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This is what I don’t get about the manosphere movement.
Young guys watch these influencers being abrasive macho dorks, talking exactly like this. They somehow combine that “dorky, petty semantic minutia” argument style with being aggressively condescending and being a macho jerk, all at once. I’m a pretty isolated guy, yet it’s amazing how grating it is to me.
And men watching these influencers conclude that… other people will appreciate that?
People seek confirmation that their negative traits are positive ones. Why put in effort to win, when you can just get an echo chamber to explain to you that you already won because of XYZ reason.
This isn't limited to the manosphere stuff but it certainly is a big part of it. Any group that uses that other people are full of shit though as evidence that they are the good guys is also trying to pull the same trick.
There is value in feminisim because women's rights are "new" and that is to say that there are people alive who grew up in a time where women's rights were considered a joke. Women received the ability to have their own bank account without a man co signing in 1974. That means MOST Gen X people, when they were born, their mothers were not legally allowed to have a bank account. That isn't ancient history like some folks like to act it is.
Yup "Equalists" are just the same as all lives matter folks completely missing the point and trying to poison the well.
It's like saying "I want everyone to be equal" and saying both men and women should be given a 10% pay raise to account for the gender pay gap.
Sure, you raised women's wages to cover the gap... but now the gap remains because you also increased men's by the same amount.
That's false. If you want to make everyone equal, you close the pay gap.
To me, egalitarianism is making sure neither group is treated unfarly, so they should both receive the same pay for the same work, but also the same punishment for the same crime, etc.
The gap doesn't just remain in that scenario, you actually increase the gap making it even worse.
If feminists are allowed to be egalitarian but focus on issues which harm women, others (whatever label they have) can be egalitarian with a different focus. But it needs to be real equality, not a deflection, like the person in the comic.
Where it goes wrong is in telling people they can't focus on specific issues close to their heart, or in telling people that since legal equality has largely been achieved somewhere there's nothing else to do.
"All lives matter" was an obvious reaction to a slogan which, to all but existing allies, seemed to be excluding something obvious. BLM people saw rampant violence against black people as evidence that society didn't think black lives mattered. But that's not something that comes through when it's distilled to a slogan.
The UK currently has an "end violence against women and girls" campaign even though men are more often victims of violence. There are reasons to focus on violence against women, but there are also reasons to focus on other things... there is room for nuance here.
Feminism isn't just about women.
Toxic masculinity isn't caused just by men.
Black Lives Matter isn't just about black lives.
"Believe women" isn't about blindly believing what women say.
"Christian charity" is the least charitable thing in the world.
"Defund the police" and "abolish the police" aren't about eliminating police forces and letting crime run rampant.
AI is anything but intelligent.
"Global Warming" sounds tame for what's actually happening: "climate disruption" and "climate catastrophe".
A bunch of countries with "communist" or "democratic" in their names are anything but.
Words are stupid. Slogans are lazy. People lie.
Which is why I like the lyrics of 'Enjoy the Silence' so much.
Every single line item in your comment became ammunition for foreign agents to get into our culture over the last 20 years and just escalate the FUCK out of both sides of each idea there.
It was directly from the KGB handbook written over 50 years ago, that if you infiltrate a nation's culture and just amplify the most radical takes of both sides of every issue, it will create so much chaos and completely destabilize a culture so that people tune out and stop trusting each other or any news story they read. This has the effect of making the population just default to whatever state media they see and stop caring about social issues entirely. It's been shocking seeing how effectively it's played out in the US.
I watched it happen, I was on the frontlines, managing a few social sites and moderating a huge subreddit about relationships. It was a creeping infection at first, but eventually it was like Helm's Deep, but instead of orcs outside, it was astroturfers, crybullies, sea lions, and the entire goddamn ZOO of bad-actors and subversive chuds. For every horrible, shit-mouthed incel ranting about how women need to be put in cages, there was also some delusional, insane "feminist" screaming about how all men are rapists and men should never be left alone with children.
I gave up the fight, reddit banned me for being an involved human, but it continues to this day, getting worse by the day.
I watched it happen because I saw it happening and read the (too few) news reports that pointed out that it was indeed happening.
But it’s like climate change. It seems to go in one ear and out the other for the vast majority of the population.
He had a point but he kinda fucked it up in the third panel.
Tbh I think the term is kind of unfortunate exactly because of this confusion and rebuttal. We would spend less time discussing this if it was actually called egalitarianism or whatever, I feel. People use the "fem" in feminism to make the movement seem unequal. I think the term is just kind of unnecessarily confusing and egalitarianism would be less ambiguous.
But I don't really care that much, the ideas behind are obviously more important than the word we use - but words are also important.
Sure, but its exactly because words are important that its called feminism. When you're talking about "egalitarianism" the goal is so vague that everyone can be on it. That's why you have names like "feminism", because that movement is focused on how we live in a patriarchal society and how women have been historically treated unjustly under it. Or "black lives matter", which, although I'm sure would also agree that "all lives matter", are focused on why historically, black lives specifically haven't as much. Same thing for trans rights.
When you combine that all into one, all the nuance of the different groups gets lost and the average becomes "yeah but human rights are so much better than 50 years ago" to shut down discussion.
Wish I had more than one upvote to give. Movements and groups name themselves after their targeted focus, yet you never see someone going up to the teacher's union rep and saying "but shouldn't you also care about the other jobs?"
Say what you will about PETA (I'm sure I could say a lot), but you never see someone criticising them for their "narrow minded focus solely on the welfare of animals, without regard for the ethical treatment of humans, plants and fungi"
You'll never catch someone criticising a homeless shelter for not doing enough to shine light on the prevalence of gun violence.
So why does anyone treat these bad-faith criticisms as anything more or less than attempts to silence the already-marginalised groups for which these movements are advocating?
yet you never see someone going up to the teacher's union rep and saying "but shouldn't you also care about the other jobs?"
For ducks sakes that's literally how unions are SUPPOSED TO WORK. No wonder the US worker's rights are so weak if that's what you think, and based off your comment you're on the side of the workers!
Here in Finland when one union goes on strike for a cause other unions join in! Airline union going on strike? Guess what, so I'd the railway, buses, logistics, grocery workers, and so on, with more joining in if it's for a really good reason, even teacher unions.
People use the “fem” in feminism to make the movement seem unequal.
Do the money that feminist organizations also go towards problems that affect men, like shelters for abused men, helping men with legal fees to retain access to children or similar causes?
Or does it (obviously) go towards bettering women's lives (which is the obvious stated purpose of feminism)?
There isn't much wrong with establishing necessary things for women. Pretending those organizations are going to spend their efforts on male specific gender egalitarian issues is unrealistic.
On top of that, there are multiple incentives to help women and girls go into male dominated fields. This is good. I have yet to see incentives to help men and boys go into female dominated fields. There has been a feminist social change on how male nurses and such are seen, which is a good thing, but, organisations as such are not out there setting up drives to get more boys and men in those industries.
Ragebait art by someone who wants to seek rage from both sides. Mastered art.
Hippy, politically correct, feminist, SJW, woke...
It doesn't matter how many times you rebrand ~not being an awful person~ people will always make goodness the enemy
How to get the point across a bit better while also pointing out the guy actually doesn't care.
All lives matter~
Once upon a time I objected to the Black Lives Matter moniker. I didn't disagree with the message that black people need to be counted more than they were. I have always thought that I counted black people as equals to everyone, so I just subconsciously completed the sentence by adding the word "more" in my head. Thinking to myself "oh, they have a terrible branding issue because everyone who reads the phrase Black Lives Matter will automatically just think they mean Black Lives Matter More". But ultimately that wasn't the problem. It wasn't the phrase that was the issue.
What was the real problem was the inherent racism that had be ingrained into my consciousness by untold years of media and politics that continually make black people out to be lazy selfish useless people who only want a handout. (See Ronald Reagan's speech about the "welfare queen". Hint, he wasn't talking about a white woman.)
In the end the problem I had with the phrase "Black Lives Matter" wasn't their fault for picking a bad phrase. It was, in fact, me and my own preconceived notions of what a black person is and should be. All based on how society has portrayed them my entire life.
So now I very loudly say "BLACK LIVES MATTER". And more people need to embrace this instead of trying to logic it out of existence with the pointless platitude "well ackchually all lives matter" like some snivelling little child with an inferiority complex. Because yes all lives should matter but in our fucked up society black lives usually don't.
I mean, the phrase wasn't good either, hence why you also ended up thinking that.
Black Lives Also Matter would have been much better, as it alludes that there is enough prejudice that society must be reminded, and the acronym is BLAM, which could be used as onomatopoeia invoking gun shots, which directly ties to the causes original protests against the police. It also sounds more of a plea for help than it does an aggressive simple statement - which considering the movement aimed to be peaceful, is the kind of sound you'd want.
The truth is these kinds of things heavily rely on optics, and BLM was a very bad choice of slogan. People forget even the whole Rosa Parks thing was carefully orchestrated for a reason - you need good causes, good figures, and good slogans for rallying support.
BLM is so bad I wonder if the push to use it was some kind of counter psy-op to then push things like All Lives Matter to help discredit it, because I swear I heard the BLAM acronym being used as well in the beginning. I would imagine such authorities would have learned well how to discredit such movements ever since the days and success of the Civil Rights era.
Yeah, it's definitely not a bad thing to focus on raising women to the same level in society as men.
The problem is, like with any group, the radicals who use the movement to spread hate and tarnish the reputation of everyone involved. Religion has the same issue.
In this case, it's the ones who think equality means swapping positions of power so men are the ones who are oppressed. They give the whole movement a bad name and lead to associations like this.
Honestly, the well might be so poisoned at this point that rebranding with an umbrella term might not be a terrible choice, although it's terrible that it's not a terrible choice. It shouldn't be this way, but humans suck.
Where are these hoards of feminists committing "reverse sexism" and oppressing men other than a random tumblr or twitter comment? Where is there institutional power and how are men structurally oppressed in a way not obviously connected to the patriarchy?
Who are you referencing when you reference, "the ones who think equality means swapping positions of power so men are the ones who are oppressed?" I'm curious to see what an example or two of that would look like.
I've have an example of this that happen recently. It was on a post about Spain (iirc, might have been Italy) making killing women because of their gender a hate crime.
People were arguing that men should receive harsher punishments for killing women because of their gender than women killing men because of their gender.
Which isn't equality since criminal prosecution should be on a case by case basis. It should be a hate crime to kill anyone because of the way they were born. The fact that women are more often victims just means that more men will be prosecuted than women, but the sentences should be the same.
There's also the crazies who think that any time a woman has sex with a man, the woman is being raped.
This is no way to argue. It's only pointing with fingers while victimizing yourself.
even worse it is just discussion in bad faith
If a particular group of people (be it gender wise, race wise or whatever) are being treated unequally, it sounds like a ~~retarded~~ stupid board game to try to point this out without actually using this group's name.
Love the sentiment, but the R word slur contributes to treating a group unequally.
It's a valid point though. A simple change in terminology and messaging is literally all it would take for these types of criticisms to go away.
ah tumblr
When cornered though something something excesses of ism.
Trans issues is the big one because the reality is so counterintuitive that even renoun internet celebrity scientists utterly fail to engage with the actual research.
I even feel compelled to stress that yes the science supports the need for unequivocal acceptance of trans people.
