I hear ya. I ain’t doing too bad recently myself but I know how that goes.
I think it’s important to recognise the types that can be reached and the issues involved and break things down. There are legitimate problems that affect blokes and need addressing. And there are guys that might be salty about the way their life’s turned out and be looking for a convenient scapegoat. I’m deliberately leaving out the real hate-spouting assholes here as I don’t believe they can be reasoned with.
These things can be fixed by a feminist approach, but I don’t think it’s the “job” of feminist ideology to directly address it, if you see what I mean. Rather, this is something I think that male feminists and allies can do. People like you and me, doing it the way we think is best, either through addressing issues where dudes are let down, engaging directly and campaigning or by shooting down hateful bullshit on forums while offering a sympathetic ear to anyone who shows signs of wanting to engage.
And I see people doing that pretty well here.
I’m mostly just repeating stuff that’s been said upthread anyway but I see it as a complex issue with a very simple, but difficult solution.
I’m going to don my crash helmet and water wings and wade in with my two cents on this one.
I have three elder sisters and was raised by a single mother as a feminist. I will pull up my male friends and coworkers when I think they are being misogynistic even when it’s supposed to be “banter” (gods, I dislike that term), because it irks me in the same way as casual racism. I like to think (and I know this comes from a position of white male privilege) that I am an “ally” in that I believe that feminist socialism is our best chance as a collection of societies to move things to a more equal, positive place for everyone involved.
However, I tend to steer clear of discussions of feminism online because certain terms have become so loaded (and the people involved so defensive) that the response to any sort of attempt at dialogue is met, more often than not, by hostility.
This is less of a problem on BB than in the wilds of the internet but even typing this out I’m nervous that the reaction to this post will be more “heat” and less “light”.
Terms such as “privilege” and “mansplaining” are very useful ways to describe social phenomena but they are also frequently used to shut willing participants out of the discussion. My reaction is to think “well, ok; my input is not wanted here” and to carry on trying to live my life as best as I can.
For a lot of men, however, I suspect that the defensiveness and (quite righteous) anger they get in response to their opinions is perceived as hostility, and when combined with a subconscious fear of loss of privilege, this causes them to double down on the misogyny and helps to “radicalise” them as MRAs or whatever stupid acronym they’re using these days to normalise their bigotry.
The media is particularly guilty of fomenting this reaction. When was the last time you heard or read a balanced feminist viewpoint in the mainstream media? Even the Guardian, that supposed bastion of left-wing progressive thought, realised a while ago that the more extreme the feminist point of view they put across, the more pageviews they get from angry MRAs eager to tell the columnist how wrong she is/threaten her with violence. The comments section on the Graun is one of the most hateful and unpleasant places on the internet, and I don’t think that’s accidental.
More often than not, I think it’s more that we’d like to be listened to and we’ve already experienced quite a lot of being talked over, ignored, or outright dismissed, or our input NOT being wanted in our daily lives, no matter what the topic. It’s probably not person, but comes from serious frustrations.
Right, instead of being chastised, if rhetoric is the problem, sidestep and mention specific, tangible issues that can be improved upon.
Better sex education for boys, removal of rape culture from popular media and what it is to be a man, better mental health care for everyone… there’s plenty of stuff to improve the lives of men but it involves acknowledging women and how men treat men.
