cause traditionally/stereotypically feminine things are seen as stupid, useless, and cringe while masculine ones are seen as serious, deep, and respectable.
trans people also show that being a man is seen as an “upgrade” while being a woman a “downgrade” (trans men don’t get a fraction of the hate trans women do). same thing with tomboys-femboys.
plus, a man and woman could do the exact same thing (being assertive for example) & the perception will be different (woman - bitch, man - boss).
It’s not misogyny. Maybe the experiences of boys and girls aren’t comparable, but some things transcend gender, and getting ridiculed is one of them.
This post unnecessarily genders something that isn’t gendered, so it makes total sense that someone would point out that it’s not restricted to one gender.
Guys are used to having their experiences invalidated when it comes to this kind of stuff. “Oh, be a man. Don’t be so sensitive. No one cares about your feelings. Man up, be stronger, stop being weak and then people won’t make fun of you,” the list goes on.
And then there’s the aspect where bringing up issues that impact men always gets hit with “BUT WHAT ABOUT WOMEN?!? MEN HAVE IT SO GOOD, WHAT COULD YOU POSSIBLE HAVE TO COMPLAIN ABOUT?!?”
So when a post directly implies that “girls get ridiculed, to the exclusion of boys,” it makes sense to clarify that “boys get ridiculed too.”
Also, it’s mostly women and girls who judge other women and girls, so trying to make that about misogyny is kind of a stretch. Men and boys get judged by men, women, boys, girls, and everyone else.
Not to mention when a woman or a girl gets made fun of, like thirty people have her back, but when a guy gets made fun of, no one cares.
Just overall, making this a gendered issue from the start was the wrong call, and the people responding by saying this affects other genders too aren’t the ones unnecessarily gendering the issue.
I understand the feedback because there’s no need to distinguish between gender when you are talking about something as generic as personal empowerment. The post is not about girls, it’s about human psychology.
I’d disagree with this. Personal empowerment is universal and applies to everyone, sure. But its nature is personal, and shaped by a multitude of factors including (but not limited to) gender. That’s basically the idea behind intersectionality.
Along the various lines that make up someone’s circumstances, groups can share collective barriers to their empowerment. In this case, women face specific, gender-based obstacles (men do as well, but that wasn’t what was being discussed). So when you generalize a conversation about one group’s particular issues, at best you derail something that would’ve been helpful. At worst, you end up with an “All Lives Matter” bumper sticker.
ETA: And yes, I know all people face bullying/teasing. But the nature of the bullying/teasing is not universal, nor is the impact it has on the collective empowerment of specific groups.
so why exclude men who are made fun of for feminine expression?
there are definitely socialized negative biases that specifically women deal with, but being exclusionary doesn’t actually help the cause, it just narrows the audience that is allowed to relate to the cause.
and it applies in gender neutral situations, like drawing literally anything in jr.high/highschool would grant the name ____fucker, no matter the benign nature of the variable being drawn.
it’s a good little rule that doesn’t need to devolve into a cultural battle about which group gets to identify with it more.
i constantly talk about the atheist/mra vs feminist war which just put everyone on the defensive, destroying active efforts in fighting groups like the heritage foundation, who are now doing unimaginable systemic harm to women through destruction of academic spaces and scientific efforts around women’s health largely propped up by religious fundamentalist efforts.
sometimes you have to be like “there’s something specific about this group which we don’t want being lost in the current conversation,” but also sometimes it’s good to be less rigid about which generalized group is allowed to identify with or benefit from progressive ideals.
Making a post about women doesn’t - and shouldn’t - mean you’re excluding men. I feel like excluding should only be defined as an active attempt to prevent people from associating with the post, rather then a failure to include men and enbies and every other gender in existence in the body of the post.
I feel like leftist spaces have gotten a bit too expectant that everything relevant to an individual must be explicitly stated to be as such, rather than encouraging people to simply find relevancy even in things that are not explicitly made for them. I’m a guy, and when I read this I felt a connection with it - I didn’t even think about how it only mentioned women, as if that should mean it can’t apply to me.
I would rather instill a mindset in all people that would allow for situations where, for example, a man can find relevancy in a post about women, rather then try to get all people to only share content that specifically addresses who all is intended to be able to relate to it. A woman saying things are hard for women isn’t making any comments about whether or not it’s hard for men, just like a black guy saying black lives matter isn’t making any comments about whether or not all lives matter.
TLDR: how we bound things matter, most of society is social constructs. biologically relevant bounding (gender binary) is both not absolute (intersex) and individually contextualizable during development and social reification (genderfluid). deciding as law that there are only two genders is a purely social reification move, and not actually representative of reality.
constantly gendering/bounding things for no reason does weird bad things for the social construct people build and make socially real. again, this is a vulnerability for divide and conquer tactics. we don’t want louder general voices to dominate over important signal of groups experiencing systemic problems, but that is a different issue from defending unnecessary and unhelpful framing that continues to be used against us with very real effects.
–
“A woman saying things are hard for women isn’t making any comments about whether or not it’s hard for men”
what is the role of bounding this statement to half of the population if not to exclude it from the other half? the entire point of gendering is lost if we recognize this. please understand i’m very generally against unnecessary bounding for what i see as important reasons that affect us all.
“black lives matter” is a very american movement, “all lives matter” might make sense to say, a pakistani-american who also experiences systemic problems and would like to join a collective effort for change, but is being excluded. in this context, most are willing to ignore that plight because of the redneck/corpo american using “all lives matter,” as a signal to their white supremacy group is actually enough of a problem that the backlash towards ALM has weight in that setting. personally i think “black lives matter too” would have been a better and more inclusive bounding that isn’t abusable by opportunistic bad actors. but we can’t cooperate for that level of nuance around the words we use i guess, it’s too ‘annoying’ i guess. although comprehending framing is a much more important use of energy than people seem to believe. entirely unnecessary progressive exclusivity is literally harming us all.
my emphasis is on progressives unnecessarily being -weirdly- exclusive about every issue, even very general issues, and then cause a fuss when any of the ‘wrong’ people want to take part in the bandwagon and affect change. “divide and conquer” is THE rule for stopping collective action for change.
why i brought up the feminist/atheist stuff. the fact that progressives aren’t allowed to cooperate is a huge problem. if the post was “men get made fun of for everything, might as well do what you want.” i would have NO issue with women/NBs going “why is this being gendered lol? that’s such a general problem.”
and instead of people going “ha ha yeah i guess that is a pretty general experience.”
you get a big ol’ “if you feel excluded, too bad.”
“why does it always need to be about men” is generalizing a lot of vague unrelated contexts to one that we defined very specifically.
there’s a reason i stated “there are definitely socialized negative biases that specifically women deal with”
because not all problems do need to be generalized, and sometimes gendering it could be relevant for some actual reasons.
“men are from mars, women are from venus.” kind of thinking is just… classic patriarchy? why are we defending it so hard?
at this point i’d get into social constructs, and how we frame things is incredibly important for things like, stopping progressives from unnecessarily being divided for stupid shit that doesn’t matter while fascist chuds are enabled in enacting systemic violence towards women (axing sciences and women’s health stuff, as stated,) and everyone else. while everyone is spending all of their energy trying to navigate the fucked up framing that divides people unnecessarily and encourages those groups to be antagonistic unnecessarily.
when “this applies generally” could easily consume as little energy as “ha ha yeah this is unnecessarily gendered.” which, in recognizing, allows us to hold a better general idea of the complexity of the world and experience.
again, the inertia of really bad social constructs are still implanted in society. isn’t deconstructing that supposed to be a big part of feminism? that youtube video essay i linked is actually pretty good, on emphasizing around this issue, but as i pointed out with the atheism/feminism thing, this is a very real and tangible problem that i’m trying to address while also noting the context of not deflating some actual specific issue that is being made salient.
that being said, if you build a system for dealing with a problem that mostly affects one gender, being exclusionary is going to cause unnecessary friction, you cause inevitable tension as your group bounding become less reliable at full scale. ignoring the edge cases doesn’t make them disappear, and leads to subgroup antagonism that was entirely preventable.
there’s nothing wrong about making a post about girls, but there’s also nothing wrong with going “that’s a weirdly gendered framing on a very general experience.”
group specific “do what you want,” also causes weird problems, because to some people this message could be easily read as gender specific (else why gendered?) and “do what you want” becomes what it does for the least thoughtful and most aggressive of any group, usually leading to more division and antagonism because we’ve weirdly bounded our interactions to be so strictly group specific that we just aren’t allowed relating to each-other, and we can now define punching down as punching up because context doesn’t matter, only the salient boundings we’ve defined as truth. anecdotally, you get things like a manager telling their employee “you’re lucky you already worked here when i was hired because i don’t hire men,” which is just one of my personal experiences. this doesn’t mean women aren’t systemically disadvantaged in some hiring areas, but i don’t think getting at the pan-demi-autistic barista(ask me about my thoughts on gendered languages,) who grew up in poverty is really “punching up.” it does make fighting for equality more disheartening when this becomes a general experience in progressive areas.
i really REALLY don’t care to be defined and seen as “MAN” whenever people start their assumptions about me, and the less baggage we randomly invent in people’s minds the better. anyone who has been ill-treated purely for group association rather than their actual behaviour knows this feeling. if you feel unnecessary gendered/grouped doesn’t harm you, then maybe you aren’t so familiar with the oppression of systemic framing, and the people actually affected by it. all of whom i think deserve to be free from this really shitty framing tools we seem to be incapable of growing out of as a species.
remember, most of our world is socially constructed. a lot of what is “absolutely just how the world is” falls apart more quickly than the MAGA “two genders” very inaccurately framed argument under any scientific scrutiny. AKA, it’s not that simple, and pretending it is hurts everyone that doesn’t fit your neat low-energy boundings, and failing to properly frame and interact with the complexity of the world leads to systemic failures that harm us all.
i’m just trying my best, and have been while people spent the past two decades fighting rather than stopping the heritage foundation and other such actual problems that are actually affecting us all, which we need to be able to successfully collect and communicate around without devolving into different preferred boundings over-ruling the shared reality that we are all creating and growing into.
Yes, our world is constructed in certain ways, but that’s only because we decided to construct it that way. If we as individuals within that world decide to build a new construct, or to view the current construct in a different way, we can make bubbles that aren’t constructed in the same ways. Eventually those bubbles can coalesce into something large enough to rival the default construction. There’s no point in only seeing the world as we built it without also seeing that it can always be renovated.
Most of your post centers around the question you posed: “what is the role of bounding this statement to half of the population if not to exclude it from the other half?” The simple answer is that we often only know our own experience and the experience of those we’re intimately familiar with. I’m a man, and I know many other men, as I spend most of my time around friends of the same gender. Like most men, I’m less close to women outside of those who are in my family and those I’ve dated. I can speak confidently about men in society in ways I simply can’t about women. Therefore, if I talk about something that I can tell affects many men, but I can’t reliably extrapolate that effect to women, I word my remark along the lines of “this affects men” not to exclude women, but to leave the discussion open for women to impart their own experiences that I’m unaware of.
I pose my own question to you: why assume mentioning one party excludes the other when we have perfectly good language to do just that? If we want to exclude women, we can use words to exclude women. We would say “this affects men, not women” or “this affects men more than women.” I wholeheartedly believe that someone who doesn’t include women in their comment is doing so because they’re simply deciding not to comment on women. It need not be more complicated than that.
Many men’s assumptions about men are similarly a problem when applied to me, for the same reasons of framing the binary and existing gender stereotypes, while sometimes useful, is often over applied and overly made real by shared affirmation.
To answer your question, I’m not implying intent by the author, rather just stating that the way it has been framed, consciously or otherwise, is relating a very general experience as if you should expect it to be gendered. We can decide to construct it like that, or we can make the framing more salient and fix a lot of the inevitable downstream issues of attempting to communicate when people are making expected differences more salient and real that shared (even if slightly different). Experiences that we can collectively identify and change.
Again, if atheists could have kept focus on countering groups like the heritage foundation, rather than defending against weird assumptions about their general group that they are being inappropriate related to, or if the lessons learned from academic feminism can be applied by other groups rather than being devolved into nonsensical associations with SJWs and weird claims like “trying to make circumcision illegal in the USA means you hate women because FGM is a more important issue”. Further devolves into “being an atheist or supporting causes that help men means you hate women and want to destroy advances in women’s rights.”
Which I think we can all agree is stupid, and not representative of any serious work being done by academic feminists.
Would be an easy voice to stir up division, and make defensive arguments built around bad framing problems and associations more salient than the actual issues these groups should be making salient. Such as the heritage foundation and other extremely important obstacles that we should all be finding ways to cooperate against.
I assume that noting one party excludes the other because I see it like “we have blue cups and red cups. Be careful the blue cups are hot.”
And then “oww i burnt my hands on the red cups, they are also hot!”
Followed by “i didn’t say the red cups couldn’t be hot, only that blue ones were.”
I think someone chiming in on the original statement with “all the cups are hot, just generally be careful.” shouldn’t be a contentious addition.
Hopefully that comparison makes my framing problem more clear.
Making a post about women doesn’t - and shouldn’t - mean you’re excluding men. I feel like excluding should only be defined as an active attempt to prevent people from associating with the post
Does this apply to making posts about men? Because if so (meaning, the rule applies universally without making exclusions for certain demographics), then I’m inclined to agree.
Experience shows however that posts (or any media) about men usually get attacked for ostensibly excluding women, even without explicitly doing so.
I would rather instill a mindset in all people that would allow for situations where, for example, a man can find relevancy in a post about women, rather then try to get all people to only share content that specifically addresses who all is intended to be able to relate to it.
This is almost hilarious. I mean, on the surface I agree. But again, if we flip the situation then we can see how comical it is. Can women find relevancy in a post about men without commenting by saying it isn’t gendered, or even that it applies to women more than it does to men? The same thing applies to race. Can POCs find relevancy in a post about white people (even just implicitly), without claiming it’s excluding other races?
The fact is if a white guy wants to create any form of media, be it writing a novel or making an indie film or whathaveyou, he has to be very careful to explicitly include other genders and races, because anything less will get nailed as being exclusionary.
But when a post is explicitly exclusive to one gender, as long as if that gender happens to be women, then suddenly “Oh it’s fine, men can just find relevancy in it even if it doesn’t (explicitly or implicitly) include them. It doesn’t have to be gendered even though it’s clearly and deliberately gendered.”
Like, the mental hoops people will jump through to justify double standards as long as men are the ones being disadvantaged by them. That is not egalitarianism.
Bud, what? Women constantly have to find relevancy in posts about men. It’s been the default for nearly every culture since the beginning of human history. The only double standard is the universal double standard that people like you couldn’t see this whole time, and is only just slightly starting to close.
Any post you see without a woman complaining that it’s fallen on them to once again find relevancy in a post that isn’t about them is an example of them utilizing their own lived experience, rather than being outlined as the intended audience by the poster. So, yes, they’re following the mentality I described for most posts.
You’re usually the one doing the crucifying, so I’m not surprised you haven’t witnessed it as a spectator.
Media is usually centered on the male perspective.
That is an overly-broad generalization and not even remotely accurate. Maybe fifty years ago that would apply in most cases, but still not all.
And unless you’ve literally never read media analysis in any academic journal, we both know that male-centered media is considered a faux pas at best these days.
We quite literally live in a patriarchal society.
Patriarchy harms men and women. You can’t just lump all men in as “the patriarchy,” that doesn’t even align with the perspectives in actual feminist literature.
Patriarchy is specifically the structures of dominance and oppression which, while traditionally ascribed as a male role, women can also participate in. There is such thing as women participating in patriarchy and if you don’t believe that then you’ve never read actual feminist philosophy.
By the way, reinforcing patriarchal standards of toxic masculinity (such as "men can’t/shouldn’t talk about their problems or their feelings) is participating in patriarchy. Way to go.
Egalitarianism is about equality. If you think uplifting women means putting men down, then you’re not a feminist.
These are the kinds of subtle undertones that one learns to read as a man in society simply by the experiences and microaggressions that one’s received since boyhood. They’re not always overtly stated.
You can’t just lump all men in as “the patriarchy,” that doesn’t even align with the perspectives in actual feminist literature.
Where did I lump all men in as “the patriarchy”? It’s not fair to lob an accusation and then say it’s in subtle undertones. Subtle undertones where? In what comment?
By the way, reinforcing patriarchal standards of toxic masculinity (such as "men can’t/shouldn’t talk about their problems or their feelings) is participating in patriarchy. Way to go.
Another specific accusation. Where did I say men can’t or shouldn’t talk about their problems or feelings? Which comments contain the microaggressions suggesting this?
fem guys already relate to content targeted toward women since their lived experience is closer to that than to the typical man, so no exclusion.
men often do this. post is about something women related -> “but what about the men?”. we don’t have a duty or obligation to include men in every single conversation. men can also create their own content/conversations, and they should. hijacking/inserting themselves just reeks of insecurity and misogyny.
edit and just to be clear: anyone who finds this post relatable is more than valid and welcome, regardless of gender. it’s just the act of explicitly turning it into a “won’t somebody please think of the men?” thing that really grinds my gears.
fem guys already relate to content targeted toward women since their lived experience is closer to that than to the typical man, so no exclusion.
Shit like this makes my blood boil… “oh, you’re struggling with acceptance and your identity? Well, people ridicule you for not adhering to what boys should be, but the best we can do is offer you stuff targeted at girls because, you know, you’re essentially a girl anyway”. Fuck that. And then telling me about misogyny. Ridiculous.
we don’t have a duty or obligation to include men in every single conversation.
This isn’t a female safe space. Posting something here that deliberately leaves out half the population and then complaining that people bring up the stupid line you’re drawing between boys and girls where none is necessary is laughable.
Yes, it fucking is. It’s a safe space for everyone. That’s literally rule #1 in this place. Feel free to take a week off from here to learn how to be respectful.
This isn’t a female safe space? Holy shit, way to tell on yourself.
It’s not just men here and this community isn’t a male safe space either. It’s a shitposting community and you couldn’t handle a woman making a post about a woman’s perspective.
They never said “the best we can do is offer you stuff targeted at girls because, you know, you’re essentially a girl anyway”, you did. If you think there should be more stuff for certain men, you’re free to make it. If not all men relate to that content, I hope they are more capable of nuance than you seem to be. The idea that relating to the experience of another group somehow takes away from your actual identity is not how someone who has a normal relationship with their identity would work.
I date women as a woman and sometimes men will be talking specifically to other men about dating women and I will find what they say relatable. It does not make me question my gender or sexuality. I just think “wow! So true!” and move on with my day.
It’s ok to have a similar experience or understanding of the world as someone else, even if they are not talking directly to or about your personal experience.
They are not drawing a line. You’re welcome to comment what you like, but this is straight “so you hate waffles?” level of reasoning.
Quite right. I would also say there is definitely a stigma to men who do not present as fem doing the occasional fem thing, and it is more of a stigma than when a woman who generally presents fem doing the occasional male thing.
Way less, in my experience, than ever before, but definitely still there. You get less open mockery and more silent confusion these days.
Yeah a girl without makeup in a hoodie and sweaters wouldn’t really raise eyebrows as much as a guy in a dress and makeup, I would bet money on that. Perhaps not as much nowadays but I’m sure it still very much exists.
Especially if you live in rural areas instead of a large city. Probably people living in L.A. etc. can reasonably disagree with this, but in general.
cause traditionally/stereotypically feminine things are seen as stupid, useless, and cringe while masculine ones are seen as serious, deep, and respectable.
trans people also show that being a man is seen as an “upgrade” while being a woman a “downgrade” (trans men don’t get a fraction of the hate trans women do). same thing with tomboys-femboys.
plus, a man and woman could do the exact same thing (being assertive for example) & the perception will be different (woman - bitch, man - boss).
If you think boys aren’t ridiculed (for literally anything) you’ve never been to school.
So, boys, might as well do what you want.
Boys already do what they want hahaha
The phrase “boys will be boys” is a thing that exists ffs
This reads like the kind of tumblr 13 year old that thinks boys don’t have self esteem issues or something
the experiences of boys and girls in society aren’t comparable.
this post is about girls, going “but what about the boys?” on it is just misogyny.
It’s not misogyny. Maybe the experiences of boys and girls aren’t comparable, but some things transcend gender, and getting ridiculed is one of them.
This post unnecessarily genders something that isn’t gendered, so it makes total sense that someone would point out that it’s not restricted to one gender.
Guys are used to having their experiences invalidated when it comes to this kind of stuff. “Oh, be a man. Don’t be so sensitive. No one cares about your feelings. Man up, be stronger, stop being weak and then people won’t make fun of you,” the list goes on.
And then there’s the aspect where bringing up issues that impact men always gets hit with “BUT WHAT ABOUT WOMEN?!? MEN HAVE IT SO GOOD, WHAT COULD YOU POSSIBLE HAVE TO COMPLAIN ABOUT?!?”
So when a post directly implies that “girls get ridiculed, to the exclusion of boys,” it makes sense to clarify that “boys get ridiculed too.”
Also, it’s mostly women and girls who judge other women and girls, so trying to make that about misogyny is kind of a stretch. Men and boys get judged by men, women, boys, girls, and everyone else.
Not to mention when a woman or a girl gets made fun of, like thirty people have her back, but when a guy gets made fun of, no one cares.
Just overall, making this a gendered issue from the start was the wrong call, and the people responding by saying this affects other genders too aren’t the ones unnecessarily gendering the issue.
I understand the feedback because there’s no need to distinguish between gender when you are talking about something as generic as personal empowerment. The post is not about girls, it’s about human psychology.
I’d disagree with this. Personal empowerment is universal and applies to everyone, sure. But its nature is personal, and shaped by a multitude of factors including (but not limited to) gender. That’s basically the idea behind intersectionality.
Along the various lines that make up someone’s circumstances, groups can share collective barriers to their empowerment. In this case, women face specific, gender-based obstacles (men do as well, but that wasn’t what was being discussed). So when you generalize a conversation about one group’s particular issues, at best you derail something that would’ve been helpful. At worst, you end up with an “All Lives Matter” bumper sticker.
ETA: And yes, I know all people face bullying/teasing. But the nature of the bullying/teasing is not universal, nor is the impact it has on the collective empowerment of specific groups.
Huh?
“These two things I’m comparing aren’t comparable!”
You’re fucking right. Experiences of men and women in society are absolutely not comparable when we’re talking about societal expectations.
You’re also right that women don’t have to center every conversation around men.
I can’t believe someone told you directly this isn’t a female safe space hahaha
so why exclude men who are made fun of for feminine expression?
there are definitely socialized negative biases that specifically women deal with, but being exclusionary doesn’t actually help the cause, it just narrows the audience that is allowed to relate to the cause.
and it applies in gender neutral situations, like drawing literally anything in jr.high/highschool would grant the name ____fucker, no matter the benign nature of the variable being drawn.
it’s a good little rule that doesn’t need to devolve into a cultural battle about which group gets to identify with it more.
i constantly talk about the atheist/mra vs feminist war which just put everyone on the defensive, destroying active efforts in fighting groups like the heritage foundation, who are now doing unimaginable systemic harm to women through destruction of academic spaces and scientific efforts around women’s health largely propped up by religious fundamentalist efforts.
sometimes you have to be like “there’s something specific about this group which we don’t want being lost in the current conversation,” but also sometimes it’s good to be less rigid about which generalized group is allowed to identify with or benefit from progressive ideals.
Making a post about women doesn’t - and shouldn’t - mean you’re excluding men. I feel like excluding should only be defined as an active attempt to prevent people from associating with the post, rather then a failure to include men and enbies and every other gender in existence in the body of the post.
I feel like leftist spaces have gotten a bit too expectant that everything relevant to an individual must be explicitly stated to be as such, rather than encouraging people to simply find relevancy even in things that are not explicitly made for them. I’m a guy, and when I read this I felt a connection with it - I didn’t even think about how it only mentioned women, as if that should mean it can’t apply to me.
I would rather instill a mindset in all people that would allow for situations where, for example, a man can find relevancy in a post about women, rather then try to get all people to only share content that specifically addresses who all is intended to be able to relate to it. A woman saying things are hard for women isn’t making any comments about whether or not it’s hard for men, just like a black guy saying black lives matter isn’t making any comments about whether or not all lives matter.
TLDR: how we bound things matter, most of society is social constructs. biologically relevant bounding (gender binary) is both not absolute (intersex) and individually contextualizable during development and social reification (genderfluid). deciding as law that there are only two genders is a purely social reification move, and not actually representative of reality.
constantly gendering/bounding things for no reason does weird bad things for the social construct people build and make socially real. again, this is a vulnerability for divide and conquer tactics. we don’t want louder general voices to dominate over important signal of groups experiencing systemic problems, but that is a different issue from defending unnecessary and unhelpful framing that continues to be used against us with very real effects.
– “A woman saying things are hard for women isn’t making any comments about whether or not it’s hard for men” what is the role of bounding this statement to half of the population if not to exclude it from the other half? the entire point of gendering is lost if we recognize this. please understand i’m very generally against unnecessary bounding for what i see as important reasons that affect us all.
“black lives matter” is a very american movement, “all lives matter” might make sense to say, a pakistani-american who also experiences systemic problems and would like to join a collective effort for change, but is being excluded. in this context, most are willing to ignore that plight because of the redneck/corpo american using “all lives matter,” as a signal to their white supremacy group is actually enough of a problem that the backlash towards ALM has weight in that setting. personally i think “black lives matter too” would have been a better and more inclusive bounding that isn’t abusable by opportunistic bad actors. but we can’t cooperate for that level of nuance around the words we use i guess, it’s too ‘annoying’ i guess. although comprehending framing is a much more important use of energy than people seem to believe. entirely unnecessary progressive exclusivity is literally harming us all.
my emphasis is on progressives unnecessarily being -weirdly- exclusive about every issue, even very general issues, and then cause a fuss when any of the ‘wrong’ people want to take part in the bandwagon and affect change. “divide and conquer” is THE rule for stopping collective action for change.
why i brought up the feminist/atheist stuff. the fact that progressives aren’t allowed to cooperate is a huge problem. if the post was “men get made fun of for everything, might as well do what you want.” i would have NO issue with women/NBs going “why is this being gendered lol? that’s such a general problem.”
and instead of people going “ha ha yeah i guess that is a pretty general experience.” you get a big ol’ “if you feel excluded, too bad.”
“why does it always need to be about men” is generalizing a lot of vague unrelated contexts to one that we defined very specifically.
there’s a reason i stated “there are definitely socialized negative biases that specifically women deal with” because not all problems do need to be generalized, and sometimes gendering it could be relevant for some actual reasons.
“men are from mars, women are from venus.” kind of thinking is just… classic patriarchy? why are we defending it so hard?
at this point i’d get into social constructs, and how we frame things is incredibly important for things like, stopping progressives from unnecessarily being divided for stupid shit that doesn’t matter while fascist chuds are enabled in enacting systemic violence towards women (axing sciences and women’s health stuff, as stated,) and everyone else. while everyone is spending all of their energy trying to navigate the fucked up framing that divides people unnecessarily and encourages those groups to be antagonistic unnecessarily.
when “this applies generally” could easily consume as little energy as “ha ha yeah this is unnecessarily gendered.” which, in recognizing, allows us to hold a better general idea of the complexity of the world and experience.
again, the inertia of really bad social constructs are still implanted in society. isn’t deconstructing that supposed to be a big part of feminism? that youtube video essay i linked is actually pretty good, on emphasizing around this issue, but as i pointed out with the atheism/feminism thing, this is a very real and tangible problem that i’m trying to address while also noting the context of not deflating some actual specific issue that is being made salient.
that being said, if you build a system for dealing with a problem that mostly affects one gender, being exclusionary is going to cause unnecessary friction, you cause inevitable tension as your group bounding become less reliable at full scale. ignoring the edge cases doesn’t make them disappear, and leads to subgroup antagonism that was entirely preventable.
there’s nothing wrong about making a post about girls, but there’s also nothing wrong with going “that’s a weirdly gendered framing on a very general experience.”
group specific “do what you want,” also causes weird problems, because to some people this message could be easily read as gender specific (else why gendered?) and “do what you want” becomes what it does for the least thoughtful and most aggressive of any group, usually leading to more division and antagonism because we’ve weirdly bounded our interactions to be so strictly group specific that we just aren’t allowed relating to each-other, and we can now define punching down as punching up because context doesn’t matter, only the salient boundings we’ve defined as truth. anecdotally, you get things like a manager telling their employee “you’re lucky you already worked here when i was hired because i don’t hire men,” which is just one of my personal experiences. this doesn’t mean women aren’t systemically disadvantaged in some hiring areas, but i don’t think getting at the pan-demi-autistic barista(ask me about my thoughts on gendered languages,) who grew up in poverty is really “punching up.” it does make fighting for equality more disheartening when this becomes a general experience in progressive areas.
i really REALLY don’t care to be defined and seen as “MAN” whenever people start their assumptions about me, and the less baggage we randomly invent in people’s minds the better. anyone who has been ill-treated purely for group association rather than their actual behaviour knows this feeling. if you feel unnecessary gendered/grouped doesn’t harm you, then maybe you aren’t so familiar with the oppression of systemic framing, and the people actually affected by it. all of whom i think deserve to be free from this really shitty framing tools we seem to be incapable of growing out of as a species.
remember, most of our world is socially constructed. a lot of what is “absolutely just how the world is” falls apart more quickly than the MAGA “two genders” very inaccurately framed argument under any scientific scrutiny. AKA, it’s not that simple, and pretending it is hurts everyone that doesn’t fit your neat low-energy boundings, and failing to properly frame and interact with the complexity of the world leads to systemic failures that harm us all.
i’m just trying my best, and have been while people spent the past two decades fighting rather than stopping the heritage foundation and other such actual problems that are actually affecting us all, which we need to be able to successfully collect and communicate around without devolving into different preferred boundings over-ruling the shared reality that we are all creating and growing into.
Yes, our world is constructed in certain ways, but that’s only because we decided to construct it that way. If we as individuals within that world decide to build a new construct, or to view the current construct in a different way, we can make bubbles that aren’t constructed in the same ways. Eventually those bubbles can coalesce into something large enough to rival the default construction. There’s no point in only seeing the world as we built it without also seeing that it can always be renovated.
Most of your post centers around the question you posed: “what is the role of bounding this statement to half of the population if not to exclude it from the other half?” The simple answer is that we often only know our own experience and the experience of those we’re intimately familiar with. I’m a man, and I know many other men, as I spend most of my time around friends of the same gender. Like most men, I’m less close to women outside of those who are in my family and those I’ve dated. I can speak confidently about men in society in ways I simply can’t about women. Therefore, if I talk about something that I can tell affects many men, but I can’t reliably extrapolate that effect to women, I word my remark along the lines of “this affects men” not to exclude women, but to leave the discussion open for women to impart their own experiences that I’m unaware of.
I pose my own question to you: why assume mentioning one party excludes the other when we have perfectly good language to do just that? If we want to exclude women, we can use words to exclude women. We would say “this affects men, not women” or “this affects men more than women.” I wholeheartedly believe that someone who doesn’t include women in their comment is doing so because they’re simply deciding not to comment on women. It need not be more complicated than that.
Many men’s assumptions about men are similarly a problem when applied to me, for the same reasons of framing the binary and existing gender stereotypes, while sometimes useful, is often over applied and overly made real by shared affirmation.
To answer your question, I’m not implying intent by the author, rather just stating that the way it has been framed, consciously or otherwise, is relating a very general experience as if you should expect it to be gendered. We can decide to construct it like that, or we can make the framing more salient and fix a lot of the inevitable downstream issues of attempting to communicate when people are making expected differences more salient and real that shared (even if slightly different). Experiences that we can collectively identify and change.
Again, if atheists could have kept focus on countering groups like the heritage foundation, rather than defending against weird assumptions about their general group that they are being inappropriate related to, or if the lessons learned from academic feminism can be applied by other groups rather than being devolved into nonsensical associations with SJWs and weird claims like “trying to make circumcision illegal in the USA means you hate women because FGM is a more important issue”. Further devolves into “being an atheist or supporting causes that help men means you hate women and want to destroy advances in women’s rights.”
Which I think we can all agree is stupid, and not representative of any serious work being done by academic feminists.
Would be an easy voice to stir up division, and make defensive arguments built around bad framing problems and associations more salient than the actual issues these groups should be making salient. Such as the heritage foundation and other extremely important obstacles that we should all be finding ways to cooperate against.
I assume that noting one party excludes the other because I see it like “we have blue cups and red cups. Be careful the blue cups are hot.” And then “oww i burnt my hands on the red cups, they are also hot!”
Followed by “i didn’t say the red cups couldn’t be hot, only that blue ones were.”
I think someone chiming in on the original statement with “all the cups are hot, just generally be careful.” shouldn’t be a contentious addition.
Hopefully that comparison makes my framing problem more clear.
I really appreciate your thoughtful and level-headed replies here. Thanks.
Does this apply to making posts about men? Because if so (meaning, the rule applies universally without making exclusions for certain demographics), then I’m inclined to agree.
Experience shows however that posts (or any media) about men usually get attacked for ostensibly excluding women, even without explicitly doing so.
This is almost hilarious. I mean, on the surface I agree. But again, if we flip the situation then we can see how comical it is. Can women find relevancy in a post about men without commenting by saying it isn’t gendered, or even that it applies to women more than it does to men? The same thing applies to race. Can POCs find relevancy in a post about white people (even just implicitly), without claiming it’s excluding other races?
The fact is if a white guy wants to create any form of media, be it writing a novel or making an indie film or whathaveyou, he has to be very careful to explicitly include other genders and races, because anything less will get nailed as being exclusionary.
But when a post is explicitly exclusive to one gender, as long as if that gender happens to be women, then suddenly “Oh it’s fine, men can just find relevancy in it even if it doesn’t (explicitly or implicitly) include them. It doesn’t have to be gendered even though it’s clearly and deliberately gendered.”
Like, the mental hoops people will jump through to justify double standards as long as men are the ones being disadvantaged by them. That is not egalitarianism.
Bud, what? Women constantly have to find relevancy in posts about men. It’s been the default for nearly every culture since the beginning of human history. The only double standard is the universal double standard that people like you couldn’t see this whole time, and is only just slightly starting to close.
Any post you see without a woman complaining that it’s fallen on them to once again find relevancy in a post that isn’t about them is an example of them utilizing their own lived experience, rather than being outlined as the intended audience by the poster. So, yes, they’re following the mentality I described for most posts.
There’s quite a few posts here centered on men’s perspectives and I don’t see them being crucified in the comments.
Like what are you even talking about? Media is usually centered on the male perspective. We quite literally live in a patriarchal society.
You’re usually the one doing the crucifying, so I’m not surprised you haven’t witnessed it as a spectator.
That is an overly-broad generalization and not even remotely accurate. Maybe fifty years ago that would apply in most cases, but still not all.
And unless you’ve literally never read media analysis in any academic journal, we both know that male-centered media is considered a faux pas at best these days.
Patriarchy harms men and women. You can’t just lump all men in as “the patriarchy,” that doesn’t even align with the perspectives in actual feminist literature.
Patriarchy is specifically the structures of dominance and oppression which, while traditionally ascribed as a male role, women can also participate in. There is such thing as women participating in patriarchy and if you don’t believe that then you’ve never read actual feminist philosophy.
By the way, reinforcing patriarchal standards of toxic masculinity (such as "men can’t/shouldn’t talk about their problems or their feelings) is participating in patriarchy. Way to go.
Egalitarianism is about equality. If you think uplifting women means putting men down, then you’re not a feminist.
Where did I lump all men in as the patriarchy?
Where have I said men can’t or shouldn’t talk about their feelings?
These are the kinds of subtle undertones that one learns to read as a man in society simply by the experiences and microaggressions that one’s received since boyhood. They’re not always overtly stated.
Where did I lump all men in as “the patriarchy”? It’s not fair to lob an accusation and then say it’s in subtle undertones. Subtle undertones where? In what comment?
Another specific accusation. Where did I say men can’t or shouldn’t talk about their problems or feelings? Which comments contain the microaggressions suggesting this?
fem guys already relate to content targeted toward women since their lived experience is closer to that than to the typical man, so no exclusion.
men often do this. post is about something women related -> “but what about the men?”. we don’t have a duty or obligation to include men in every single conversation. men can also create their own content/conversations, and they should. hijacking/inserting themselves just reeks of insecurity and misogyny.
edit and just to be clear: anyone who finds this post relatable is more than valid and welcome, regardless of gender. it’s just the act of explicitly turning it into a “won’t somebody please think of the men?” thing that really grinds my gears.
Shit like this makes my blood boil… “oh, you’re struggling with acceptance and your identity? Well, people ridicule you for not adhering to what boys should be, but the best we can do is offer you stuff targeted at girls because, you know, you’re essentially a girl anyway”. Fuck that. And then telling me about misogyny. Ridiculous.
This isn’t a female safe space. Posting something here that deliberately leaves out half the population and then complaining that people bring up the stupid line you’re drawing between boys and girls where none is necessary is laughable.
Yes, it fucking is. It’s a safe space for everyone. That’s literally rule #1 in this place. Feel free to take a week off from here to learn how to be respectful.
This isn’t a female safe space? Holy shit, way to tell on yourself.
It’s not just men here and this community isn’t a male safe space either. It’s a shitposting community and you couldn’t handle a woman making a post about a woman’s perspective.
Is it a safe space or is it not a safe space? Because you seem to be claiming both in one comment.
Don’t gender it, it’s either a yes or a no. Is it a safe space for all genders, or not a safe space for any gender?
It’s a safe space for both. It’s not a “male safe space” any more than it is a “female safe space”.
Okay, so now that’s clarified
This is so fucking funny lol
They never said “the best we can do is offer you stuff targeted at girls because, you know, you’re essentially a girl anyway”, you did. If you think there should be more stuff for certain men, you’re free to make it. If not all men relate to that content, I hope they are more capable of nuance than you seem to be. The idea that relating to the experience of another group somehow takes away from your actual identity is not how someone who has a normal relationship with their identity would work.
I date women as a woman and sometimes men will be talking specifically to other men about dating women and I will find what they say relatable. It does not make me question my gender or sexuality. I just think “wow! So true!” and move on with my day.
It’s ok to have a similar experience or understanding of the world as someone else, even if they are not talking directly to or about your personal experience.
They are not drawing a line. You’re welcome to comment what you like, but this is straight “so you hate waffles?” level of reasoning.
deleted by creator
Quite right. I would also say there is definitely a stigma to men who do not present as fem doing the occasional fem thing, and it is more of a stigma than when a woman who generally presents fem doing the occasional male thing.
Way less, in my experience, than ever before, but definitely still there. You get less open mockery and more silent confusion these days.
Yeah a girl without makeup in a hoodie and sweaters wouldn’t really raise eyebrows as much as a guy in a dress and makeup, I would bet money on that. Perhaps not as much nowadays but I’m sure it still very much exists.
Especially if you live in rural areas instead of a large city. Probably people living in L.A. etc. can reasonably disagree with this, but in general.
deleted by creator
“fem guys” are not even the majority of guys with so called feminine interests.
It’s not about a “duty to include” but there is a reasonable expectation not to exclude when there’s no good reason to.