[AlecSchueler]

> It's an annoyingly double-edged issue, and one that I believe neither side of the political spectrum (speaking in very broad strokes here) has addressed well at all.

Where would you expect to see it addressed? bell hooks wrote The Will To Change more than twenty years ago.

[zahlman]

I'm not familiar with The Will to Change, but a former Internet associate of mine wrote a multi-part critique of Feminism is for Everyone many years back. As I read along I had to agree that it simply isn't nearly as sympathetic to men as bell hooks seems to have thought it was. Just as many other supposedly softer takes on feminism aren't. In particular, there's a refusal to acknowledge the harm that feminism has actively done to men, and the fact that there very clearly are people and policies out there that actively seek to harm men because they are men. In "liberal" feminism, everything bad that happens to men is rounded off to "the patriarchy hurts men too".

(The promulgation of the term "patriarchy" is itself an example of the harm I'm talking about. Feminists and other progressives will insist that the meaning of terms cannot be divorced from their etymology, and cite questionable-at-best etymology when complaining about words and campaigning for replacements. But then they have an entire canon of words that were deliberately coined to associate masculinity with harmful or undesirable things and femininity with virtue and resistance to oppression. As Karen Straughan put it: "[Feminists are] not blaming men, [they] just named everything bad after them.")

[AlecSchueler]

> In particular, there's a refusal to acknowledge the harm that feminism has actively done to men,

Then I heartily recommend you read the book I referenced.

[zahlman]

When I look it up, the summary I get from Amazon is:

> From New York Times bestselling author, feminist pioneer, and cultural icon bell hooks, an evergreen treatise on how patriarchy and toxic masculinity hurts us all.

Which is the exact thing I complained about.

[AlecSchueler]

Honestly I can't continue the conversation. You say the thing you want isn't being said. I say it is and point you towards it, but you're discrediting it based on a second hand account of a different book or a single paragraph summary. I've read all your points and I'm telling you man to man that this is your book. You can take it or leave it.