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Comment by donohoe | Hacker News Reader

I am not saying that.

But there are many (typically men's rights orgs) who seize on stories like this to say that 'enough is enough and truly it is us men who are being marginalized [in ways beyond what the article says]' and thats not at all true.

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Well, if I ever want to be marginalized I want it to be like how women are marginalized, specially in the West. Only marginalized group to have better education and healthcare funding, lives longer than their oppressors, have more legal rights than their oppressors plus vast majority of tax benefits directed towards them as well.

Yeah, historically men were forced to work 12 hours in coal mines, oil rigs, garbage dumps, forests, in deep seas with next to nothing safety equipment and with no regulations while women were forced to stay in their homes with their children. Where can I sign up for this kind of discrimination?

Then please argue with those people when and where you encounter them.

I will. I predict we will see it in the comments here - likely throwaway amounts.

That is why I was calling for a sense of perspective in advance.

5,000 years from now you can still say "let's not forget, once upon a time..."

It just doesn't really add anything to the current topic.

Now that this thread has fallen off the front page, and there are no more comments, we can see that you did not answer any commenters here. Either you never planned to do this, and just wanted to stir up trouble, or you were wrong about there being such comments, either from throwaways or not.

I intended to. I didn't. Life gets in the way. I think my larger point remains true.

There are a lot more people arguing that men suffer almost equally in discrimination or women have it better, then I had expected.

All of them by men.

How do you know the gender of people here? Or are you, again, talking about people who are not here?

Yet you did find the time to come back and answer his comment :)

> All of them by men.

You are also a man, and I'm sure you're aware that there are much stronger cultural narratives around men rescuing women than the other way around.

A bit of introspection is needed here.

I'm sorry but I have to: *tips fedora, M'Lady

Men are marginalized in many ways beyond what this one article says - education, criminal justice, mental health to name but a few broad areas. Anyone who says otherwise is part of the problem and should have no voice in this conversation.

Happy International Men's Day.

> Anyone who says otherwise is part of the problem and should have no voice in this conversation.

This is the same intolerant gatekeeping that I loathe in the feminist camp. Everyone has a voice, anyone can participate, no one-person gets to define "the" problem, let alone label/dehumanize people as being problems.

> no one-person gets to define "the" problem

Well of course, this is not a dictatorship and I'm not a dictator. I'm stating my opinion on a forum.

In the same way flat-Earthers have no place teaching astronomy, someone who believes the pay gap is women getting paid less for the same work has no place teaching sociology. That is intolerant, but so it should be.

Gatekeeping is inevitable and necessary, the problem is that the wrong people currently hold the keys. You can find yourself locked out for stating that the wage gap is one side of a compromise, or that men get harsher criminal punishments (for the same crimes), or that female-perpetrated sexual abuse has been grossly undercounted (my personal grievance). If we want to confront these issues, then the existing gatekeepers need to be replaced, not tolerated.

But fields of science/academia have factual authority that a random persons' opinion does not.

The "conversation", which I assume to be the societal conversation i.e. marketplace of ideas is explicitly a free, and public one.

It's perfectly OK to "gatekeep" against falsehoods and those who spread those falsehoods. In fact, a functioning society depends on weeding out falsehoods, otherwise everything goes down the toilet.

Does that mean functioning societies have no religion?

No, it means that functioning societies keep religion out of running the show.

Participating in a conversation is not running the show.

In other words, there are some MRAs that minimise discrimination against women, so you must do the same in opposition? Why not instead lend support to MRAs that don't do this, and attack all marginalization?

So call out articles from those organizations that are creating a false narrative. "Getting ahead of the curve" on articles like this only serve to muddy the waters even further and create more opportunities for bad faith arguments.

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