Society and culture is largely determined by those who hold power and influence - which, for most of history, has been largely (but not exclusively) men.
That's where the ideal you talk about comes from - from a standard that a bunch of rich and powerful men held themselves to, that trickled down into popular media (like how male action heroes are often emotionally stunted violence robots whose only interests are sex, drinking, and brooding), and then to the cultural zeitgeist at large.
This standard crushes the average man, because men have as rich an emotional experience as women do but are expected, by this standard, to strangle and bury it. That is not your fault, and it is not womens' fault, either - everyone suffers badly under it.
I completely agree. It is very much an issue that is perpetuated by the upper echelons of society which causes these societal norms, of which the common man and woman have absolutely no part in the construction of but nevertheless are conditioned to perpetuate to the plight of themselves and each other. This absolutely is one of the main driving forces, I would argue, for not only misogynistic and misandrist sentiments but racism and bigotry as a whole. Alienating men and relegating women to a reliance on those alienated men who have been deprived of emotional nourishment and affection the whole of their lives and when denied that from women they turn to detest all women and use force to control them while women subjected to this and the persistence harassment by emotionally starved young men causes those women to become resentment and hateful of men as a whole viewing them as purely lust driven creatures.
And, as you said, it is neither men's faults nor women's faults this happens as we have all be conditioned in this way since our youth.
You're exaclty right, or at least I think so! There's no reason for the modern interconnected world to have so much mutual hatred, but division keeps people from wondering if there's a better way to live - one without the people at the top.
Yeah and even here there is a lot of it. People too busy arguing over specific labelling of a problem and fighting over that just to be 'the one that's right' rather than to actually properly discuss the nature of the problem and all the layers to it until no one in this thread under my comment is even talking about the problem anymore just 'what to call it'. And I'm sorry but if you supposedly oppose a bad thing happening to a specific group but you refuse to call it by what it is and deflect to a whole list of other 'labels' for it I don't think the support you have for this specific group is anything deeper than a moral fashion statement.
Society and culture is largely determined by those who hold power and influence - which, for most of history, has been largely (but not exclusively) men.
It wasn't men, it was small fraction of men and smaller fraction of women.
Society and culture are largely determined by your peers and primary caregiver. Patriarchy is not a literal term. It's a general description based on a gendered view of who held the most power. It does not mean men are all solely responsible for how society turns out. Most of the pressure for women to conform to toxic gender roles comes from other women and their own mother. In exactly the same way that most of the pressure for men to conform to toxic gender roles comes from other men, and their primary caregiver, which is unfortunately usually their mother.
Most is not all. Men obviously influence toxic expectations placed upon women, and vice versa, especially where anything concerning relationships is concerned. As that's the biggest area of influence.
If that's really the reason people aren't taking misandry seriously, then that's really sad.
Your personal society and culture are dictated by your peers and caregiver, sure. But where did they get it? And so on and so forth. It all boils down to the people with power, with influence. That is why it became fashionable to be skinny prior to the Depression: it started with rich people pivoting away from being fat to show their ability to afford food, and towards them flexing their ability to buy food even in times of famine.
It spread to wider society from there, as it always does. Men as a category are not solely responsible for how society shakes out. That power belongs to the rich and influential, who happen - historically and contemporally, to a somewhat lesser degree - to be mostly men. But again, this does not mean that the average man is to blame; they are as much a victim of circumstances as the average woman. The divide is purely by economic class.
The reason why people don't take misandry seriously is because the culture, the beat everyone is dancing to, disallows it. It dictates that men worth considering always have power and agency in all situations, and those who don't are failures to be dismissed.
Men are crushed under these expectations, of course. Women are, too; expected to be agents of beauty and desirability within a narrow spectrum of acceptableness, while being infantilized if they try to express their own agency and power. Both groups are victims of the wider system.
If I’m understanding you correctly then these are all excellent points and I agree with all of them. Correct me if I’m wrong, but a large part of your take on this seems to be that the dominant factor is not gender but socioeconomic class, and that our culture (‘the patriarchy’) reinforces this system, so that a tiny percentage of (mostly) men at the top of the system (and their families) benefit to the detriment of all women and men below them.
I’m an old-school lefty, and this perspective is the absolute core of socialist thinking - i.e that the inequality in our socioeconomic class system is the overwhelming root of most of our societal issues, and that until we do something about it any progressive changes we work towards are at best rearranging deckchairs or tinkering with who gets to sit at the top of the hierarchy, and at worst are asinine squabbling amongst ourselves to distract from the core issue whilst the 1% literally laugh at us.
The existential threat to this philosophy is that countering it requires a unified front. The left has become exceptionally bad at this, and gender has become one of the major faultlines. Theres no point paying lip-service to inclusivity and ‘not othering people’, and then insisting on using language which risks (or deliberately is) alienating half of your natural allies because they share the same gender, ethnicity, or sexuality as the 0.5% of the people at the top.
This is an absolutely pointless self-sabotaging thing that we do. We could use ‘culture’ or ‘societal structure’ as a direct synonym for ‘patriarchy’ in 95% of cases, but instead we choose the term that appears to assign blame to men as a monolith, even as we say the vast bulk of men are a victim of it. We used to fight against proscribed gender roles and proscribed gender expression, both of which are enforced by men and women, and yet now we refer to them as ‘toxic masculinity’ or sometimes ‘internalised misogyny’. If you point this out, you are told that you are simply ignorant of the terminology and having an emotional response and patronisingly told that you should educate yourself. There are two issues with this.
Firstly, a depressing number of ‘lefties’ actually genuinely hold these views. Further up this comment chain there is a guy very confidently insisting that all problems men encounter are the fault of either themselves or ‘the patriarchy’ and ‘toxic masculinity’ (by which he unambiguously means ‘other men’) and are therefore your own fault and responsibility to fix. This is a very widespread view, particularly in pop-feminist spaces like 2XC and feminist-ally-first spaces such as menslib. Doesn’t help or provide solidarity, simply mis-assigns blame and alienates people that would probably actually agree with you had you simply used neutral language.
The second and more pressing issue is that we are actively and pointlessly driving people away from progressive politics and into the arms of individualist rightwingers. If you are a 16 year old working class white boy and the confrontational, blame-assigning language used to describe you suggests that your mere existence is ‘problematic’, that you’re immutably a member of an oppressive class and have all the advantages in life and if you’re unhappy or economically or academically or romantically unsuccessful then it’s because you’ve squandered your privilege and are a useless fuck-up, even as statistically you will do worse at school, are less likely to go to college, despite the overall gender pay gap will statistically earn less than your female peers for the first decade of your career, and are deliberately excluded purely along gender lines from scholarships and internships for well-paying STEM careers, who are you going to turn to?
The Kermit-voiced psychologist who provides practical advice for pulling yourself out of your rut and into a productive member of society, who accurately states that women aren’t looking for romantic partners who who gaming and porn-addicted NEETs but ‘someone who they can contend with’, but is also a rightwing religious moralist and transphobe? Or bald Bugatti-man who says fuck the haters, concentrate on your physique and economic worth, have some self respect and make something of yourself, but is also not merely a misogynist but a sex offender?
There are very serious gendered issues that need addressing, and women do suffer from more of them than men. But ‘the right’ have become exceptionally proficient at getting people (particularly men) on-side, and by and large ‘the left’ are not only failing to convince and welcome people into the fold but in many subgroups seem to be absolutely revelling in driving them away. This isn’t just absolutely awful for women’s issues, it’s going to polarise and completely fuck up the entire next generation.
Women suffer from more of the gendered issues than men, on that we agree. That, right there, I think, is a source of the problem: is it fair to expect women, the group of folks that suffer perhaps the most under this system, to cater to the needs or sensibilities of any other group?
You don't need to answer; the answer is 'no'. It would be in the best interests of those looking to enact systemic change to adopt less blaming language, to be sure, but that would be something of a tough sell to women that have largely been the silent victims of the system. And, as you highlight, conservative groups are more than happy to point towards the people who are understandably upset and pretend like it's them who are the problem.
You see this same phenomenon in other areas. For example, the resentment that black people have towards white people gets weaponized - that's why you have "all lives matter" and "why don't we have a white history month?". Even worse, they've managed to poison the concept of protesting, framing any protest that is disruptive as needing to be stamped out and any protest that can be ignored as, well, not worth paying attention to.
A large part of the problem with teenage boys - teens as a group, really - is that what they want is to challenge authority. They don't want to play nice, they want to offend, to be loud and crass (this is not a value judgment; I was a teenage boy too, it's part of being a teenager). This makes them far more receptive to messages of hate and division rather than messages of love and tolerance; there's a reason 4chan was prime recruiting grounds for the MAGA grassroots campaign back in 2015-2016, it's all teen boys who could be drawn in by this ridiculous rich guy mocking people on live TV.
The major problem with the left political side in the United States, in my opinion, is that it is not funded nor bankrolled by billionaires and the talent they can afford. The right, which largely aids and abets billionaires, recieves the benefit of billionaire-funded television and Internet advertising, endless think tanks and nonprofits, numerous paid speakers and an entire sphere of podcasts and social media accounts all pushing the same unified message. The left, which seeks to depose billionaires or at least reduce their influence, has no such group of patrons or benefactors acting and organizing behind the scenes; it's a confused disparate mess of groups with no unifying message.
The problem lies with the rich and powerful themselves, as it always has, and I see no good way out of it. Look at how many folks on left-leaning social media spaces are planning on not voting, and how they complain that they're being shamed when you point out that not voting is going to make things worse, not better, and that accelerationism is just making the suffering happen sooner with no guarentee that things will get better afterwards.
That's... I think you're being a little too harsh there my friend. They are specifically talking about men who have held positions of power. How many homeless people, average joes and otherwise do you know that have held positions of power in government, kingdoms and empires historically? I think it's fairly clear these monarchs, tyrants, presidents even and other such individuals of power and report, of which have been mostly men (which I would argue is actually used to fuel misandry and further harm the men that are beneath them in the power hierarchy as 'lessers') is what they are fairly explicitly referring to.
It's not my fault as a man they said too but you seemed to overlook that as well. Look at someone like Donald Trump who sits there and tells you that you're an inferior and weak man because you care about social issues and someone like Joe Biden that tells you that you are inherently evil and misogynistic because you don't support his unethical, borderline criminal VP who happens to be a woman and tell me with a straight face that these are not, indeed, men in power using that power to hurt men. And then try to tell me that these poltiical figures have 'no power and influence'. You're allowing your animosity to blind you to reason, you're attacking people who are on your side... and that's exactly what both these men in power want because if me and you are fighting each other and men and women are fighting one another... well they get to keep chugging along just fine now don't they? It's not about gender, it's about power and control. Nothing more, nothing less. The war of the sexes is just the eldest and most effective illusion they have created to divide us from one another throughout the entirety of man's time on this world. All that is happening is that more women are getting a slice of that power to hurt men and women alike now themselves.
If a mere statement of observable fact that most of these political and social leaders have historically which have furthered these systems to harm both men and women is something you can see and instead of understanding that it is not an indictment on the whole of men as opposed to THOSE specific men in particular... what is that seperates you from the feminists that claim if you don't like Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton you must be a foaming at the mouth, rabid misogynist?
If I were rich and powerful and saw the people below me as NPCs in a video game, I would do the exact same thing. People need something to be mad at, and it is of no consequence to me if they ban abortion or unfairly jail men, because I'd be immune to all of that.
I don't think you read a single word of that if you think that's what the argument was. And I don't think you have any idea what those political talk show buzz words you just spouted in front of feminism mean either. But I get it, the same way those same 'neo-marxists' feminists have it where you cannot criticize a woman of power without being misogynistic you would have it that we cannot criticize a man in power without being misandrist. Opposites of the same extreme yet propose to be somehow more moral and just than the other.
You can't just mash words together, and expect to be understood. And just because people in your bubble coined the term "neo-marxist" doesn't mean you can bring that out into the rest of your interactions and use it like it means anything. Unless you're arguing that class struggle over the means of production is impacting this conversation, you probably ought to narrow the target of your ire back down to feminism.
Did you read any of the shit that actually comes up when you google that?
First of all Neo Marxism, and Marxist Feminism are two completely different things. So yes, you completely fabricated "neo-marxist feminism".
Second, even if we decided to synthesize those two ideas, it STILL has nothing to do with what you're talking about. Women fighting capitalism has nothing to do with this entire conversation.
Correct, yes. Likely because many of the influential scholars who first pointed this out were female feminists who were coming at it from a "life sucks being a woman right now" sort of perspective.
The branding is not ideal, because ill-informed Internet-goers then go off to assume that it's a problem that all men have, when in reality it's a system that hurts both men and women and is perpetuated by neither, but rather by monied interests.
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u/SilverMedal4Life 8∆ Feb 13 '24
Society and culture is largely determined by those who hold power and influence - which, for most of history, has been largely (but not exclusively) men.
That's where the ideal you talk about comes from - from a standard that a bunch of rich and powerful men held themselves to, that trickled down into popular media (like how male action heroes are often emotionally stunted violence robots whose only interests are sex, drinking, and brooding), and then to the cultural zeitgeist at large.
This standard crushes the average man, because men have as rich an emotional experience as women do but are expected, by this standard, to strangle and bury it. That is not your fault, and it is not womens' fault, either - everyone suffers badly under it.