dispute, but it remained the fact that a boy born today can expect to have more power than his sister. I do think this can be true while there can also be elements of society that push the other way. Culture is made up of many micro cultures and the kid born in SF will have a different experience than the one born in Mississippi, but we do have bigger issues than people on the internet making fun of mansplaining or something. It’s just too easy to have one’s perception of reality distorted by your perception.

haswell 3y ago
This is not a zero sum game. We can acknowledge that there has been regression or no change in some areas without any bearing on the negative outcomes of over corrective attitudes towards men. Food for thought: the types of men who are likely to rely on macho masculinity and the abuse of power dynamics are the least likely to be phased by an undercurrent of anti-male sentiment. Sensitive men, the men who are not propagating these patterns are the men who take such sentiment seriously, and are more likely to be harmed/held back by it. The issue is not “men”. The issue is bad behavior. But as long as the framing is men vs. women, people who are not exhibiting the targeted behavior get caught up in the broader backlash, leading to a very hostile situation that does little to address the real issues in a sustainable way. It may be that the pendulum swing was necessary for a time, and indeed there have been times in our history where this was obvious, e.g. the women’s suffrage movement. And there are still clear wage gaps and the issue of bodily autonomy among others that remain critical to solve. But those can be addressed without perpetuating a culture that demonizes boys for being born male. This is a shift in thinking that we must make.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  I don’t agree. “Sensitive men” are acutely aware of the behavior of “toxic masculinity men”. It’s not a behavior that exclusively affects women. It affects everyone. I can’t say I’ve ever felt threatened by this concept as a guy. Semantics get messy and people can use terms however they want but the basic to me feels obvious and just. It is no surprise that such men don’t have their emotional needs met. But there are layers upon layers of issues that create this circumstance.
  - haswell 3y ago
    > I don’t agree. “Sensitive men” are acutely aware of the behavior of “toxic masculinity men”. It’s not a behavior that exclusively affects women. It affects everyone. I agree with this, and I'm not sure on which point you disagree. My point was that the broader cultural anti-male rhetoric that arose as an (understandable) response to toxic masculinity tends to have the least impact on the worst perpetrators, and the most negative impact on those who are not the problem to begin with. And to your point, there are many layers involved here, and reducing this to just a spectrum of masculinity is not sufficient on its own. We need broader thinking.
    - ziml77 3y ago
      The combination of the depictions of nerds vs jocks in 80s and 90s media plus this huge overcorrection on toxic masculinity really fucked with me hard. I thought that nerd and jock was a hard line, that I had to actively avoid anything sports related to not be one of the stupid jocks who were all woman objectifiers. I was also convinced that women wanted nothing to do with sex, hated getting hit on, and would consider any physical contact without explicit verbal approval to be assault. Now I know that's all a load of crap. Nerds can and should play sports for the health and social benefits, women absolutely have sexual desires, and all physical interactions with someone are contextual. It just would have been great to have had that realization way sooner than my late 20s! There must be a middle-ground somewhere that discourages being disgusting to women while also not making men feel like they are inherently disgusting. Something that lets a wide spectrum of both masculinity and femininity be considered valid and acceptable.
belorn 3y ago
All those issues has equality issues that impacts both genders, and solutions that would benefit both men and women generally ignored. Roe vs Wade could be changed into a human rights discussion where every person has a right to demand consent to parenthood before being forced into it. The asymmetry of child birth has up to today dictated different amount of rights for men and women, both before and after birth. Unifying those into a single right, a human right, would bring those issues closer to each other and change how policy is created around them. Women still get payed significantly less than men, and men work significantly more hours than women and at more dangerous jobs. Those two inequalities also hang together with inequalities related to non-paid work like parenting, and also that men are twice as likely to not have children than women (sometimes refereed to as reproductive inequality). Solving those require a lot of different initiatives that all work in unity to reduce inequality for both men and women. Women are also at much higher risks of sexual assault, and men are at very higher risk of assault. Reducing sexual assault and assault involves solutions that are fairly similar, ie higher cohesion in society, more trust, and stronger social connections, social networks and social support among the population. Inequality in social economic status is also a strong indicator of high amount of sexual assaults and assault.
erenyeager 3y ago
Could it be that equality is not the just nor fair answer? A big silence in terms of women’s equality is found in the most drastic case in fields like the military, where even though women have been allowed and encouraged via advertisement, is still overwhelmingly male worldwide. It’s obvious that women’s bodies are not the same as men’s bodies in general… so why would we aim for full equality (aka identicalness) given these basic facts that men are not like women? Also see pay and work: the more time a woman spends at her job is less time with her kids, which directly impacts society in many unfortunate ways, especially since men are still often the breadwinners, and even sociobiologically, the role of motherhood cannot equal fatherhood. So is work pay more about capitalism & lowering wages or more about a nebulous sense of empowerment? In terms of assault and harassment: there is also the general culture on both genders of situations that encourage this. For example, things like clubbing, heavy drinking, proximity with strangers, hookup culture, a culture focused on individualism and bringing attention to oneself in terms of clothing, behavior, etc… all of these are factors. Perhaps to obtain the outcomes people wish to see, “equality” is not the answer.

haswell 3y ago

This is not a zero sum game. We can acknowledge that there has been regression or no change in some areas without any bearing on the negative outcomes of over corrective attitudes towards men. Food for thought: the types of men who are likely to rely on macho masculinity and the abuse of power dynamics are the least likely to be phased by an undercurrent of anti-male sentiment. Sensitive men, the men who are not propagating these patterns are the men who take such sentiment seriously, and are more likely to be harmed/held back by it. The issue is not “men”. The issue is bad behavior. But as long as the framing is men vs. women, people who are not exhibiting the targeted behavior get caught up in the broader backlash, leading to a very hostile situation that does little to address the real issues in a sustainable way. It may be that the pendulum swing was necessary for a time, and indeed there have been times in our history where this was obvious, e.g. the women’s suffrage movement. And there are still clear wage gaps and the issue of bodily autonomy among others that remain critical to solve. But those can be addressed without perpetuating a culture that demonizes boys for being born male. This is a shift in thinking that we must make.

jncfhnb 3y ago
I don’t agree. “Sensitive men” are acutely aware of the behavior of “toxic masculinity men”. It’s not a behavior that exclusively affects women. It affects everyone. I can’t say I’ve ever felt threatened by this concept as a guy. Semantics get messy and people can use terms however they want but the basic to me feels obvious and just. It is no surprise that such men don’t have their emotional needs met. But there are layers upon layers of issues that create this circumstance.
- haswell 3y ago
  > I don’t agree. “Sensitive men” are acutely aware of the behavior of “toxic masculinity men”. It’s not a behavior that exclusively affects women. It affects everyone. I agree with this, and I'm not sure on which point you disagree. My point was that the broader cultural anti-male rhetoric that arose as an (understandable) response to toxic masculinity tends to have the least impact on the worst perpetrators, and the most negative impact on those who are not the problem to begin with. And to your point, there are many layers involved here, and reducing this to just a spectrum of masculinity is not sufficient on its own. We need broader thinking.
  - ziml77 3y ago
    The combination of the depictions of nerds vs jocks in 80s and 90s media plus this huge overcorrection on toxic masculinity really fucked with me hard. I thought that nerd and jock was a hard line, that I had to actively avoid anything sports related to not be one of the stupid jocks who were all woman objectifiers. I was also convinced that women wanted nothing to do with sex, hated getting hit on, and would consider any physical contact without explicit verbal approval to be assault. Now I know that's all a load of crap. Nerds can and should play sports for the health and social benefits, women absolutely have sexual desires, and all physical interactions with someone are contextual. It just would have been great to have had that realization way sooner than my late 20s! There must be a middle-ground somewhere that discourages being disgusting to women while also not making men feel like they are inherently disgusting. Something that lets a wide spectrum of both masculinity and femininity be considered valid and acceptable.

belorn 3y ago

All those issues has equality issues that impacts both genders, and solutions that would benefit both men and women generally ignored. Roe vs Wade could be changed into a human rights discussion where every person has a right to demand consent to parenthood before being forced into it. The asymmetry of child birth has up to today dictated different amount of rights for men and women, both before and after birth. Unifying those into a single right, a human right, would bring those issues closer to each other and change how policy is created around them. Women still get payed significantly less than men, and men work significantly more hours than women and at more dangerous jobs. Those two inequalities also hang together with inequalities related to non-paid work like parenting, and also that men are twice as likely to not have children than women (sometimes refereed to as reproductive inequality). Solving those require a lot of different initiatives that all work in unity to reduce inequality for both men and women. Women are also at much higher risks of sexual assault, and men are at very higher risk of assault. Reducing sexual assault and assault involves solutions that are fairly similar, ie higher cohesion in society, more trust, and stronger social connections, social networks and social support among the population. Inequality in social economic status is also a strong indicator of high amount of sexual assaults and assault.

erenyeager 3y ago

Could it be that equality is not the just nor fair answer? A big silence in terms of women’s equality is found in the most drastic case in fields like the military, where even though women have been allowed and encouraged via advertisement, is still overwhelmingly male worldwide. It’s obvious that women’s bodies are not the same as men’s bodies in general… so why would we aim for full equality (aka identicalness) given these basic facts that men are not like women? Also see pay and work: the more time a woman spends at her job is less time with her kids, which directly impacts society in many unfortunate ways, especially since men are still often the breadwinners, and even sociobiologically, the role of motherhood cannot equal fatherhood. So is work pay more about capitalism & lowering wages or more about a nebulous sense of empowerment? In terms of assault and harassment: there is also the general culture on both genders of situations that encourage this. For example, things like clubbing, heavy drinking, proximity with strangers, hookup culture, a culture focused on individualism and bringing attention to oneself in terms of clothing, behavior, etc… all of these are factors. Perhaps to obtain the outcomes people wish to see, “equality” is not the answer.