Please note: this community is women-only, please read the rules before commenting.
In the many times I’ve had men (and some women ffs) force this explanation upon me, they usually:
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Have fundamental misunderstanding of what feminism is. They often think women want dominance over them or something, giving them a victim complex.
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Support feminist values in theory, but get annoyed when literally anything at all is asked of them to contribute to meaningful change. (see also: systemic racism)
Neither of these are an excuse and I’m so exhausted hearing them over and over.
I think the logic on #1 (though they probably don’t consciously realize this) is women have generally been treated terribly for millennia, they don’t want the same treatment themselves.
This makes sense if you have a zero-sum world view.
It also makes sense when you realize they’re fine with a negative sum as long as they get a larger share, but they understand that saying that would get them in trouble.
There also is a fair amount of (very understandable) misandry mixed in with feminism. Not that all feminists are misandrists but all misandrists are feminists and this is amplified in media.
Misandrists are fake feminists
Real feminists are not misandrists
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Yes? I have never met someone who hates men that also thinks women deserve fewer rights than them.
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Dude. We’re talking about a person who hates men and boys but also thinks women should have fewer rights and opportunities than them. What would that even look like?
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Then there’s the rarer #3 (but still very nice when it happens):
- They were ignorant at first, and then taught about it, and then realised it, and work on it and speak on other men when they behave badly.
Those are the good allies <3 and I try to focus on those things. Pessimism makes us feel desperate and lack the will for action. Focus on the good we have wrought so far!
Yeah, though in my experience, those men are genuinely curious and asking good faith questions to begin with, rather than just fire-hosing their opinion.
I guess I was mainly complaining about the unsolicited opinions I hear when the topic comes up (and sometimes, when it didn’t… -_-).
Edit - oh, damnit, I didn’t see what community I was posting in. Hello from /all. Sorry to intrude!
It’s fine thanks for editing your comment it’s really respectful ❤️
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I find this website equally as anti-feminist as Reddit. Doesn’t really surprise me since this website is more male than Reddit and also full of Reddit refugees.
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Block some instances, that helps. Give me a sec, I have a list ready.
Edit: here’s one to look for in comments. Still looking for the list…
Edit 2: found it! Here’s the block list I use, very handy.
@sveltecider@lemmy.ca , this may also be handy for you!
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To be fair I’m a lesbian so I def don’t mind the boobs lol, but yeah it’s a bit too frequent for my feed, haha.
What also helps is being on an instance that is explicitly affirming and welcoming to gals and queers. I often tongue-in-cheekishly use queer and furry presence as a canary. They tend to be super chill and whenever they’re in some space, it’s often a sign for me that it’s welcoming.
The instance is important, because some defederate with a lot of the bad stuff by default. So that helps.
Another thing is PieFed, they have some anti-authoritarian features baked in, which is handy. Though I’m not a fan of the “often low score comments = comment not visible” element, that reminds me too much of Reddit.
Whether one chooses Lemmy, PieFed, or Kbin, all are valid in the long end - they’re all part of the fediverse, that’s the important one. It boils down to preferences.
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Join us. There’s so many trans femme nerds here it’s great.
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I feel like it’d work better if you’d ask them “should men be treated like how you want to treat women: without a right to decide whether to have a child, without being able to work, without being … etc.”.
I feel like most men don’t really understand, unless if they were put in our shoes. I’ve seen shows where that exactly happens: they get whistled at by even stronger people, they’re derided and told their views don’t matter, they get lower wages (in simulations), and so on. Some do change their mind after that, at least.
A large part of the issue is the framing the right wing uses. The right wing will say something like, “well, if you want equal rights, you’d be egalitarian, not a feminist.” And then point to the most extreme examples of feminism like, I dunno, a woman killing a bunch of people and claiming to be a feminist? as what all feminists stand for, and only use uncharitable examples. And if a viewer doesn’t have enough feminine friends to vouch, it seems to them like the issues either don’t exist or are exaggerated.
If they want to play the normalizing the extreme game, for every example they can come up with for feminism I can come up with a dozen for Christians, the manosphere, male celebrities, etc. without even straining myself.
I think conservative leaders try to tell people that everything is equal now. That Martian Luther King ended racism in the 60’s, that women can have jobs and that the wage gap is this crazy left wing conspiracy theory and just give it time because we live in a meritocracy, and the BLM protesters are all insane. They had pivoted so far abstract with the southern strategy that over the past ten years I think they started to have the audacity to be self righteous about it, and say that any push forward towards equality is actually a reversal of the hierarchy. They will point to positive stereotypes and paint them as privilege rather than boxes to other and expectations to be enforced. And this type of thinking goes so deep into every “identity politics” issue with conservatives, I don’t know what could ever get the moderate conservative voters out of it. They just trust the feelings that were instilled in them about themselves and “other kinds” of people in the world and don’t stop to question any part of it when sexist things happen to the women around them. And from what I have seen, it does look like to me that the propaganda will always try to scare people away from the solutions if they dare question their own ideology, so they never even stop to read about or listen to the issues straight from the horse’s mouth.
I think patriarchy discourages empathy in men for this reason, as well as just imposing that women are THE caring gender just to get free labor. I imagine it’s a lot like being white and not questioning your biases and blind spots when it comes to black people until they’re challenged. When you’re raised in privilege, it can become invisible like a fish noticing that it’s breathing water.
Hot take - men are against de jure “positive discrimination” in favour of women because there’s no de jure “positive discrimination” in favour of men.
https://melissahogenboom.substack.com/p/feminism-has-gone-too-far
She tries to explore the statistics where new generations feel that feminism is no longer about lifting up women but putting down men.
It is interesting to see that she mentions that women outperform men academically and in early earnings. She however fails to explore why that happens.
I can’t speak about your country and your culture - I can only speak about mine. I will be quoting women feminists (with links), but in Polish (I tried autotranslating them and they seem readable).
Here in Poland men are de jure (and de facto) discriminated against in all levels of education, e. g. https://www.rp.pl/opinie-polityczno-spoleczne/art43786261-jakub-chabik-dyskryminacja-pozytywna-plus-rownosc-selektywna-to-bunt-mezczyzn in early education: girls have now better average scores in language than boys and equal in math, but for their gender girls are offered extra points to qualify for “math excellence extracurricular programs”, as uni STEM only sees only ~40% of women. There is no similar program for uni bio or med, where men are only ~25%.
Heck: https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kraj/wieczorkiewicz-istnieja-formy-dyskryminacji-mezczyzn-ze-wzgledu-na-plec-polemika-z-wojcikiem/ - she explores forms of de juro and de facto discrimination against men in Poland, lack of interest from progressive and leftist parties to even mention men discrimantion and issues (and even blaming men for them), and finishes the article saying that she sees the right-wing counterforce parties getting access to men because of all that.
So yeah - if you base your feminism at “When someone is accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”, then that feminism is bad.
Isn’t the default “positive descrimination” towards men?
Some people will loudly proclaim so, which makes it seem like a universal unimpeachable truth
actually, if you think about it, you could argue there’s “positive discrimination” in favour of men. That is called male privilege. For example, getting paid more than women and (other) queer/minority peeps.
Another is being taken more seriously in discussions. Or getting CEO positions easier.
Not sure what you want to discuss. There’s also pretty privilege, tall privilege and rich privilege.
There is a difference between de facto (by custom) and de jure (by law) discrimination.
Idk about your country (so if you wanted to discuss via its lenses please tell me at least the name of it), but in Poland there is much much much less de jure discrimination against women than there is against men (as per linked articles in my previous comment).
The cases you’re mentioning are potentially examples of de facto discrimination against women.
For example, getting paid more than women and (other) queer/minority peeps.
This is potentially a de facto discrimination.
(“Potentially” because gender pay gap is critiqued by many scholars and its purely discriminatory origin is contested if not rejected already)
Talking about my country only, as this shit changes vastly between countries, Poland has one of the lowest (7%) average gender pay gaps in Europe (and depending on a sector not always favouring the men, which adds to the gender pay gap critique; source https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Gender_pay_gap_statistics#Gender_pay_gap_much_lower_for_young_employees ), has multiple existing pay equality programs and tools (I know of two, one of which is a FOSS for the companies to check if they do have gender pay gaps), as well as upcoming transparency pay laws.
Another is being taken more seriously in discussions. Or getting CEO positions easier
For all the readers who don’t know, this is called “authority gap” and is usually measured as percentage of women in positions of power (like members of Parliament or C-levels, boards of directors etc).
Another potential de facto discrimination. No comment here, as I never studied the topic and I literally can’t add to the discussion nor even know the stats for my country.
About 1/3 of Parliament members are women, that’s all I can tell ya.
(“Potential” because there is no study if women don’t win elections at 1/2 rate because of being women and thus discriminated against or because there’s just fewer women candidates)
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The only feminism branch I take issue with is the TERF variety, and just to be clear, its not the feminist part of that. I hope that enough of us can agree on that much.
Zero disagreement here. You’re for all women or you’re not feminist. There’s no middle ground.
100%, the ostracizing of transwomen leads to oppression of all women. Not looking, dressing or acting feminine enough… it’s about controlling women. The ones who get attacked in bathrooms by terfs and other transphobes are most likely ciswomen because there’s so few transwomen in comparison
Edit// whoops, I came through /all and didn’t notice which community… Sorry! I’ll leave this up only since I’m technically allowed as an enby, and because fuck terfs.
TERFs aren’t feminists
They clearly do not strive for gender equality since they hate, in their words, “women who are men”; this means that they want to distinguish between genders and treat them differently
Feminists strive for equality. Misandrists do not.
There definitely isn’t going to be someone from the meme in this comment section.
Usually it’s more like « I know we oppressed you for millennia, but maybe you could ask more nicely for us to stop »
It’s hard to reason with people who keep saying “we’re fucked because of who women voted. They shouldn’t be able to vote.”. If anyone has advice on how to convince them otherwise…
Don’t forget the strawmen that insist the majority of feminists want a heirarchy reversal in society. (And also regularly insinuate or outright say that feminism leads to white men being ‘cucked’ universally by black men. Really, it all sounds like fetish projection when you look into it enough.)
or outright say that feminism leads to white men being ‘cucked’ universally by black men.
The real psychosocial roots of fascism.
See also the argument that most anti-LGBTQ+ people are in fact, deeply “in the closet”, usually because of religious brainwashing reasons.
It could be argued that this is why progress is measured in lifetimes. The old must submit to entropy before the new can take their place.
If you’re genuinely trying to convince someone in particular, try asking “how?” That should starting breaking the ignorance into smaller chunks that you can repair with truthful knowledge. You might have to go a few layers of “how?” deep to start patching the holes in their understanding in order to build a solid foundation for the rest of what you and I take as obvious.
Edit: At the risk of “stating the obvious” I’ll point out that the term “woke” is intended as a derogatory reference to those who have “woken up”. Meaning, we learned something that suddenly made everything else make sense. Some missing piece of the puzzle was, at some point, unveiled to us, and we became aware of (at least part of) the bigger picture.
Go wake some people up. 💛
you mention age but genz is a huge oroblem. people in their 20s right now are fucking bigots
Yeah, there’s been a massive slide backward in young men in particular.
Social media algorithms favouring rich, wealthy men’s views (polarisation) can be blamed, alongside the backsliding of socioeconomic equality, and the rising gerontocracy. When you feel hopeless in your perspective, and all you see is how to blame others, you’re inclined to do so. It’s a classic “divide and rule” tactic employed by the wealthy.
I try to make them aware of that socioeconomic inequality and to battle for their wellbeing through protest, through supporting equality. After all: another person’s equality helps their own too.
Maybe those men see feminists on the internet mainly complain about men, rather than attempting to make positive changes?
This entire thread is just a bait, and the level of misandry I see when this sub appears on my feed is depressing.
Let’s try and be nice to each other.
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The first sentence in the top comment on this thread: “In the many times I’ve had men (and some women ffs)”
Sounds like “Gender critical talk” and misandry to me. But I’m going to bow out now.
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“Gender critical” means “transphobic”; it means seeing sex and not gender as what “matters”
Yeah it’s usually not feminists that complain about men, it’s just women complaining about male behaviours and refusing to put up with bullshit.
There is a lot to complain about. Hell we’re at the point where there’s documentaries about it. Stop crying about being called out for being an ass.
The right to say “no”.
That’s pretty much it. Every other right boils down to that one in the end.
misandry is bad. and a lot of people confuse the two.
but the outrage is justified. crazy to think that women are still being made to feel less than in the fucking future.
Misandry is absolutely it. I feel like it’s like the confidence vs arrogance. It can be easy to confuse one for the other.
Most men don’t know what feminism is. They just go by the name and what the most vocal ‘feminists’ say or do.
It’s like they would rather listen to anti-feminist propaganda than learn about the issues people are mad about.
I’m a man, and after a lifetime of work, I can say that I have generally preferred my women bosses more than the men. I’ve had a few great male bosses, but I’ve also had some extremely terrible ones.
On the other hand, most of the female bosses I’ve had have been excellent, some great, and only a few have been mediocre or bad, but none of them were as bad as some of the male bosses I’ve had.
Today, as a business owner, I also prefer to hire women. They are more reliable, in general, and it’s easier to find smart women workers than men. Many men are proud of their ignorance.
I’m a man, and …
“… as such feel the need to talk where my talking is specifically against the rules. Because I’m a real feminist and show this by ignoring women’s boundaries.”
I didn’t know it was against the rules. I didn’t look at the source, just the topic, and I weighed in. No disrespect intended.
no worries, just please don’t comment or post further, thanks!
