My apologies for the bad link to the URL on the UK boys study. I've been in meetings all day and didn't see everyone's emails pointing it out. The link has been fixed but here is the link to the study https://www.equimundo.org/resources/the-state-of-uk-boys/
My favorite line: “But the reality is that if your sense of well-being was predicated on the misery of your partner, you didn’t have well-being in the first place. What you had was a lie.”
I’m tired of placating. By answering “what about men” with answers about how men benefit too, it still centers men in a way. Let us be free because it will be good for you. It reminds me of womens groups/clubs/schools, etc that say “men can join too” when asked. It’s a combo of reflexive niceness and consideration for them, even as it harms us because we are thereby decentered. Because IME when men enter the conversation, they take over. I’ve seen this in a hundred contexts and situations. Not their fault, it’s cultural. They’re taught to speak up, we’re taught to be “nice” and give them space to speak. But honestly sometimes you need to hold the line. You need to be able to say, this isn’t about them. This isn’t for them. This is for us. We matter. They need to step aside. Sometimes you need to hang a sign on the door saying “women and girls only” or even “not men” and relax into that like taking a long shower without worrying about who’s taking care of the baby. (Should go without saying, trans women are women; non binary, gender fluid and intersex people are not men.)
“There are over 28,008 gis analysts currently employed in the United States. 27.3% of all gis analysts are women, while 72.7% are men.” My husband is a retired medical library director. Library and information science is a female dominated field. It would have made perfect sense for him to belong to a “Men in LIS” group. Even in LIS, btw, men are more likely to be directors. This is just one bit of context.
While I appreciate that you paid to come into the comments and be a living example of what I’m writing about I am suspending your commenting privileges.
Charles I could make all kinds of further sarcastic remarks, but instead of you working so hard to prove us wrong (we aren't), I'd recommend you take good advice from the BLM movement and be quiet for a little while, assume you don't know because you are part of privileged group, and consider that you really really need to learn. https://agora.unicef.org/course/info.php?id=7107
Charles, you suffer from sour grapes syndrome. Women haven't come close to achieving parity on this planet and yet you complain about extra social benefits (no matter how small after centuries of abuse) extended to them to even begin to make amends. You must suffer the same sour grapes for any benefits to minorities that have historically suffered as well. Let me remind you that only white men were considered in the Constitution with women unable to vote until 1920. Slaves were considered 3/5's of a person, if considered at all. So, please, whine a little more about women colleagues in IT being given opportunities that you personally did not receive.
There you go, asserting that I am a rascist for wanting equality for all, which would, from your viewpoint, be taking power from white men. AND, you even try to distract from my comment by throwing in a reference to the mass killings in GAZA, and, the background of Obama.
Your word salad trying to rationalize the historic privilege of white men as somehow being altruistic fails to address the topic.
If you have a true interest in this topic, then you can have a wonderful time learning from the tens of thousands of resources, books, classes, legal cases, data reports, etc all available that will give you the background to enter this conversation.
My daughter and grandson went to the Australian Open last week (just the cheap tickets - there's lots of other stuff to do there apart from watching tennis, and it was the end of the school holidays).
He thoroughly enjoyed himself - despite knowing nothing about tennis. He's nearly eight.
He was keen to understand why men and women competed separately, and what happened to people who didn't identify as either.
When I was married I was so conscious of what you refer to as the "zero-sum capitalist" thinking about power hierarchies, though I'll confess I didn't think about it in terms of capitalism, but about patriarchy. And more generally about all systems that rely on power hierarchies. My ex-husband, for all of his progressive politics, didn't instinctually understand power except as a hierarchy. Therefore, if he wasn't on the top the only option was that he was on the bottom. I would be sitting there, trying to talk about what essentially boiled down to sharing power-- in our financial decision making, in child care and house work, in sex, in how we prioritized each other's dreams in our family direction-- and literally all he could understand was "You want to dominate me!" It boggled me for years, this experience of speaking the same language and yet him not understanding the words being said AT ALL.
It took getting out of the relationship to really see fully what was going on. I'm not opposed to relationships with men, but I've gotten to the point where the first questions out of the gate are "Does he have a nuanced relationship to his own power? Can he lead sometimes? Follow sometimes? Share (ever)?" Because the reality is that *I* can do all three of those things and I expect someone I'm going to give my precious time and energy to to also have that level of intention and self-understanding. Otherwise, I'm just signing up for feeling like I'm banging my head against a brick wall and I like my life alone enough to not think getting laid regularly is recompense enough for self-harm.
Sure. But I wasn't taught all kinds of shit and I figured it out because it was necessary to be in the world as the person I want to be having the sorts of relationships I want to be having. They need to learn. The world does not owe them emotional simplicity.
Imagine if every time an issue of race was addressed we were like: but what about us poor whiteys??? I was in conversation with a despondent 30 yo female friend yesterday about this topic and her profound remark was how much unlearning boys/men have to do just to get to a place to literally SEE inequality and privilege. That includes so many stupid huge walls of defensiveness and shame and blame and more. Why would they want to do that? They don’t even want to take care of their own progeny
This position comes from the assumption that you understand a hamstrung patriarchal culture that doesn't take care of its progeny... ie. low/poor pay for teachers, day care workers. No universal health care, terrible maternity/paternity leave policies and so much more. Because one man gets home from work and changes a diaper (oh here's your gold star btw) doesn't mean that our inherently flawed patriarchal culture actually cares for its progeny. It's doesn't. And yes... that's on men.
What was it you said about rhetorical fallacy? False equivalence: teachers have degrees and construction workers are laborers.Keep trying tho sweetie. You are trying soooo hard.
I recently read a piece by Jill Filipovic about how the institution of marriage itself is really outdated and not suited for modern life—how no matter how much you want to build a better model of it, it tends to realign itself with tradition. I think this is true for men as well as women. I do feel sorry for men sometimes—and think about how, like angry children, they need to feel understood before they can be reasoned with. But it’s not women who are hurting men. It’s patriarchy. Men tend to have fewer strong relationships, relying on their wives for emotional support as well as social scheduling. Once a wife leaves, a lot of men basically have no social lives. It’s easy to feel sorry for them, but it’s not like it’s a woman’s responsibility to be a man’s only emotional support. That’s unsustainable. Who taught men that they should put all of their eggs into a basket for their wives to carry? Just as patriarchy teaches women to do emotional labor for men, it also teaches men to shut down emotional connection with others except maybe their wives/sexual partners. Toxic masculinity is just as toxic for males as it is for females.
"If your sense of well-being was predicted on the misery of your partner, you didn't have well-being in the first place. What you had was a lie " Yes! When will the masses understand that the only liberation is collective liberation. Insert any marginalized group in that sentence (gender, race, ethnicity, etc) and it holds true.
Men have been running the world since the very first hints at community or civilization, with women ALWAYS being considered 'weaker' and less than men. Men created the religions and laws, all of which codified patriarchy. Men have used violence to control everyone and every living thing and have exacted tremendous damage to many peoples and the earth. So now, women (the majority gender on the planet BTW) achieve small footholds, (while again losing rights to their own reproductive choices), and yet men are STILL WHINING about their perceived loss of power or position?! You can even hear hints of this whining in some of the male comments here. I call bullshit. If men truly believed in equality, which they do not, we would have it by now.
When the Black Lives Matter movement began and the backlash was "All Lives Matter," my husband said, "If a house is on fire, you don't water the whole block. Only the one that's on FIRE." I feel like this is always true with "what-about-ism." The one that's in trouble and needs help is not about anybody else. Help the people that need help and move on.
Amen. This was so good. When my oldest son was 5 he was upset because he wanted to play with his toys and we had to leave for dinner.
“you never make me happy” . I bent down to his level and I said “I’m so glad you made this comment so we can have this conversation when you’re young. Sweetie, it’s not my job to make you happy. That’s your job”.
If you’re raising boys - please let them know that they’re responsible for theirselves.
Whew. Slept in a little and missed a whole thing here. Read through the (currently) 68 comments - though arrived too late to see our banned and deleted friend, but I can guess. I'm happy in my marriage, but that doesn't mean it is some idealistic, tension-free status. My common refrain when we have issues is "at least you are happy" - usually has something to do with me needing something and my husband thinking I don't. We work it out, but it has taken a lot of time and a lot of change on both our parts to make this work. We'd be idiots to not acknowledge that there is an imbalance, and we do work to rectify that. It is the water in which we swim. I had a former colleague who, when I told him I was going back to school to earn my PhD said-"why? Can't you just do what you are doing and live off of your husband's salary?" Ugh. And that guy thinks he is a feminist. The world assumes you will defer to your husband's career, ideas, etc.
But more to the point - the data and the real imbalance - misreading or having a biased interpretation of data is a very patriarchal thing. It's a very white supremacist thing. A college I used to work for did one of those student satisfaction surveys, and because 85% of the students felt good and had no issues, they interpreted that to mean that things were good. Breaking that data down by race indicated that white students were happy, but students of color/Black students were having a terrible time. So - data tells stories, but you have to see all of them.
Here's my "what about the men" response: Sexism and the patriarchy are bad for men too. That's what's causing their pain, limiting them and how they can live their lives. It makes them feel less than when their spouses or partners earn more money than they do. Instead of being happy that their households are literally richer, they feel like failures because, "hey, aren't I supposed to be the provider?" And that's sad.
I identified with these grievances in my youth. When I didn't get the attention I wanted from women, I would shame women for being "stuck up" or too shallow to recognize my value. What a catch I was!
The only person who could solve my feelings of unworthiness back then was looking at me in the mirror all that time. One I saw myself differently, everyone else did too.
Accordingly, men collectively need nothing from women to solve this, but they could role model Lyz (and those like her) by moving beyond the idea that another person of whatever gender is what keeps them from finding meaning and satisfaction in life...until we all die anyway. :)
Been reading 'Sister Outsider' and like...blaming women for male oppression really is a tale as old as time. Couldn't be that patriarchy and limited ideas of what masculinity gets to be are the problem! Not the confluence of white supremacy capitalism and heteropatriarchy that suck for everyone! Nope. It's them *woms* wanting to be treated like *people*. That's the threat!
My apologies for the bad link to the URL on the UK boys study. I've been in meetings all day and didn't see everyone's emails pointing it out. The link has been fixed but here is the link to the study https://www.equimundo.org/resources/the-state-of-uk-boys/
And a link to a Guardian piece https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/08/feminists-war-on-men-misogyny-boys-gender-stereotypes-masculinity
My favorite line: “But the reality is that if your sense of well-being was predicated on the misery of your partner, you didn’t have well-being in the first place. What you had was a lie.”
Exactly. Men are sulking and engaging with the right wing « alpha » morons because women have finally had enough of their sh*t!
I came here to say exactly this!!!
so good!
On point, truly.
I’m tired of placating. By answering “what about men” with answers about how men benefit too, it still centers men in a way. Let us be free because it will be good for you. It reminds me of womens groups/clubs/schools, etc that say “men can join too” when asked. It’s a combo of reflexive niceness and consideration for them, even as it harms us because we are thereby decentered. Because IME when men enter the conversation, they take over. I’ve seen this in a hundred contexts and situations. Not their fault, it’s cultural. They’re taught to speak up, we’re taught to be “nice” and give them space to speak. But honestly sometimes you need to hold the line. You need to be able to say, this isn’t about them. This isn’t for them. This is for us. We matter. They need to step aside. Sometimes you need to hang a sign on the door saying “women and girls only” or even “not men” and relax into that like taking a long shower without worrying about who’s taking care of the baby. (Should go without saying, trans women are women; non binary, gender fluid and intersex people are not men.)
This this this all of this
Thanks especially for including that last part!
Context-free thinking right here, ladies and gentlemen.
“There are over 28,008 gis analysts currently employed in the United States. 27.3% of all gis analysts are women, while 72.7% are men.” My husband is a retired medical library director. Library and information science is a female dominated field. It would have made perfect sense for him to belong to a “Men in LIS” group. Even in LIS, btw, men are more likely to be directors. This is just one bit of context.
While I appreciate that you paid to come into the comments and be a living example of what I’m writing about I am suspending your commenting privileges.
Charles I could make all kinds of further sarcastic remarks, but instead of you working so hard to prove us wrong (we aren't), I'd recommend you take good advice from the BLM movement and be quiet for a little while, assume you don't know because you are part of privileged group, and consider that you really really need to learn. https://agora.unicef.org/course/info.php?id=7107
Charles, you suffer from sour grapes syndrome. Women haven't come close to achieving parity on this planet and yet you complain about extra social benefits (no matter how small after centuries of abuse) extended to them to even begin to make amends. You must suffer the same sour grapes for any benefits to minorities that have historically suffered as well. Let me remind you that only white men were considered in the Constitution with women unable to vote until 1920. Slaves were considered 3/5's of a person, if considered at all. So, please, whine a little more about women colleagues in IT being given opportunities that you personally did not receive.
There you go, asserting that I am a rascist for wanting equality for all, which would, from your viewpoint, be taking power from white men. AND, you even try to distract from my comment by throwing in a reference to the mass killings in GAZA, and, the background of Obama.
Your word salad trying to rationalize the historic privilege of white men as somehow being altruistic fails to address the topic.
Literally no one here has said that.
If you have a true interest in this topic, then you can have a wonderful time learning from the tens of thousands of resources, books, classes, legal cases, data reports, etc all available that will give you the background to enter this conversation.
Classic reframing-stories-of-female-liberation-into-tales-of-male-alienation.
You didn’t have to do the thing she said we’d do. If you’re going for irony though, this is a bit too much on the nose.
My daughter and grandson went to the Australian Open last week (just the cheap tickets - there's lots of other stuff to do there apart from watching tennis, and it was the end of the school holidays).
He thoroughly enjoyed himself - despite knowing nothing about tennis. He's nearly eight.
He was keen to understand why men and women competed separately, and what happened to people who didn't identify as either.
So proud of my grandson!
your grandson is awesome!
Thank you, yes he is! 😊
Awesome kid-- absolutely no good answer for this question at this moment in time. Sigh.
The kids are alright!
When I was married I was so conscious of what you refer to as the "zero-sum capitalist" thinking about power hierarchies, though I'll confess I didn't think about it in terms of capitalism, but about patriarchy. And more generally about all systems that rely on power hierarchies. My ex-husband, for all of his progressive politics, didn't instinctually understand power except as a hierarchy. Therefore, if he wasn't on the top the only option was that he was on the bottom. I would be sitting there, trying to talk about what essentially boiled down to sharing power-- in our financial decision making, in child care and house work, in sex, in how we prioritized each other's dreams in our family direction-- and literally all he could understand was "You want to dominate me!" It boggled me for years, this experience of speaking the same language and yet him not understanding the words being said AT ALL.
It took getting out of the relationship to really see fully what was going on. I'm not opposed to relationships with men, but I've gotten to the point where the first questions out of the gate are "Does he have a nuanced relationship to his own power? Can he lead sometimes? Follow sometimes? Share (ever)?" Because the reality is that *I* can do all three of those things and I expect someone I'm going to give my precious time and energy to to also have that level of intention and self-understanding. Otherwise, I'm just signing up for feeling like I'm banging my head against a brick wall and I like my life alone enough to not think getting laid regularly is recompense enough for self-harm.
Women are intrinsically taught nuance, because we have to know when and how to act certain ways. Men are not taught this.
Sure. But I wasn't taught all kinds of shit and I figured it out because it was necessary to be in the world as the person I want to be having the sorts of relationships I want to be having. They need to learn. The world does not owe them emotional simplicity.
Oh, I agree.
absolutely, asha!
Imagine if every time an issue of race was addressed we were like: but what about us poor whiteys??? I was in conversation with a despondent 30 yo female friend yesterday about this topic and her profound remark was how much unlearning boys/men have to do just to get to a place to literally SEE inequality and privilege. That includes so many stupid huge walls of defensiveness and shame and blame and more. Why would they want to do that? They don’t even want to take care of their own progeny
This position comes from the assumption that you understand a hamstrung patriarchal culture that doesn't take care of its progeny... ie. low/poor pay for teachers, day care workers. No universal health care, terrible maternity/paternity leave policies and so much more. Because one man gets home from work and changes a diaper (oh here's your gold star btw) doesn't mean that our inherently flawed patriarchal culture actually cares for its progeny. It's doesn't. And yes... that's on men.
Hmm, your focus in the comments about a column about women's liberation is about our sexism and unfairness. My dude, read the room. Please.
What was it you said about rhetorical fallacy? False equivalence: teachers have degrees and construction workers are laborers.Keep trying tho sweetie. You are trying soooo hard.
What a wonderful ouch, Manders!
I recently read a piece by Jill Filipovic about how the institution of marriage itself is really outdated and not suited for modern life—how no matter how much you want to build a better model of it, it tends to realign itself with tradition. I think this is true for men as well as women. I do feel sorry for men sometimes—and think about how, like angry children, they need to feel understood before they can be reasoned with. But it’s not women who are hurting men. It’s patriarchy. Men tend to have fewer strong relationships, relying on their wives for emotional support as well as social scheduling. Once a wife leaves, a lot of men basically have no social lives. It’s easy to feel sorry for them, but it’s not like it’s a woman’s responsibility to be a man’s only emotional support. That’s unsustainable. Who taught men that they should put all of their eggs into a basket for their wives to carry? Just as patriarchy teaches women to do emotional labor for men, it also teaches men to shut down emotional connection with others except maybe their wives/sexual partners. Toxic masculinity is just as toxic for males as it is for females.
"If your sense of well-being was predicted on the misery of your partner, you didn't have well-being in the first place. What you had was a lie " Yes! When will the masses understand that the only liberation is collective liberation. Insert any marginalized group in that sentence (gender, race, ethnicity, etc) and it holds true.
Men have been running the world since the very first hints at community or civilization, with women ALWAYS being considered 'weaker' and less than men. Men created the religions and laws, all of which codified patriarchy. Men have used violence to control everyone and every living thing and have exacted tremendous damage to many peoples and the earth. So now, women (the majority gender on the planet BTW) achieve small footholds, (while again losing rights to their own reproductive choices), and yet men are STILL WHINING about their perceived loss of power or position?! You can even hear hints of this whining in some of the male comments here. I call bullshit. If men truly believed in equality, which they do not, we would have it by now.
I first read "men-hating feminists" as "men hating feminists" and I was blown away that David Brooks was right about something
When the Black Lives Matter movement began and the backlash was "All Lives Matter," my husband said, "If a house is on fire, you don't water the whole block. Only the one that's on FIRE." I feel like this is always true with "what-about-ism." The one that's in trouble and needs help is not about anybody else. Help the people that need help and move on.
Amen. This was so good. When my oldest son was 5 he was upset because he wanted to play with his toys and we had to leave for dinner.
“you never make me happy” . I bent down to his level and I said “I’m so glad you made this comment so we can have this conversation when you’re young. Sweetie, it’s not my job to make you happy. That’s your job”.
If you’re raising boys - please let them know that they’re responsible for theirselves.
Whew. Slept in a little and missed a whole thing here. Read through the (currently) 68 comments - though arrived too late to see our banned and deleted friend, but I can guess. I'm happy in my marriage, but that doesn't mean it is some idealistic, tension-free status. My common refrain when we have issues is "at least you are happy" - usually has something to do with me needing something and my husband thinking I don't. We work it out, but it has taken a lot of time and a lot of change on both our parts to make this work. We'd be idiots to not acknowledge that there is an imbalance, and we do work to rectify that. It is the water in which we swim. I had a former colleague who, when I told him I was going back to school to earn my PhD said-"why? Can't you just do what you are doing and live off of your husband's salary?" Ugh. And that guy thinks he is a feminist. The world assumes you will defer to your husband's career, ideas, etc.
But more to the point - the data and the real imbalance - misreading or having a biased interpretation of data is a very patriarchal thing. It's a very white supremacist thing. A college I used to work for did one of those student satisfaction surveys, and because 85% of the students felt good and had no issues, they interpreted that to mean that things were good. Breaking that data down by race indicated that white students were happy, but students of color/Black students were having a terrible time. So - data tells stories, but you have to see all of them.
Here's my "what about the men" response: Sexism and the patriarchy are bad for men too. That's what's causing their pain, limiting them and how they can live their lives. It makes them feel less than when their spouses or partners earn more money than they do. Instead of being happy that their households are literally richer, they feel like failures because, "hey, aren't I supposed to be the provider?" And that's sad.
I identified with these grievances in my youth. When I didn't get the attention I wanted from women, I would shame women for being "stuck up" or too shallow to recognize my value. What a catch I was!
The only person who could solve my feelings of unworthiness back then was looking at me in the mirror all that time. One I saw myself differently, everyone else did too.
Accordingly, men collectively need nothing from women to solve this, but they could role model Lyz (and those like her) by moving beyond the idea that another person of whatever gender is what keeps them from finding meaning and satisfaction in life...until we all die anyway. :)
Been reading 'Sister Outsider' and like...blaming women for male oppression really is a tale as old as time. Couldn't be that patriarchy and limited ideas of what masculinity gets to be are the problem! Not the confluence of white supremacy capitalism and heteropatriarchy that suck for everyone! Nope. It's them *woms* wanting to be treated like *people*. That's the threat!