Here’s an item. I don’t know what or who the original source is. One of several on tumblr.
I’m a guy, and I need feminism. Not “men’s rights.” Feminism. Here is why.
Everything that MRAs talk about that men can’t do or are socially punished for arise directly and immediately from misogyny. Not “misandry.” Misogyny.
Whether I am expressing my emotions, playing with children, baking, having sex wherein I am penetrated in any way, wearing the wrong color, talking the wrong way, moving the wrong way, being sexually harassed/assaulted, or paying too little attention to looking like I’m not paying attention to how I look, when society punishes me or derides me or marginalizes me for these things, it is happening because they are things women, not men, are expected to do, and our society at large fucking hates women.
Has that sunk in yet?
Men, can you even think of a single goddamn way you have ever been mocked that wasn’t related to something that a misogynist society sees as feminizing? Even when large men are mocked for their bodies, they are referred to as having “man-boobs,” for fucks sake.
How do you expect to improve those things with “men’s rights?” What right are you fighting for? I can tell you what I think you’re fighting for. I think you’re fighting for the right to contain and control misogyny, and direct it back at women, where you think it belongs. You want to maintain your privilege but erase its consequences, and that’s why your movement is farcical; it’s a big fucking feedback loop. How do you expect men to be free from the peripheral effects of misogyny when you refuse to even fucking believe it’s real?
It’s the truth. I sometimes (often) get overwhelmed by despair when I see yet another example of that phenomenon.
I think humans are all bullies, the way we’re all bipedal. We have opposable thumbs and we have an instinctive urge to bully anyone we can. That urge combined with sexual dimorphism gets you just this arrangement, where women are bullied for being women and men are bullied for being like women.
Intelligent design? Don’t make me laugh.
Yeah, although I guess there’ll be some outliers and of course that whole other double whammy of women getting treated like shit for both “feminine” and “masculine” behaviours.
The silly pop-psych book ‘Sex at Dawn’ spends some time pointing out that humans have the LEAST sexual dimorphism of all the primates.
Gender apartheid has a tone of desperate denial at its heart. Trying to ‘reform’ in some unilateral manner is a dream. Feminism is always going to imply criticism of male norms. Any REAL movement for ‘men’s rights’ would immediately encompass opposition to patriarchy and misogyny.
It would BE feminist, by nature…
Brilliant. This sums it up so nicely. Even the constant whine about men not getting custody of their children came from misogyny – the idea that it was the woman’s job to care for children, therefore not a fit job for a man. Consequently, men aren’t able to do it right, because it’s built into women’s “essential nature”.
When men do get custody of children, the woman gets treated like shit. When I divorced, I allowed my ex custody (though I had very liberal visitation rights) because at that particular time, it was a better situation. I was very ill and hospitalized, and it seemed better for my son to go to his father until I was able to take care of him again. For the rest of my life, I’ve been given shit (by men and women alike) for that decision. If his father had allowed me custody without fighting, he would have been regarded as normal and acceptable (he was also regarded as normal and acceptable for having custody, while I would have been a “divorced single mother” who was unable to keep a relationship).
The least? Really? I’d have thought gibbons and siamangs (to name just two) would be better candidates for that. And then lemurs…
That claim sounds pretty wrong to me.
Mmmm…
Brilliant! Yes, when the status quo is misogyny, defending the status quo is defending misogyny.
@polishalami #5
It might be argued. Consider that chimpanzees behave very differently, in terms of heirarchy and aggression from bonobos. Is that a purely learned behavior or is there an instinct to heirarchy-building violence? (aka: bullying) I suppose it could also be an emergent property of the environment but that wouldn’t explain why 2 closely related species in similar environments act very differently. Humans appear to fairly consistently build heirarchies, too. I don’t think the idea that there may be an instinct is ridiculous at all, the problem is separating learned from instinctive behaviors, as usual.
I hope that we figure this out, someday.
Yes, there’s the whole primate/hierarchy/competition thing that gets us to bully. However, I think that for as long as we’ve had societies, there’s been an opposite impulse that’s caused cultures to become more pro-social. Societies where everyone’s contribution is valued, and where people don’t get shat upon because they’re female or weak or different, have an inherent competitive advantage over societies where the biggest brute dominates a gang of brutes. Not least of these is the fact that, unless you keep them physically chained up, the low-status people always have the option of “voting with their feet” and sneaking off in the middle of the night to the tribe where they’ll be treated the way they want to be treated.
Marcus Ranum #7:
There have been some experimental societies that have shown hope for a less hierarchical and authoritarian future: Spain in the 1930s, the Israeli kibbutzim, modern Kurdistan. People forget that long-term trends are still not permanent trends.
I hesitate to say anything, because anything I want to say smacks of evo-psych, which is just made-up BS. With that disclaimer…
I suspect that properly formalized (e.g., using game theory), there’s some sort of theorem that establishing a pecking order is one of the easiest ways to minimize conflict. It’s also unjust, perhaps maximally so, but it minimizes conflict. Once you know your place and learn to stay in it, most conflicts are resolved simply by deferring to the higher-status member. If this is so, then it wouldn’t be surprising that evolution keeps churning out species that have pecking orders. Bullying could be a side-effect in which one tries to climb a rung by picking on someone marginally higher up, or maintain one’s position by punching down.
Equality is right because it’s right, whether or not it’s “natural.” It requires thinking, empathy, and other things that take more work than simply checking the size of the other person’s canines and deferring to the one whose are bigger.
bruce – yup, definitely. I’m not saying bully-instinct is all there is or even that it’s dominant. (I have no idea whether it is or not.) I’m just saying it’s there, the way stereotypes are there, no matter how much we want to be rid of them.
This point needs to be made, repeatedly, whenever the subject of the “Men’s Rights Movement” arises. This is what it is, in a nutshell.
@10 Masked Avenger
Evo-psych is BS because it is based on several shaky premises: the biggest of these is the idea that behavior is somehow transmitted genetically rather than socially, which simply isn’t so.
OTOH, there’s meme theory, which says that cultures (not individuals) compete with one another for resources and flourish or go extinct based on which traits they adapt. It was this idea that made me give up my long-held theism; before I came across it, I hadn’t been able to account for why pro-social behavior (what we call “good”) tended to be so similar across so many cultures and religions. But if goodness confers a competitive advantage for the societies that adapt it, then it makes perfect sense.
The source appears to be the Tumblr blogger “riotrite” in 2012:
http://riotrite.tumblr.com/post/35869108510/misandry-isnt-real-dudez
It has more than 36,000 notes, most of which appear to be “likes” and “rebloggings”.
Bullying others doesn’t raise oneself, but it certainly pushes down others. It seems no matter how high or low we are on the social totem pole, we want to know there’s someone worse off than ourselves. And some people will actively take part in putting others down so they aren’t the lowest themselves.