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While I am only a visitor from Reddit on this website and I will likely not post on here again, I felt compelled to make an account and reply to your post. You

• oh_sigh 14y ago
  > One does not often see this quality of writing and thoughts combined into a singular document on internet sites Maybe because you're a visitor from reddit.
  • CubemonkeyNYC 14y ago
    It appears that you do not detect the irony in your own comment.
    • oh_sigh 14y ago
      It appears that your attempt to be clever failed. I never said that all comments on hacker news were high quality. I only implied that most comments on reddit are not high quality. Please learn to think.
      • Anton338 14y ago
        You are in no position to imply anything. Please refrain from posting your uneducated opinion regarding websites you don't frequent.
        • kaoD 14y ago
          Redditors got mad lol
        • oh_sigh 14y ago
          What part of my "opinion" was "uneducated"?
          • ano3879 14y ago
            The part where you assign a value of quality to "reddit". Would you had visited the website, you'd known that due to its number of users and (this is important) many subreddits, assigning a value to "reddit" instead of a specific subreddit is akin to assign a value to "the internet" when in reality you meant to degrade a specific forum/website.
            • oh_sigh 14y ago
              I've been reading reddit for approximately 7 years, and I have multiple accounts on reddit that are in the 6 year club. I don't understand why you would assume that I don't read reddit based on the comment. My assumption was that the original person I was replying to came to ycombinator from /r/programming. That is a good example of a subreddit where a vast majority of comments, even generally upvoted ones, are low quality. For a tech related subreddit that has higher quality comments, /r/netsec is maybe the best reddit has to offer.
• apoptosis 14y ago
  While I generally abhor the talk about "privileged" groups, there doesn't need to be a "mens rights" movement. We dont need it. What we do need is to get on the bandwagon and propagate the "3rd wave feminism." The sub groups that are repressed/oppressed need the special exemptions, leniency, and attention. If you're worried about mens rights, get on board with 3rd wave feminism. It leaves the focus where it needs to be but also includes that ANYONE should be allowed to be whoever they want to be. Mens rights should be an after thought, tagged at the bottom in small print.
  • coinin 14y ago
    I'm glad to hear that your experience of 3rd wave feminism has been one that includes discussions of men's rights. Mine has been one which identifies any discussion of men's rights as "derailing" and "reactionary." So long as feminists (3rd wave or other wise) exclude discussions of men's rights from their group then there will always be a need for the MRM.
• astazangasta 14y ago
  As another visitor from Reddit, I apologize for this comment. While I agree with the original commenter that this case is overblown and shouldn't be called out as sexism, it flows from error and a reaction to a real problem. To suggest that we need a "men's rights movement" to counter this sort of error seems absurd. If this is the level of "hardship" that men are facing, they have little to complain about. Men should be more concerned about helping women, who continue to face significant sexism (and harassment) in the workplace at levels far in excess of what is faced by men.
  • ticking 14y ago
    I find false accusations, which in this case even lead to the accused loosing their jobs a serious hardship. Consider our societies view of men that are nice to children, most immediately think "pedophile", instead of nice guy. Just because we have to fight for true freedom of women, doesn't mean we shouldn't fight for the same when it comes to men. We need more men in social jobs, and we need a mens right movement to foster this, just as we need more women in IT. The real thing we need though is a unified movement that fights against discrimination of any kind without a label of a particular gender, race, religion or ideology.
    • revdinosaur 14y ago
      How were the accusations false? It seems they were making jokes that made another human being uncomfortable and they took action. One of the two men involved even posted in this thread and admitted that they were making the jokes.
  • truthtacular 14y ago
    Mmm. Nothing gets the Men's Rights fanatics frothing like the suggestion that they aren't the most oppressed people of all time (OF. ALL. TIME.). So it might help ease their minds to acknowledge that there are a few significant scenarios in which there is actually gender bias that favors women. The worst one is probably child custody. Who says moms are automatically better single parents? I'd say the other bad one is the draft...we don't have one right now, and maybe now that women are allowed in combat, if we do have a draft again it won't only be men who are conscripted. But yeah, aside from a few outlying examples, for the most part gender bias favors males, so the excessive whining of the Men's Rights movement is just a big steaming pile of Yeah...No.
• craftyPseudonym 14y ago
  I say that rather than focusing on women's rights or men's rights, we as a society need to put more of an emphasis on equality overall, and making a concerted effort to eliminate sexism from both directions at the same time. In doing so it would help with the issue of the historically oppressed group B from rising to a point in which group A is now oppressed, as either a byproduct of the increase in rights or as revenge for their oppression. While men are oppressed in ways that many people fail to notice, and are expected to act in certain ways and exhibit "manliness", a men's rights movement is not the answer. What is needed is an individual rights movement, to allow everyone equal opportunity to do what they want and be who they are, so long as it does not infringe on anyone else's rights. When the focus is on gaining rights for a single group then typically that group will end up either above the other group(s) or it will remain lower, resulting in continued discontentment. If men fight for equal rights, while not equal they may still receive additional rights, but these may come at the cost of women not having these rights, and so the cycle repeats.
  • WalterSear 14y ago
    The problem is that people have difficulty in recognizing sexism when it isn't pointed at them.
• bobwaycott 14y ago
  Hey, thanks for the compliment and kind words. I appreciate that. However, I must emphatically and proudly express that I do not support the negation and devaluing of women's (as well as ethnic, [other] cultural, LGBT, etc.) rights by way of reactionary countering with a "men's rights" movement. One of the most pressing reasons is that such a movement would likely result in a majority of white, heterosexual male adherents (at least here in the US). From a historical perspective alone, males of nearly all notable ethnicity have dominated the world stage in terms of rights, privileges, and power--and white, heterosexual males in particular. This undeniably central component of human history (especially as it leads to Western modernity) is a primary motivator on my part to refrain from supporting an ideological, social, or economic (read: material) crusade that would pose a serious threat to the hard-won and valiantly fought-for progress that has been made in the human condition over the past century+. It could be possible that a notable minority male demographic would join such a movement, but at least in the US, such calls for "men's rights" are typically laden with reactionary white men who feel somewhat despondent at figuring out how to navigate in a world that, at least in words, tries very hard to no longer privilege that genetic inheritance. More abstractly, a "men's rights" movement would, I think, offer very little gain to humanity as a whole, and would threaten to destabilize and retard the advancement of human rights and greater gender and sexual equality in social relations. This would be a terrible regression to allow to happen. Even when people like Adria raise the red flag in a moment of haste that, I think, will later be reflected on as regrettable, it is still done (I hope) from a position of sincere concern for protecting those who are actual victims of bigoted, discriminatory behaviors. On this particular issue, I am disheartened to see the fallout from her overreaction, especially as her actions have affected three children, their father, and (assuming she is present) their mother. One woman's dislike of a comment that she mistook for sexist antagonism (or some emotional reaction in the same vein (also: I'm not using 'emotional' in a pejorative sense here)) has now affected five lives. Moreover, in reading her blog post on the subject, it threads through a story of a person who has been hyper-traveling from conference to conference, is exhausted, has already dealt with a person on the same day making a completely inappropriate and objectifying joke/comment that is absolutely inexcusable, and then she basically takes it out on a couple of guys who said something which, given their own statements and the available evidence, bears every indication that she basically went in, guns blazing, to the wrong fight. What is most important is this: the guy who made a comment directly to her about looking under a [table] skirt and finding it "bare, just the way [he] liked it" DID NOT have a picture posted to Twitter and a massive call-to-the-carpet moment. She talked to him. She even told him the comment could be funny in a different venue (her own admission). The evidence available leaves the distinctly bad taste that the punishment did not fit this crime, while a much more serious issue in which she actually spoke to the offender directly was apparently cause for discussing the comedic appropriateness of a shaved vulva at a tech conference. Moreover, to go back toward the philosophical end of things, this brief quote from Wikipedia provides a decent enough look at exactly what is meant by the Marxist understanding of gendered disparities in social equality: >Marxist feminism's foundation is laid by Friedrich Engels in his analysis of gender oppression ... a woman's subordination is not a result of her biological disposition but of social relations, and that men's efforts to achieve their demands for control of women's labor and sexual faculties have gradually solidified and become institutionalized in the nuclear family. Through a Marxist historical perspective, Engels analyzes the widespread social phenomena associated with female sexual morality, such as fixation on virginity and sexual purity, incrimination and violent punishment of women who commit adultery, and demands that women be submissive to their husbands. Ultimately, Engels traces these phenomena to the recent development of exclusive male control of private property and the attendant desire to ensure that their inheritance is passed only to their own offspring: chastity and fidelity are rewarded, says Engels, because they guarantee exclusive access to the sexual and reproductive faculty of women possessed by men from the property-owning class.[1] We are, on even our worst days as a society, nowhere near a state of affairs in which that synopsis can swap the gendered pronouns and hold true. I hope that provides a bit more context, as well as a decent enough grappling with why, given how much social inequality actually still exists to be eradicated, a "men's rights" movement is nothing that needs to be on the table. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_feminism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist_feminism