[adriand]

Feminism isn’t about putting women ahead of men though. It’s about creating equity. Feminism is needed because of the ongoing power imbalance between the sexes. There are still very few arenas in which men do not enjoy the advantage.

The men’s rights stuff is toxic because it’s about conflict. It’s about pushing back against feminism, which is essentially fighting against equity. With that said, I see nothing wrong with fighting for the interests of boys and men. I, too, want to see boys succeed (I have a son!) But it’s not about his rights. It’s about his opportunities and the support and so on, that he gets.

It isn’t feminism that is holding boys and men back, it’s that we live in an inequitable society. That makes feminists allies, not enemies.

I agree with your parent commenter, kodah, that gender blaming is reductive. I recognize that the way I phrased my views could have been better: perhaps a more constructive way of putting it is to say that the present situation is one that men have both the responsibility to improve, and the power to do so.

[hiptobecubic]

This post pretty much perfectly reflects their point.

"Arguing for men's rights is bad because it's all about squashing women, otherwise they'd be arguing for women's rights, which is actually just arguing for everyone's rights." This just isn't a reasonable way to frame it at all.

There aren't many places where men have a clear and systematic disadvantage in society, but there are some and arguing that there shouldn't be is not all about conflict.

[dlp211]

Then make those arguments, few do without coming full of baggage.

[setr]

The baggage is assumed, whether or not it exists, and regardless of whether you bring it.

Of course, that’s true for any argument held between strangers, for both participants.

[rmak]

Feminism is never about equity or equality between sexes. The most straight forward and correct definition of feminism is women wanting to be equal to or surpass rich and powerful men. Women never wanted to be equal to average men. Average men are disposable. Women had it better than men almost everywhere since the beginning.

Feminists are out rightly man hating. They are not allies of men/boys. They start killallmen trend, they started endfatherday, feminists support not jailing women for anything, NOW, the largest feminist org in the us oppose shared parenting, feminists in Canada shut down male dv centers....

[skinkestek]

> Feminists are out rightly man hating.

Some of them. Many are reasonable. I even have one to thank for doing as well as I have done.

The problem is I can't see many of them distance themselves from the toxic elements you mention below.

I'm squarely in the camp that women and men are born with equal worth but different abilities.

I also think society and every human has a duty to protect the weaker ones from abuse by the stronger ones, but unlike many others I won't tolerate abuse of men and especially young boys as a punishment for what other men have done long ago.

[stuckinhell]

I don't really agree with you except I do think pop culture "feminism" is becoming much more of "man hate" club in the last couple years due to social media amplifying our worst impulses.

The killallmen trend ESPECIALLY is the reason I don't like calling myself a feminist anymore. As the mother of two young children, a boy and a girl, it scares me to think to think people would hate my son just because he's a boy.He's 13 and is struggling with depression. It's become very clear to me that many young girls his age really enjoy repeating that horrible horrible slogan as a form of bullying.

I've been really thinking about enrolling him into a private school over this madness.

I think things have gone too far.

[Gareth321]

>Feminism isn’t about putting women ahead of men though. It’s about creating equity.

This is demonstrably incorrect. In our society, men are underrepresented in all kinds of quality of life metrics. They die younger. They comprise the vast majority of the homeless. The vast majority of workplace death and injury. They work much longer hours. They commit suicide at much higher rates. They have much higher rates of unemployment. They're failing, relatively, at every level of the educational system. They're far overrepresented in endemic illnesses like heart disease and diabetes; as well as mental health problems like depression and addiction. I could go on for a long time.

This isn't to say women don't have their own unique issues - like sexual assault. Feminism advocates for only issues in which women experience issues, and none of the issues I listed above. The net effect is observable today: areas in which women underperformed are now normalising at that "equity" level. But all of the many ways in which men are underperforming are getting worse. Any movement which purports to aim for equity cannot only focus on one side of the equation. Feminism doesn't aim for equity or equality. It is an advocacy movement for women. And that's okay. Just don't lie and say it has anything to do with equity or equality. Don't try to prevent men from having their own movement to try to improve some of the horrific ways in which men are suffering today in Western nations.

[adriand]

I'm having trouble understanding if you are arguing in good faith here. Surely you are not suggesting that men die younger than women because women have worked to create a society with greater gender equity? Of the list of factors for why men die earlier than women in this article [1], not a single one can reasonably be attributed to that.

> The vast majority of workplace death and injury.

Where do you see gender inequity in this? The top 10 professions dominated by women are occupations like preschool and kindergarten teachers, dental hygienists, childcare workers and hairdressers. [2] We can agree that these occupations are less likely to kill or injure you than construction, aviation and firefighting. But it's certainly not the case that feminism has worked to keep men out of the safer jobs dominated by women. If you want to start a meninism movement that works toward creating more male preschool teachers or personal care workers, good luck to you.

> They commit suicide at much higher rates.

Women are much more likely to attempt suicide than men. But men are "better" at getting the job done. This seems to reflect what we tend to see, which is that men are more likely to be violent and to kill things than women. Again, is this because of gender inequity? And are you not concerned that so many more women want to kill themselves?

> They have much higher rates of unemployment.

This is just flat-out not true. In the US, right now, the unemployment rate for men is 4.10%, for women it is 3.90%. In December, it was 3.90% for both sexes. [3]

> They're far overrepresented in endemic illnesses like heart disease and diabetes; as well as mental health problems like depression and addiction.

True for heart disease and diabetes, not true for depression. Women experience depression at twice the rate of men! [4]

The broader point I would make here is that equity != equality. Equity is about creating equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. The measure of gender equity isn't that we have the same number of female fighter jet pilots as male. It's whether a woman faces structural difficulties that prevent her from becoming a fighter pilot if she wishes to pursue that career.

That is still not the case in today's society. You wrote, 'areas in which women underperformed are now normalising at that "equity" level'. In the US, women earn about 20% less than men do. [5] How is that "normalised"? Think about how much money that is across the entire workforce! It's a damn shame that men are dying of addiction and heart disease, but show me how that is the result of gender inequity. I think it has far more to do with class and race.

1: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-men-often-die-earlie...

2: https://ca.topresume.com/career-advice/top-10-professions-do...

3: https://www.macrotrends.net/2511/unemployment-rate-men-women

4: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/depression/in...

5: https://blog.dol.gov/2021/03/19/5-facts-about-the-state-of-t...

[scarmig]

You're performing a sleight of hand with your point about so-called "equity": effectively, you define worse outcomes that happen to women as the results of a lack of equity, and thus worthy political consideration, but worse outcomes that happen to men are just the natural state of the world and thus treating them as political is inappropriate or even misogynistic.

Holding a bunch of other factors constant, men would live the same length of time as women do: monks have comparable lifespans to nuns. Men die earlier because we work longer hours at shittier jobs and are socially punished for asking for help from others and aren't given the space for self care.

As far as men dying earlier on the job because they're choosing to be firefighters instead of kindergarten teachers, you simply ignore the discrimination male teachers face. In your "equity" framework, you'd demand men to just buck up and accept it and even deny it's social as opposed to a series of coincidental discriminations by individuals. The fact that you can't even see how your categories don't map to reality is a key tell for being captured by an ideology, in the social/Gramscian sense.

Lastly, you repeat the "wage gap" myth: women earn less than men because men work more hours than women. The rallying cry used to be "equal pay for equal work," but it seems to now have shifted to "equal pay for less work." (Despite that same excess work being what's killing men and destroying their bodies.)

[Gareth321]

The other user accused you of a sleight of hand, but I'm going to accuse you of outright duplicity. You argue that men's issues are just the way of the world, while women's issues are the fault of men or society. If you'd like to engage in an honest discussion you have to apply the same logical framework to both sides of this problem. If you will not, what is the point of even attempting such a discussion? Everyone in attendance will understand you to be facetious.

[mecha_ghidorah]

> "The men’s rights stuff is toxic because it’s about conflict. It’s about pushing back against feminism, which is essentially fighting against equity. With that said, I see nothing wrong with fighting for the interests of boys and men. I, too, want to see boys succeed (I have a son!) But it’s not about his rights. It’s about his opportunities and the support and so on, that he gets."

See the thing about this is even if you genuinely try to not make it about conflict in my experience people project conflict on to you. I once wrote an article about men being disadvantaged when it came to access to resources when escaping domestic violence, despite making up a significant proportion of victims according to data gathered by the Australian bureau of statistics (I'm Australian and was writing about the situation here).

A lot of government sources also presented domestic violence data in a way that was straight up misleading i.e. "31% of women experiencing assault experienced it from a partner vs 4.4% of men", totally ignoring that men were vastly more likely to be assaulted by strangers and a better comparison is the total number of men and women (73,800 women vs 21,200). Which works out to a little over than 1in 5 people surveyed who were assaulted by a partner being men, which despite still being significantly less certainly doesn't seem as minimal as the numbers when presented as a proportion of total assaults suffered. (note this happened nearly 10 years ago so these numbers are from a survey done in 2006).

My article discussed this kind of presentation and how it made male victims of DV more invisible than they should be, and how services for them weren't present (including some government services having "for men" pages which only had advice for how abusers can stop being abusive).

I legitimately had editors at places argue with me and suggest I was ignoring facts to have an anti woman agenda by quoting some of the numbers I was criticising in my article. That's how pervasive some of this stuff is. That you can say "hey look, this place is using very selective language when when framing the data, look if even using their own sources you can see how this creates an unfair comparison to minimise male victims" and then have someone use the exact numbers being discussed to tell you that you are being anti woman.

This is a sore spot for me because as a child I suffered domestic abuse, and I find the idea that there wouldn't have been resources for me if I had suffered it as an adult scary.

And I especially object to the idea that men's rights stuff is inherently about conflict. It certainly is for some people, but I made a genuinely constructive attempt to discuss a problem that in no way blamed women (my sister suffered the same abuse I did, I certainly wouldn't want her to not have resources!) and I had multiple people accuse me of being sexist.