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

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

there are a load of shitheads here who seem to have some possibly valid objections to the rulings of the family courts but protest against them in the most self-indulgent way possible, to the extent that they have typecasted fathers in custody disputes as vindictive psychos and lessened sympathy for any injustice that might have occurred

I think all issues are best dealt with in specific tho! Hence my admittedly vexatious habit of kicking against setbuilding exercises here and elsewheres (hence my objection to yr suggestion of 'against x is for y'

fair enough

Cycled home in meantime

Yeah dads4justice are an awful bunch. A terrible men.

So, have men been feminised by society recently?

I would answer that in the negative, bcoz a) essentially 'masculine' or 'feminine' traits, if they do exist, turn out to be pretty hard to find empirically and b) it's just too much of a 'good old days' scenario – once I could have lived up to the ideal of a Man, but that was in the old days, before (whoever) got in the way and also before I was born

(by traits I mean personality traits and behavours, not penis and vagina)

However, in the UK at least (and in the US?) there has been a measurable shift in society with industrial jobs vanishing through being outsourced and a rise in service economy and intellectual labour: anecdotally I know lots of people who were left behind by this shift, could this be a genuine thing, the real story behind the talk of feminists taking over and forcing men to be feminine that one hears so much about on men's rights activism websites

This is generally how I feel about most of the MRA talking points, anyway: their framing of the situation is all wrong and ends up blaming Mummy or Women generally, but there is often some genuine problem or complex underlying it which can and should be talked about without necessarily being shouted down by LOL MALE TEARS.

The talk of 'nice guys' being put in a 'friendzone' is, a percentage of the time, pure dodgy whining, however, some men from certain backgrounds and youths and upbringings will have reason to feel ... a certain way about standards of masculinity (you're only a man if you hate pakis and faggots) that defined who got the girls (who were for shagging, gi a fuck if they get pregnant) and which effectively shut these men out of life (or so it may seem, subjectively) ... a lot of these men could be forgiven (?) if they get their keels caught on the barrier reef of 'I'm a nice guy, why won't people have sex with me' and associated lyrics

iirc donna haraway actually refers to part of that change/process as the feminization of labor—the replacement of stable, career-track jobs w/ less-stable part-time, freelance, etc jobs that resemble the types of work traditionally afforded to and/or forced upon women

xp

Looking at it from another angle, I have often found MRA talk to be a kind of 'overshooting' or 'doth protest too much' discourse, e.g.,

We can all see that Walter White has attractive elements to him, let's discuss that, but woah, you actually think he's the hero of the show?

Yeah, I don't like yuppies either, calculating their relationships like that but woah, hang on guys, you do realise male yuppies are as bad as female yuppies? Right? Oh.

Yeah, sure, 'surface' people seem to do alright for themselves, aren't they awful ... but woah hang on guys women wearing makeup are hardly the worst example of this I mean is that even ...

whenever I stumble upon any of this talk it's like I've fallen into some alternate universe. friendzone? mra? wtf. apparently I am old.

FWIW, there's a handy chart someone's done showing the contradictions of 'The Red Pill', an example of an MRA community on reddit:

http://i.imgur.com/qutEGRb.png

akm, the friendzone is where a woman uses a man (a 'nice guy') for lifts/money/affection, keeping him erotically interested, whilst never planning to bring him into a sexual relationship. The friendzoning woman is supposed to reserve her intimacy for 'bad boys'. The rube tags along, putting the woman on a 'pedestal'. But swallow the Red Pill, and you can escape this 'matrix' of female lies, etc.

It may sound like the sort of thing teenage lads would go on about but no, it's apparently very popular with adult men on the internet and even a few of my IRL acquaintances have been heard to talk about it.

(What, Cardamon, have you honestly never felt like you were this rube? Not quite, at times I've just barely avoided adopting this piece of wisdom, and what prevented me from getting on board with it, even in my saddest little moments, was the undertone of about 'women using thuh men for thuh money'. I've never been in a position to throw money around to try and get sex, so have never really come round to see myself as a man of means at risk of depletion)

i have known men to actively "friendzone" themselves, in what seems a sort of deliberate avoidance strategy. such men befriend attractive young women, shower them with expensive gifts, emotional support, time & attention -- all the while (and somewhat resentfully) hoping for sexual favors that will clearly never materialize. i tend to view such arrangements as the "dating behavior" of guys who are too afraid to actually pursue viable romantic relationships, subbing a glamorous fantasy for the risks & complexities of the real thing.

the idea of just one mra type getting into donna haraway via the feminization of work thing is pure bliss to me

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/419F5rPaj7L.jpg

Thread for the focusing on the clownishness of yr stereotypical mra as clowned on every other internet site not actually run by such.

http://i.imgur.com/UiJ6paV.jpg

http://www.salon.com/2013/12/08/american_mens_hidden_crisis_they_need_more_friends/

Funny how for these dudes becoming friends with a woman is like the worst thing thing that can happen

Just another thought: Its ironic that we would find any of this surprising when you realize that all the places where men had access to each other and build friendships have been criticized and demolished.

Mens clubs, the smoke rooms, even sports teams and the military- essentially all the spaces where men were able to bond with each other and build relationships in a way that men could feel comfortable with- have been invaded, criticized and blown open by women and feminism in an effort to undo "patriarchy"

Literally 99% of the comments are like this.

"patriarchy"

The article itself is valid though and not mra-related at all. Macho self-sufficiency is an inhuman value code and trying to live by it leads to loneliness.

The article itself is good (apart from the "man up" ending which I agree with the commenters on).

Self-sufficiency isn't always cos machismo what about social anxiety and stuff?

i have loads of men friends we talk about manly stuff mostly we meet in this men's space called the pub

i am very sympathetic to male social anxiety as that basically is my entire life in three words but at the same time i don't think there's anything to it that is specific to males or maleness xp

in fact i could imagine having many more things to be anxious about on a day to day basis were i a woman

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/04/male_rape_in_america_a_new_study_reveals_that_men_are_sexually_assaulted.html

Stemple, who works with the Health and Human Rights Project at UCLA, had often wondered whether incidents of sexual violence against men were under-reported. She had once worked on prison reform and knew that jail is a place where sexual violence against men is routine but not counted in the general national statistics. Stemple began digging through existing surveys and discovered that her hunch was correct. The experience of men and women is “a lot closer than any of us would expect,” she says. For some kinds of victimization, men and women have roughly equal experiences. Stemple concluded that we need to “completely rethink our assumptions about sexual victimization,” and especially our fallback model that men are always the perpetrators and women the victims.

ok i'm pretty sure that no boys thread is basically just misandry at this point - it's not acceptable when a bunch of men sit around complaining about women, the reverse is equally gross.

no

yup

lmao

liberté, égalité, misandré

you're either trolling or being willfully obtuse

but in case you're not, by some miracle

it is not the same thing because of the various historical, institutional, and societal supports that misogyny has propping it up (cf. cracker vs the n-word)

that's a lovely thought but utter bullshit. the historical reality of misogyny does not excuse a bunch of ppl of a particular gender or race sitting around talking shit about another gender or race. it's not cool and the "historical, institutional, and societal" argument needs to be retired. nb i realize that there's no way i can make this argument without someone going "TROLLING."