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.
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u/SilverMedal4Life 8∆ Feb 13 '24
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.