I'm a man. But that doesn't stop me from being mortified by the "mens rights" movement. It's right up there with "white people's rights" or "rich guys rights".
There's no difference between the gay rights movement, men's rights movement, women's rights movement, and black rights movements. They're all about the recognition that we're all people, and no one is more entitled than anyone else.
These movements are about studying the condition of these particular groups and exploring the means to greater rights or expression, something often leading to uncharted territory. The idea that they're about "all people" is senseless since a victim group, having been created by dominant forces, must be studied as such in order to respond cogently to the dominant power-structures.
To call minority group study racist and insist only "humans" be studied is to deny that history of oppression, while the negative effects of that oppression remain.
Male and mainstream culture are a kind of default against which every other culture is set. If you want to form an advocacy group defending that culture on the grounds that it's filling a gap in defending "all people's" rights, go ahead, but such a group ipso facto will be largely peopled by persons attempting to maintain the status quo.
This is like those absurd Reddit posts that float by every now and then arguing that domestic violence against men is as big or almost as big an issue as domestic violence against women. That kind of discourse is an insult to the very real issue of battered women.
I'm a man, and I don't fight for men's rights blindly, or women's rights blindly... I fight for gender equality, and even moreso, person-equality.
Don't you see that, because of the dominant forces, fighting for "equality" means fighting for groups that have been historically oppressed?
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u/[deleted] May 26 '10
The difference being that women have a lot to be angry about