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The downvotes only further illustrate my point. They don't - the downvotes (none of them mine) are because this is a somewhat dismissive mischaracterisation of
by matthewmacleod 13y ago
The downvotes only further illustrate my point.
They don't - the downvotes (none of them mine) are because this is a somewhat dismissive mischaracterisation of the issue.
No reasonable person or group objects to discussion about issues that affect men. What they do object to—quite reasonably—is the often-associated attitude which runs along the lines of "Men suffer from <any problem> too, it's not a feminist thing!", which isn't really helpful.
The idea suggested by this article is that men are actually approximately as likely to suffer from sexual assault as women are. That's a perfectly valid possibility, and it's likely true.
But what's the general goal of a "feminist," if you can use such a broad term? Let's keep it simple, and say that "a feminist's goal is to further the cause of equal rights for women." Given that, why would we expect feminists to be talking about the effect of sexual assault on males? It's not their responsibility to do so, and I'm absolutely certain that most feminists would not object to male campaign groups which highlight the problem of male sexual assault. The problems which affect both genders, even in this area, are actually quite different!
The problem with these discussions is the ease with which one can focus on outspoken minority groups. The vast, VAST majority of feminists are not "anti-male"; that vast majority of men are not anti-feminism. It's easy to get carried away by overemphasising the views of minority groups.
Your comment is ultimately a meta version of that - in truth, there's very little opposition to discussing men's issues, but instead a fair bit of opposition to discarding womens' issues because "men have it bad too."
- makomk 13y agoThe trouble is that in a way, feminists talk about the effect of sexual assault on men all the time. Much of the feminist campaigning on sexual assault and rape is based around the claim that they're gendered forms of violence against women that don't generally affect men. Indeed, quite a lot of feminists use the exact 2010 CDC report mentioned in the article as evidence that men don't get raped (usually by not counting men who are "forced to penetrate" despite saying they consider this rape). Yet because feminism is supposedly not about men, anyone who challenges these claims is accused of making everything about men and derailing the discussion away from women's suffering, because "it's not about the men". Quite a lot of the feminists who do this don't even realise that they're not including many men who meet their definition of rape, simply because the issue was never mentioned by anyone with a wide audience until a few months ago. Also, despite men's issues not being a part of feminism, quite a few feminists loudly insist that feminism is the real movement helping men, that anyone who disputes this is obviously just out to disparage feminism and not really trying to help men, and that because all men's problems are caused by patriarchy it's unfair to call feminists out for supporting those supposedly patriarchal ideas. So the net result of all this is that most feminists are helping perpetuate the shitty status quo for men whilst having convinced the world that they're actually challenging it. Needless to say this pisses people off.
- Crake 13y ago>Given that, why would we expect feminists to be talking about the effect of sexual assault on males? Because "feminism fights for men too!" is something we hear all the time. >It's not their responsibility to do so, and I'm absolutely certain that most feminists would not object to male campaign groups which highlight the problem of male sexual assault. You'd definitely be wrong about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWgslugtDow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWgslugtDow