you're falling for the "Why isn't there a white history month?" trap here. Men don't have a gender-based US lobby group because, to put it bluntly, they don't need one.
Men's
issues are, in total, at least as serious as women's. It's unbelievably crass of you to belittle addiction, suicide, homelessness, violence (both perpetration and victimization), biased courts, etc. It hurts me to see such rank bigotry from otherwise intelligent people. Ally Fogg is a true hero for
politely debunking feminists who casually post offensive rubbish. Or listen to this woman on Quora.com:
Misandry is a serious problem.
I can assure you that men as a class do, in fact, have an in-group bias;
http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903 for instance. if you don't feel like reading, that study covers the orchestra stuff i mentioned earlier. men were far more likely to be picked, until blind auditions were introduced, at which point the gap narrowed significantly. if that doesn't show male in-group bias, i'm not sure what does.
I'm familiar with Claudia Goldin's work and respect her a great deal. But her study on orchestra auditions doesn't show in-group bias for two reasons: (1) it doesn't differentiate between male and female judges; and (2) it isn't double blind - that is, candidates knew when they were being observed and this may have affected their performances. So it doesn't even conclusively show hiring discrimination against women. And even if it did show discrimination, we'd have to weigh it against other studies such as
Williams & Ceci 2014 and
Breda & Hillion 2016 which observe hiring discrimination against men. Maybe some fields or regions discriminate against men while others discriminate against women; overall, hiring discrimination doesn't support your claims about male privilege and female oppression.
Many,
many economists have debunked the usual feminist interpretation of the wage gap, including the aforementioned
Mrs. Goldin! "CLAUDIA GOLDIN: Well, I'd rather not use the word discrimination. Much of the difference has to do with what I call the high cost of temporal flexibility. [...] I know that there is discrimination. How much is there - probably not that much." The studies claiming to show discrimination always fail to control for at least one important factor like benefits, full-time status, hours worked, overtime, field, sub-specialty, etc.
and yes, men as a class very much do have power over women as a class. men are more likely to be in positions of power than women are, are on average more wealthy than women are
Women are outnumbered in positions of power because
they prioritise security and flexibility rather than career advancement and income. In US and UK,
Women buy 83% of all purchases, and own about half of wealth. This not oppression, nor is it evidence of oppression.
and are more likely to actually be listened to than men are. men actually tend to see more women in a crowd than there actually are:
http://inthesetimes.com/article/16157/our_feminized_society if a crowd is about 17% women, men perceive it as 50-50, and if there's 33% women men think they're significantly outnumbered. in classroom environments, this means male professors and teachers will answer questions from male students far more often than from female ones. again, these biases are all-consuming. men will give raises to men.
Your conclusion (male teachers are biased towards male students) doesn't follow from the premise (males overcount females). It is possible that their answer ratio is biased as you say, but it's equally likely that they undercount males because they pay less attention to male students on average, and so their answer ratio is biased towards women. Your claim that biases are "all-consuming" is pure hyperbole. We should be more worried about the preponderance of female teachers, since
studies suggest that they are biased against male students.
when it comes to the criminal justice system, well. the same societal bull**** that tells men to "act like men" also defines men as someone willing to take risks, and tells men who don't take risks that they're cowards. this probably accounts for the fact that although women are in more car crashes overall, men are in more fatal collisions. and although women are more likely to attempt suicide, men are more likely to succeed.
Thanks for acknowledging this area of male disadvantage. Isn't this significant and worth fighting against? What makes you think that all of this gender policing implicitly refers to women?
the reason men are more likely to be put in jail isn't necessarily because men are profiled to an even greater rate than black people, but because men are simply more likely to commit crimes; or, at the very least, the sorts of crimes that get people caught and/or put in jail. to further support this claim, men are far more likely to commit mass shootings than women.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_crime
Blacks are far more likely than whites to commit crimes. Take homicide, for example:
over 50% of murderers are black, even though blacks are only 13% of the population; blacks are over 7x as likely to commit murder as whites. It's simply not plausible to write off this enormous gap as profiling. So men really do face the same kinds of discrimination as blacks; in fact
the magnitude of the discrimination against men is 6x larger than for blacks. Here's
another study showing that men face systemic criminal justice discrimination even more serious that that faced by blacks (p. 302). An impartial reading of the evidence suggests an
outrageous amount of discrimination against men.
as for men and government programs, this article sums things up pretty decently;
https://newrepublic.com/article/119751/government-assistance-has-benefitted-white-men-more-anybody simply put, there are more government programs for women now because women are more likely to need them, due to being single parents more often, the gender wage gap, etc. again, it's the "why is there no white history month?" trap.
Sums it up nicely? That's just an opinion piece, not at all relevant to this debate.
Women are about 55% of the impoverished. But men are
70% of the homeless, and an even higher percentage of the unsheltered homeless...
Most homeless children are male. Do I need to argue that sleeping on the street is super bad for your health, worthy of attention? Men need help every bit as badly as women, and yet this toxic ideology blinds you to half of human suffering.
the problem with your analogy is that black people are oppressed as a class, whereas men are not.
You've repeatedly invoked "class oppression" to dismiss men's disadvantages; yet "oppression" is nothing more than the sum total of disadvantages. Your logic looks circular: men aren't oppressed because their disadvantages are negligible; and men's disadvantages are negligible because they're not oppressed. The problem with my analogy is apparently that your prejudice against men prevents you from objectively evaluating the evidence.
"your" self-righteous bigotry is also assuming some pretty dangerous things about me, yo.
Please explain how giving a **** about other men makes me a self-righteous bigot, and how calling out your blatant sexism is a
dangerous assumption. You're the one telling half of humanity that their problems don't matter.
depends on the exact situation. probably the HR department if it's a workplace thing, which is really the only situation where i can see this possibly coming up.
So you're saying that the HR department constitutes "innumerable people" that men, and only men, go to when they are discriminated against? If not, then how exactly does this substantiate your point that discrimination against men is less harmful than discrimination against women?
if you've ever heard of victim-blaming, you've probably heard it in relation to **** culture. women are blamed for being sexually assaulted because they weren't wearing enough, or drank too much, or whatever. it goes for other situations, too; if a woman speaks up about any sort of harassment, they're routinely blamed for being harassed or even domestically abused. just look at the comments section on virtually any article about a famous woman, or a woman with a famous partner, coming forward about being domestically abused, and you'll witness the dark side of humanity. anyway, here's an article.
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-polit...aggression-get-the-blame-20151124-gl6zli.html
That article is about "actions that were disrespectful or aggressive towards women". It's hard to say without a link to the actual study, but they seem to be focusing on permissive attitudes towards catcalling. This is very different from blaming victims of abuse and ****, and in no way demonstrates that women are uniquely judged as responsible for their own problems.
horrifically, i even saw this in some responses to an article about a boy who stabbed a girl to death after she repeatedly refused to go to prom with him. i find it difficult to believe that a boy who was stabbed to death for those reasons would receive the same reception.
It's the internet.
Of course people post horrific vitriol. Gender merely flavours the abuse that trolls hurl at everyone. When a guy is *****, the trolls
come out and make fun of him.
First point: Didn't have the time to click through the link, but on the previous page another poster pointed out that the "**** is ****" campaign, which raised awareness for all victims of sexual assault, was spearheaded by feminists, and that it pressured the FBI to change their definition of **** such that it allowed for male victims.
https://smashboards.com/threads/is-feminism-hurting-men.429456/
And I replied by noting that according to the president of this campaign - and further evidenced by examples in the supporting literature - broadening the definition of **** was intended to increase funding for
female victims. Men were included as a side-effect, and they were satisfied with "penetration without consent of the victim" wording that is easy for local police to misinterpret.
Second point: The study, while telling, is from 2011. This is from the national domestic violence hotline:
http://www.thehotline.org/2014/07/men-can-be-victims-of-abuse-too/
Refreshingly inclusive! Thanks for the link. Still, their
criteria for an abusive relationship feminize the victim, include "male privilege", and link to the
"Home of the Duluth Model" which notoriously excludes male victims and female perpetrators. Seeing this link from the national DV hotline is hugely discouraging.
Third point: No source on this. Plus, men are at least more likely to be perpetrators of violent crimes than women are (as covered above in wikipedia's page on gender crime statistics).
The above Duluth Model link contains training programs and manuals for counselors and police. Blacks are more likely to perpetrate violent crimes than whites, but we'd rightly condemn any program or textbook exclusively focusing on "black violence" or "the voices and experiences of whites".
Fourth point: Again, men are more likely to commit crimes than women. Rising rates of female incarceration are largely due to the war on drugs. It should be noted that I'm no fan of Hillary's and I think the prison industrial complex needs to be abolished; I could go on about the role Hillary has played in making the prison industrial complex the way it is in the first place, but that's not really the point here. One of the more worrying aspects of female incarceration is the large rates at which female prisoners are assaulted, physically or sexually, at some point in their lifetime. 92% according to a California survey in this article:
https://www.aclu.org/other/facts-about-over-incarceration-women-united-states
Prison reform should definitely get more attention. However, 92% is not surprising for counting all female prisoners who are assaulted
at some point in their lives. The equivalent figures were
82% of men and 62% of women outside of prison in 1987 (the crime rate has gone down since then, but these are lifetime stats). Most assaults, violent crimes, and serious violent crimes still target men (NCVS 2014), and given the size of the gender gap in favor of women, this is probably true among the prison population as well.
Fifth: Your source is an article about the experiences of a single person; hardly emblematic of a whole area of study being "misandrist," even assuming that he's not allowing his own feelings of entitlement cloud his judgement of what was going on there. One might read the article he was responding to.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/sep/07/gender-studies-anti-discrimination-case
That article is atrocious. Dean ridicules this poor student for daring to speak out against discrimination, denying his experience and re-framing his complaint as "attacking feminists". Then going on this hilariously irrelevant and unsubstantiated tangent about how the rest of academia is "produced by, for and about men". Then highlighting Michael Kimmel (known for his anti-male bias [
1][
2]) to show that the field is not biased against men. So ripe.
This might surprise you, but NOW is not the sum total of all feminism or all feminists. I never mentioned them in the first place. Again, I urge you to look into the "**** is ****" campaign, spearheaded by feminists.
NOW is the largest feminist organization in the world, with half a million paying members. If they ignore issues of male disadvantage (among other sins against real gender equality) then it's safe to say that mainstream feminism overlooks men's issues. I've already noted how the **** is **** campaign did not have male victims in mind. So consider Mary Koss, an undeniably influential feminist working for the CDC:
"It is inappropriate to consider as a **** victim a man who engages in unwanted sexual intercourse with a woman." (p.206)
Koss works on the CDC's
NISVS which uses her definition to exclude the vast majority of male victims from its **** statistics. Their ***** (equal to the number of female *****, annually) are dubbed "made to penetrate" and stuck in a misc. category of "other sexual violence" (p. 19). If this doesn't alarm and outrage you then you are part of the problem.
In any case, I'd argue that it's possible to hate men as a class without hating literally each and every individual man on the planet. (After all, this is largely my relationship with the bourgeoisie.)
Wealth inequality is a huge problem, but hatred shouldn't be any part of the solution. Hating men "as a class" is abhorrent; if "hating literally each and every individual man" is your benchmark for misandry then the bar is set impossibly high. Equivalent definitions of misogyny, racism, etc. would result in the cheery conclusion that those evils are vanquished! Trump doesn't hate literally every Mexican, so he must not be racist against them! What a relief.
This particular woman seems, however, like someone imbibed with "white feminism," not really paying attention to intersectionality or indeed solidarity. White feminism is feminism's primary disease, exemplified in some popular feminists. Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer, for instance, recently perpetuated stereotypes about men of color. But when one considers the impact of misogyny on society, it becomes clear that the concept of feminism is still important and necessary, it just needs to work on expunging these elements - not that there aren't plenty of women doing this already.
https://mic.com/articles/153510/as-...tm_medium=main&utm_campaign=social#.acKmOc3KMhttps://mic.com/articles/153510/as-...tm_medium=main&utm_campaign=social#.acKmOc3KM
Agreed. Still, wouldn't something like "vanilla feminism" be a less offensive way to refer to non-intersectional approaches than "white feminism"? Just seems needlessly divisive and tribalistic.
It is certainly possible to meaningfully criticize the modern (and past) feminist movement, but one must recognize that it's a very broad and diverse thing, and to criticize it on the basis of "it hurts men" is kind of focusing on all the wrong things.
That's the kind of sentence that makes you sound like an anti-male bigot.
I can guarantee you that more trans women have been hurt by sects of feminism - "trans exclusionary radical feminism" is this whole THING you could read up on which has actually resulted in people DYING - than men ever have. But every trans woman I know is a feminist. And, furthermore, I can guarantee you that Men's Rights Activists have hurt more women than feminists have hurt men
How much are your guarantees worth? Can I redeem them for cash?
Men's Rights Activists haven't... actually effectively fought for vulnerable men. They, as a group, are overwhelmingly white, and I would honestly be surprised to see them participating in, say, a Black Lives Matter protest, or actually do anything for male victims of sexual assault beyond bringing them up during arguments with feminists. From what I've seen, MRAs spend far more time fighting against feminism than fighting for men.
Did you read the article on Earl Silverman, whose domestic violence shelter was repeatedly rejected for funding by the Canadian government even though it was the only men's shelter in the nation? Did you know that Erin Pizzey, the woman who founded the first women's domestic violence shelter in the world, is a staunch MRA? How many MRA's have you met in person? What activism for the needy have YOU done?
finally, the simple experiment: you ask yourself "has misandry affected me, personally, in any meaningful way?" for most men, the answer is no. if you reverse the question, though, "has misogyny affected me, personally, in any meaningful way?" most women would say yes.
Men aren't taught and primed to recognize sexism against themselves the way women are, especially considering the variety of ways that 'misogyny' is used to mean any perceived prejudice or negative attitude or even boorishness towards women, even without evidence of hatred. For instance, dismissing women's experiences and problems (as you dismiss men's). I've been groped by women in public and forced to register for SS (the draft), but the most serious harms of misandry fall primarily on disadvantaged men - the unsheltered homeless, the victims of abuse, ****, and violence who are denied help, erased from surveys, and told to "man up", the impoverished majority of "deadbeat dads" who fall behind on
child support (when they had no meaningful choice to consent to become a parent), the conscripts killed in Vietnam, men whose shaming, isolation, and lack of support contributed to addiction and suicide. Your experiment misses most of these men because they are homeless, imprisoned, or dead.
