> I want men to become feminists. I get why they don’t, though. Because almost every time I engage with feminist media, the thinking part of me has to convince the feeling part of me that I’m safe.
> This post is a long reflection on why that is, and what to do about it; on how to build a feminism that actually feels like it’s for men too, instead of just telling them so.
I get this desire. I really do. I don't share it though.
I want something that's either a little more, or a little different, and I'm not really sure which. I want a separate movement, that does its thing for men the way that feminism does its thing for women, and I want those two movements to be comfortably allied to each other. Obviously feminists can be their feminist selves while at times doing things that help me with my issues; I think if they can't, feminism has already failed. But I also don't think that feminism, the movement as a whole, can be itself while prioritizing my problems, or even putting those problems on the same level as the problems that women face. Because those problems, the ones that feminism exists to address, are real and serious and require dedicated work to fix. But they're also incomplete, as a list of problems facing humanity as a whole.
I want us to get to a place where we see that these aren't mutually exclusive. It's ok to pick particular problems and specialize in them - more than ok, it's our (nonexclusive, see also ants et al) superpower as a species; we've kind of started to understand that. I wish we could get a little further, and start to be ok with other people picking other problems to work on.
I totally get this perspective, I just see it as more of a semantic difference than a substantive disagreement. We both see two truths. We want to advocate both of them, to whichever portion of society doesn't see one or the other. Which we choose to amplify at which time will of course be context dependent, and yes, we can all specialize in the piece of the puzzle we see most clearly, or that our experiences best inform. But whether we mentally group them both under the same ideological label of "feminism" or separate them into distinct movements seems less important to me than the fact that both are true and ought to be amplified.
If feminism exists to empower women, men's struggles are external to it. If feminism exists to smash the patriarchy, men's struggles are part of it. But either way, men's struggles under patriarchy are real and deserve empathy, and media trivializing, mocking, or misrepresenting those struggles is problematic imo. And either way, we need to convince men currently hostile to feminism to be less hostile to it, which may be accelerated if we can show how it benefits them too. A singular movement for gender liberation - enabling both men and women to be more traditionally "feminine" without being stigmatized - seems like a more inclusive and uplifting vision to me than a separate movement, in part because the existing "men's rights" movements seem so toxically branded - but I'm open to suggestions on what else to call it. (r/MensLib is a decent community I've found for this).
On the one hand, this is fair. On the other hand, I am a pedant and a splitter! On the gripping hand, there's no real need to take over someone else's comment section to argue that my definitions are "the" best way to look at things, so I'll leave off with that.
I definitely agree that "men's rights", and almost all things associated with it, are incredibly toxic for reasons that are hard for me to discern. It is always good to hear about non-toxic zones for dealing with these sorts of problems; I just wish the signposting was better. It feels wrong to try to group what we could loosely call "men's lib" under the banner of feminism, though, because of the prioritization problem I was talking about. If feminism does make these things first-order priorities, then it feels like it's lost the plot on being "the movement that helps women". But if it doesn't, then overcoming sexism is a second order priority when the main victims are men. To me the natural solution is to build up an allied movement that does the "men's lib" stuff, and say that the two together are necessary to fully overcome sexism.
The ADL and the NAACP can coexist without major problems, so why can't we do something similar in this arena?
(And to be clear, I agree that we almost certainly agree on things with material impacts, but ADHD and/or The Thing has created in me an instinct to treat all feedback from others as necessarily *requiring* some sort of response, which I need to affirmatively overcome in order to let a conversation actually end.)
Have you just tapped into why certain demographic(s) are rabidly attacking our V.P. with memes that promulgate the old stereotype that only women who sleep with the bosses get ahead? Hmm?
> I want men to become feminists. I get why they don’t, though. Because almost every time I engage with feminist media, the thinking part of me has to convince the feeling part of me that I’m safe.
> This post is a long reflection on why that is, and what to do about it; on how to build a feminism that actually feels like it’s for men too, instead of just telling them so.
I get this desire. I really do. I don't share it though.
I want something that's either a little more, or a little different, and I'm not really sure which. I want a separate movement, that does its thing for men the way that feminism does its thing for women, and I want those two movements to be comfortably allied to each other. Obviously feminists can be their feminist selves while at times doing things that help me with my issues; I think if they can't, feminism has already failed. But I also don't think that feminism, the movement as a whole, can be itself while prioritizing my problems, or even putting those problems on the same level as the problems that women face. Because those problems, the ones that feminism exists to address, are real and serious and require dedicated work to fix. But they're also incomplete, as a list of problems facing humanity as a whole.
I want us to get to a place where we see that these aren't mutually exclusive. It's ok to pick particular problems and specialize in them - more than ok, it's our (nonexclusive, see also ants et al) superpower as a species; we've kind of started to understand that. I wish we could get a little further, and start to be ok with other people picking other problems to work on.
I totally get this perspective, I just see it as more of a semantic difference than a substantive disagreement. We both see two truths. We want to advocate both of them, to whichever portion of society doesn't see one or the other. Which we choose to amplify at which time will of course be context dependent, and yes, we can all specialize in the piece of the puzzle we see most clearly, or that our experiences best inform. But whether we mentally group them both under the same ideological label of "feminism" or separate them into distinct movements seems less important to me than the fact that both are true and ought to be amplified.
If feminism exists to empower women, men's struggles are external to it. If feminism exists to smash the patriarchy, men's struggles are part of it. But either way, men's struggles under patriarchy are real and deserve empathy, and media trivializing, mocking, or misrepresenting those struggles is problematic imo. And either way, we need to convince men currently hostile to feminism to be less hostile to it, which may be accelerated if we can show how it benefits them too. A singular movement for gender liberation - enabling both men and women to be more traditionally "feminine" without being stigmatized - seems like a more inclusive and uplifting vision to me than a separate movement, in part because the existing "men's rights" movements seem so toxically branded - but I'm open to suggestions on what else to call it. (r/MensLib is a decent community I've found for this).
On the one hand, this is fair. On the other hand, I am a pedant and a splitter! On the gripping hand, there's no real need to take over someone else's comment section to argue that my definitions are "the" best way to look at things, so I'll leave off with that.
I definitely agree that "men's rights", and almost all things associated with it, are incredibly toxic for reasons that are hard for me to discern. It is always good to hear about non-toxic zones for dealing with these sorts of problems; I just wish the signposting was better. It feels wrong to try to group what we could loosely call "men's lib" under the banner of feminism, though, because of the prioritization problem I was talking about. If feminism does make these things first-order priorities, then it feels like it's lost the plot on being "the movement that helps women". But if it doesn't, then overcoming sexism is a second order priority when the main victims are men. To me the natural solution is to build up an allied movement that does the "men's lib" stuff, and say that the two together are necessary to fully overcome sexism.
The ADL and the NAACP can coexist without major problems, so why can't we do something similar in this arena?
(And to be clear, I agree that we almost certainly agree on things with material impacts, but ADHD and/or The Thing has created in me an instinct to treat all feedback from others as necessarily *requiring* some sort of response, which I need to affirmatively overcome in order to let a conversation actually end.)
Have you just tapped into why certain demographic(s) are rabidly attacking our V.P. with memes that promulgate the old stereotype that only women who sleep with the bosses get ahead? Hmm?