Dienervent

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"Slaves do not dream of freedom. When their eyes sadden at the gleam of gold, they are not pining to be free. They want slaves of their own."

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Dienervent OP , (edited )

Why is it that practically everyone I interact with on kbin is basically an irony machine. Are you at least self aware of the irony. Or is it just something you do instinctively?

One of my points is that all of these things are things that SHOULD bother you but men tend to downplay or refuse to let it bother them out of some sort of bravado.

So saying that this doesn't bother you makes it seem to me like you didn't understand what I said or didn't make it clear enough.

If you disagree with my point that this is something that should bother you, then please explain why.

Because if you're not going to be constructively contributing to the conversation then why are you even saying anything?

Edit: changed machismo to bravado. It's more accurate.

Also. PS:

I change my mind, it's not something that should bother you. You're perfectly entitled to be bothered or not bothered by whatever it is you damn well please.

But it is something that bothers many men. It is something that I believe many men are bothered by without being particularly self aware of. And insist that it is something that needs to be addressed to help society move forwards to more egalitarian outcomes and hopefully just generally more harmonious relationships between different people.

Dienervent OP , (edited )

I agree with pretty much everything you've said, except your characterization of my intentions, motivations and inner thoughts.

It's absolutely not my intention to tell men how they should feel. Nor is it my intention to imply that the only thing wrong with those things I mentionned is the names that they are given.

But I understand now, that I really should have made that more clear.

I do maintain that the terminology is hurting men's mental health in general. And I do suggest that on that basis alone there is sufficient justification to ask that we stop using this terminology.

One of the primary motivations behind this is to remove one of the more powerful tools misandrist have at their disposal by using of equivocation with that terminology.

I'll do a bit of a point by point of the rest of your post to try and explain why my approach has potential. But clearly it's not getting the kind of traction I was hoping for.

It's wrong to use because it's intentionally insulting and sexist

To me that's functionally equivalent to hurt feelings. I don't presume to claim that this is the intention of everyone that uses the phrase "toxic masculinity" but I strongly suspect that most of them know what they're doing.

"Patriarchy" we should absolutely keep talking about, because it's a very popular brainwashing ...

Only under certain definitions of patriarchy. Under other definitions of patriarchy it means very different things. I suspect that the closer you get to where policy makers are, the less sense this argument will make. I've had a few arguments with "academic feminists" end with them saying that only right-wing reactionary lunatics thinks that anyone believes the interpretation of Patriarchy you just used.

Arguing the merits of the meaning behind the word Patriarchy is futile, every version of Patriarchy has been debunked all the way to the deepest depth of academia. Except for the vary latest interpretation that hasn't had the time to get debunked yet.

It doesn't matter, it's going to be equivocation all the way back up to the politician and/or business executive that will be implementing policy that end up unjustly negatively affecting men's lives.

Take away their ability to use the word on the basis that hurts your feelings and they can't do equivocation anymore. They have to speak directly to the merit of the thing and there is none, which gives us a much better fighting chance.

Letting most feminists "rebrand" into egalitarianism will just make egalitarianism the same sexist dumpster fire.

I could be wrong here, but I disagree. Language is much more powerful than this very few of the misandrists will be willing to transfer to a different label, they'll lose so much of their power. The more moderates we can convince to let go of the feminist label the more blatantly and unacceptably radically misandrist those that remain will be.

The way I see it, feminism is a full blown industry that informs decision makers who want to try to make sensible moral decisions (because they have no morals of their own). It's an industry that these decision makers rely on and has taken decades to build up. I hypothesize that to really get some real world change happening we need to either reform the existing infrastructure or build an alternative one. I just don't see building an alternative as something that's feasible. I believe that feminism got to where it is because it organically grew out of the void left behind by the loss of religious morality.

So I think that to have some real success, we need to rebuild the existing infrastructure. Think "regulatory capture", not "revolution". I think maybe starting with nomenclature is the best first step.

... all these men you keep throwing names and adjectives at when they don't agree with you?

The guy was flippant towards me, I was flippant in return in my own way. I spent a lot of thought and effort into my post and someone that just replies to that with "Buzz off" doesn't really deserve that much respect.

As for why you get pushback saying these things, it's very clearly because you presume to tell men what they are and should be feeling

Again, not my intention, but I see how it came across that way, I should have qualified what I said better.

Dienervent OP ,

Did you not read everything I just replied to you? How am I ignoring the real life sexist impact the statements have. The whole point of my whole thing is to try and have more tools to fight that off.

But yes, I consider "it gets on my nerves" as having hurt feelings. You at least got that one right.

Dienervent OP ,

I really like this take. What I was trying to go for is sort of a simple universal complaint anyone can make, even in a formal setting vs highly educated and potentially bad faith actors.

Like, imagine you're in a marketing strategy meeting about finding a socially responsible way to engage with your customers. Your company has hired a consultant to help with this and that consultant starts using that terminology.

If you try just using a rational argument, it's just not going to work. These things have already been debated ad nauseum and you're not going to come up with something the consultant hasn't heard before and isn't ready to counter.

But if you start with "It just gets on my nerves". That's subjective, the consultant can't argue about that. You also have a rational (at least to you) justification so you're not being unreasonable. The consultant could try to argue that your justification is incorrect but they'd just be wasting everyone's time, it won't change the fact that "it just gets on my nerves" something the consultant can't argue against.

The point is to create a social cost to using that terminology so that in any kind of formal setting that terminology won't be used and more gender neutral terminology comes in to replace it.

I believe that gender neutral terminology alone can really temper the outcome of these kinds of discussion because it just changes the whole "vibe" of the discussion which can lead to real world change. But beyond that, it makes it more difficult for misandrists to use equivocation, and the gender neutral terminology should level the battlefield when arguing against misandrists.

Dienervent OP ,

I've clarified this to you already in my reply AND I've clarified it in an edit of my original post.

Read my words, "I unreservedly assert that the damage caused by those three things I mentioned is far more than just "hurt feelings""

Any impression I may have given that I believe otherwise or would want others to believe otherwise is completely unintentional.

Was that sufficiently clear and direct for you? I'm on the edge of my seat waiting to see how you'll manage to mischaracterize this one.

Dienervent OP ,

I have no problem with these terms. Toxic masculinity is a descriptive term for a harmful set of behaviors. It’s good to have descriptive terms.

Ok so it doesn't bother you... Who cares? It bothers ME and many other men. For comparison, the N-word doesn't really bother me personally in of itself. But I don't use it, I wouldn't tolerate anyone else using it in my presence because I know how much it bothers other people and what it means to them.

When it comes to "Toxic Masculinity". I personally find this terminology EXTREMELY insulting, reductive and I think it's harmful to the general gender discourse. If you have any empathy in you, I'd like you to consider trying to use alternatives. And I'm far from the only one who feels this way. Seriously, I find that terminology truly disgusting.

Someone who generalizes “toxic masculinity” to all male behavior is just wrong, and would be with or without the term.

Yes, and that's another huge problem. People get things wrong all the time. And in this case it can actually be quite harmful. All I'm asking is that you use less pejorative terminology.

And one of the weirdest thing with this one is the irony.

So I just did a web search for what is toxic masculinity. According to that page, one of the defining traits is this one:

Antifeminity: This involves the idea that men should reject anything that is considered to be feminine, such as showing emotion or accepting help.

Men in general will be averse to expressing their concerns because they're worried it will make them appear weak, emotional or feminine.

That's why it's so important for those of us engaged in the gender discourse to choose our terminology in an empathic and considerate manner.

It’s good to have descriptive terms.

And that is also my point. "Toxic" is not descriptive. Go search online for the word and I guarantee you that you'll find a ton of stuff trying to sell you useless things an mischaracterizing how bad the thing they're trying to "cure" really is and mischaracterizing in what way that thing is bad.

"Toxic Masculinity" is ripe for misinterpretation and I would never qualify it as being "descriptive".

Harmful gender expectations is descriptive. It's true that it may not be appropriate for all circumstances where someone might use "Toxic Masculinity" and that's a good thing. It's because it actually is a descriptive term, whereas "Toxic Masculinity" is kinda of an amorphous catch all term. It is not descriptive.

To put it in a different context. Let's say someone mentions "The problem of lazy Mexicans". And I tell him, please don't say that: it's racist. And the guy replies:

You misunderstood me. I was in no way implying that Mexicans are lazy. I was talking about a very well researched phenomenon that due to a combination of cultural and climate influences many Mexicans find themselves adopting a set of counterproductive behaviors. There is ample research on this and what steps can be taken to go from a lazy Mexican to a prosperous Mexican.

Unfortunately, changing habits and long held traditions is psychologically difficult to accept even when the benefits are so clear. This is why so many Mexicans seem to be focusing on the terminology instead of the actual discourse as some kind of ego defense mechanism.

Other than those reactionary Mexicans no one interprets it this way. So we're not going to start rewriting all of our literature just for this.

‘Toxic masculinity’ is toxic terminology — The Centre for Male Psychology ( www.centreformalepsychology.com )

As I psychologist, I’m concerned about mental health, especially the mental health of men and boys because it’s been overlooked for so long. Because there was so little interest in how much the negative discourse around masculinity impacts boys, my colleagues and I ran a survey. We found that around 85% of respondents...

Dienervent ,

I've actually never seen feminists use "sexist gender expectations and roles” but maybe I don't frequent them enough. The term I've more commonly seen is "internalized misogyny". Because why waste an opportunity to imply that men are the cause of all the problems?

Dienervent ,

While it's true that the term was coined during men's movements of the 80s/90s, it had a different contextual meaning then: more like a counterfeit male code to be contrasted with the idea of a true "deep" masculinity.

This is true, but also I think these guys really hated the Arnold Schwarzenegger types. Even if they had a healthier idea of masculinity that they wanted to promote. It's possible that the term itself was born out of hatred.

Generally, if someone's telling me that something is "toxic", I just assume that they're trying to sell me something that I really shouldn't buy unless I have some serious proof to the contrary.

Dienervent ,

I suggest you use the terminology "harmful gender expectations" it's a bit more of a mouthful and it's less catchy. But then again the reason "toxic masculinity" is catchy is because it creates a strong negative emotional reaction in a discussion that should be intellectual or empathetic.

Dienervent ,

Women have more purchasing power than men. That men earn more money is a reflects the reality that men work more than women. That women spend more may indicate that men earn that the money earned is on behalf of women.

But do women spend money on behalf of men or do they spend it on their own behalf. When a woman goes to do groceries, is it just for her or is it for the whole family. If women primarily spend money for themselves then that indicates they have the power, but if they spend it on behalf of their husband, then that's just work they do for their husband.

Let's say women do in fact only spend money on behalf of their family and not for themselves. They're still faced with a wide variety of options at the food aisle. One thing that massively influences the choices they make here is marketing. Marketing funds the vast majority of media which in turns structures discussions in the public sphere. And all of it would then be structured to predominantly appeal to women.

All of the things I mentioned could be an accurate and prominent reflection of what happens in society. I believe we are literally over a hundred years away from having the proper scientific tools and cultural maturity to be able to conclusively determine the extend of the influence of such abstract ideas on society.

In feudal times, aristocrats were more powerful than the serfs. This was self evident from their quality of life and what aristocrats were allowed to get away with in their treatment of the serfs.

The difference in power between men and women is so small today that it is impossible to conclusively determine which is more powerful. Especially in the context of so much complex forces at play.

All this to say that income can't be used to conclusive determine "power" especially among the middle class.

And for the second point, your assumption that "power" (based on money/income) follows a normal distribution. There's just so much stuff wrong with it, I'll just point to the fact that the vast majority of people that live on the street are men completely refutes your interpretation.

But for more clarification, a normal distribution (usually also called a Gaussian Distribution) has two parameters: the mean and the variance.

If you look at the high end of distribution M and you find a much greater population than at the same location of distribution M, then it could be caused by a increased mean, or by an increased variance or a certain combination of the two. If you find increased population on both the low end and then high end, then you definitely have higher variance. If you look at total income from work only, it seems that men have slightly increased mean and vastly increased variance.

My currently running hypothesis is that it's the lack of a proper social safety net that scares men into earning as much as possible, and the competition for mating that causes them to transfer vast amounts of wealth to women as well as seek top income levels. By contrast, women have many safety net options should they fail to acquire their desired level of independent income, and so don't have the same level of motivation to gain high income status.

Dienervent ,

I'd add that the poorest people are also men.

Dienervent ,

From a practical perspective, if someone for example takes the stance that if you're not a feminist you're a sexist and refuses the label of egalitarian. Then they're obviously the sexist one.

From a more theoretical but still really important perspective, life is a quite a bit more complicated than that.

Two person may believe different facts about the world, and as a result have opposite expectations for how an egalitarian person should behave. Obviously in this situation at least one of them would be wrong, but in practice, getting all the facts right is hard enough that I expect that often times both people aren't completely right about their facts.

Even if both persons are egalitarian minded and have the same facts, they can have different ways to interpret these facts (aka they have different ideologies), which can again lead to them having opposite expectations for how an egalitarian person should act. I'd argue that some ideologies are much more suspect than others, unsurprisingly I tend to find feminist ideologies extremely suspect.

Even if both persons have the same facts AND they interpret them in the same ways. They may value different things which would again lead to different expectation as to how an egalitarian person should act.

Of course anti-egalitarians who want to leverage the political power of presenting themselves as egalitarian will use all three of these as tools to hide their true agenda.

I feel like less of a man because of how emotionally sensitive I am.

I don’t know how else to describe it, but all my male friends and family are very unemotional. Not in the sense that they don’t feel anything, but that they are a lot better at handling them and I feel like I’m not. I’ve tried meditation, therapy, healthy eating and a better sleep schedule but nothing works. I still...

Dienervent ,

I just don't have time to do a proper response right now. I think pretty much everything you've said is incredibly helpful and I can only speak for myself here, but I hope you stick around.

Except one thing. Blaming it all on the patriarchy. I'm pretty sure that it's not your intent, but I think this is not a good thing to do, especially when speaking to a vulnerable man. I'm sure you have your definition of what the patriarchy is and that it clarifies why what you said is perfectly reasonable, but from the perspective of a vulnerable man hearing "patriarchy" this and "toxic masculinity" that (which to your credit, you didn't say the latter), rationally or not leads many to start seeing masculinity itself as problematic. Which for vulnerable men, especially those with anxiety issues leads to self loathing and a lot worse problems down the road.

Frankly, I think, when trying to help vulnerable men, you should make sure to keep feminist ideology out of it. Otherwise you risk making things worse, not in a big hit, but in a death of a thousand cuts kind of way.

Does that make sense?

Dienervent ,

Contrary to your perspective here, I think it is useful to examine the social context, including how gender is systemically wielded to reinforce power structures that were designed to support the lifestyles of a select few. Living in a patriarchal society doesn't mean you inherently benefit simply by being a man. It's more about putting you into a box so you behave as expected and perform the roles pushed onto you. Having narrow definitions of masculinity or femininity and strictly defined gender roles (no crossing over!) are a big part of building and maintaining those boxes for everyone.

This is not contrary to my perspective. I completely agree with this. I disagree with naming the cause of this problem "patriarchy". I consider this to be engaging in victim blaming.

Dienervent ,

This IS progress. Much better than the previous but simpler definition that went like "Feminism is a movement that fights for gender equality for women". Which is a bit of a oxymoron if you ask me.

The next step is to recognize that cultural norms that harms people on the basis of gendered expectations isn't uniquely or even primarily caused by an elite few, but is a systemic wide cultural problem for which both men and women are responsible. Using "patriarchy" as the term to refer to this problem is a best misleading, causes unnecessary division and leads to a certain myopia when looking at how to address the problem.

The step after that is that it is obviously absurd to name a gender equality movement after only one of the genders. Again this alienates certain groups of people and prevents them from contributing to the conversation on an equal footing.

But in practice, that's not what's going to happen. There's not going to be a flipped switch and everyone agrees to stop using the word patriarchy to refer to the ills of society or to rename feminism to something else. Instead, little by little, the more sensible people recognize these issues and individually choose to no longer use the patriarchy and feminist terminologies. Until the only the only people left still willing to call themselves feminists will be the most radical of misandrists.

Dienervent ,

This might give you a case of déjà-vue, but "harmful gender expectations" is a pretty good alternative. It doesn't cover all the reasons why someone might want to use the term patriarchy, but it covers a large portion of them, in particular it does cover the use of it in this thread that set off all this discussion.

And I think using clearer more precise terms depending on circumstances would be greatly beneficial. The terms patriarchy seems easily misunderstood and misused and I've seen many people go so far as to believe that the term is intentionally misused or intentionally misunderstood.

On a somewhat related topic, what do you think of male privilege. Are men a privileged class?

There was a guy in this thread that talked about how acknowledging his male privilege literally saved his life (I'm exaggerating). But he also had the misfortune of using the word "Toxic" followed by the word "Masculinity" without any irony and therefore suffered the wrath of our merciless mod.

I spent 30 minutes preparing a reply before I realized there was nothing left to reply to, I ended up sending it to him in a dm. But you seem to have a bit more advanced understanding of these topics so I'm curious what you think of this one.

why i think that men dont align with feminism and the left at large ( kbin.social )

so overtime i have been seeing the left after the convo's about men's place in society, and it has been dismal. There was this video of a trans man talking about the loneliness of men went viral on TikTok and A channel named Aba and Preach covered it from their perspective (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZF7k9nVNRw&t=1088s)...

Dienervent ,

The modern political left has become extremely anti-egalitarian on the gender axis: they discriminate against men.

And they do it relatively openly, though they rarely, if ever, explicitly admit to it and they often claim to be gender egalitarians.

But if you're going to make a post talking about the misandry found in the left, without mentioning the equal amounts of misandry found on the right, then I find that to be a little disingenuous.

Many of men's greatest issues like effective access to mental health care, effective social safety net, accessible and welcoming social environments of neurodivergent men etc... Are all things that are being fought against by the right.

This is going to be speculative, but when you recognize the amount of money in government and how the left has historically been trying to provide social safety nets for everyone, you can see that this creates certain social pressures. If there's a lot of money in helping people, then there's going to be a feedback loop of people financially interested in promoting even more investments in helping people.

The right tends to stand in opposition to this. And what the left has learned is that while the right will be willing to burn everything down just to stop a tiny little welfare project that helps everyone, it turns out that if this welfare project only helps women, then the right won't stand in its way, it may even be supportive of it. This has created a massive industry that focuses on helping only women. Some of the money involved ends up for the promotion of misandrist ideologies that help to legitimize programs that help exclusively women, because that's where the money is.

My perspective is that leftist type people want to help men and women equality. But the right makes it impossible. Over time, this situation combined with the sustained power of money has warped leftist ideology away from what they'd ideally want to see.

The right is just as much to blame for all this as the left. I would argue it is even more to blame for it.

Welcome to /m/men! ( kbin.social )

I just stepped down as moderator from all five of the subreddits I used to moderate over on Reddit. I just can't ethically justify continued activity on Reddit, and especially free volunteer labour for an openly greedy company that is engaged in scummy behaviour, forcing mods to open protesting communities or be demoted....

Dienervent ,

Hopefully it will be like the subreddits he moderated. They turned out quite nicely. Unapologetically advocating for men from an egalitarian perspective while also being unapologetic about defending against the misandrist detractors, a large number of whom call themselves feminists and leverage feminist ideology.

Dienervent ,

The concept of patriarchy refers to a social system in which men hold primary power and women are marginalized. While the degree and manifestation of patriarchy may vary across cultures and societies, if you examine a list of presidents, CEOs, top academics, and billionaires it's difficult to conclude women are given equal treatment-unless you genuinely believe women are inferior, and so have achieved less.

Ugh, new forum, same old story. And I just don't have the patience of go through yet another rabbit whole with yet another pseudo-academic online feminist.

I've done it enough that I've given up hope on breaking through all that brainwashing. I reply to you, but not for you. This reply is for anyone else reading this who still has the capability of independent thought.

"men hold primary power": There's multiple interpretation of that phrase, and feminists leverage this to both claim that patriarchy is everywhere and imply that it creates inequality in favor of men. Once you disambiguate the phrase, you quickly find out that both are rarely true at the same time.

Specifically:
A) "men hold primary power" means that men as a class wield the power of how society function. They, as a class, make the rules. And they do so only understanding their own needs and desires and as a result, they rule to the benefit of men at the expense of women.

The opposite interpretation is:
B) The positions of authority are held by men, but they do not wield this authority on their own behalf, they wield it on behalf of stakeholders where one the most important of which is women. As a result the authorities create a society that primarily oppresses men to the benefit of women.

So feminists like GravyMan like to go around claiming that we live in a patriarchy by mentioning male billionaires, top politicians etc... And then usually they imply that this means that there is inequality that favors men and oppresses women. They usually only imply it because this gives them wiggle room to wiggle out of the claim. Here he didn't straight out claim a direct link of inequality he just said "it's difficult to conclude [the opposite]", but that's a difficult one to wiggle out of.

So yes, obviously, the prevalence of men in positions of power implies that we live in some kind of patriarchy for some definition of patriarchy. But the question is: which definition is the one that applies to our society?

And if you look at the rates of completed suicide, the rates of homelessness, the rates of homicide victims and more recently post secondary education. Then contrast this with social efforts to help victims of violence, suicide risks, education opportunities that are gendered for the benefit of women. It becomes quite clear that we're far closer to definition B) than we are to definition A).

Furthermore, people like me, who are concerned with the general trend of callousness towards men and accompanying misleading ideology that takes away empathy and aid resources from those men, we don't like the term "Patriarchy". We see how it is misused to imply things that are not true about the way society function. And we see how it's definition is so malleable and routinely exploited to the detriment of men. So we try to condemn its use wherever we see it.

While I agree with OPs three other points. I don't generally like to spend much time on them. I think ideas are more important than labels.

And at the end of the day there is just one core concept that can unravel all of the misandry found within feminism. And I can summarize it in a simple question:

What happened to your empathy and compassion for men?

Dienervent ,

You are correct.

Especially in this case I probably judged GravyMan prematurely. He's using detailed definitions and explanations which I usually attribute to "Academic types" who have years of in depth experience in the topic and can't possibly be completely blind to the double standards present within feminism. But looking back, his statements are more like feministm 101 type statements, so it's actually believable that he just doesn't have any in depth understanding of what he's talking about.

So I definitely should have taken a far more charitable approach.

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