thread for contemplating the serious issues raised by the Men's Rights movement

Desite requests otherwise iirc, ilx is hardly gonna bother with a separation there i'd imagine

― 30 ch'lopping days left to umas (darraghmac), Tuesday, November 19, 2013 9:44 AM (28 seconds ago) Bookmark

Take strength from the courage of your convictions and make a stand against your oppressors, for once

i posted this in hey jews a bit back but i think it's relevant here too

Rav Soloveitchik distinguished between the Sinai covenant that teaches what a Jew should do and the Patriarchal covenant (Brit Avot) – the “I’ awareness of the Jew. 94% of the Jews in the entire study had that awareness. Rabbi Soloveitchik clearly stated that precedence goes to the Patriarchal covenant. How do we learn about this covenant? Rabbi Soloveitchik answered that we learn through exemplarity; Abraham was kind to strangers and argued for justice.

My evasion of specifics is usually (and u will note it as a constant across most themes) related to my ignorance of the topic at hand, like im not gonna study up on mra to argue about it on ilx, likewise astrology or w/e.

― 30 ch'lopping days left to umas (darraghmac), Tuesday, 19 November 2013 14:42 (3 minutes ago)

just glad we know it's the usual deems triangulation thing where you disavow ilx' customary treatment of a subject, then disavow any interest in or concern for the subject itself because you don't want to seem wounded on behalf of its proponents

so you don't REALLY give a shit but give enough of a shit to pretend you don't give a shit

xp ive related a general lack of conviction already tbph

and like if the behavior being modeled is heinous, maybe better to be without entirely. but i think it's natural as a human to look to ppl older than you for guidance on how to act. i have studied (consciously + subconsciously) my parents both to figure out what to do and what not to do. in some ways i've reflected my father in my marriage + as a father myself, and in some ways i've moved away from him, but having him a basis to start from has been a tremendous boon in my life. and on a more esoteric/distant level, i think that our 'forefathers' can have a similar place - something to adopt or reject within the context of a personal familial tradition.

― Mordy , Tuesday, 19 November 2013 14:44 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Why does this need to be gendered though? Why the assumption that you can learn more from your father than from your mother, or even different kinds of things?

idk shit about mra either but we both know or can imagine the laundry list of complaints the mra luther will nail to the door of their nearest hooters, and if you can't see why it is ludicrous to list them together as 'men's right's, or alternatively argue that there is a coherent reason for that umbrella of majoritarian special pleading, then you shouldn't have pretended to be interested in the first place

xp lol idk about 'wounded' but will admit a propensity to argue against specific cases rather than for any given thing, other than that eh...

if your arguments are consistenly aligned against the same stuff, then a consistent if vague argument for can be inferred, unles you want us to believe that all your oppositional arguments are just chosen entirely randomly, in which case it's a miracle how consistent they seem

mra is dogshit, mra advocates are delusional victimhood queens, there are instances where men suffer unduly, these need to be remedied but they are not to be understood within a communitarian 'rights' analysis

do you agree or disagree with this formulation? you have to choose one or the other, it's decision time deems

xxxxp i'm not going to take a gender essentialism approach bc i don't believe in one, but speaking personally the things i have learned from my mother are not the things i learned from my father. maybe this is bc of historical cultural mediation, or bc of some level of gender essentialism (having children has clarified for me that some gender distinctions - like regarding pregnancy, breastfeeding, etc - are real + relevant), but whatever it is, my father was able to model to me how to be an adult male and my mother did not. obv for someone like me who participates in a culturally historical community that still operates heavily on gender lines (men wear tefillin and kipot, women light candles friday night) having that male role model might be more significant/important than someone operating in a different environment.

also, despite disavowing gender essentialism, i don't necessarily agree w/ the tenant that, genitalia aside (and sometimes not even that), men + women are exactly the same. if not the least bc of reproduction, but also bc even if gender is *just* culturally mediated doesn't mean it's ignorable or avoidable. i'm not convinced that you can will the reversal of hundreds of thousands of years of gendered performance.

You can challenge it, though! Cultural mediations must be constantly questioned. I am not sure that mothers and fathers are so prescriptively different in their effect on children. A fluid perspective is necessary. And it must take the form of a direct challenge to widely-spoken orthodoxies. Hence why this thread might serve some purpose if retitled and radically centred upon the changing potentialities of 'maleness' vs the marketings of masculinity proponed by a necessarily reactionary consumerist agenda

mra is dogshit, mra advocates are delusional victimhood queens, there are instances where men suffer unduly, these need to be remedied but they are not to be understood within a communitarian 'rights' analysis
do you agree or disagree with this formulation? you have to choose one or the other, it's decision time deems

Ive agreed with this at least twice in the past two days?

Re: arguments against w/e forming a vague argument for 1/(w/e), nah

I agree lj, tho I think a challenge must take the form of an alternative construction as opposed to a simple rejection. Xp

Started new thread

I could burrow round for irish suicide rates and trend of gender-differentiated school reports, homelessess, drug abuse stats and and all that but i mean who cares tbh

― bachmansplain jenny turner overtalk (darraghmac), Monday, 18 November 2013 12:41 (Yesterday)

so what is the relevance of this laundry list?

LJ did we need another thread on this topic

Relevance in the 'who cares tbh' insofar as you are exercised re my position or lack thereof i spose?

yes we did, we needed to have this convo under different & more positive auspices

Looks like it's off to a swimming start

deems i'm just trying to get you to explain why you brought up a list of XY victimhood grievances in the men's rights thread

yes we did, we needed to have this convo under different & more positive auspices

lol no we didn't

i assume the reason there is anxiety about discussing maleness, or men's issues, is bc maleness has been historically hegemonic. when an ilxor asked me why there's a women-only thread but not a men-only thread, i joked that it's bc the rest of ilx is men-only. i don't actually believe that to be true, but i do think there might be a radical component in discussing maleness as a specific phenomenon. instead of assuming that maleness is the default and already well-represented, by keying in on it specifically it disentangles male experience from the 'patriarchy.' left unspoken it just remains this amorphous ruling aesthetic, even though it may not actually operate that way for countless individuals enmeshed in it.

the very invocation of 'maleness' seems to set up some useless dyad of unreconstructed, dogfighting and grain liquor masculinity counterposed against some cool new progressive lifestyle masculinity which will either fail for being too 'emasculated' or too much like a thinly veiled rebranding exercise, it's one of those words that can only fester neurosis and evasion

this reminded me i was going to look up an ol' dirty bastard interview from the nme circla 2000 the other day

there may be value in unearthing historical, cultural alternative definitions of maleness as competitive narratives. surely dogfighting and grain liquor masculinity has a long history in certain western cultures, but it is not the only mode of maleness, and it's kinda, idk, anglocentric to pretend that this is the only dyad worth considering.

http://biblehub.com/genesis/25-27.htm

The boys grew up, and Esau became a skillful hunter, a man of the open country, while Jacob was content to stay at home among the tents.

two modes of masculinity there - and acc to the torah it's the later that is emphasized ('staying at home among the tents' is oft explained as staying at home learning/studying texts)

yes the english speaking world represents an anomaly where the rest of the world eschewed violence and selfdestruction

you're not wrong, but for the sake of my theoretical project we have to pretend that historically there have been legitimate variations on male physical expression, even if yr right that male violence is ubiquitous.

It hadn't occurred to me when I clicked on this thread that people would actually be discussing this self-evidently moronic concept seriously.

nobody is discussing it, we're trying to discern why deems made it into a thing

Mordy otm, I'm militating for neither end of nakh's knowingly false dichotomy

Idiot thread hijacked by srs discussion, srs discussion thread hijacked by idiocy, world turns

mordy i was responding to lj in the sadly misbegotten maleness thread which described 'maleness' asa bankrupt orthodoxy, so taken to read the worst excesses of dope lifestyle affliction t-shirt culture rather than the kindly father guiding his sons or whichever contrary historical archetype of benign patriarchy one could invoke

http://i26.tinypic.com/2udyu5e.jpg

unsex me here

don't you have a dope lifestyle to pretend to inhabit gr8s?

http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/4281/tynan6in.gif

thread for contemplating the serious issues raised by Max Bygraves

true/false - some males (particularly on ilx) have extreme anxiety when it comes to discussing their own personal histories in the context of gender/sexuality? either g80-style irreverent photo bombing, darragh dissembling, or matt dc's blanket disavowal. surely we're shaped by our genders - either through society or biology or other - so why shouldn't that be relevant to discussion? do ilx women feel the same anxiety discussing femaleness?

Deconstruct 'em Mords - I have lessons now

For my part, I have absolutely surety that most of the ILXors who like to discuss these things have almost zero frame of reference for any facet of my experience of "maleness" and that attempting to discuss it with them would generate a self-perpetuating fountain of well-meaning racism that no one actually wants to read.

fwiw, DJP, I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts on the topic. partially bc i imagine your social relationship to a religious community has ramifications for your views on gender/maleness, and partially bc i think some courage is going to be needed to discuss subjective/intimate associations w/ maleness. actually i suspect that MRA comes from an inability to produce an authentic voice of maleness. in the vacuum of its lack of rhetorical expression it gets filled w/ minoritarian oppression discourse. since that's how other identity groups organize, men who otherwise lack a voice latch onto these terms of 'rights,' and discrimination. we all agree that such an approach is at best a waste of time and at worst sexist/inane/moronic/etc, but then what do you fill instead? maleness should not remain this empty vessel - as tho it were the default gender. that's the original problem.

FWIW I am blanketly disavowing the concept of "men's rights" rather than maleness per se.

intersectional maleness def encouraged

http://i.imgur.com/WMtiUoG.jpg

Nakh ill have time to address u fully on friday all goin well if my input to the thread is yr main amusement with it but i threw out those things (really the first two) as two instances that would strike me where there is fairly clear statistical trends suggesting a male-specific issue that might merit discussion... idk if thats a huge prob for u man

drugs/homelessness from professional experience i came across many more men than woman- tbh this can be written off as a product of the prioritisation of families (ito of housing) which in irish system (and most others i assume) grants custody in first instance to the mother so that explains that aspect.

Enjoying mordys posts/thoughts itt.

Am the product of a violently fucked family unit myself without significant female input for most of my early to adolescent life, balanced against an absent but dominant father figure- idk how much i attribute to this in my formulation as a 'male' when i consider these/gender issues and how much comes from wider societal input etc which in rural ireland would prob also leave me at significant variance from ilx proper.

thanks i just wanted you to clarify! though don't you think those issues are best dealt with in specificity rather than considering them subsidiary to some misandrist trend in public life? i'm sure you are correct on the specifics wrt housing because the same disparities exist here, and the family court system is always subject to criticism, some which is warranted

I wasnt criticising tbph, as i say i met these guys