Possible thread-killing wall of text ahead. TL;DR version: people said incorrect or misinformed things and I responded, generally to the tune of "shhh, gender equality still isn't a thing even in first world nations because of all these reasons, yes male problems are things that need to be addressed, but there are still more and bigger female problems and it's pretty damned obvious when you look at them side by side."
Magic Magnum said
If by heck of a lot to do you mean in less well off 3rd world countries then yes you're right.
In 1st world though, not so much.
Gender inequality is not a fixed issue, but rather an issue that now plagues men and women equally.
So having our counter to it being something that simply focuses on one gender is not appropriate to the problem we face today.
It may of worked in the past, when women are clearly the lesser gender in terms of rights.
But as problems and issues change so must the way we approach and solve them.
Sure, doing feminism might help women representations in media and gaming, acceptance in geek culture, more control of their bodies etc.
But what about the men and being able to report being raped or assaulted without being laughed at?
To be able to have a decent shot at gaining child custody rather than starting off the court case with a huge disadvantage simply for being male?
To be able to cry and talk about how they feel without being laughed at?
To not always be the one expected to provide for the family, pay for everything their girlfriend/wife wants, do all the leg work/first moves simply cause he's male?
To not always be pressured by the media to be ripped, tall etc?
There's a lot of discrimination against men that people just ignore or cast aside just cause it's seen as culturally normal we were raised to treat this stuff like 'common fact' that men must be tough and the take charge people always.
I'm gonna go ahead and call shenanigans on this. Yeah, gender inequality is less troublesome in most first world nations, but saying that men and women have equal levels of problems is simply false. I agree that the old approaches of first wave feminism aren't the way to go forward from where we are now (and modern feminism of the social justice warrior variety is a fucking joke), but that's because we're getting closer to equality and things have changed a lot since then, not because we've actually
reached some level of equality. The whole "omg patriarchy is out to get us" thing is a load of horse shit, but sexism against women is indeed endemic and prevalent throughout all levels of society. A lot of those things you brought up as male problems have equal or worse versions for women, among the tons of other issues women face. I'll go through that list item by item and show you what I mean.
Rape - Women get laughed at and mocked for rape accusations too, many of them blown off as having decided to fuck a guy and then regretting it in the morning so they're pressing bullshit charges for any of a variety of reasons. Hell, just a year ago there was that Steubenville rape case where US national news networks (especially CNN) spent tons of time talking about how the bright futures of the two guys were ruined by their rape conviction, barely even seeming to acknowledge the fact that they were fucking rapists and didn't deserve a bright future. The rape issue is less to do with sexism and more to do with how stupid people are about sex and anything to do with it.
Child Custody - Yup, cut and dry male problem, no direct female analog here. This is one of the few problems caused by gender roles (women are expected to be better parents and are thus absolutely needed by their kids) that actually doesn't have an equal and opposite problem.
Feelings - Where men are expected to be all strong and stoic, women are expected to be emotional wrecks. If a woman is quiet about her emotions she's seen as being a stone-cold bitch, just like a man is seen as a pussy if he's highly emotional. This is an equal problem area where both genders are affected by stupid gender role assumptions.
Family Stuff - Women are expected to be mothers first and foremost. If a woman with children decides to work instead of be a stay at home mom, she gets similar levels of shit as a guy who chooses to be a stay at home dad. Furthermore, if a man chooses not to have kids at all or until 30+ ages it's all well and good, but women who don't have kids by their mid-20s are seen by many as not fulfilling their duty as women. As for men paying for shit and having to be the one to make the first move, on the converse it's seen as highly inappropriate if a woman were to do that. This is another equal problem area caused by gender roles.
Body Image - Wait, really? Come on. As far as society is concerned, it's totally cool for a guy to be out of shape, overweight, even getting into fat territory; it's only when you're getting to obese levels of weight that men really get major disapproval from society, and even that isn't very frequent or as bad as it is for women. The level of pressure put on men here is a candle next to the raging bonfire that is body image pressure the media puts on women. Seeing frumpy dudes as main characters in TV or movies is normal, but you almost never see a female main character that doesn't have a pretty face and a tiny waist. It gets even worse when you look at advertisements. For an indication of how lopsided the problem is, take a look at statistics (
here's where I found a nice list of them) for eating disorders: only ~10-15% of those who suffer from anorexia or bulimia are male. Seriously, this is a no contest area where women have it worse.
So of the five areas you brought up, one was clearly a male only problem, one is clearly more of a female problem, and the other three are roughly equal. Add to this list things like the gender pay gap, the continuing attack on female bodily autonomy that is the abortion debate, the strange rarity of female characters in almost all forms of media, and the other various odds and ends that make up the problems women still face in first world nations. The only sort of big male only problem left to counter that is the draft in the US maybe? Could be broadened to military things in general where they're expected to perform at higher standards than women, but it's still just one thing and then small odds and ends that don't make up the difference. Shit, if you could eradicate all the issues caused by gender roles there really wouldn't be any male only problems left, but there are still a good number of problems women would be left with. That alone is indicative of how the scales are tipped, if the actually listing of the number of major issues wasn't enough for you.
Male issues exist and are just as valid as female issues, but it's blatantly obvious that there are more of the latter than the former. I would say that we're definitely past the point that female issues should be focused on exclusively, but it's still enough of a gap that female issues getting more attention and work done to solve them is understandable. It'd be nice if we could get to a point where people don't just mock male problems, but I don't see that being a thing any time in the near future, unfortunately.
Dark Wind said
And as I've said before, a big thing feminism today is fighting for is not for female domination, but for equality on a social level.
Organized feminist groups are generally after that, sure, but when you say "feminism today" that's kind of inclusive of the toxic modern wave of feminism that these guys (and I) take a lot of issue with. There are many people who have co-opted feminism for their female domination agenda, which has weakened the whole of the movement by association. Take a cruise through the feminist realms of pretty much any social networking site and you'll see people spewing shit about how men are evil and should be subservient to women and how it's time for women to rise and form a matriarchy to get retribution for the horrible oppression they've faced under the mythological patriarchy. Most people who say feminism is garbage are people who've seen or interacted with these kinds of "feminists," not those who truly hold to the ideologies of first wave feminism that was all about attaining equality.
Just bringing it up because it's an important thing to keep in mind whenever you're talking about feminism. Not everyone who calls themselves a feminist is actually aiming for equality, sadly.
Oh, and for the sake of fairness, this sort of garbage also exists on the other side of the aisle too. There are those who claim to be concerned with male issues but use it as a disguise for misogyny and such. People suck, they always try to co-opt well meaning movements for their own shitty agendas.
Magic Magnum said
I realize there are still issues for women here like maternity leave.
I wasn't trying to say there wasn't, but those things have been listed and argued for millions of times now.
But the issues facing men are largely ignored or brushed off, so I felt specific need to bring those up when the topic was about if we're feminist or not and why.
Yeah, male issues getting ignored or played off like they don't really exist is a load of bullshit. It's sexism coming typically from people claiming to be fighting against sexism. Whee hypocrisy.
Magic Magnum said
As for feminism = Gender equality.
This leads me to one big question right off the bat. If this is true why is it called feminism?
Because when it first became a thing females were second-class citizens even in otherwise progressive nations, so naming the movement for gender equality based on the current lay of the land made all kinds of sense. Part of the core ideology was always a removal of gender roles, which included those of males that cause all sorts of issues, but it did indeed focus solely on women at first because that was the area in need of vastly more work. The main reason there hasn't been a name switch is because feminism is such a huge movement that renaming is impossible; attempts to change monikers leads to people being viewed as splinter groups that aren't part of feminism, so they lose a lot of their credibility and sway in society. This is part of why people who say "I'm not a feminist, I'm a humanist" are given shit, because humanism isn't a well known thing that has a lot of social clout like feminism.
It's sort of goofy that a movement seeking gender equality has a naming bias like that, but hey, a rose by any other name.
Magic Magnum said
Other than that, I'd argue simply looking at feminist today that seems to be pretty split down the middle.
You've got plenty of those who do want gender equality, and plenty who don't.
I'd agree with the split down the middle estimate, though only when talking about those who openly talk about being feminists. Those who don't make a big hubbub about it tend to be the kind that want gender equality, but of those who'll describe themselves as a feminist it seems roughly 50/50 for being a real feminist versus being a pro-women advocate, which are indeed different things.
Magic Magnum said
You're half-right in saying fighting against women gender roles will help men. It would help by extension some men issues.
But Ultimately all it does is make women accepted into everything, and men simply more commonly filling in the blank.
Rather than say both men and women being accepted into everything.
Not necessarily. It's entirely possible that if female gender roles are eradicated, male gender roles will either go with them or follow soon after. They appear to exist in a sort of parasitic opposition, so if you remove one the other ought to shrivel away. Even if that's not the case, getting rid of female gender roles would at least make it bloody obvious that the same is going on with men, so full attention could be turned to getting rid of that side of things. Ideally though, both sides of the equation should be strangled simultaneously if at all possible. That'd make things cleaner and neater all round.
This is all ignoring the high probability that due to human nature gender roles will never actually go away, but hey, it's all hypothetical anyway.
Zaresto said
That might be because men do not get preggo. Not the fault of any patriarchy, just evolution.
Well, there's also such a thing as paternity leave, where a man might be given time off to be there for things, but that's rather uncommon to even be offered. Not sure what point Dark Wind was trying to make by bringing up maternity leave, but it's true that there's a huge discrepancy there even when you account for the fact that men don't get pregnant.
Zaresto said
Although it still is tainted by those who give it a bad name. Acknowledging this, many feminists do little to quell these more radical feminists. Questions the priorities of many feminists, doesn't it?
Many men also do little to quell radical feminists. This isn't an indictment of feminism so much as it is an indictment of the bystander mentality prevalent in humanity. Lots of times people see something bad or stupid going on, they won't step in even if it'd take a trivial amount of effort. Trying to call bullshit on feminists for not reining in the radicals is like trying to call bullshit on politicians for not reining in political extremists. It's not really their job and they've no obligation to do so, it's up to the listener to decide whether a voice is worth paying attention to or is full of shit.
Zaresto said
Sure, I can see how women have it worse in other parts of the world, but for you to say that they don't have massive amounts of privileges above men here is downright ignorant.
Let's see:
-Male genital mutilation is acceptable
-Men are constantly seen as the oppressor
-Women get an average of 60% less time in prison
-In the US, men are required to enlist for the draft
-Men are seen as expendable (Drawing off previous point)
-Men are seen as bad fathers
Oh hey, another list. I'll do with this the same thing I did with the other one.
Genital Mutilation - Hm, that's actually something I haven't seen brought up in this kind of debate before. If we're talking first world only, yeah, it's kind of fucked up that it's totally cool to chop off part of a boy's genitals but everyone would flip shit if you did the same to a girl. Religion and culture are fully to blame for this one, and in the first world there isn't really a direct female analog. Even if we were to go worldwide with it, I'm pretty sure male circumcision is seen as far more acceptable than female versions. I'll count this as a clear male only problem in the first world context though.
Oppressors - This is an interesting one, depending on what you mean. If you're talking about men being seen as the oppressors in the whole gender equality debate, well, given the history of women having the short end of the stick, it's pretty damned true. Kind of bullshit when it's applied to all men in general, but it's not something I'd count as being a solely male problem because it's tied to basically all of the female problems so by its very nature it's already countered with female problems of equal or greater weight. Now, if you're talking about more general stuff, how men are supposed to be dominant and such, that's also countered by how women are supposed to be submissive and so forth, which is one of those things that are caused by gender roles existing. Either way you want to look at it, this is at best something with an equal and opposite female problem.
Prison - First off, I went and did a little research on this. I found the study where I assume you're pulling that 60% figure from. I also found half a dozen others that cite numbers more like 20%, so take that for whatever it's worth. If you're going to cite sentencing, it's interesting to note crime rates: depending on what statistics you look at, men commit somewhere from 3 to 9 times as much crime as women. Perhaps that accounts for the longer sentencing, similar to how males are charged more for car insurance because men get into more accidents. Furthermore, recidivism rates among men are ~10% higher than women, and given our retributive justice system it's logical to be harder on those more likely to offend again in the future in order to try to punish them into flying straight in the future. On the face this looks like a straight up male problem, but it looks like there are a lot of contributing factors that make this go from being horribly sexist to being fairly logical. I'll still call it a male only problem though, since there's no direct female analog.
Draft - Yup, this is a clear point in the male problems column, nothing else to say about it since there's no point in turning this into a political debate thread too.
Expendable Men - This is a strange one. Men are seen as expendable when it comes to emergency and war situations, sure, but what about in general life? Men are seen as the foundation of families, expected to be the one providing financially for their wife and children, and that sounds pretty non-expendable to me. Hell, life insurance became a thing by preying on this idea, the whole "what would your family do if you were no longer there to support them?" pitch that works well because men are supposed to be the breadwinner and such. Both of these come from gender roles, with the expendable in emergencies thing coming from male expectations of chivalry and female expectations of weakness. Women aren't allowed to sacrifice themselves for the sake of men, as society sees it, because they're the ones that are supposed to be saved. I'd have to call this one a problem that has a balance on the female side, though it's a really weird one.
Parental Expectations - Probably should have gone with "bad parents" there precisely because of the joke you opened up to mdk, but no harm done. The converse of this is that women are expected to be perfect parents and know what they're doing from the moment they shove a baby out of their vagina. A woman being a horrible parent is judged severely by everyone, but a man being a bad parent is just shrugged off as expected. In this way men get a lot more leeway in parenting than women, so it's not a purely bad one. This is the clearest of the equally balanced things on your list, and the only one that didn't require any real thought to respond to.
There we go. Your list of male problems was a lot stronger than Magic Magnum's. Solid 50/50 on clear male problems versus ones that have balance in related female problems, none that were obviously outweighed by the female side. I could argue that these are a lot smaller issues than the core female problems, but I'll let that half a sentence suffice rather than taking a paragraph or two to do it, though I'll go into detail if asked.
Zaresto said
Of course, women don't have alot of abortion rights, but that is about it. They have the right to vote, they have equal pay, and they are generally adored by society. On the subject of sexual activity, I can see where the stigma comes from. Generally, women have a much easier time securing a partner, so it is seen, by some men, that "getting the girl" is an accomplishment. As for the fact that there are more gender-based insults associated specifically towards women rather than men, I'm going to have to ask for some examples. Looking at it now, it seems that men have the short end of the stick, don't they?
It's not just a matter of having little in the way of abortion rights, it's a matter of large segments of society attacking female bodily autonomy. Bodily autonomy is a very important concept that is the core to laws dealing with your right to choose how your body is treated (which is what the term 'bodily autonomy' means, for anyone who wasn't already aware). Without bodily autonomy you could be forced to donate blood or bone marrow or organs to those in need. Without bodily autonomy people wouldn't have the choice not to donate their organs after they die, it would just be done if the hospital wanted to regardless of your preferences or religious beliefs on the matter. Without bodily autonomy the government could dictate whether or not you could get tattoos, or what style or color your hair could be, or pretty much anything to do with your choices about your body. Bodily autonomy is a core reason for why rape is illegal: you have the right to say what can and cannot be done with your body, so someone trying to have sex with you against your will is violating that right. The fact that people are trying to tell women they don't have say over what they do with their body, by way of trying to force them to carry unwanted pregnancies to term, is extremely troubling both because they're trying to reduce women's rights to less than that of a corpse (the organ donation thing means corpses have bodily autonomy still in effect) and because of the possible future implications of what could happen if the concept of bodily autonomy is legally thrown out the window.
Okay, rant over, on to the other things. Women do have the right to vote, yep. Equal pay though? Nope, not at all. When you look at full-time workers, women are paid on average 77% of what men are paid. This figure is an average from across all kinds of occupations, but there exists a pay gap between men and women who have the same level of experience and qualifications doing the same job in almost every field, including those that are typically dominated by females like teachers and nurses. A lot of people like to bring up maternity leave and such to explain it, but even when you look at a childless women they're only paid an average of 82% of what their male counterparts are paid. These are all figures from the United States, from data gathered in 2012. I wouldn't call being pay about 1/5 less than men "equal pay," so I'm not sure what you're talking about when you say women have it.
Women are adored by society? Hmm. Who's doing the adoring? Why are they being adored? The only adoration I see comes from men to women they find attractive. Is this a boon for women, or is it a product of objectification? When it comes to sex, sure women have an easier time getting a partner, but they're also shamed for doing so where men are congratulated for their conquests. That one's a two-way street though, as there are plenty anti-male things with sex (such as sexually inactive males being subject to far more mockery than women, and sexual dysfunctions in men being the subject of jokes whereas they're viewed almost universally as serious medical problems for women). For gender-based insults, I think Dark Wind was talking about things like bitch, cunt, slut, whore, and pussy that are derived from female sources (the first two), mainly directed at females (slut and whore), or insult by way of likening someone to stereotypically female traits (pussy). The only similar insult for men is dick, so if you buy into the idea of gendered slurs and such (which I don't, as my phrasing should have made clear) there's a pretty clear bias.
Does it look like men get the short end of the stick? Nope. Men have child custody and divorce proceeding disadvantages as a major level issue, women have the pay gap, the attack on their bodily autonomy, and the constant media attack on their body image as major level issues. Everything else ranges from being minor issues in the grand scheme of life that don't add up to being equal to any of the big ones to having obvious equalities on the other side of the gender line. At a clear 3 to 1 disadvantage, I'd have to say women still have the short end of the stick.
Zaresto said
Media doesn't really matter. Even if it did, it still favors women.
Things that are pumped into our eyes and ears all day don't matter? Interesting stance to take. Pray tell, how exactly does the media favor women? Males are disproportionately represented in all kinds of media, a large portion of the women in media are there simply to be eye candy for men, and media in general is constantly blaring "you must look like this or you're garbage" type messages at women. I fail to see favor in there.
Zaresto said
Actually, the reason men get laughed at for reporting rape is because they are seen as the people who cause it.
Eh, that's talking about domestic violence, not rape. People (not just men, though men more often to be sure) get laughed at for reporting rape for other reasons. If you go take a look at studies on victim blaming, you'll see that people in general tend to blame the victim of a rape (which in turn implies a lack of sympathy and a chance of mockery); when you look at it separated by gender, men blame the victim more often than females, both when the victim is female and when the victim is male. As I've said elsewhere in this post, the negative attitudes about rape victims has a lot to do with things other than sexism. It's true that men are less likely to be taken seriously when reporting rape, and that difference between genders is where the sexism lies, but you can't ignore the fact that women also get mocked and blamed for being raped. There are deeper problems in this area that make a foundation upon which sexism is one of many layers, so claiming that any kind of nonsensical attitude about rape is solely for sexist reasons is not taking all the facts into account.
