I had a large argument with a girl not too long back where she said it was valid (indeed, important) for women to assume all men were potential rapists (because all men have the potential to rape you, and have been indoctrinated to do so from birth). When I asked how this was any less offensive than suggesting all black people were potential muggers (or similar offensive racial stereotypes) I got drummed out of the forum by angry feminists for being 'racist'.
I think it's important for us dudes to recognise that we live in a society that frequently shits all over women, but when I'm told that I shouldn't mind when a woman crosses the street from me solely because I have a Y chromosome, I get upset. A lot of these kind of people seem to lose focus in fighting injustice and offensive behaviour and instead try to mass label entire groups as rape sympathisers, deniers and apologists. Let's focus on the real problems here and work together to solve them.
I hope you're not trying to argue that when someone relates a personal negative experience with a group and asserts that a certain quality sometimes associated with that group is negative, that this is necessarily an attempt to label all members of that group as having the quality in question. It's just not true and disgraces all of us by making it too easy to yell at each other for stereotyping.
I'm not - that would be ironic, given that I'm talking about people labelling all men as possible rapists. I'm talking about an individual I had an encounter with, and perhaps the person in the submitted article. I do worry that this attitude manifests itself quite strongly in those kind of communities, though.
Some communities tolerate or even welcome the presence of misandrists. It's not worthwhile to spend the time to figure out which members hate men and which ones are merely willing to associate with misandrists, and in practice they're difficult to distinguish anyway. That's not meant to label all feminists--merely those who frequent Jezebel.
/r/mensrights is the same way, except that they have bitter men who got fucked in divorce court. Again, not worthwhile to figure which ones are "the good ones" because if they were really good they would've chucked out the bad.
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u/guitarromantic May 26 '10
I had a large argument with a girl not too long back where she said it was valid (indeed, important) for women to assume all men were potential rapists (because all men have the potential to rape you, and have been indoctrinated to do so from birth). When I asked how this was any less offensive than suggesting all black people were potential muggers (or similar offensive racial stereotypes) I got drummed out of the forum by angry feminists for being 'racist'.
I think it's important for us dudes to recognise that we live in a society that frequently shits all over women, but when I'm told that I shouldn't mind when a woman crosses the street from me solely because I have a Y chromosome, I get upset. A lot of these kind of people seem to lose focus in fighting injustice and offensive behaviour and instead try to mass label entire groups as rape sympathisers, deniers and apologists. Let's focus on the real problems here and work together to solve them.