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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

I'm very far from a red-pilled anti-feminist but I do think this is a hugely overlooked problem.

Perhaps too much of an aside but I was lucky enough to be able to take an extended parental leave when my child was born, being a "stay at home dad" for the best part of a year. It was incredibly hard work, incredibly rewarding but also a real eye opener at how society still doesn't know what to do with a full-time parent that isn't a woman. Meetups are still called "New Mums Groups", you get shifty looks at playgrounds, playspaces etc., endless questions about what it is that you do. Even the people trying to be positive end up being somewhat patronising ("oh are you babysitting today!").

Anyway, point is, true equality would mean that it's absolutely fine for a man to stay at home and raise a family while the woman is the breadwinner. We're not there and that hurts both men and women.

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I had this exact experience as well. Returning to my career was strange. People were half glad to hear that I prioritized my family, and half disconcerted that I’d set my career aside. Our culture wants men to be extremely productive and committed to wealth generation.

Women are increasingly treated this way too though. Women were shunned for choosing their career. Now if they choose family, their career still suffers. How can they win? At least men have a clear expectation from society. In many parts of North America, it’s increasingly true that women don’t have the freedom not to work.

We have a serious problem here. It doesn’t strike me as a problem of gender roles so much as cultural priorities (perhaps at the core of this is the pursuit of wealth and growth over focusing on family). I was as capable as my wife in caring for our son so that wasn’t a problem. The problem was that anyone ever saw something wrong with that picture, I suppose.

We also took an enormous financial hit in order for her to continue working, because there was a very real concern than her career would suffer beyond repair if she took off, but I’d presumably be able to return fairly easily with my decade or so of software development experience. This happily turned out to be true. But still, what a strange situation to have to navigate.

> Women were shunned for choosing their career

in my experience raising two kids women are much more looked down on for choosing family over career. My wife wanted to be a stay-at-home mom but many of her friends, and especially online, thought she was "too good for that" with some even being hostile to the very concept. If a woman has an established career and then chooses to be a stay-at-home mom she's likely to pay a heavy price socially.

And if she had picked career, she would also have payed that price.

Men only pay it when choosing stay-at-home dads.

Similar experience for us. Wife was basically surrounded by nannies and there wasn’t a ton of community support, at least not nearly as much as there used to be for my mother. I assume this varies based on location (not all communities can afford nannies).

It’s just economics IMO. It’s mostly double income now.

It's literally insane that people would consider working at a company to be more important than someone raising their own children instead of paying someone else to raise them for most of the day. I'm thankful the mother of my children could stay at home with them while I worked.

In the US I think, for me personally, its less about the work/career itself being more important than raising the kids (because it's definitely not, don't get me wrong). Moreso is the issue of financial opportunity and stability. Much of society and decent living standards today _demands_ dual income households. Permantently risking half of that dual income is terrifying.

Having been through this, I think some of it is a little jealousy/sour grapes from the 2 income couples who have to work to pay for all their stuff.

By your own admission you chose work instead of raising your own children. Why is that different?

> women are much more looked down on for choosing family over career

I don't doubt this at all, at least in certain circles. I suspect it's not limited to small circles, either. My wife's office culture is somewhat accepting of women leaving to raise families, but many of the women in management have totally forgone that option or have/had their kids in daycare very, very early on. I'm certainly not judging as I have no idea why, or what would necessitate that, or if it's necessarily good or bad. It's too complicated to judge in any meaningful way.

It certainly generates expectations and pressures though, and they're very harmful to people like my wife. Many of the women my wife has talked to feel distinctly anxious about managing their family life with women like that in charge. Further, many of the men in management are quite old and tend to think of leaving to raise a family as a distinct lack of commitment to the work – something which gets you excluded from "serious" work like field deployments where high reliability and commitment is considered crucial to the role.

Many women are already excluded from much of field work because some older dudes think women aren't strong enough to make the work safe. For example, under-water installations of equipment are almost exclusively performed by men because the men running the deployments believe a woman would be incapable of supporting a man if his safety was compromised. As such, the women on the team who want to progress need to fully commit in all other possible ways in order to appear viable. Leaving to have kids is essentially 3 strikes at once against your reputation in field work.

It's tough to watch.

Depends heavily on your social group. If your social group are all college educated liberals then I’d expect this. If they were conservative MRS degree holders or lower income they’d likely envy your wife

> People were half glad to hear that I prioritized my family, and half disconcerted that I’d set my career aside.

People don't really know what to do when you demonstrate you don't have total devotion to an organization. Even if it's for a "higher calling," in the case of care, it still feels like they see it as not fully devoted. There's also this weird undercurrent that your career must be the focal point at all times in your life and that you must be constantly growing and fulfilled in it.

> In many parts of North America, it’s increasingly true that women don’t have the freedom not to work.

Yeah, this is really gross. And the norms are pushed by those who made the choice to not have a family, or to outsource/ignore theirs. In effect, it becomes a game of, "who can sacrifice the most to capitalism?" And games like that favor those who are broken/not smart enough to throw more of their lives away.

> Our culture wants men to be extremely productive and committed to wealth generation.

This drive objectifies men, and men are smart enough to realize they can't fight it, so they instead try to channel it. But it's not at all the same as an intrinsic motivation, it's an extrinsic threat of sorts. It dehumanizes men to see themselves primarily as providers rather than people. This makes it easier to prioritize their career at the expense of other things.

This could somewhat be solved by regulation

You get around 1 year of parental leave here in my country - it starts 28 days before expected birth for the mother and lasts for 105 days, the father also gets 30 days, but 15 have to be used during the parental leave, and the other 15 in the next few years. After the 105 days of "mothers leave" are over, both parents get 260 days to divide between themselves however they want).

The norm is for the mother to take the full 260 days, and the father goes to work. On one hand, fathers complain because they're not with their kids, on the other side, usually feminists complain about women losing a year of their carrers (because women still have a choice to go to work and let the dad use those 260 days), and hiring a could-be-soon-pregnant woman is a risk, because she might be gone for a year.

If we atleast split the 260 evenly, and made it mandatory for both parents to be atleast a bit more equally absent from work, that would solve a lot... but since women would lose the 260 day, and there's no money for both parents to be absent from work, this won't ever be implemented.

Yeah, this is real. Men still tend to get erased from the parental equation to a large degree. And this doesn't just affect stay at home dads. Much of the dialog around pregnancy loss and childloss seems to forget that there's often a father involved as well, and that the loss impacts both parents. When we lost our first child to a still birth, people would often focus entirely on my wife when offering sympathy and comfort. The assumption was often that I was supporting her through the loss, not that I was also someone experiencing the loss who needed support. This is problematic on multiple levels, but on a very basic level it just made it that much harder for me to grieve the loss and made me feel erased.

That said, I don't think it makes sense to connect the issues surrounding the ways in which men and women are still gendered in society, our resulting assumptions, and the harm they do with this particular problem. Because I think this particular problem affects both men and women, though with perhaps some differences in affect that are worth calling out because of the aforementioned gender roles and assumptions.

I haven't read the referenced book, but I would separate this problem from the one described in the book. I think we're reinforcing those stereotypes when we frame the general problem of "people not having work" as being specific to men.

Even beyond that, I would challenge the whole notion that people need to be included in the workforce. I think we're framing the problem wrong when we look at it that way. People need to be economically secure, they need to have deep connection to communities, and they need to have something meaningful to do with their time. Right now, many people only get those things from work. This is true of both men and women, plenty of women talk about loss of identity and struggle finding community when they become stay at home parents.

So I would argue that the book is taking the wrong framing - both in focusing on men and in taking the wrong assumptions, or perhaps, the wrong ordering.

I remember during most interactions with healthcare providers during my wife and I's pregnancies, hardly anyone ever talked to me, sometimes never even looking at me. I get it, I'm not the one carrying a baby to term, but I would have thought the fact that I was showing up to all these appointments, staying by my wife's side, taking part in decisions, and supporting her and the baby through the whole thing would have granted me a bit of acknowledgement of my role and investment in the whole process. But many times people acted like I wasn't even there.

I can't imagine having to deal with that dynamic with what you went through, and am so sorry for your loss.

i know exactly what you mean. I remember an early doc appointment with my wife she was pregnant with our first child, the doctor was going over things with my wife like what she should be doing and what she should not be doing etc. I asked the doctor what i should be doing and what i should look out for, she just glared at me and said "you've done enough." implying i was only there to get my wife pregnant. That was 13 years ago but i still remember it vividly.

I cannot relate to yours or garettmd’s experience, on both east or west coast of USA. There was lots of information for me (the dad) by the OB, and during the class about birthing we took for our first. This was in last 5 years.

I mean, what you think doctor should tell you about what you should be doing while wife is pregnant? If the wife wants your support, I would expect the wife to tell you what kind of support she needs. She does not need doctor to be her speaker, presumably. And doctor giving you instructions on what she should be doing in pregnancy would be patronizing toward wife.

If we take the poster with good faith we can assume he genuinely thought the doctor might know some useful ways he could be of help that neither he nor his wife knew. Even if there wasn't (which seems unlikely to me) I feel like good bedside manner should extend to a patient's loved ones when possible. Simply addressing him politely to say "Just be available and help as you can." would have be a far kinder way to blow off an anxious person.

A good example of something a doctor could tell the other half is like “if she can’t get out of bed and you take her blood pressure and it’s X then call me but if it’s Y then call 911”. Those are important things a partner needs to know during a pregnancy.

I did not got instructions for "if I can't get out of bed" and I was the pregnant one. Nor the relationships style advice about availability and interpersonal help.

Both kind of suggest there is not much to tell, like they are doctor going out of way to give advice about stuff they normally don't talk about, just to have something to say.

For a first pregnancy, the doctor shouldn't make any assumptions about what the couple knows and doesn't know.

Even if the advice was "Let her listen to her body, she will know when she needs help and support" would go a long way- both in assuaging the father's concern, and in reinforcing that it is both acceptable and encouraged to ask for help as the mother's body changes.

Medically speaking, what did you expect a pregnancy doctor to tell someone who wasn't pregnant?

Presumably they know what things that the patient would benefit from external help with. That kind of advice is pretty standard in the medical world.

I was interested in things like what to look out for that may be an indication of a problem. Changes in habits or behavior, that kind of thing. Basically, how to help and care for someone who is pregnant from the medical perspective. Because, at that time, I had never done it before and had no idea.

The fact that you need to apologize and explain why you care about issues that might affect men is telling in and of itself.

The American Zeitgeist around gender issues is distorted to dehumanize men and alienate anyone who even dares to recognize this fact. I'm a pretty hardcore liberal and I I'm totally astonished on a daily basis at the hate in vitriol directed at men that go without comment, let alone castigation that it deserves.

As for the rest of your post, absolutely. I love being a dad and it's a shame that our society doesn't seem to care much about father's apart from being a provider of money. Every man should be aware that if things go south and their marriage that their children could be taken away from them and they will be vilified if they try to get them back. You will not get sympathy from your friends or family or from the public at large. He will be fighting the tide.

> The American Zeitgeist around gender issues is distorted to dehumanize men and alienate anyone who even dares to recognize this fact.

I'm conflicted about that. Not denying that what you've said is true but I specifically chose the term "red pilled" because there are huge toxic (predominantly online) communities that are openly misogynistic. e.g. in theory I'd like and participate in the "men's rights" subreddit, in reality it's a pit of toxicity. Some of the frustration there is justified (family law definitely seems biased against fathers) but the result is not positive.

I'd also add: a lot of this societal pressure against men being accepted as stay at home parents comes from men.

Just like how a lot of the societal pressure causing womens issues comes from women. There's no difference between genders in this aspect. Though for some reason, i see some feminists trying to blame men exclusively for men's problems. I have never seen a man blaming women for all women's issues the same way.

Yes, just as anti-feminist/pro-patriarchy behaviors can easily come from women. It’s part of our cultural programming and its very hard for people to sidestep that without a lot of self analysis.

> I'd also add: a lot of this societal pressure against men being accepted as stay at home parents comes from men.

Funnily there’s also research showing that a lot of gender discrimination towards women comes from women.

Perhaps as a social species we all try to keep our group from straying too far from core values.

>in theory I'd like and participate in the "men's rights" subreddit, in reality it's a pit of toxicity.

Indeed, but so is the equivalent feminism subreddit (try "r/askafeminist" for example). And yet "women's rights" don't have the same stigma as "men's rights". What explains this asymmetry? Why is it some movements get defined by their extremists, and others don't?

>: a lot of this societal pressure against men being accepted as stay at home parents comes from men.

Really? Maybe its the company I keep, but I've never felt judged by other men when I share I love caring for my kids. If anything, I get a lot of smiles and nods irl and supportive comments online. If someone like Andrew Tate gave me shade about it, I'd take it as a reason to pity him. It takes a special kind of asshole to throw shade on a father who loves his kids, and who's kids love him.

I’d argue that women’s rights, from Suffragettes on, has a widely documented history of… reasonableness, for want of a better term. Men’s Rights doesn’t yet. It’s a much newer movement, things may change. But right now I’m struggling to think of the sane, sensible organisations out there promoting men’s rights.

I’d also question whether /r/askfeminists is “the equivalent”. It has 100k followers, /r/twoxchromosomes has 13 million followers and from a brief read through doesn’t feel like a particularly toxic place, despite discussing feminism/women’s issues. Maybe the key here is that women’s issues are mainlined into general conversation while men’s issues are sidelined to their own area where toxicity breeds.

part of the problem with '/r/twoxchromosomes' is that no moderator of the sub actually has two x chromosomes, which introduces a new and separate dynamic.

I never knew that, absolutely hilarious. I find that internet forums are just terrible all around. Moderating is an extremely important but thankless and unpaid job. So (with rare exception) the only people that do it are completely irrational and inept power hungry people with too much time on their hands. In the case of HN the reason moderation is so good is because Dang is actually paid from what I understand. But even on HN the mouth breathers learn the ins and outs of the system and know how to abuse flagging among other things.

Exactly. I think there's a pretty simple answer to this question:

> What explains this asymmetry?

What explains it is an asymmetrical history: millennia of oppression of women, often violently enforced. E.g., if you read the Iliad, it's basically a who-stole-my-woman story inside a who-stole-my-woman story; at the time, women were pretty close to property with opinions. An easy way to see the through-line to today is the history of "marital rape", where society did not see married women as being able to choose whether or not to have sex with their husbands. That was always the case under English common law, and was not fully outlawed in the US until 1992: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape#Legal_aspect

We may have removed most of the gross legal infrastructure of patriarchy, but the cultural aspects are still only slowly dissolving. We have generations more work to do there. The reasonableness you mention is exactly what amazes me. Think of all the men who haven't been murdered as the slept.

And I think this history also explains why the Men's Rights movement is so bonkers. A shift toward fairness is a loss for the people who used to benefit from the unfairness. This has left a lot of men upset that they aren't getting what they feel they are due. Some handle that well, but the ones who don't are going to fight to turn the clock back. And as Corey Robin points, out, reactionaries like that often cloak their efforts in the progressive language of the day. So we end up with "men's rights" as a bizzaro-world mirror of women's rights. And one of their heroes, one with 4 million Twitter followers, getting arrested as an abusive sex trafficker and international pimp.

Kindly visit the Men's Rights Movement wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_rights_movement

Go through the issues in the second section and tell me what Andrew Tate's position was on any of them.

Spoiler alert: you can't. Tate was not an MRA, he was a pickup artist.

Male feminists also tend to find themselves in trouble, by the way. Michael Kimmel used to play the same game of lumping legitimate issues (suicide/education/family courts) in with incels upset they can't get laid. He had to retire after getting #MeToo'd, heh. Tiresome and predictable. Perhaps I should add a Google Alert for your name ;)

Is this just a nitpick on Tate in particular? That was a side note, and one I don't think you quite got, as I didn't say he was an MRA, just popular among the same sort of people. Which I think you'd have a hard time denying.

And my point isn't that the men's rights people don't have legitimate points about how patriarchy also harms men. They do! My point is that for an awful lot of people, those points are a cloak for a deeply emotional backlash against feminism. So I'm less interested in what they claim motivates them than what we can learn from what they actually spend their time and attention on.

> just popular among the same sort of people. Which I think you'd have a hard time denying.

I'd have a hard time denying it because I have no idea what that "sort of person" is even supposed to be. Is it just people you don't like?

I went down the Men's Rights rabbithole because I got sexually assaulted by a woman as a teenager and didn't know how to deal with it. They were the only ones talking about it, and I assure you nobody involved had any interest in relegalizing marital rape.

Rather, that seems to be a bit of DARVO given that feminist thinkers like Mary Koss would see happened to me reduced to "unwanted contact".

> And my point isn't that the men's rights people don't have legitimate points about how patriarchy also harms men.

"Patriarchy hurts men too" is empty handwaving, not a substitute for genuine solutions.

Given your little quip - "think of all the men who haven't been murdered as they slept" - I doubt you'll be interested in providing help for men (or boys, as it was) like myself. If that's the feminist line, then it is clear that feminism, to put it mildly, isn't for me.

> that "sort of person"

I have a hard time believing you can't figure this out on your own, but briefly, the manosphere.

As to the rest, I am truly sorry to hear about your sexual assault. But I'm also sorry that you, like so many of the "sort of person" I'm talking about, have turned a bad experience into a reason to bash feminism rather than a reason to fight things like rape culture. If even with your experience can't figure out why serial rape victims might murder their attackers and why somebody might be surprised that doesn't happen more, then I'm not sure how I can clear up my point for you.

> the manosphere

You're talking in circles here - you brought up what "sort of person" is in the manosphere, and your answer is people in the manosphere. Not exactly insightful.

The so-called manosphere is a wildly diverse grouping with different experiences, complaints, and conclusions. Lumping in Andrew Tate with Men's Rights is just nonsensical.

> bash feminism rather than a reason to fight things like rape culture

I can do both and it's served me very well. When feminists like Koss et al. downplay female abuse of boys, that is rape culture and I'll fight them all day long.

> If even with your experience can't figure out why serial rape victims might murder their attackers

This is a schizophrenic strawman. I understand that perfectly and I've said nothing that could lead someone of sound mind to think otherwise.

I've been called a feminist in real life (much to my annoyance) in arguments about abortion, or about behaviour online or at work. There's nothing about Men's Rights that requires taking legitimate rights away from women. I can be a good person without identifying as my own enemy.

If you were actually sorry about my experience, you might like to prove it by not making up lies, cut from whole cloth, about me and men like me, in what looks like a desperate attempt to paint yourself as One of the Good Ones.

I obviously disagree in almost every particular here, but we seem to be mainly talking past one another, so I'm tapping out here. I am truly sorry about your experience though, just as I am for everyone who has been sexually assaulted.

> /r/twoxchromosomes

That is a sub in which nearly every post that rises to this a "my partner/male-acquaintence did x I'm shocked" and it's nothing but a pile on about how "bad men are". Even if not every post is male critical a lot of the positives seem to be shaping on behavior. It hasn't always been radicalized like that, nor has it been focused on that type of content.

As a woman who finally gave up on twoxchromosomes because I felt is was a bit too toxic I somewhat disagree on it not being toxic. It seemed determined to paint women as perpetual victims of toxic men. Ironically it also seemed determined to paint men as bad if they didn't protect women (yes, this is an exaggeration. No, not all and perhaps not even most posts/comments were this way. It just happened enough and it made me angry enough that I decided avoiding that subreddit was best for my mental health)

I will disagree with the "reasonableness" with the Suffragettes. They weren't perfect. Two instances seemed unreasonable. First, the bombings. If you don't know about the bombings associated with the Suffragettes well ...

The second being the involvement with that White Feather movement. As much as people say "You don't have to put men down to elevate women," that was a prime case of it.

And after that we've still got the "boys are stupid, throw rocks at them" T-shirts, the "male tears" cups, the "#killallmen" hashtag, and so on.

Maybe all of this just escaped you, I dunno, but now that you have it in front of you, please don't ignore it.

There have been plenty of nutjob feminists out there; "feminism" is very broad and there is a wide range of variety in viewpoints. Many of these viewpoints are reasonable. Others ... not so much.

A few years ago I tried to bring up this issue in the comments section of a paywalled (and fairly small) magazine where I voiced the view that we should move a little bit "beyond feminism" and look more towards gender relations and have a more "holistic" view on things, rather than look only from a female perspective. Not that there's anything wrong with feminism, but you know, it's just one side.

In the next article my comment was cited to "demonstrate" that men still had a lot to learn with some disparaging and condescending text.

Not the first nor last time I've seen something similar happen. Yes, you can have the occasional constructive discourse on a small scale (such as HN), but bringing the topic to the forefront in the mainstream is difficult, especially as a man. When you do succeed it captures attention for 5 minutes and then we move on and nothing really happens.

So ... I gave up. I don't really talk about it much. Why bother? It's like screaming in a void.

So what are we left with then if many of the reasonable people have given up? The nutjobs. And now it's even harder to bring these issues up.

Is it really that hard to understand the difference between a historically oppressed minority and the minority that historically was doing the oppressing?

> the minority that historically was doing the oppressing?

Is it so difficult to realize those oppressors are dead and these men weren’t alive in 1920?

Who killed all the gamergaters?

These are like a few thousands people, maybe in the tens of thousands at the most. There are about 1 billion men on the internet, give or take.

The internet is very good at amplifying a bunch of very motivated nutjobs. I can, if I wanted to, send death threats and all sorts of horrible things to hundreds of people before breakfast. And tomorrow again. And the day after that. And I'm just one guy with a crummy laptop.

Go out on the street and I'll bet you that most men haven't even heard of gamergate, or have only vaguely heard of it and don't really know much details. And those that do at least roughly know what it was all about will think they're a bunch of idiots.

The point is: men with this grievance are doing it to themselves. If you think Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate are going to break you out of "the matrix" and restore the proper roles of men, that's only going to make you hideous to normal people, especially women, even if you 'roided up and got a Joe Rogan neck size. There is no shortage of these men that filled the ranks of gamergaters, the various "patriot" brownshirt gangs, etc. They are very much among us and they are horrible misogynists. Pretending they died off three generations ago is unproductive and nutty.

It's not being amplified without effect, recruitment, and numbers. Jordan Peterson would not be a podcast star without a large population of followers. Those followers are being misled into misogyny and related "red pill" ideologies.

Ok, so when do historical victims stop being victims and stop being treated like victims?

This is a fascinating question because we're in a transitionary period.

Like my mother, who is very much alive and still working, was 100% a victim of sexism: She was alive in and grew up in times where she couldn't have a credit card or mortgage, when jobs were sex-segregated, and wasn't allowed to go to college to be an engineer like her brother because she was raised to stay at home and pop out babies. (She bailed at 15 instead of conforming.)

On the other hand, that's very different from the experience of a woman born in 2003. They're both adult parts of society.

And that's without getting into the experiences of women in their 30s and 40s which, depending on where they grew up, could go either way.

What makes that super weird for me is the inheritance by gender.

I get reparations, e.g. for enslaving people. In its simplest form, you break it down to "should have been paid instead" and make that a claim that can be inherited. There are arguments about collective guilt and claims against collectives etc, but that's a second step.

But women aren't an ethnic group. Children are pretty much a 50/50 split between male and female. Those claims (for reparations, and extra privileges because other women elsewhere in a different century were disadvantaged) are very different, and make no sense to me, at all.

That is a really interesting perspective.

Even if you buy into intergenerational guilt and benefit for groups, each new generation (without exception) must come from both groups.

I agree that reparations make no sense for sex based oppression historically. The only/main type of reparations I might agree with is something like extra social security for women of an age where they were legally prevented from earning more. (You can't turn around and tell a 65+ year old woman she should have chosen a higher earning career if you didn't let her). Or providing state support to child brides (I'd also support this for minor males married to of age females).

Then again, I think reparations in general are a terrible idea.

It's just interesting because our society is moving so quickly that you have some people alive who genuinely were personally oppressed and some in the same group who weren't.

There was indeed a case in Iowa where the female babysitter assaulted the minor male under her care, became pregnant by him, and the court ordered him to pay child support

Yeah, I heard about that. Talk about fucked up! She should be paying for his therapy.

This is a classic problem of binary thinking, identity politics, and crab bucket mentality.

Any progress and help will always be met with resistance if you lump huge swaths of the population together and view it as a competition.

Let's not forget that most white men on Earth were always in the "oppressed" group. In Europe, you were either in the aristocracy, in some semi-privileged class like clergy, or you were working super hard for a living, and sometimes (fairly regularly in some countries, e.g. France) died due to starvation. In America, it was similar - yes, there were some slave owners, but majority of white men were living and working in abhorrent, dickensians conditions in the slums of New York etc. or living a tough, poor and primitve live rural life, while being opressed by nature itself.

Depends what the goals of the movements are. Most feminist discussions I've seen acknowledge that "the partriarchy hurts men as well". So highlighting issues like being discriminated as a male single parent or stay-at-home dad would probably find support in feminist spaces: Dealing with them shares the same vision as feminism does, just from the perspective of men instead of women.

In contrast, many spaces that are branded as "men's rights" today seem to go for an entire different vision of society, which often looks like a cartoon version of the 50s (if consistent at all). If lots of men find themselves lonely, unfulfilled and unable to find a girlfriend, I think that is a serious issue, but the solution of the "men's rights" groups - that it's the women who have cut back their own goals and ambitions, just so some men they don't even know have a chance to have sex - seems pretty insane to me.

Also note, not all women are feminists either. There are plenty of women who have issues with men taking on traditionally feminine roles because they it violates their own conservative worldview. I believe that's where the "Karen" slur originated from.

>, many spaces that are branded as "men's rights" today seem...

That's the thing, that's the branding. The left (with Tucker Carlson's help) managed to get everyone to think of a man tanning his balls with any mention of men's rights. This is a major coup for leftist feminists, and a major loss for human rights.

Men's rights are human rights. They are father's rights. They are worker rights. It means equal protection under the law, protection from rape and violence, protection from discrimination and threats. These are basic human rights that should be afforded to everyone. This should not be a zero-sum game: to give one group rights you should not take them away from another group! There are plenty of rights to go around and they won't run out.

> Men's rights are human rights. They are father's rights. They are worker rights. It means equal protection under the law, protection from rape and violence, protection from discrimination and threats. These are basic human rights that should be afforded to everyone. This should not be a zero-sum game: to give one group rights you should not take them away from another group! There are plenty of rights to go around and they won't run out.

Fully agreed here, I'm just doubting that the resistance against that really comes from the left - my impression is that it more comes from the right (or maybe press outlets who have rebranded to look "woke" on the surface but still promote mostly traditional views).

E.g., I haven't yet seen a feminist sub on reddit excuse a female rapist or deny that a male rape victim is a victim. Though I have read articles that have done exactly that.

Some examples of feminist discussion of men's issues from Reddit:

- https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFeminists/comments/z083j5/the_gu... While the OP is dismissive, the discussion itself is far more nuanced.

- https://www.reddit.com/r/WitchesVsPatriarchy/comments/zz535i...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/z7rsv1/mens_...

Also, I like subreddits like r/menslib which try to provide "non-tate/peterson" communities for men's issues - often arguing exactly like you did.

> E.g., I haven't yet seen a feminist sub on reddit excuse a female rapist

They don't have to, society already does this for them all the time.

Pay attention to how media frames the crime when a female teacher sleeps with an underage male student versus when a male teacher rapes an underaged female student.

My word choices are deliberate here. In a vast majority of headlines and articles I've seen, if the perpetrator of a sexual crime is female, the language is much softer about the action.

And courts tend to be much softer on them as well than on the men doing the same crime.

Yep, I've seen this as well. What I've haven't seen is actual feminists endorsing those articles.

This makes me think this kind of narrative stems more from "woke captialist" media or from people pushing the "men are always happy about sexual attention" narrative. That narrative is considered part of "toxic maskulinity" - exactly the mindset that feminists want to get rid of.

Also note that (in the US) the legal definition of rape was changed to include men no earlier than 2012 [1] (i.e. under Obama). Under the previous definition, it was fundamentally impossible to consider a man a rape victim. That previous definition was from 1927.

So the assumption that only women could be raped was the older one. The modern progressive movement was who got men included in that definition.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/blog/updated-definition...

That reminds me that even now, in the UK, rape is legally defined as "when a person intentionally penetrates another's vagina, anus or mouth with a penis, without the other person's consent."[0] So biological females literally cannot be convicted of rape.

[0]: https://www.met.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/rsa/...

South park's take on this is a classic: https://southpark.cc.com/video-clips/9lb529/south-park-nice

The issue with branding isn't the lefts. The issue is that many incel communities call themselves men's rights activists.

The left, however, has a compassion problem with men. It seems like very few people actually want to engage in a healthy way in left oriented spaces whereas the right actually talks to young men and offers them advice over a range of topics that a lot of boys feel most insecure about. I think that is something that needs to be addressed otherwise grifters such as Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate will continue to infiltrate spaces of 12 year old boys, with innocuous seeming lifestyle advice.

The advice I see given most frequently to boys and young men by lefties seem irrelevant to their actual interests at best or patronizing at worst (e.g. "Don't rape/make the world a better place"). I rarely see advice on how to engage with their own masculinity in a way that isn't harmful. It feels like the gut reaction of a lot of people is to conveniently label boys as assigned evil at birth rather than to guide them and unpack how interactions with peers, girls, or society work.

This isn't feminists ruining young men, it is society failing to have adequate role models and show compassion to young me.

Yeah, I fully agree with you there. My impression is still that is is worse online than offline (in europe though at least, I can't realistically say anything about the offline climate in the US) but this is definitly a problem.

A related impression I had is that a lot of innovation in understanding and talking about sexuality has happened in queer/LGBT spaces, but relatively little of that has swept over to hetero sexuality. There are tons of highly nuances discussions about queer and feminine sexuality and relationships. This is happening far less for hetero relationships, because traditional role models and traditional ideas of a relationship still exert a strong pressure.

It happens even less for hetero men than for hetero women in my impression. Yes, men have metric gigatons of porn available, and society is still mostly wired to male definitions of attractivity. But at the same time, the the act of actually being sexually attracted is portrayed in the media as shameful and creepy for hetero men. That sort of hypocrisy can be difficult to navigate, especially as a teenager.

I'm not familiar with r/askafeminist (or any other part of Reddit, really), but from what I've seen, the mirror "equivalent" to MRAs more generally is radical feminism, or radfems.

For those who are unfamiliar, the basic tenet of radical feminism is that the source of women's oppression is the patriarchy (OK so far, if reductionist), which is run by and for men (broadly true), and thus men are all inherently bad (whoops that's where they lose me).

In many cases, it's an ideology that ends up repeating many of the aspects of Christian fundamentalist patriarchy, just from a different angle: men and women are fundamentally different; biology dictates your role in society; etc.

Radfems I have seen were significantly less hateful then what I found on Redpill or MRA subs. It is not that some of them were not hateful or mocking men, but the levels and amount of it were much different.

> I'd also add: a lot of this societal pressure against men being accepted as stay at home parents comes from men.

Maybe men are just more vocal about their opinions regarding stay-at-home dads? Women may not exert "societal pressure" against stay-at-home men, but they're ~30% more likely to divorce them than working men (a 3.3% chance of divorce in a given year vs. 2.5%)[0].

> For marriages formed after 1975, husbands’ lack of full-time employment is associated with higher risk of divorce, but neither wives’ full-time employment nor wives’ share of household labor is associated with divorce risk. Expectations of wives’ homemaking may have eroded, but the husband breadwinner norm persists.

[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0003122416655340

An unemployed (not by choice), frustrated guy can't be fun to be married to. I could see it causing problems in the relationship.

Lo and behold, in the paper they say this too:

"It is possible that husbands’ less than full-time employment is associated with marital disruption more strongly than wives’, not because of gendered interpretations of lack of full-time employment, but because husbands’ part-time employment or nonemployment is more likely to be involuntary. Involuntary nonemployment may negatively affect marriages more strongly than voluntary nonemployment, by affecting outcomes like partners’ mental health. It is not possible to evaluate this perspective with the current data, because voluntary specialization by men in unpaid labor is rare: in 2012, only about one-fifth of stay-at-home fathers were home primarily to care for the family (Livingston 2014). Future research is needed to explore the experiences of deliberately nontraditional households, although their rarity illustrates the consistency of the male-breadwinner norm."

> Women may not exert "societal pressure" against stay-at-home men

I'm not sure that the study supports this. I think that the terms "stay at home dad" and "stay at home man" implies a male spouse who stays at home to do unpaid housework or child rearing instead of working a full time job.

The study seems to say that, for men, being unemployed is positively correlated with divorce risk, but that doing a larger share of household labor is not.

Not all unemployed men are "stay at home" men.

There are some men's right subreddits that do not have allow the self-pity but they do not make it to the front page. I will not share specific subreddits for the sanity of the moderators but they are out there that focus on men's mental health specifically.

Toxic Masculinity is men on men hate.

"Toxic Masculinity" is an idea created by men's groups [1] to describe the stresses on them that make them unhealthy and come from some cultural ideal of manhood. It was literally created by men as language to separate discussion the good parts of societal expectations from the damaging parts. A large number of people (that is, everyone who wants to talk about it sincerely) still use precisely that meaning. It's only those people who look for every reason to get upset who willfully misinterpret it as an insult on the concept of masculinity.

"Toxic masculinity" is men examining themselves and seeking to reject the parts they don't like. There's no hate involved at all. The whole thing is an exercise in self-expression and self-determination.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythopoetic_men%27s_movement

I don't know a single man that uses or embraces that term. It seems to be used exclusively by arm chair psychiatrists or terminally online twitter people.

I use it. HTH.

It's irrelevant how the term was born. It's relevant how it ia used now: and it's never used in good faith. Can you tell me part of masculinity that are not toxic, based on modern feminist thought?

Check out /r/MensLib/

"but the result [of men's rights subreddits/etc] is not positive"

For me, it was positive. When you're going through personal hell, there's a lot to be said for having others in the situation to commiserate with. Do many of the guys there sound like jerks? Sure. Maybe they even are--or maybe they're just blowing off steam in the face of a horrible situation. I think it's often the latter.

One side effect of carefully banning forums that (truly) support men is that we're left with an environment where most places that might seem to be "help" are actually dedicated to gas-lighting and castigating men in this situation. This has created a vacuum where some rather dubious looking options are actually the best available.

May the gods bless my MRAs and the guys at my local dive bar. Without them, I wouldn't have made it.

Sharing my thoughts, a recent idiom I ran across that I increasingly find useful in situations like this is "two things can be true at once."

There can be people who are extremely misogynistic - but they can also have completely valid concerns and grievances that make them feel that way. "They might be idiots at best, but they might have decent reasons why they got there." Just ask any dad who has lost his children, wife, and property to an actually-false claim of domestic abuse. Ignoring those grievances, under the hope of trying to avoid giving them any respect, I believe risks actually increasing the number of misogynists because it doesn't address the underlying hurt that many of them may be experiencing, or the cause that will keep repeating itself.

A similar thought I find helpful to internalize is that "hurt people hurt other people". That is to say, many victims are themselves assholes and abusive.

It is important to remember that fair justice should be extended to all people, independence of their individual moral or sympathetic valence.

It cuts both ways. Despicable people deserve a fair treatment, and victims themselves must be held accountable for their actions.

> The American Zeitgeist around gender issues is distorted to dehumanize men and alienate anyone who even dares to recognize this fact.

I must be living under a rock then — this Zeitgeist you talk of is alien to me. I am a male who does not feel in any way dehumanized, nor have any of my male friends expressed as much.

Good for you! I've never noticed this thing so it doesn't exist. Pure and simple internalized misandry.

Doesn't exist.

Zeitgeist.

There's a pretty broad strata between those two.

I had the same reaction to his first sentence. Why do you need to say that?

a lot of this, at least in the united states, is due to a deep-seated dichotomy of heteronormative gender roles in suburban life. new mums groups have learned to be welcoming, but not inclusive to newcomers and that may largely be due to puritanical influences present in a lot of the cultures that oversee these groups. one could go so far as to say such patronisation and strict gender conformity serve to ostracize and secure the old-guard from ever encroaching threat of feminism or change.

As a diesel mechanic in the midwest, I can say the decline in men that have work could be a couple of factors. First, we decided 30 years ago everyone had to go to college, and in doing so found most degrees hardly worth the paper they were printed on while landed gentry reaped the windfall of college loan income. conversely tradecraft like welding, carpentry, HVAC, engine repair, and plumbing fell by the wayside with many of these crafts given a scarlet letter and left to beg and plead for any help whatsoever. there is still plenty of work, its just been made obscure and wicked by a hand that cant reap any lending profit from it.

second, militant drug testing and background checks have created an artificial scarcity. Do i need a sober person to run a drill press? certainly, but if that person spent a little time in jail for cannabis possession i dont care. Viewing potential employees as potential liabilities has in turn created a culture of calvinist jackboots that only hire the most visibly noble --if not technically bereft-- to fill their ranks.

I used to tell kids to go to college, and was unhappy if they did not go. Now I tell them they need a career. You need a skill people will pay for, or your life will suck. I'm in IT and most of skills come from a 2 year local degree, so it's college, but. It was very skills based. It was a career. Tell kids to get a career.

I believe (and that's hardly an original observation) that some of the problems in the US trades based professions stem from their lack of non-academic credentials systems.

In e.g. Germany or Switzerland, your pot smoking drill press operator could point to a four year apprenticeship, and possibly even advanced specializations beyond that, with hundreds of recognized professional tracks. In the US, professional skills seem to be acquired somewhat more randomly, and consequently, are less portable.

That's less true in union work or licensed trades; but of course lots of trades are only licensed in specific localities or the licensing is loosely enforced.

There definitely is a emphasis in the U.S. on college being the "correct" path though. I recently saw a public charter school in my city advertise their entire graduating class was accepted into colleges. Clearly this was the best metric of success to them.

> First, we decided 30 years ago everyone had to go to college, and in doing so found most degrees hardly worth the paper they were printed on while landed gentry reaped the windfall of college loan income. conversely tradecraft like welding, carpentry, HVAC, engine repair, and plumbing fell by the wayside with many of these crafts given a scarlet letter and left to beg and plead for any help whatsoever. there is still plenty of work, its just been made obscure and wicked by a hand that cant reap any lending profit from it.

If welding, carpentry, HVAC and so on were clearly strong career paths, people would have figured this out and ignored the college advice. Skilled trades have the potential to be great careers, but fall short. 1. They just don't pay enough. You can go to college and learn computer science and at 22 years old have a shot at making $100K+ or even more in expensive COL areas. In the trades, you have lots of training, apprenticeships, seniority... how many years does it take to get to $100K as a welder? 2. The work is tough on your body, which has a shelf life. As opposed to an office worker who can sit in his office chair, collecting a salary, until he dies of old age. I supposed these two points can be mitigated by learning the business and eventually running your own contracting company, where you siphon your profits and employ younger bodies. But not everyone can/will go down that path.

I agree with you about the drug and background checks. I'm sure they don't help either.

I think comparing the trades to the hottest intellectual profession on the planet with extremely heavy competition is extremely misguided.

The whiteboard torture test exists because there are tens of thousands of candidates and only hundreds of those actually have a pulse when it comes to developing software.

I'm not talking about implementing Kadane's or Dijkstra's, I'm talking about fizzbuzz, basic control structures, etc.

If welding paid, I'd be doing that rather than sitting at my computer dealing with corporate bullshit. I didn't get a degree but I'm still sitting here coding and not welding. I'm just saying I think there's more to the issue than that we sent people to college. The trades just don't pay well enough.

Two big things stick out in all of this to me...

1) There's the idea that one parent does not work for a company.

This is hard for a lot of men and women to handle. A lot is put into the idea that adults need to be part of the economic productivity cycle or you're failing. Stay at home dad's are looked down on by others a lot due to this. It happens to many stay at home mom's, too.

Think about it. If both parents work they make more so they can consume more. That means more money for share holders and companies.

> what it is that you do

This assumes that the important thing to do is something related to companies and the economy. It's unsaid but assumed without most realizing it.

2) We have an idea that women can do anything men can. That women can step into traditional mens spaces. But, the opposite isn't true. That men can step into traditional womens spaces. It's a double standard. It's not said but it's thought. Even when people don't realize it.

<< A lot is put into the idea that adults need to be part of the economic productivity cycle or you're failing.

Yes and no, I think. I agree in abstract, because I am sure it is a factor, but I will give my personal anecdata. Covid was a stroke of good luck for me, because I effectively was able to be a father and work from home at the same time ( 1st year kid - and she slept on a tight schedule ). And I will admit it was incredibly fulfilling ( albeit tiring ).

We are a dual income household and above average in terms of income for our state and I honestly do not feel comfortable enough to let her stay home full time ( which is part of the reason for my goals for 2023 are more aggressive in terms of learning and moving my skill set to the next level ). Even by myself, we are above average and I still think it is not enough to keep the current level of comforts ( and I have no idea how other people manage ).

<< 2) We have an idea that women can do anything men can. That women can step into traditional mens spaces. But, the opposite isn't true. That men can step into traditional womens spaces. It's a double standard. It's not said but it's thought. Even when people don't realize it.

Again, I think yes and no. Are there MMA fighters? Yeah, and some good ones too, but as my cousin recently said: "Do I want my daughter to be a plumber? No."

> "Do I want my daughter to be a plumber? No."

How many people want their son to be a plumber? Likely not many of the people on HN.

Does a lot of this view have to do with what people think of jobs like plumbers?

Plumbers, at least on the East Coast, make good money. If one of my kids became a plumber I would have no problem with it. Do I WANT them to become a plumber? Not really. If school is just not interesting to them and they like working with their hands a trade isn't a bad way to go.

They make decent money here too. I genuinely want my kid to do what they feel they want to do ( or have a strong predisposition for ). That is obviously not apparent now, but I absolutely agree that trade is not a bad idea from my perspective. I have an indoor job with no heavy lifting, but.. eh, there are days I wish I asked my dad to teach me about currents and cars.

Why doesn't your cousin want their daughter to be a plumber?

It was not explicitly stated. The unspoken reason was "She should get a degree and have a BS job in an office." It is possible I am just projecting my own prejudice here.

I get the "are you babysitting today" whenever I take the kids to the grocery store, but only from women. If men say anything, it's usually a joke about a vasectomy. I find both off-putting, but the "babysitting" thing really is odd. It's Saturday! We're buying groceries!

yeah i get the "babysitting?" thing a lot which is awkward. I never really know how to respond, like "no, just doing regular stuff as usual.."

I know this thread is about a different topic but i went to a dad's lunch at my oldest's middle school. The school put on this presentation about how to be a good dad, it was very humiliating. Like it wasn't even about being a good parent it was just about how not to be a terrible parent, interviews where the guy says things like "i'm a good dad because i'm sitting at the table when my kid is eating dinner" or "i'm a good dad because i don't make jokes about my daughter's weight" etc. I was embarrassed to be sitting there and just turned around and talked, and had lunch, with my son which was why i was there to begin with.

I recently learned about the concept of the "Lead Dad" which is when the father is the chief caregiver. There are a handful of groups that try to connect these fathers (1).

A big part of their emerging agenda is to get corporations and schools to recognize that the father is actually the point of contact and to destigmatize the dad who pauses or leaves his career to raise the kids.

1. https://thecompanyofdads.com

Being a stay at home parent is certainly a lot of work. I did it for a while until my son started pre-k. However his school follows the schedule of the local university so it’s just been he and I for the past 3 weeks during the holidays and for 2 weeks recently before that during Thanksgiving break.

We quickly fell back into our same routine of taking walks and working on his reading and writing.

But I am definitely familiar with the questions from the mothers at the playground or the fitness class he attends.

I just tell them that I was fortunate enough to retire at 40 and I’m presently trying to reinvent myself as a web developer.

I barely talked to any of them after some of these exchanges. I refuse to explain myself.

For the record, I agree with you and your argument is aligned with everybody I know who consider themselves feminists. It's part of what's meant by the now-memesque "patriarchy hurts everyone".

I think this book is probably more about men who aren't working and are instead doing nothing productive. Raising children wouldn't count.

Yeah I was kind of “yes, and”-ing the book topic. Women being out of work isn’t seen as such a crisis because so many are actually “working raising families. My point is that the same opportunity ought to be available to men, too.

It does if you got a serious education that goes woefully underutilized.

I don't know, I have a "serious" education and using it to help a corporation make a little bit more money doesn't really seem that much more valuable than raising my kid. The opportunity cost for many with serious educations is maybe not that high.

It's a real problem that goes further than feminism. There are large numbers of men and women who truly believe that childcare is more naturally a woman's domain and see men getting involved as a kind of 'woke-ism' - men aren't raising children because they want to, they are raising children because they think it gives them leftist brownie points.

I've seen this attitude on HN. I think a lot of posters like to see themselves in a man-of-the-house role and wouldn't want to give up their position as breadwinners.

Being out with three young children, as a man, is the only time in my life I've had people go as far out of their way to hold a door for me as men commonly do for women (with or without kids). That was interesting. First time I was like "wtf is happening?" before it dawned on me. That only lasted a year or two, a window in which I had enough in the right age range to trigger that behavior, I guess. Wasn't because I had a stroller, since I usually didn't, and wasn't because my hands were literally full, since I usually had at least one free. Like, nobody goes that far out of their way if I'm just carrying a couple drinks or something. It was truly exactly how we (guys) behave when holding the door for women. Neat experience to see the other side of that, I guess.

I got a lot more comments about it than my wife did. I'd get several of the "wow, you must be busy!" sorts of remarks every time I was out. She'd get the occasional one, but nothing like me. Different expectations, I guess.

Never felt shunned or treated with suspicion at parks. Worried I might, but it was never an issue. I tend to dress pretty well, though, by the standards of my area, which probably helps.

> society still doesn't know what to do with a full-time parent that isn't a woman

True, but I think there’s an issue with expectations. Biases don’t change overnight. It sucks, but everyone could use a little pragmatism IMO.

TBH I’m not sure this bias will change very much anyways, as I don’t think the math supports it. If anything we’ve moved to double income, not to a role reversal.

I’m still surprised that people are aware of the drawbacks that a patriarcal society with strong gender division where those who don’t conform are usually punished, and somehow identify with “redpilled antifeminists” who want a traditional society and attack the group which historically has been criticizing and questioning gendered roles.

We didn't let Jordan Petersons (not that he is some sort of ideal) brand of masculinity out and now we are stuck with the Andrew Tate style. Masculinity is something that needs to be cultivated, trying to stamp it out just results in weeds.

One (not the best) way to judge a world view or policy is to simply empower it and let it play itself out. Then investigate the value add to society and itself over time. Both of your examples wound up being problematic in the fullness of time.

I definitely think there’s a place in the human world for the masculine and feminine and etc. But actual bullying, which I think relates to much toxic masculinity, rightfully should be countered. It doesn’t help that much toxic masculinity, to me, seems based in fundamental weakness or fear. (So address the underlying source of fear as a psychological phenomenon.)

Maybe I'm reading you crosseyed, but you seem to be implying the that Jordan Peterson supports bullying. There are a few problems I have with him, but I've never heard him support that. I'm having trouble thinking of any particularly toxic male behaviors he advocates at all, so perhaps you could add examples.

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