Byron: As a man I’ll try give my take on the present state-of-play as i see it:
Feminism cannot do anything to get men on board. That isn’t the direction the pendulum is swinging. Two generations of men who grew up vilified & demonized under feminism have communally come to realize they have been lied to & over the internet the news is spreading like wildfire. The men that used to count themselves as feminists (such as myself) have come to realize they were aiding & abetting a terribly destructive force. Men concerned about equality, fairness, & truth that would once have involved themselves with feminism are much more likely now to get involved with the men’s rights movement instead, which is at the present time still amazingly new, dynamic & open-ended. And its arguments actually make sense, too, which helps.
So no, there is nothing in feminism anymore for men, if indeed there ever was. Whatever good it actually may have done in the world (in the 1970?s?) is long past & it is only now a harmful presence wherever it appears. The last thing the human race needs is more feminism, in a new package. You can’t rebrand totalitarianism, nor should you want to.
Feminism is the wound, not the bandage. The present culture of misandry originates almost entirely with that single entity, which history will judge as a hate movement.
However, women who have previously identified as feminists can do the most amount of good right now by being prepared to leave old ideologies behind & looking to the future. They can try simply listening to the men around them without judgment, taking on board their concerns, &.seeing men’s needs as equal to their own. They can speak out on behalf of them to others. Men & boys are in far more need of attention, aid & compassion today than girls & women, as a rule – Men are 80 percent of the suicides, 85 percent of the homeless & 95 percent of all workplace deaths. Men die at greater rates than women from all the major diseases yet are given a comparatively tiny amount of the care & medical aid. I could go on but I feel like I’ve said this stuff too many times before. The information’s out there if you care enough to go look.
MuleChewingBriars: One of the other posters hit the nail on the head. We need to learn to celebrate women’s achievements as women’s achievements, not just when they are a man’s achievements achieved by someone in a skirt. A woman who nurtures a family is equally as valuable as a woman who runs a company as CEO (even more so, given the track records of some high profile female CEOs).
Men and women are different. They have different motivations and psychologies. Their brain morphologies are different. We need an ideology that is more accommodating to our biology, not one that will be one-size-fits-all. In attempting to make life more comfortable for the misfits and outliers, we have things practically unbearable for the mainstream. I think most men, without openly expressing it, want some form of a return to a kind of patriarchy-lite, where masculine accomplishments achieved in a manly way by men are celebrated. Patriarchy seems to have evolved in response to the problem of female hypergamy.
Monogamy is not always a logical outcome of patriarchy, but it does stabilize it by reducing the social static created by large numbers of unconnected men.
Zed: I doubt that too many men who retain any small amount of their mental health will sign on to help feminists achieve their goal of men’s demise.
According to Maria Shriver, the US is a woman’s nation now. What more could feminists need from us than for us to dig our own graves and save them the trouble of having to do it?
Dannyfrom504: This has gotten interesting. there’s nothing i could suggest to miss steinberg that others have said already. i don’t even engage a devout feminist anymore. even when you point out it’s unfairness and how truly it truly DOESN’T champion “gender equality”, they get flummoxed an start rambling stats. whatever.
And as one reader said. there’s no point trying to get men on board. now that the interwbez has the advent of the “manosphere” (a term i HATE btw), there are SCORES of men being told the truth about women and relationship. it’s always good when i get a new reader and their eyes open.
PasserBy: Next article idea – “From an African American point of view, what could the KKK do to get more blacks on board?” OK, just kidding … sort of.
MikeC: Feminism reminds me of the Vietnam War. There are no clearly, defined strategic objectives. There is no timeline. There is no clear criteria for “victory”. Just an everchanging enemy that must be fought. Patriarchy is communism. The movement has largely crossed the stage where there were noble objectives and is now into massacring of the innocents.
The problem is EVERYTHING has to start with a solid foundation. If you don’t have a solid foundation, everything crumbles from there. One of the foundations of feminism is the ideological nonsense that “gender is a social construct” instead of the reality of very real biological differences between the sexes (such as visual-spatial for men versus language for women)
Badger: I’ll be open in that I am not going to answer your question, because feminism had men on board and decided it’d be more fun to demonize them.
Feminism suffers from the same overreach that has marred latter-day racial activism – painting the status quo with way too broad a brush, and in the process asking for a de facto protected class status that belies its billing as an equality movement. I’ve never oppressed black people, and I’ve never oppressed women, but the activists keep saying I need to be controlled and suppressed because of some shit that went down decades before I was even born.
Many, many men have supported the movement because they thought it was the right thing to allow women to work and not marry if that was what they wanted. Not just guys who wanted to get laid from sexual liberation, but honest men who saw wrong and wanted it righted. Feminism of the past 20 years, with its resurgence of misandry in the service of supporting female narcissism (open sexuality for women while controlling that of men, frivolous divorce with crushing alimony and child support margins, glorifying abortion), has done nothing less than spit in their faces. All the while getting fully behind (and underneath) shameless rakes like Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy.
I wrote about this here, quoting Bettie Dodson in the section “V Day Guilt Complex”:
http://badgerhut.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/valentines-day-follow-up/
“That night I wondered how men in the audience felt after being nailed as “the enemy.” It’s my bet that the men attending V-Day were all staunch supporters of equal rights for women. But here they were, faced with the same old male-bashing of the 60s and 70s.”
…Feminism’s job is done, the rest is just entitled shouting.
OfftheCuff: Neely: See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equity_and_gender_feminism.
Feminism today, as espoused in culture, academia, and by feminist leaders is gender feminism, not equity. Feminism purports to be about equality but really is about superiority in practice.
Most men here believe in equity feminism, but not gender feminism. A few of the more strident types suggest rolling back the former but nobody takes them seriously.
Wayfinder: The problem with feminism in particular is that on a deeper level most of the men already agree that women should have equality of opportunity. Many men in those same time periods were denied opportunities, because of race, or class, or wealth, or culture. But as the waves progressed, feminists lost sight of the fact that with the men of their generation they were preaching to the choir, and used the lack of immediate hostility to get more hostile themselves.
This hostility is built up when the more militant radicals get airtime. All sex is rape. Men are as useless as a bicycle to a fish. These are the kinds of feminists who get quoted approvingly by Bolick in the Atlantic. Women hear these as messages of empowerment. They were fighting against being kept in a box. But at the same time, they are doing their best to keep the men in that box. Masculinity can only be approved if they like it politically. Femininity can never be approved, because that would be giving in to what the men want.
And so, we get a generation of young women who have been lead to believe that the only way to get a relationship with a guy is to act as much like a man as possible, get to sex quickly, and then he’ll be sure to like her. And then is hurt and confused when he treats her the exact same way he’d treat a guy.
And we have a generation of young men who believe that by never making the first move or intruding in her personal space he’s doing what she wants. And is bewildered when he gets beaten up for it.
William: Every group has sub groups of people who only believe in some of their core beliefs, Feminist are no different.
Sometimes you will see and hear feminist who want to improve woman’s lives while having no problem with throwing men under the bus.
We will never be equal, there will always be one group getting more than the other, the only thing we can do is make the gap smaller. While there are double standards that negatively affect woman, there are double standards that negatively affect men.
Dogsquat: What could feminists do?
They need to use tact.
When your goal is to influence a group of people or bring about societal change, “scoring points” is unimportant, and is often counter-productive.
The most visible/vocal feminists out there are drunk on rage and addicted to indignation. They seem to get off on dictating the language people use. It seems like Marcotte and her ilk would rather make a man feel stupid than explain a principle, or illuminate a viewpoint he might not have considered.
That’s a good way to make an enemy.
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It would be dishonest not to acknowledge that feminism has helped men in important ways: It’s reduced the financial burden of men; it’s allowed men the option to be stay-at-home dads and thus nurture their relationships with their children; it’s allowed men to look at women as their equal partners. Many men rejoice in these gains, and they must not lose sight of them.
The current feminist movement must also not lose sight of the fact that its current trajectory is alienating men in droves. Women cannot become what they once fought so vociferously against. Women need to listen to the concerns of men; we need to respect their opinions; we need to look at the cold hard facts of what’s happening within the male demographic; we need to speak out more in defense of men and know that we won’t be shamed for doing so or presumed to be traitors who are against empowering women.
Women would do well to remind themselves of Walsh’s counsel: “A society in which males do not thrive cannot survive for long.”