https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/nov/17/row-after-...
> A row has broken out at York University after plans to mark International Men’s Day on Thursday were cancelled following an outcry from staff and students.
There is a big rift in feminism which feminists seem loath to acknowledge, preferring instead to claim that it isn't real, it's made up by anti-feminists, and it isn't important even if you can point to actual evidence. Well, it's real, it's important, and despite the posturing, we aren't all ignoring it.
More:
https://time.com/3432838/emma-watson-feminism-men-women/
> Just in the past few days, many feminist commentators have taken great umbrage at suggestions that soccer star Hope Solo, currently facing charges for assaulting her sister and teenage nephew, deserves similar censure to football player Ray Rice, who was caught on video striking his fiancée. Their argument boils down to the assertion that violence by men toward their female partners should be singled out because it’s a bigger problem than female violence toward family members. Meanwhile, in Watson’s native England, activists from women’s organizations recently blamed the shortage of services for abused women on efforts to accommodate abused men (despite the fact that, as Guardian columnist and blogger Ally Fogg demonstrated, even the lowest estimates of the prevalence of domestic violence against men suggest that male victims are far less likely than women to get help).
Dating is much the same: the majority of the hetero/bi female dating pool selects in favour of features that are often red flags for toxic masculinity. This gets better as one gets older, mercifully, but gender is a verb as well as a noun, and men and women alike aggressively gender one another and unwittingly punish people who deviate from the rules.
Still, at least we're talking about it. Previous generations succumbed badly to gender essentialism - "men are from Mars" and that stuff - and as ever, left a mess for the next generations.
This is so insane. Anyone who's been enough a player of the dating game and treed to optimise your strategy known you will end up becoming or (in my case) pretending to be "toxic masculinity" because it work so much more on girls.
I saw a meme that summed it up nicely:
“You’re not a gladiator or a spartan warrior who needs war, you’re a middle manager who needs therapy”
Let me expand on that: “you’re a middle manager who needs therapy” – because we’ve built a society where you can’t fulfill your innate desires.
I for one am tired of the therapy meme. If everyone needs therapy, it’s society that’s wrong.
You can’t just take a monkey out of the savannah, put it in a cubicle, then say “you need therapy” when it misbehaves.
PS: I’m not saying therapy doesn’t work, just that it feels like we’re using it as a bandaid on a deeper issue. Like, hey, maybe people should lead fulfilling lives instead of using therapy to fit themselves into the box society drew for them.
Sometime I wish we had a real, secular, replacement for the church that existed off of donations (with basically everyone donating for cultural reasons) and took care of education, medicine, community building and psychiatric support. One that wasn’t the government, obviously, since that has the monopoly on violence as well.
This. Pioneering psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, father of character analysis made a similar claim. He was pilloried for suggesting that we should focus on prevention of mental illness over treatment. To do this he said that we should radically reorient our societies so that they meet people's organismic needs. He died in US prison.
The psych establishment now is a tool to rehabilitate workers who have become unproductive, not a way to help humans fulfill their potential. Therapy has been helpful to me, but woefully inadequate. That is by design. It's not about my needs, it's about my employer's needs.
For those curious, the miracle cure was sitting inside a special magic box he claimed would do something with your "orgone energy", which was like that orgasm/organism joke but posited as a real thing his device could help you with.
They burned his books, including "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" and his seminal "Character Analysis" in what has been called one of the worst instances of book burning in US history at the time. Looks like the burning times are back, eh?
He was jailed for refusing not to proselytize the Orgone box, but that was really a pretext. Orgone boxes aren't in any way dangerous. He was jailed because his theories and practice were a threat to the status quo.
To be perfectly clear, I'm familiar with multiple political prisoners in the USA and am well aware that the US does imprison people for political reasons. I'm just not convinced that this guy is one of them.
I don't think that the majority of people need therapy. But I've also never met a manager who acted like they were a Spartan going to war. This may well be one of those social bubble sorting issues, where something that is common in one person's experience is very rare in another person's experience.
It’s that there are a small amount of men in the modern world who need a warrior ethos and the ‘tempering fires of warfare’ and other such cringe imagery employed by those pushing hypermasculine ideology.
The majority of men don’t need to be ‘redeemed through violence’ and, like the proverbial middle manager, probably just need someone to tell them they aren’t alone and things will be OK in due course, or whatever a therapist does.
And yet the manufactured adversity industry is booming. Look at all the marathons and triathlons and iron mans and spartan races and ninja warriors and all the other nonsense we’ve invented just to scratch this itch for men and women alike.
Humans _need_ something to fight against. If there’s nothing, they’ll make something up.
I haven't met anyone who was actually competitive about it in terms of wanting to be the fastest or whatever. I suspect it is a minority of the group, who in turn are also a minority of society.
If we are making generalizations about what humans need, I wouldn't consider "fighting against something". Perhaps "being right on the internet" would fit more people.
I'm curious why you think it's nonsense though. Those activities can be fun, safe and encourage discipline.
No one is pushing that, other than those that push that as a strawman.
> The majority of men don’t need to be ‘redeemed through violence’
You are so far off the mark that you're crossing over into speculative fiction at this point.
Ever heard of testosterone? Do you know what the effects are?
Okay, sure, it doesn't result in a bloodlust, but it is largely responsible for active aggression. As a society we channel this aggression into sports where it can be safely bled with limited violence.
Not like I’ll ever access it (too masc, heh) but I definitely see therapy as a much more positive way to address your emotions than self destructive or violent behaviour.
Sports and stuff helps too, maybe martial arts are the masculine equivalent to talk therapy.
What's wrong with therapy? You go to the doctor from time to time to take care of your physical health, why shouldn't you go to a therapist from time to time to take care of your mental health?
I don't know about the US, but here in Australia, GPs are supposed to take care of both your physical health and your mental health.
Feel the need to see a psychologist? You go see your GP, and they create a GP mental health care plan, which entitles you to a certain number of government-subsidised psychologist sessions per a year. At a certain point through those sessions, you need to go back to the GP to get the plan reviewed. The psychologist sends your GP status reports on your progress.
Feel the need to see a psychiatrist? You need to go to your GP and get a psychiatry referral, before a psychiatrist will see you. You have to go back to the GP once every 12 months to get the referral renewed. The psychiatrist sends regular reports back to the GP on your progress.
GPs also commonly prescribe antidepressants, anti-anxiety drugs, antipsychotics, etc. Individuals with more serious mental health needs are referred to psychiatry/psychology (sometimes paediatrics for children/adolescents), also those who need prescriptions GPs can't legally write (mostly psycho-stimulants for ADHD).
All this talk of "you need therapy" is very American. One thing the Australian government is concerned about, is people with only mild (or even non-existent) mental health issues consuming mental health resources, causing strain on the availability of those resources for those with more severe mental health issues who really need them, and adding to the burden on the taxpayer – especially when those who seek out professional mental health services for minor issues skew middle-to-upper class, while many lower class people with serious mental health issues aren't getting enough support.
I jest, but I think you are right on the money that this talk of "you need therapy" is very American. The deep irony of someone telling someone else "you need therapy" is that it is spoken with the implication that it should be considered a punishment for a moral failing, rather than resource to live a one's existing life but better. It all feels very Puritan.
You don't "go to the doctor from time to time", unless you're in some dysfunctional medical system where doctors can make more money by doing unnecessary work. You go to the doctor when you have a problem. You don't see a doctor regularly unless you've got something wrong with you (including old age, but old age life is not exactly healthy - it just beats the alternative), and if a lot of people in a certain environment are going to the doctor regularly then there's something wrong with that environment.
On the contrary, you should go for regular checkups. Even late-stage capitalist health insurance covers these, because it help detect some problems early, before they become a bigger problem. Generally, this is once a year or so.
Nah. They're popular in America because of the corrupt healthcare-industrial complex, there's no health benefit on average.
(OTOH, if and when you notice something unusual, go to the doctor post-haste, don't wait around hoping it'll clear up or put off mentioning it until your scheduled annual medical).
Nothing is wrong with therapy. I’m just saying that if your entire diet consists of ice cream and you’re feeling poorly, maybe try eating some veggies. You don’t need a doctor for that.
I think the crucial difference to me is whether people say “You need therapy [to change your life]” (good imo) or “You need therapy [to fit into your life]” (bad imo). And it feels like too many people mean the latter.
You presumably think there's a) an objective thing called "mental health" that can b) be effectively treated by talking to someone called a "therapist". But if either a or b is not correct, then there may be something wrong with going to therapy.
There's a big difference, though.
Doctors, by and large, diagnose using a body of knowledge acquired from scientific fact backed by intensive peer-reviewed and reproducible studies. They prescribe using a similarly evidence-based foundation of facts.
Therapists (psychologists, not psychiatrists) have no such foundations in science. Much of what they "know" is from non-reproducible studies.
If you need mental health maintenance, there's literally no evidence that going to an actual therapist is any more or less helpful than meditating, religious involvement, sports clubs, homeopathic remedies, diet modification, acupuncture, etc.
I'm not arguing that taking care of one's mental health isn't a good thing, I'm arguing that there's no evidence that therapy with a psychologist is better than the placebo.
Is therapy any more effective than that? Or do they just repeat you into submission until you sing the right tune even if you don't believe in it?
I'll say it: it was completely useless, a total waste of time. I wouldn't consider speaking to a therapist about anything ever again.
However -- I did have some breakthroughs with a life coach I found watching youtube vids. It was really helpful for me to go into a therapeutic relationship when I already know I can connect with the coach on a personal level.
Society is one abstraction, reproduction is another, and they don’t always mesh nicely.
Maybe the perfect society for reproduction is one of polyamorous warlord harems or something (this is a hypothetical)
Men optimizing for that status quo would be absolutely lethal in our peaceful monogamous society.
On the male side, prisoners' dilemma. On the female side, tragedy of the commons.
insert meme about selection bias here
There's a whole world out there of fairly normal people who don't play those games. They are not in nightclubs. Try to live an actual life.
I will be the first to say #notAllWomen, but every number is heavily skewed in a direction that promotes toxic masculinity.
I was mostly referring to the general idea tat woman are attracted to dominant, physically strong, confident men (that's for the 'good' traits') but also downright confrontational, insulting, mean and even humiliating with other people.
Since in my opinion women want to avoid being with what they perceive is a "weak" man, they will give a pass to all the bad traits because they see it as 'being a strong dominant man', and if you are nice or just not mean, they will be scared you are being weak
If anyone reads this and decides to learn about it, go ahead. I'm never going to tell someone else not to educate themselves. But don't treat it as an instruction book, and don't treat anyone like shit.
And davidguetta, if you can figure out how to express the good traits but not the bad ones, you'll find a girl that is not only attracted to you but may actually grow to love you. And what's more, you'll learn to love and respect her and yourself.
What women are looking for is someone confident in their ability to defend themselves and others. You don't need to be toxic to show that.
> And davidguetta, if you can figure out how to express the good traits but not the bad ones, you'll find a girl that is not only attracted to you but may actually grow to love you. And what's more, you'll learn to love and respect her and yourself.
Yeah.... well first if you read my message I never said I even WANTED to express bad traits or did it that much beside trying to pick up in bars, nor think it's good. It just works better in the flirting phase, whatever you or I think about.
BTW there's a class of girl where it works particularly well and it's the cliché of the "low self esteem girl"(LSE). It's the kind of girl who thinks / knows she's crazy / stupid and have issues so you can't really NOT be an ass to her because if you treat her as your equal she's going to despise you. ("I suck but he likes me so he must suck too"). I'd recommend running away from these kinda of girls but if you want sex there are a bunch of hot ones among them.
Also I think you should know love and attraction are a lot closer one from the other from what you seem to think...
But once again I'm not particularly interested in having to do that as a man. I'm in a relationship and I explicitly explained to my gf that she should be ambitious, have some fight in her and not take shit from other people or me. I also vaguely explained whole concept of LSE so that she doesn't become one. I have 0 interest in being in a relationship where I can see my gf as someone I respect / vaguely admire. I mean there are women astronauts ffs
Or there may be a lot more to it than you think. Attraction will certainly fade.
Anyway, I didn't mean to jump to conclusions about you, but I'm sure you know there are plenty of guys that look for fulfillment through sex, don't care who they hurt doing it, and it's not a great path.
It's not that bad if you are young. To me the good path is you should fuck at least 20 girls to know what you like / how girls work before settling (and girls should do the same). Then after 40+ girls you get tired of it if you are not a retard. The fact that most young people almost don't fuck at all is a bigger problem than the one who fuck too much ^^ (consensually of course)
You live in a toxic culture, why wouldn't women be also toxic?
In general girls who don't go to nightclub are still going to respond to basically the same 'stimuli' / behavior than club girls. It's just in general they are less conscious of it and don't understand it, and sometime blame themseleves (when they are not just at the edge of depression) for despising their "nice" boyfriend and getting horny for the "toxic" guy.
Maybe we could make progress by tabooing words that frame being male as a bad thing?
Teaching boys to epxress masculinity through strength, assertiveness, self-reliance, etc. is totally healthy in moderation. Teaching boys to be violent or domineering isn't, nor is teaching them that showing emotion or asking for help is weakness.
This type of recent linguistic addition really sticks out when people are working so hard to make language humane and inclusive elsewhere, while simultaneously going in the exact opposite direction with male-related neologisms.
And the last part of your own post illustrates that bad traits like being violent or domineering can be called out without having to pointlessly gender the terms.
I'm open to this argument because it's clear that many people take it this way, but how else would you state it? Everywhere else in English, an adjective limits the scope of the noun it's attached to. "Toxic chemicals" doesn't imply that chemicals are inherently toxic, "red car" doesn't imply that cars are inherently red. "Toxic" is probably needlessly sensational though, I'll grant that.
> bad traits like being violent or domineering can be called out without having to pointlessly gender the terms.
I agree with this. To clarify I think part of the frustration/misunderstanding with the term comes from it being applied at the wrong level. It's a descriptor of a social/cultural phenomenon, not a trait of an individual. If a man is being violent, it may or may not have anything to do with toxic masculinity, and invoking toxic masculinity to describe his actions would be inappropriate and needlessly gendered.
It really only makes sense to start talking about toxic masculinity when asking higher level sociological questions like, for example, why men are so over-represented in violent crime stats. It's a term to use when exploring causes, not effects, if that makes any sense.
It's like the difference in terminology between an ER nurse and an epidemiologist. The nurse might just say "flu", because at the level they operate that's the issue at hand. For them to speculate about the origins of the specific strain would be inappropriate. For the epidemiologist, however, these questions are exactly the point, because understanding the details of how an outbreak spreads can help us be more prepared in the future.
I'd frame them in a way that centers on behavior ("domineering", "violent") without gendering them. I think this makes the actual things that are toxic clearer and that lumping them into "masculinity" makes them less clear.
> "Toxic chemicals" doesn't imply that chemicals are inherently toxic
Yet you've probably seen at least a few people who take this as a reason to worry about "chemicals" in general, despite that covering literally everything. Things like this just make me think that if we want to avoid harmful associations, we have to simply not pair up the words at all. If someone is being violent, we can complain about that without bringing their identity into the frame.
> why men are so over-represented in violent crime stats
But the term is bad because it does nothing whatsoever to illuminate which things might actually cause that and there are probably many causes it lumps under a single umbrella wrongly.
I've seen stats that indicate one of the bigger causes is untreated psychosis, which has nothing in particular to do with being male, or any other identity that's over-represented in arrest data for that matter.
And to me that just reinforces the idea that the identity shouldn't be used at all when framing the problem. I'm aware of the correlations, but we have to find actual causes and, e.g. get people mental healthcare to fix the behaviors creating toxicity, rather than accepting a framing that centers on someone's very identity as if that's the thing that's problematic.
And I can say "causes" because causal modeling is a thing now. I've been reading the Book of Why lately and it's interesting how much things have advanced even in just the last couple of decades or so.
toxic masculinity as a descriptor is equally useful when asking higher level sociological questions as female hysteria was in the past when asking higher level sociological questions. Why are women so over-emotional in certain situations. Why were they over-represented in mental institutions. It's was a term they used to exploring causes of those things, and as a by product it was used to justify their conclusions.
It was originally a terminology used by doctors and health experts. It was later used by people and politicians. It was then abandoned by doctors and health experts, and then much later abandoned by people and politicians. It existed for hundreds of years and then abandoned. Neither change how inappropriate and needlessly gendered it was, nor the harm it did.
I have an idea. Maybe it has nothing to do with the syntax of the term in the abstract and all to do with what a large number of people using it actually mean. If the term had no history of abuse, this wouldn't be a problem, exactly as you say. What we see in the actual world though is what people really mean by the term. The people using it are misandrists (evidenced by things like the other terms mentioned in the GP) and so the term has come to be a sort of slur; they just hate men and genuinely believe that masculinity is toxic tout court and they have a very hard time hiding it despite simultaneously spouting off otherwise reasonable theories. In other words, they don't mean what they claim to mean by it and people can detect this, so the term has become tarnished.
If I started going on about "toxic femininity" (e.g. gossiping and character assassinating rather than confronting people directly, or favoring groupthink over independent thought), then I'd rightly be called a misogynist for clearly trying to blame women for these negative human behaviors. Femininity is seen as a protected and positive trait, while masculinity is so shunned that even saying we shouldn't bash it is seen as suspicious
> refusing to admit you’re wrong > escalating situations > being overly boastful
The reason why people, mostly men, don’t like that term is because it gets thrown around for pretty much anything at this point to mostly put men down. Spreading your legs and holding the door open for someone is considered toxic masculinity.
Why not just describe it as "being an asshole", or "stubbornness", or "aggressiveness", or "being disagreeable", "being antisocial", etc?
Why limit this only to "masculine" pride? You absolutely see women picking fights to defend their pride.
We just call that behavior "being a Karen" (or "catfights"). Which, being fair, both come with their own misogynistic problems.
In general, women do all of this all of the time except the last. So you see the problem.
trigger warnings for whatever reason
it's a blanket statement, it gets thrown around way too often without apparent reason, that's why
Toxic femininity might not be as visible, but in many ways it's more harmful for society because it hinders collaboration on every level
I don't think it's fair to equate that to "men bad".
Then again, how would a similar "Toxic Blackness" concept fly?
Negative elements of traditional black American culture seem well discussed by the community itself, perhaps to a fault.
That didn't happen to me but I live in a large city where I've come across (many) other dads who seemed to have more flexible schedules as evidenced by said dads showing up for pickup/dropoff and playdates. I'm not sure if there is/was a greater acceptance for fathers taking care of young children more visibly in metropolitan areas.
>> Previous generations succumbed badly to gender essentialism... and as ever, left a mess for the next generations.
Perhaps previous generations--thousands of them? millions?--realized there's more to gender than blank-slate social constructionism. And the mess is self-created by a younger generation wanting to rebel for want of anything else to rebel against?
See how easy it is to apply ageism in the other direction? /s
Entire entertainment genres are built around portraying men as inept fools who can be looked down upon by the opposite sex. Seinfeld is one of the few sitcoms where a female character is as flawed as the men. You couldn't even do that show today.
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia? Succession? Yellow Jackets? The Righteous Gemstones? Beef? White Lotus? House of The Dragon?
You could argue about percentages but it is in fact extremely easy to do a show with flawed female characters today.
To that point, culture is absolutely full of baseless attacks on women too, often in a far more damaging context. Lots of people still feel way too comfortable suggesting women are biologically unsuited for high status jobs and really only valuable for making babies. And the vitriol directed at women in the abortion debate, and the actual reduction in rights that rhetoric has led to, sort of puts dumb male sitcom characters in perspective.
Yes, men are more privileged than women in many ways. But men are also disadvantaged in many ways -- many individual men are actual quite vulnerable! -- and negative stereotypes about men cause real harm. Yes, society is sometimes quite shitty to women; but that doesn't somehow make it okay to be shitty to men.
Feminism at its best treats both women and men with respect and dignity. Feminism at its worst uses "gender equality" to justify hurting men. Right now you're doing the latter. Please stop.
We had a stunning lack of shows which tried to depict well adjusted male characters: i.e. people who could have emotions, who could have flaws and were allowed to work to correct them, but who could also be sources of wisdom or correct. Instead we had "sitcoms" and "drama".
And in Australia at least, our "drama" is...pretty god damn messed up - but at least that was obviously something you didn't want to watch.
It's why show's like Bluey have exploded the way they have: it fills that need for a middle ground of something in media to say "this is what you can be" in a way which isn't playing to stereotypes.
Though I suppose all of that could be summarized as: the death of boomer humor about hating your wife is long-overdue.
I would venture to guess that's because you are not in the socio-economical bracket where this is not just something you see on TV but become how people actually treat you.
In my arm-chair and widely unqualified perspective, the life experience of men is very very bi-modal. A select few with whatever the characteristic du-jour are can have such a different experience that it become harder to related to the less fortunate.
> Humor at the expense of traditionally more powerful groups works
About the same remark, traditionally, the most the people with the most power were/are men, doesn't follow that most men have power or that even that the average men have more power than the average women. The distribution of power/social status is usually very skewed for men.
> because it can be seen as both a way of balancing the scales a bit
Two wrong doesn't make a right , and the sin of the father do not belong to the sons. The problem with balancing things like this is that you are punishing people who weren't not involved in a situation...
> it doesn't come with the uncomfortable connection to examples of people taking the underlying ideas way more seriously.
And racist joke were also justified before because they were just joke that nobody take seriously.
> Comedy about my gender is funnier because nobody actually thinks my gender is a weakness.
You would be surprised... Sure not weakness... But things like emotional maturity and basic organization skills that's a different story.
> To that point, culture is absolutely full of baseless attacks on women too, often in a far more damaging context. Lots of people still feel way too comfortable suggesting women are biologically unsuited for high status jobs and really only valuable for making babies. And the vitriol directed at women in the abortion debate, and the actual reduction in rights that rhetoric has led to, sort of puts dumb male sitcom characters in perspective.
This also a big problem every time men/boys problem are brought to the for front. It seems to always been turned into "but what about women... etc..."
I can only speak for myself, as fairly liberal man. We all understand (even if we don't always relate to them) the tribulation that women face. Those things should definitively be addressed and fought for. But we don't need to solve ALL the women problems before we give some attentions to men issues. And certainly shouldn't use that as excuse to continue detrimental societal stereotypes.
Stereotyping an entire gender as dumb, un effective buffoon is wrong and as you mentioned yourself not very funny. Let's just stop it and move on... there is no need for mental gymnastic to find bizare excuses.
Oafish bumpkin of a husband, the wise and understanding wife always coming to the rescue.
I don't think the Munsters is about the wife rescuing the husband. The humor is often about the family thinking they are normal, and the reaction they get from interacting with actual normal people. None of the characters are "wise" they all misunderstand the basic nature of what a normal family looks and acts like and fail to realize they are scaring normal people.
MwC was definitely the oafish husband, again with the childish schemes, much like Ralph in the Honeymooners. It's just a raunchy version of the Honeymooners.
ILL is a rare exception - a reverse Honeymooners.
P.S. I still enjoy watching these shows. Especially the Munsters. Herman always makes me laugh.
The Munsters... well, I think I've seen a few episodes. I don't recall the wife (Lily) doing much in the episodes I watched, to be honest. I did see the recent Munsters movie, and Herman is both the cause and solution to their problems, Lily doesn't really do much from what I recall, if she has a comedic premise it's the ridiculousness of her falling for Herman.
Velma and Clone High have women as bad as the men and female villains. Wednesday is pretty removed from it's Adams Family roots and is only occasionally a comedy, but also features at least one female villain.
The recent Beavis and Butthead made for TV movie had a subplot where a female politician is chasing Beavis and Butthead through the country and trying to murder them to cover up a scandal. That's certainly not treating women as "paragons of virtue."
So you observed a whole bunch of modern shows and judged that none met the same standard... Which one of them did you watch that was closest?
> Misandry is normalized in society.
Is it?
I don't regularly (if ever) encounter "baseless attacks on men"... excepting situations where "reversing the roles" would result in the perpetrator still being a man and the victim still being a man.
> there'd be pitchforks for treating women as anything other than paragons of virtue.
Wait, are you doing a sarcasm?
Who wields the pitchforks? It's the husbands, right? Those who were wronged when their wives' virtue was called into question?
In fact, the sensational coverage of these very incidents you cited demonstrates the misogynistic standards of the society and media cycle. The reason you've heard so much about these "prominent karens"[0] perpetrating racist attacks is because they are women. Women being violent is seen as a scandal and ridiculed by society/media. The fact that it's not an everyday occurrence is (counter-intuitively) why it seems so common. Men are responsible for a much greater share of all violence. It is clearly the violence perpetrated by men, not women, that is normalised.
[0] and that there can be "prominent karens" in the first place
"Trans rights are human rights!"
Okay, fair enough. Then a few metres later, in the same colour and obviously by the same person:
"Kill all men!"
People will say "yes, but it doesn't mean literally kill all men", and of course it doesn't. But it's not exactly positive, is it?
Prior to my transition, I was an outspoken radical feminist. I spoke up often, loudly and with confidence. I was encouraged to speak up. I was given awards for my efforts, literally — it was like, “Oh, yeah, speak up, speak out.” When I speak up now, I am often given the direct or indirect message that I am “mansplaining,” “taking up too much space” or “asserting my white male heterosexual privilege.” Never mind that I am a first-generation Mexican American, a transsexual man, and married to the same woman I was with prior to my transition.
I find the assertion that I am now unable to speak out on issues I find important offensive and I refuse to allow anyone to silence me. My ability to empathize has grown exponentially, because I now factor men into my thinking and feeling about situations. Prior to my transition, I rarely considered how men experienced life or what they thought, wanted or liked about their lives. I have learned so much about the lives of men through my friendships with men
What continues to strike me is the significant reduction in friendliness and kindness now extended to me in public spaces. It now feels as though I am on my own: No one, outside of family and close friends, is paying any attention to my well-being.
I can recall a moment where this difference hit home. A couple of years into my medical gender transition, I was traveling on a public bus early one weekend morning. There were six people on the bus, including me. One was a woman. She was talking on a mobile phone very loudly and remarked that “men are such a–holes.” I immediately looked up at her and then around at the other men. Not one had lifted his head to look at the woman or anyone else. The woman saw me look at her and then commented to the person she was speaking with about “some a–hole on the bus right now looking at me.” I was stunned, because I recall being in similar situations, but in the reverse, many times: A man would say or do something deemed obnoxious or offensive, and I would find solidarity with the women around me as we made eye contact, rolled our eyes and maybe even commented out loud on the situation. I’m not sure I understand why the men did not respond, but it made a lasting impression on me.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2018/07/20/feat...
The mental strain of maintaining a false identity during the making of Self-Made Man ultimately caused a depressive breakdown, leading Vincent to admit herself to a locked psychiatric facility
Because male intra-gender solidarity is viewed as the first step to neo-Nazism, so we grin and bear it in mixed company.
Robert Sapolsky studies baboons, and I heard him describe this same behavior.
Males would were in constant competition, and if one tripped up in any way, the others jumped him.
Females would protect each other, form a group to help each other. If one tripped up, the others would come to their aid.
Claiming those feminists aren't feminists does nothing to stop them from calling themselves feminists.
If the story is accurate as conveyed and the separate graffiti instances really were written by the same person (not a given, a lot of stories like this aren't true on the internet, although I think this one probably is), I have a decent idea of the sort of person that would write it - I have known a couple that could have written this while they were teenagers. Someone from the postmodern left or intersectional queer theory milieux, certainly young, not a cisgender man, who is frustrated with the ability of powerful men to continuously escape accountability for the violence they enact against women and queer people. They view "kill all men" as a non-literal rallying cry to demonstrate their seriousness and willingness to fight against the injustices they recognise in the world (and are/were likely subject to in their own lives). I am extremely certain they have never killed a man, and just as certain that if given the choice they would not actually kill all men (or any appreciable quantity thereof). They would probably kill a lot of rapists, if given omniscience and omnipotence. I'm giving all of this characterisation because I think it's very unlikely that most people on HN would have met or known well the sort of people that say these sort of things genuinely, and because most of what I see here on these topics is either genuine confusion or literally misguided anger that doesn't understand the people they are angry at.
For context, I agree with "Trans rights are human rights" as a slogan and disagree with "Kill all men" as a slogan.
Granted. However, even though we can never fully understand another person, we can still demand that nobody in the room calls for the elimination of another group of people, even as a "joke" or "expression of anger" or similar. That's basic defense of human rights, the acknowledgement that nobody deserves to be targeted for things they can't control. Because jokes are used by extremists to gauge the tone of the rest of the group, and, if the group is conducive, they magically aren't jokes anymore.
> For context, I agree with "Trans rights are human rights" as a slogan and disagree with "Kill all men" as a slogan.
Yes, I fully agree with this.
To clarify, I was explaining what the type of person who would write that believes and why they would write it, because that question was asked in the thread. I don't agree with the slogan, I am just able to explain the thought processes and background of those who do.
>Because jokes are used by extremists to gauge the tone of the rest of the group, and, if the group is conducive, they magically aren't jokes anymore.
I'm familiar with the concept you're discussing but I don't think it applies here. For one, it's not a joke - it's insincere, but not humorous. For another, I have known neo-Nazis (I have worked in deradicalisation, specifically exit programs for young men in neo-Nazi groups) who would do the whole "day of the rope" thing and claim they were joking but were actually chomping at the bit to enact it, and I would consider myself well-equipped to judge whether these "kill all men" people were "secretly serious" like those neo-Nazis are. Genuinely, they really weren't.
Or, to put it another way, out of the people I knew who would be willing to say or agree with the slogan "kill all men", if they were in a social situation where they had the opportunity to contribute to the slaughter of a group of men in a socially supported way, they would not contribute and would almost certainly actively resist if they weren't having some sort of nervous breakdown at being in such an unusual situation. The same is not true for neo-Nazis or theocratic Islamists or some other groups that I have interacted with who are calling for the death of people with contingent insincerity - outside of a few of the younger members of those groups, given a social situation which allowed them to act out said social murder they would do it, and they all know it, as does anyone who interacts with them for any length of time. That's why I don't think the analogy is valuable, because in a practical sense these people aren't actually engaging in domestic terrorism and don't have any power to enforce their beliefs even if they were sincere, and also because I am familiar with the dynamics of the phrase and the sort of people that say it and they would not actually support mass murder even in an imaginary social context which was specifically supportive of that.
I know you have said you don't agree with it, so please don't take the following as me accusing you of excusing the slogan or agreeing with it, I'm trying to further conversation and am interested in your thoughts and really don't want to come off as accusatory.
Even if it is 100% definitely, totally, absolutely, meant as a joke should we be making allowances for that? Lately we have culturally been moving away from jokes that are about genders/races/identities being considered acceptable... or at least we have been for all identities other than "white" and "men", such as in this case where this whole group of people will listen to someone saying "kill all men" and just understand it is a joke and let it go by.
I actually do understand why someone who feels frustrated by certain things might make a joke like that, and I have nuance enough to understand that context and audience matters, and that often things said in jest are a way to emotionally deal with something without any desire to cause any sort of hurt (emotionally or physically) to the people being joked about.
For me at least though that sort of joke is frustrating and hurtful when I have had to listen to years to (an often overlapping set of) people talking about how men have a responsibility to speak up when their male friends make those sorts of jokes and tell them to stop. "Silence is Violence" and all that sort of thing.
I guess what I'm getting at is you may say that people upset about people saying it don't understand the people saying it, but I do. I do hang around these sorts of people, some of my good friends belong to the local socialist party and their social circles include these sorts of people. And it still does upset me, not so much because of what they are saying - although it isn't a great thing to say - it's the hypocrisy of it that upsets me. I have legitimately heard the exact same person have a little rant about how misogynistic the phrase "bi--- be crazy" and also make jokes about how "the straights aren't ok", etc.
I think people in general, and myself especially, would be a lot more receptive to "oh it's just a joke" if those people hadn't spent a bunch of time policing what was said as part of comedy shows and stuff because as of right now it feels like a lot of people have decided that certain groups I am in are the only acceptable targets for this sort of thing, which is just... incredibly frustrating.
>make jokes about how "the straights aren't ok", etc.
I think you may be misunderstanding what that means, although in this case you have correctly identified that this is a joke. It doesn't mean "not okay" as in they're not acceptable or they're bad, it means they're "not okay" in the same way you might say to someone "The situation in Russia is not okay" or "Thank you for your concern, I'm not okay at the moment". It's an expression that someone needs to check in on them, not that they're bad. You'll find it said when straight people are doing something really weird for frivolous reasons related to their sexuality, like starting wildfires using a gender reveal party. It's sort of like concern trolling (not really, but explaining actual jokes is not my strong suit), in that it's a ~false expression of concern. If it bothers you a lot, I'd advise you to laugh at it and do some thorough research to learn what sort of weird things queer people are doing (as in actually doing, not the fake nonsense propaganda like grooming children or whatever - go to queer sources and find what they're complaining about queer people doing). I guess something like "At least straight people aren't declaring a national crisis over the top shortage when they could go outside and find one by literally just talking" or "I think the degree of drama involved in your average lesbian break-up definitely means they need a check-in". Just make sure you're always approaching the topic with the understanding that the people you're talking to and joking about are currently having their children taken away from them in America or being beaten up by fascists around the world or being mass murdered in Chechnya etc for being queer, and for that reason it would once again be a very bad idea to use the hypocrisy argument, because it's very easy for them to dismiss it (and you) by pointing out that these situations are not actually the same and therefore there's no obligation to talk about or treat them the same way.
>if those people hadn't spent a bunch of time policing what was said as part of comedy shows and stuff because as of right now it feels like a lot of people have decided that certain groups I am in are the only acceptable targets for this sort of thing, which is just... incredibly frustrating.
Just because of statistics, I know there's at least one group of acceptable targets for comedy that you're not in, which is the capitalist class. You can make jokes about Beyonce running sweatshops or Barack Obama drone striking weddings and the people you're talking about aren't going to have an issue with it unless they're the sort of identity opportunists/morefemalecampguards people I don't have any time for (and I don't think anyone should have any time for).
More generally, good comedy is about punching up. It might make you laugh (I don't know you) to hear that really funny one about how feeding disabled homeless women into a wood chipper is cool, but most sane people are going to view it as mean-spirited. It's a lord having a big old laugh about how the peasants look like scarecrows during the famine - true, and very funny for the court, but unlikely to get a laugh from the peasants for really obvious reasons. You still have things in common with the people making jokes that punch up though, and there are people above both of you that you can both joke about. If it's too personally distressing to deal with jokes about you being white or straight or a man or cisgender or abled, you almost always have the option not to listen to them. Even if you're a diehard comedy fan, the vast majority of standup comics are not making jokes about how "straight cisgender white abled men suck amiright?" Guarantee it.
Trust me, in context it was an implication they are bad. I understand that it isn't always used that way, but in this case it definitely was an implication they are bad.
> it means they're "not okay" in the same way you might say to someone "The situation in Russia is not okay" or "Thank you for your concern, I'm not okay at the moment". It's an expression that someone needs to check in on them
I understand it is often used this way, but trust me in the group of people I know in real life it isn't always. Plus frankly even that usage could be seen as kind of patronizing, though again I want to stress that I am not personally offended by the joke itself
> If it's too personally distressing to deal with jokes about you being white or straight or a man or cisgender or abled, you almost always have the option not to listen to them. Even if you're a diehard comedy fan, the vast majority of standup comics are not making jokes about how "straight cisgender white abled men suck amiright?" Guarantee it.
I feel like you've really missed my point. I don't mind the jokes, they are (mostly) not a reflection of any genuine ill will, many of them are funny to me, etc. What is frustrating is how quickly people will assume ill will when jokes are made about certain groups of people and not others. The jokes themselves are fine.
As you noted, we're both in Australia, so there's no language or cultural differences here, so I know you're incorrect. The "not okay" in that phrase is the version of "not okay" in "I just got admitted to the psych ward, I'm not okay", it is not the version of "not okay" in "Terrorism is not okay". They are two different meanings, only one of them is the correct one for that saying.
>I understand it is often used this way, but trust me in the group of people I know in real life it isn't always. Plus frankly even that usage could be seen as kind of patronizing, though again I want to stress that I am not personally offended by the joke itself
It is insulting, patronising is exactly the right word. It's intended meaning is something like "There's something so wrong in straight culture, they need an intervention, look at this example" - it's faux concern. I wasn't explaining why it wasn't insulting, I was explaining why the meaning you were ascribing to it wasn't grammatically correct.
>I feel like you've really missed my point. I don't mind the jokes, they are (mostly) not a reflection of any genuine ill will, many of them are funny to me, etc. What is frustrating is how quickly people will assume ill will when jokes are made about certain groups of people and not others. The jokes themselves are fine.
Okay, so if I'm understanding you correctly the jokes don't cause any harm to you, but similar jokes do cause harm to marginalised people. Your contention is because the grammatical format of the joke is the same and you're not offended by it when you're the object of it, marginalised people should not be offended when they are the object of it. I don't agree with that contention, it's a false equivalency (grammatical equality does not equal semantic equality), but I think I would just like to understand how you're thinking of it. You remember the lord joking about how the peasants look like scarecrows during the famine, and how that is an objectively true observation that the lord and the court find funny but the peasants don't find funny? Do you understand why even though it's true and clearly funny to the lord and his coterie, the peasants wouldn't find it funny? If the peasants joked about the lord looking like a tomato, would you consider that to be hypocritical?
So two things. One "not okay" as in psych ward can still imply negative things, but secondly I am aware of the useage of it as a saying, I am referring to jokes people have made using the saying in such a way as to imply the other meaning of not OK, which in part are funny precisely because of the typical saying. I am getting very frustrated you refuse to believe that anyone may play on the standard meaning and that I must be mistaken.
> Your contention is because the grammatical format of the joke is the same and you're not offended by it when you're the object of it, marginalised people should not be offended when they are the object of it.
No that isn't my contention. My contention is that offense doesn't equate to harm. I find some of the jokes I am talking about offensive, but I also am capable of understanding the context in which many of them are said and that the people saying them aren't actually terrible prejudiced people. Some of them absolutely are, I've met some people who are definitely actively prejudiced but they are a minority.
> You remember the lord joking about how the peasants look like scarecrows during the famine, and how that is an objectively true observation that the lord and the court find funny but the peasants don't find funny? Do you understand why even though it's true and clearly funny to the lord and his coterie, the peasants wouldn't find it funny? If the peasants joked about the lord looking like a tomato, would you consider that to be hypocritical?
I feel like this is a false equivalency. The lord and his court are why the peasants look like scarecrows in the first place, because they will have taxed them and taken a large part of their crops and left them with little to eat. This is laughing at the misfortune of people while being the cause of the misfortune.
I also think there is a big difference between making a joke about the suffering that people actively are going through than there is about say, making a joke that references the stereotype that lesbian couples move in together quickly.
No problems, thank you for clarifying.
>Even if it is 100% definitely, totally, absolutely, meant as a joke should we be making allowances for that?
It is not a joke, I think you may have missed me saying that earlier. It is insincere, but not a joke. I think maybe you're conceiving of every statement that someone doesn't literally mean as being only okay if it's a joke (assuming it's a harmful thing to say in the first place, like "kill all men"). Have you ever talked with a co-worker and said (or heard them say) something like "I wish I could punt my boss into the sun"? It's not a joke, the person expressing it really does hate their boss and it's not intended to get a laugh, but it is insincere. By "insincere", I mean that the person does not have any intent to follow through with the literal specific thing they actually said. People just don't always talk literally, without there being a requirement that it's for humourous purposes. People can say these things as jokes and expect a laugh, but that isn't most of the use. It is definitely not the use when it's being graffitied onto a wall.
>such as in this case where this whole group of people will listen to someone saying "kill all men" and just understand it is a joke and let it go by.
I don't think that's true unless you're in a very strong filter bubble. In population-representative company "kill all men" will always get pushback, it's never going to be just accepted. I mean, just think about it being said in a group that's half men, it would be incredibly uncommon and would definitely receive pushback if someone did say it. It's not like society has agreed that "kill all men" is a cool thing to say, that just hasn't happened. It's also worth noting that "kill all men" is way, way, way less common than either "kill your local rapist" or "all men are bad" or "men suck", all much less controversial and much more common. "Kill all men" is a super fringe thing. My professional experience is in Australia and maybe it's different where you are, I can't comment on that. But I am familiar with the phrase and know where it comes from, and that it's not some common thing that goes unremarked in company.
>For me at least though that sort of joke is frustrating and hurtful when I have had to listen to years to (an often overlapping set of) people talking about how men have a responsibility to speak up when their male friends make those sorts of jokes and tell them to stop. "Silence is Violence" and all that sort of thing.
Yeah I'm very familiar with those campaigns, and I understand the facial similarity you're drawing. Those campaigns exist because domestic violence against women exists with a social and cultural support structure that normalises that violence, and the theory behind the campaigns is that intercepting the support structure earlier might stop some amount of domestic violence against women before it ever happens, by stopping its justification in culture.
It's not the same thing as the "kill all men" example because while some women definitely have killed some men, broadly speaking almost no men are being killed by women, and the number isn't spiking or any other observation that should make us concerned that that may change.
The reason those domestic violence campaigns got approved isn't because governments decided that the hurt feelings of women were worth spending a lot of money to prevent - it wasn't about the jokes and frankly at the time basically no government would have cared about that. They got approved because firstly, domestic violence by men against women is very common and most people want it to stop, and because it has a significant cost to the government in terms of healthcare, funerals, legal processing, various support services that need funding for the victims, children need to go into the foster system, etc. And secondly, there were credible theories that predicted the levels of violence should decrease if men are joking about violence against women less.
>I do hang around these sorts of people, some of my good friends belong to the local socialist party and their social circles include these sorts of people.
If they are socialists and you want them to stop saying things like "kill all men", I think your best bet is going to be an argument along the lines of "Communism is about the interests of the broad masses, and half of the masses are men - it doesn't help the revolutionary cause to alienate oppressed men who can and should be on our side. No program to end chauvinism against women can succeed without broad support from all proletarians, including men. Trying to fix chauvinism against women doesn't separate the class, but the slogan 'kill all men' does." If they respond with "it's just a joke bro don't be so emotional" or some variant, note that communists have an obligation to be truthful, and that includes being precise in your language when there's a misunderstanding. I have used those arguments successfully to convince people of this and similar issues. If you've made that point in a reasonable way without being overly aggressive or dismissive towards the oppression of women (for example by not indicating that you understand that women are oppressed more deeply and in different specific ways than men) and they still aren't interested in stopping it long term., you should probably find other friends if it (understandably) really bothers you, or ignore it and move on if that isn't worth it to you. Even if the conversation doesn't end with "Wow I didn't think about it like that, you're very right" (almost no disagreements end like that after one conversation), if you stick with it there is a good chance that they do at least change their behaviour and maybe come around to understanding why it's not a good idea. I would strongly advise you to avoid any and all variants of "This is hypocritical", because they're not going to be persuasive as arguments. Hypocrisy is treating the same fundamental situation differently based on factors that are superficial, and it's very easy to note that violence against women by men and violence against men by women are not the same fundamental situation, so hypocrisy doesn't apply.
This message was too long, so I'll reply to this with the second half.
Yes I'm aware of the motivation, I am skeptical of the efficacy personally and I say that as someone who grew up a victim of domestic violence. In Australia in particular we also invest no resources in domestic violence against men, which has women perpetrators more than most people expect, but also doesn't help victims of DV who are in MLM relationships.
> It's not the same thing as the "kill all men" example because while some women definitely have killed some men, broadly speaking almost no men are being killed by women, and the number isn't spiking or any other observation that should make us concerned that that may change.
Look, "bit-- be crazy" is definitely not a call to violence. It's a form of commiseration and some venting. This is actually the hypocrisy - the assumption that everything said is coded hatred when said by or about certain people but not others. I'm not and never have claimed that the people saying "kill all men" meant it literally.
I'm really sorry to hear you're a victim of domestic violence, and I appreciate you sharing that, I know that is an extremely difficult thing to do. It's actually not just Australia (I am also in Australia), in basically every country on Earth there is an absurdly small amount of resources dedicated to helping male victims of domestic violence, including both male victims of domestic violence by women and by men, when compared to the prevalence of that violence. Domestic violence against men, depending on the specific statistics used, is around half to a third as common as domestic violence against women - meanwhile, resources for male victims of domestic violence are more like 1/20th or less of the resources spent addressing domestic violence in general (which also need to be increased for women, as they're currently inadequate). It's a very important issue that does not receive enough attention, and unfortunately gets marred by associated with men who never mention it or care about the issue unless it's deployed in an argument to detract from the concerns of women. For what it's worth, I am a woman and care deeply about the issue, and have personally advocated to get DV support resources opened up to men as well, as well as including men on some of the poster campaigns we've done around domestic violence. It's an issue I find deeply frustrating to deal with because I generally encounter apathy from people in power.
I'm not sure how I feel about the efficacy of the specific campaigns around reducing "jokes". I certainly often feel like rates of domestic violence have not decreased, but there's obviously been a decrease in the "jokes" which is a self-evident good. I believe there is some research on this, but I'm not sure if there have been follow-up or efficacy studies since the campaigns. I'd be interested to know those results.
>Look, "bit-- be crazy" is definitely not a call to violence. It's a form of commiseration and some venting.
That's not true, it is misogyny. It's a reframing of a very old and violent trope that women are basically mentally unsound and don't need to be listened to. This attitude is the reason why many women suffered and suffer abuse in psychiatric care facilities, why fake medical conditions like hysteria were invented to pathologise normal reactions to oppressive conditions (and class as mental illnesses many physical illnesses which men refused to recognise). It is used that way today - "b*tches be crazy" as a saying means "Don't worry man, women are just like that [crazy]. Don't let it bother you." That is misogynistic.
>This is actually the hypocrisy - the assumption that everything said is coded hatred when said by or about certain people but not others. I'm not and never have claimed that the people saying "kill all men" meant it literally.
Someone who says "kill all men" definitely hates men. I've never claimed otherwise, and neither would the person saying "kill all men". There's no hypocrisy there - the issue people have with men saying misogynistic things isn't just that they hate women, many women hate men right back and are very capable of articulating what that means. The issue is that men have oppressed women and still do, and the misogynistic ideas they use to convey their positive feelings about that are important and valuable for the purpose of organising and normalising that oppression. Ideas are an important part of any group who believes anything, and men who believe in the inferiority of women and have harmed us throughout history and today use ideas to organise and support that activity.
Doesn’t seem ok now does it? Because no matter what it’s not ok to call for the death of any group. JFC why is this is hard?
The Massacre of the Bani Qurayza (627 AD): According to Islamic sources, during the siege of Medina in the aftermath of the Battle of the Trench, the Jewish tribe of Bani Qurayza was accused of conspiring with the attacking Meccans against the Muslim community. After the Meccans retreated, Prophet Muhammad's followers turned against the Bani Qurayza. The men were executed en masse, while the women and children were enslaved.
The Sack of Isfahan (1387): Timur, the Turko-Mongol conqueror, laid siege to the city of Isfahan, which was then part of the Jalayirid Sultanate. When the city finally fell, Timur reportedly ordered that every soldier in his army should return with at least two severed human heads. The total number of people killed is estimated to have been about 200,000. Women and children were often spared to be taken as slaves.
The Massacre of Nanking (1937): Also known as the Nanking Massacre or the Rape of Nanking, this atrocity was committed during the Sino-Japanese War when the Imperial Japanese Army captured the city of Nanking. Over a period of six weeks, mass killings, rapes, and looting were perpetrated against the city's residents. While not every man was killed, the death toll was incredibly high, with estimates ranging from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands. Many women were raped, and some were killed or taken away.
Srebrenica Massacre (1995): This was the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II, perpetrated during the Bosnian War. Over 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were systematically executed by units of the Bosnian Serb Army. Women, children, and some elderly men were forcibly transferred and deported, making it an example of ethnic cleansing.
The Assyrian Empire: The Assyrians, who built a powerful empire in ancient Mesopotamia, were notorious for their brutal military tactics. Their treatment of conquered peoples often included mass killings, forced deportations, and enslavement. However, it's important to note that not every city they conquered was subjected to this treatment; it was often employed as a form of psychological warfare, to intimidate other cities into surrendering without a fight.
The Mongol Empire: While not exactly "ancient" by some definitions, the Mongols under Genghis Khan and his successors in the 13th and 14th centuries were known for their ruthless conquests. Cities that resisted Mongol rule could expect no mercy; the men would often be killed and the women taken as slaves or wives. This strategy was also a form of psychological warfare, encouraging other cities to surrender without a fight to avoid a similar fate.
The Roman Empire: The Romans are known for their tactic of "decimation", which involved killing one in every ten men in a unit as punishment for serious infractions, like desertion or cowardice. But when it came to conquered peoples, the Romans were sometimes ruthlessly thorough. For example, after the Third Punic War, the Romans reportedly killed or enslaved the entire population of Carthage.I trust you can appreciate the distinction, if you think this through a little.
As for the whole whether "Kill all <historically persecuted/minority group>" should be considered equivalent to "Kill all men", I suppose one way to justify treating them differently is the likelihood of anyone actually taking such a suggestion seriously. We know there's been at least one massive-scale attempt to kill (virtually) all Jews, and we know there are still people around today who admire the ideology behind that and could potentially develop the capability to carry out such an attempt - I don't think, despite the list of examples just given, you could seriously suggest there's a group of people with sufficient admiration of an ideology that says "all men should die" and a capability to attempt carrying it out.
> They were killed for being men from the opposing side (perhaps killing women and children was considered too barbaric, or women were considered useful for some reason).
Or because they were men and thus seen as being future potential combatants where women and children were not. Men were seen as potentially future detriments and thus were killed.
The distinction is thin to the point of being indistinguishable.
Under that logic, eugenics isn't genocide either. The intent isn't to eliminate a specific group, it's to get rid of some trait they attribute to that group.
I'm not aware of any instances where Jewish people were rounded up purely for being Jewish. There was always some misguided and wrong justification, like a belief that the plague was caused by Jewish people poisoning wells, or that their numbers were enough to threaten the Christian institutions, or that they sabotaged the war effort. In other words, they were perceived as "the opposing side" in one misguided way or another.
I can't recall any sort of -cide where the cause is purely because of membership in some group. In purely practical terms, it's too expensive and too large an undertaking to randomly decide to do. There's always some kind of twisted logic underneath it.
At that point though, those Jewish people were in fact persecuted and murdered purely because of their ethnicity. It matters not that the persecution was justified with stories of poisoned wells. What matters is that those stories pertained directly to a specific ethnical group, and that group was subsequently hunted.
Flimsy excuses either matter or they don't, and the application is universal.
Your comment broadly argues that killing of one group by another is never done with purity of intention. I submit almost nothing people do is for its own sake, but rather woven within individual and collective stories. To think otherwise is to deny the role narrative plays in human consciousness.
A cursory glance through a list like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogrom shows numerous examples of massacres of Jews (and others, but mostly Jews). The attackers always claim justifications--again, no group attacks any other group without somehow justifying it to itself, either initially or post-hoc.
1. What about the many massacres of the Jews for rejecting Christianity? Surely those are examples of being rounded up for the sake of being Jewish, since the Jewish religion is incompatible with, for example, the concept of the divinity of Jesus. A key point here is that Judaism is a tribal and not universal religion. Thus, it is hard to divorce attacks on the Jewish religion from attacks on the Jewish people.
2. What about the massacres justified by absurd pretenses, such as (As you mentioned) poisoning wells, corrupting the host (Communion), or the blood libel (That Jews kill Christian children and use their blood to bake Matzo). These justifications, which do not hold up to scrutiny, only work for a population that wants to believe them in the first place. The sheer number of nonsensical justifications points to the underlying fact--there is no justification at all.
3. Need I mention the Holocaust, in which the stated aim of the Nazis was to eliminate the Jewish race? Even those with Jewish ancestry but with no religious practices (and who were not considered Jews by themselves or other Jews) were nonetheless sent to the death camps.
By the way, I have focused on historical violence from the Christian world, but this is not to the exclusion of violence from the Islamic world, of which there has been much as well.
In sum, if there was ever an example of a group persecuted for purely "being themselves", it is the Jews.
My point was primarily that in a world view where flimsy excuses like the side of a combatant makes something not a gendered massacre, those same flimsy excuses would also apply to other instances of mass killings. I'm essentially arguing that if a mass killing predominantly or solely impacts a certain group of people, then it counts as a targeted killing of that group. The justification is largely irrelevant.
Given the 2 responses, I apparently did a poor job of conveying that and should have been more clear.
Killing an enemy combatant in war is justified--after all, he or she is coming to kill you. That isn't a flimsy excuse at all. And the fact that men were conscripted into armies as opposed to women is no accident. It is attributable to human sexual dimorphism. But when many men die during war, that doesn't seem to me to be a targeted killing of men, since wouldn't women be killed as well if they were soldiers? And I don't quite get the analogy to mass killings, which seem to me to have an entirely different moral valence altogether.
> Killing an enemy combatant in war is justified--after all, he or she is coming to kill you. That isn't a flimsy excuse at all.
Certainly, but I don't think those actions are the troubling part. The troubling parts come before and after. The decision to only conscript men (that part'll be below), and the decisions to conduct massacres after combat had ceased. It wasn't uncommon to massacre the male civilian population once a city had been seized or an army subdued. The strongest counter argument there to me is that women weren't killed, but rape may have been prevalent. I don't know what the occurrence would have been in those situations, and I don't want to hazard an uneducated guess.
> And the fact that men were conscripted into armies as opposed to women is no accident. It is attributable to human sexual dimorphism.
To some degree. The minimum age for Roman conscription was 16, and I think that gap is a lot closer when you're comparing fully grown women against boys. In other words, if conscription was gated by some kind of "minimum strength requirement" where the lower bound was set by 16 year old boys, I think the sexual dimorphism claim loses some weight.
Even then, some of these events happened after the invention of the firearm where raw strength became almost entirely removed from the "who wins a fight" question.
> But when many men die during war, that doesn't seem to me to be a targeted killing of men, since wouldn't women be killed as well if they were soldiers?
Sure, but they weren't. To turn it around a little bit, would it not seem problematic to forcibly place solely a particular group of people into an incredibly dangerous job? If only Native Americans were eligible for conscription, I don't think "but other races would be killed too, they just aren't soldiers" would be an acceptable excuse.
> And I don't quite get the analogy to mass killings, which seem to me to have an entirely different moral valence altogether.
The likeness, to me, is that they have the same end result, but with different mechanisms. A mass killing is hunting down people with the intent to kill them. Conscription is hunting down people with the intent of repeatedly exposing them to events with a high probability of killing them.
I do think the moral valences are divergent. Genocides seem to be an act of outright hate to me, where conscription largely strikes me as the result of indifference. They both end with a lot of deaths of a somewhat homogenous group of people, though.
So violence is fine because it's not as bad as some other horrific events in the past? The barometer shouldn't be the frequency of violence reaching a certain threshold. It's should be zero for everyone.
You should genuinely be embarrassed at this remarkably stupid and pathetic distinction.
Surely you can see the distinction between a real and possible threat, that might genuinely put fear into the object class, and words that can never be actioned? "Kill all men" might as well say "beware of the vicious rabbit"
Not sure how any of that substantiates whatever point it is you are trying to make. Unless making allegations of violence is now considered violence itself?
They were murdered because they were Jews. In your examples the men were murdered for being on the opposing side, and so a possible threat (unlike the women and children).
nope
In terms of technical, legal citizenship, that (presumably) became available to Jews in Germany upon their emancipation in 1871. This opportunity was revoked a mere 64 years later in 1935 with the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws. Citizenship in this sense is a modern invention.
What I meant above was citizenship in the sense of belonging to a particular group. A person could be a German in a legal or social sense, and I meant it in a social sense. The Jews were never seen as being "authentically" German. They were seen as a foreign people living on German land. This certainly contributed to the ease at which their legal status was stripped.
Thus, not a single Jew who was a German (in either sense) was murdered in the Holocaust, since that is an empty category.
By the way, this attitude wasn't particular to Germany, but all over Europe, from Russia to France.
(Before anyone takes it seriously: this is a parody of how stupid the parent sounds.)
edit: radicalism is a real thing
As an honest question: why “of course it doesn’t”?
There is some percentage of “feminists” who don’t love women but simply hate men.
"280 character soundbite" social media isn't helping either here, nor is "zomg person X said something ridiculous"-type "journalism".
I use "Muslim", mostly because there's been a lot of negativity and discrimination surrounding Muslims in my own country, but obviously whatever works for you.
They are often more than happy to confide in what they think of ------------ when they feel they are in a safe space. A friend of mine, who is half-black, but passes as a white guy gets way more of that than he should in North Carolina [1].
[1] It really helps that he's working in a profession that is majority-team-red. Some people really can't help but run their mouth when they think they are preaching to the choir.
Public opinion oversimplifies things to good vs bad and works like a pendulum, and I just hope it doesn't swing too much in the opposite direction. If people saying "men suck" is a temporary by-product of addressing systemic gender inequality then that's a price I'm willing to pay. I've benefited plenty from the power of average white male mediocrity.
The above attitude I feel like minimises men's problems - the implicit assumption is that everyone else has it worse, whether that attitude was intended or not.
I've done literally no research into the problems these groups face comparatively, but I find it interesting that above case is usually assumed.
I don't have time to show my thoughts with any objective metrics, so I'm just going to lay out how I see things, so this will be touchy-feely. This is merely my opinion and I have no problem with people disagreeing.
I think the biggest impact is in how people can function in modern society - pay gap, positions of power, tokenization - a good book is "Invisible Man" by Ralph Waldo Ellison which is about more than being black in America but about being an individual that everyone wants to put in a box or a particular group - he's invisible because people don't see the individual. It's universal, and everyone feels that to some degree, but the degree I feel it as a white male is much smaller. Basically your ability to project your will on the world is easy mode for white male (btw - me).
Anecdote alert: For example I was literally just talking to an old friend who I've worked with in the past who is a great architect but kept getting the in-the-middle-of-nowhere projects at a very well known and old NYC firm, so she started her own architecture business and is doing quite well.
But not that it makes things easy for men! Because there is also expectation to be a provider, suck up your emotions and be tough. These things, which some point to as "the problem" are harming men as well and should be addressed. And this is where it gets very messy - some of the things that are "evidence" that men are privileged are also things that harm men in non-obvious ways. And as for the "easy to project your will", there is also an expectation that you have to and you're a failure if you don't. Why can't someone live a simple life without feeling like a failure?
Ultimately I think the ideal goal should be to not push gender based expectations - both for male and female.
Here's the thing though, there are objective metrics. On almost all of them, women have it better as a group than men.
Victims of violence? Overwhelmingly male. Suicides? The same. Deaths and injuries at work. The bar charts for all of those look pretty much the same.
Other objective metrics reveal females to have the upper hand: education (better for females, worse for males), health (better for females, worse for males), family court (better for females, worse for males), employment (better for females than for males), homelessness (better for females than for males).
So your assertion that there exists objective metrics but that it would take too long to present is, I feel, maybe correct, but there's so few of those metrics and they need to be applied to narrowly, they may as well not exist.
I suppose a lot of these issues come down to these subtler problems - Men have fewer problems in some senses (physical capability, professional respect, etc) but more in others (generally emotional and relationships), wheas for women it's often the reverse. These sorts of implicit assumptions that exist on a cultural level can be difficult for people of the opposite gender to see or understand.
- How about the fact that in some countries women can't even show their hair, have the right to drive or vote?
- How about the fact that women are several times more likely to be sexually assaulted?
- How about the fact that women have to worry about potential unwanted pregnancy?
- How about the fact that abortion laws are being repealed across the United States?
- How about the glass ceiling and the fact that women are paid less for the same jobs across many industries?
That's not to say that men don't have their own challenges as well, but it's borderline delusional if you think that men and women face the same level of challenges.
Hummm well i guess i am taking the bait.
> How about the fact that in some countries women can't even show their hair, have the right to drive or vote?
I don't want to diminish the experience of people in other countries. But comparing acros so many different variable muddy the water. If you gonna bring up women in muslim/arab countries (many of which support the hijab btw), then i will raise you the men currently dying in ukraine and what ever war you want to talk about.
Let's focus on the average experience in the US... where we have both enough information and cultural understanding to make good commentary.
> - How about the fact that women are several times more likely to be sexually assaulted?
Something, something prison... And what about the other kind of assaults... like say murder ?
> How about the fact that women have to worry about potential unwanted pregnancy?
Touche on this one. Also i would say that women have more control on when/if they want to be parent as opposed to men. And the 18 year child support can be brutal. (Did you know that child support can't be discharged in bankruptcy court ?)
> How about the fact that abortion laws are being repealed across the United States?
Agree that a travesty.
> How about the glass ceiling and the fact that women are paid less for the same jobs across many industries?
Yeah this one is a rabit hole. But comparing modern data, and normalizing this is much less pronouced. How about the missing men in univestity etc... etc...
> That's not to say that men don't have their own challenges as well, but it's borderline delusional if you think that men and women face the same level of challenges.
This must be an american thing, the weird need to diminish or reduce the experience of a certain group. Life sucks, and sucks for a lot of people accros so many different variable.
I understand the concept that some issue might be more pressing , but to call someone delusional simply for asking the question is not helful at all...
This should be familiar to most male members of this forum: being the computer nerd was weak, not playing the man's sports was "girly", not meeting body image standards is contrasted to being too feminine.
Men who are raped aren't taken seriously at all because of these problems. But that's never getting fixed so long as your only answer (and it's rife in this thread) is to construct these issues in opposition to femininity.
Instead everyone can remember one person saying "men suck" in some context, and on that basis they're clamoring to tear down decades of progress on equality. Which isn't going to help any man.
- How about the fact that men commit suicide at greater rates than women
- How about the fact that men are 10 times more likely to be killed on the job
- How about the fact that men are several times more likely to be physically assaulted
- How about the fact that men are more likely to die of covid
- How about the fact that 3 in 4 homeless people are men
We could go on and on like this in an all day pity party if you want?
> I don't wanna get into a whole thing
Proceeds to get into the whole thing.
But I'm with you in the frustration that this isn't talked about.