Just recently we had a popular post: “The Will To Change Men, Masculinity, And Love By bell hooks”. I can take a couple quotes from the preface of that book:
I had not been able to confess that not only did I not understand men, I feared them.
Militant feminism gave women permission to unleash their rage and hatred at men…
I think too many feminists do hate men, and to say “no true feminist hates men” is falling into the no true scotsman fallacy. Typically the loudest people in a group are the most extreme and I don’t believe most feminists hate men, but I also think it’s understandable how some people do believe that.
To share some of my own experiences:
I’m a cis, heterosexual, white male. I also pretty heavily defend human rights, try not to be a skeeze ball, and like to think of myself as generally a pretty decent dude. During the height of the MeToo movement and the #NotAllMen thing, though, it really felt like society as a large, or at least the parts of it I want to occupy, viewed many aspects of my simple existence as villainous.
Believe me, I KNOW that no one reasonable has ever thought it was all men, or all white people, or all straight people, or all cis gendered people. That doesn’t stop it from hurting anymore when you’re walking around the city with a woman you consider a really good friend, and she’s posting pictures of stickers that actually DO say “all men suck” she finds to social media.
I’m also not blind. I know this is the same treatment that marginalized groups have faced since the dawn of time. Maybe it’s finally time for men to get theirs. Or, we can all acknowledge that any condemnation over an immutable human feature just plain sucks. Just my 2 cents on the matter.
Can you elaborate on which aspects of your simple existence were perceived as villainous?
Mostly the “man” part. Pretty clear in the OP I thought. I was quite simply born as a male, and happened to identify as that gender. A significant enough portion of the population seems to believe that, because a patriarchy exists, all men have benefited from it, and all men want to continue it. The same idea plays through well enough for skin color, and orientation.
I know what I am, I know my thoughts, my feelings and my intentions. It starts to play with your sense of self-worth to be told that these things, things that have never caused you to do anything to harm anyone else, must be bad parts of yourself, because look at what people have done in their name.
It’s not the same scale, no. I’m not facing segregation, and don’t have to fight for my right to vote. Any of a number of other advantages you want to point out. Yeah, I benefited in some ways from the circumstances of my birth. All of this, common talking points from the sides of the aisle that I want to belong to. The side of the aisle that believes that no person should ever feel marginalized because of something that they had no control over. To hear that, and then feel like these same people are telling you you’re part of the problem because of your existence… It’s not hard to see how that can really impact one’s sense of worth to the world.
I’m sorry that you’ve had to experience this. It terrible to have sexism not only impacting one group of people, but both/all. I haven’t experienced what you have, it’s not possible for me to exactly as I’m female. Could you share one or two specific examples that made you feel that way? It would help me to understand your experience to help paint a picture. You are under no obligation to, nor does my request imply your argument is invalid.
Sometimes discrimination can be more of a gut feeling. Sometimes it is obvious but hidden, and sometimes it is direct. I’m going to list a few examples. None of which left me weeping and defeated, but all of them felt unpleasant. I want to hear your experience particularly so I can avoid doing this to others, but also because your experience is outside of my own.
Some of my examples:
- as a Flight Attendant, we have to do cabin checks every 10-15 minutes, this includes bathrooms. I’ve had two people go unconscious in the bathroom, it’s not personal when I knock and ask if you’re OK. I did so recently, the man came out shortly afterwards stood over me and shouted three inches from my face, “can’t I even take a shit?”. I responded, calmly (I’ve been at this too long), “any time someone is longer than ten minutes we have to check on them, I’m so sorry.” His response, “I wasn’t ten minutes, bitch,” and he returns to his seat.
- I was a regulatory compliance manager having a regular meeting with the director of regulatory compliance who was like a mentor to me. He lived an hours flight away with his wife on weekends and rented an apartment to stay in near the office during the week. He knew I was divorcing at that time. He suggested we had future meetings at his condo, using phrases such as “I know you must be lonely,” and “I’m away from my wife too often.” I was polite but declined and changed the subject. He canceled our future meetings on the calendar, when I asked, via email, he responded by email to say I no longer needed his mentorship.
- I was so proud to pass my private pilots final stage check with less than fifty hours, about average for our class but some took upwards of seventy. I shared my accomplishment in the class groupchat to be told, by a male student, “your examiner goes easy on women.” I didn’t press it because it was a stand alone comment amongst the congratulations, but I felt he implied that somehow my PPL was worth less than his.
It seems so silly to type out these things that hurt me. I almost feel it’s an unfair ask to commit yours to ‘paper’, I just don’t know how else to learn what your feeling, except to assume that your situation may be different but your feelings similar to mine.
“Kill all men”
- the average feminist, advocating female supremacy and male genocide.
“The future must be in female hands, women alone must control the reproduction of species; and only 10% of the population should be allowed to be male “
- Sally Miller Gearhart, feminist icon of the 20th century, advocating female supremacy and the violent eradication of most males.
As in all extremist organizations, moderates have zero power. They are there purely as window dressing and cannon fodder and to give the movement a wafer-thin veneer of legitimacy and respectability. It is the tail - the extremists - that wags the dog. And feminism has shown their hatred of men far more than any love of them.
So what you’re saying is that you, a commenter using a username on an internet forum are the true feminist, and the feminists actually responsible for changing the laws, writing the academic theory, teaching the courses, influencing the public policies, and the massive, well-funded feminist organizations with thousands and thousands of members all of whom call themselves feminists… they are not “real feminists”.
That’s not just “no true Scotsman”. That’s delusional self deception.
Listen, if you want to call yourself a feminist, I don’t care. I’ve been investigating feminism for more than 9 years now, and people like you used to piss me off, because to my mind all you were doing was providing cover and ballast for the powerful political and academic feminists you claim are just jerks. And believe me, they ARE jerks. If you knew half of what I know about the things they’ve done under the banner of feminism, maybe you’d stop calling yourself one.
But I want you to know. You don’t matter. You’re not the director of the Feminist Majority Foundation and editor of Ms. Magazine, Katherine Spillar, who said of domestic violence: “Well, that’s just a clean-up word for wife-beating,” and went on to add that regarding male victims of dating violence, “we know it’s not girls beating up boys, it’s boys beating up girls.”
You’re not Jan Reimer, former mayor of Edmonton and long-time head of Alberta’s Network of Women’s Shelters, who just a few years ago refused to appear on a TV program discussing male victims of domestic violence, because for her to even show up and discuss it would lend legitimacy to the idea that they exist.
You’re not Mary P Koss, who describes male victims of female rapists in her academic papers as being not rape victims because they were “ambivalent about their sexual desires” (if you don’t know what that means, it’s that they actually wanted it), and then went on to define them out of the definition of rape in the CDC’s research because it’s inappropriate to consider what happened to them rape.
You’re not the National Organization for Women, and its associated legal foundations, who lobbied to replace the gender neutral federal Family Violence Prevention and Services Act of 1984 with the obscenely gendered Violence Against Women Act of 1994. The passing of that law cut male victims out of support services and legal assistance in more than 60 passages, just because they were male.
You’re not the Florida chapter of the NOW, who successfully lobbied to have Governor Rick Scott veto not one, but two alimony reform bills in the last ten years, bills that had passed both houses with overwhelming bipartisan support, and were supported by more than 70% of the electorate.
You’re not the feminist group in Maryland who convinced every female member of the House on both sides of the aisle to walk off the floor when a shared parenting bill came up for a vote, meaning the quorum could not be met and the bill died then and there.
You’re not the feminists in Canada agitating to remove sexual assault from the normal criminal courts, into quasi-criminal courts of equity where the burden of proof would be lowered, the defendant could be compelled to testify, discovery would go both ways, and defendants would not be entitled to a public defender.
You’re not Professor Elizabeth Sheehy, who wrote a book advocating that women not only have the right to murder their husbands without fear of prosecution if they make a claim of abuse, but that they have the moral responsibility to murder their husbands.
You’re not the feminist legal scholars and advocates who successfully changed rape laws such that a woman’s history of making multiple false allegations of rape can be excluded from evidence at trial because it’s “part of her sexual history.”
You’re not the feminists who splattered the media with the false claim that putting your penis in a passed-out woman’s mouth is “not a crime” in Oklahoma, because the prosecutor was incompetent and charged the defendant under an inappropriate statute (forcible sodomy) and the higher court refused to expand the definition of that statute beyond its intended scope when there was already a perfectly good one (sexual battery) already there. You’re not the idiot feminists lying to the public and potentially putting women in Oklahoma at risk by telling potential offenders there’s a “legal” way to rape them.
And you’re none of the hundreds or thousands of feminist scholars, writers, thinkers, researchers, teachers and philosophers who constructed and propagate the body of bunkum theories upon which all of these atrocities are based.
You’re the true feminist. Some random person on the internet.
- GirlWritesWhat, on feminism, 2017-05-02
So feminism “not about hating men”?? Yeah, my big fat hirsute arse. That’s some top-tier bovine excrement in spin control.
the average feminist
Hold on just a fucking minute. The misandrists are fringe, never forget that. The great mass of feminists - and women more generally - do not hate men. I say this as someone who’s been calling out feminism, check my post history. I’m not a feminist, I have my issues with feminism, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking they all believe that.
