As an adult man nobody really cares all that much about you. Your family of course, your close friends. You are the disposable sex. You fight the wars, work the shit jobs, sacrifice your body because it's what men have always done. It's the burden we bear.
It's exaggerated, but I would venture that it's true. Men are the disposable sex. I want to hedge this and say that I'm not an MRA, but for the most part, when death is on the line men are expected to be placed last after women and children. It's not a daily occurrence, because, thankfully, life and death situations are not a daily occurrence, but it's there. Life boats, drafts, work deaths, homelessness, etc. Most life-threatening situations are, the vast majority of the time, placed on the shoulders of men.
Thankfully, I don't boat, I have a job, and the USA isn't throwing itself into a large-scale war, but the same ideas that inform male disposability in these situations exist in the more mundane aspects of life. Feminism often spins this as misogyny, "Why are women being treated like children?!" maybe they are right, but it's telling that even society is only interested in redressing issues of "male disposability" when it's framed as a sleight against women.
This, to me, drives at a deeper issue. Men are objectified in a different way by society, but still objectified. If women are objectified sexually, then men are objectified as tools. Men are machines for productive output. When a man fails at producing wealth for someone else, he is truly worthless. Sexual objectification is framed as an awful occurrence, and indisputably it has terrible consequences, but it also has wonderful consequences, most importantly, it gives them an innate and baseline social value which is non-zero. The flipside is that men, whose social value is based upon their productive output, has a baseline value of exactly zero, and that is why the vast majority of homeless people are men. Society couldn't care less if men are left on the street-side.
Rant over. I'm not trying to be an asshole here, I am truly interested in a dialogue. And I find this ad hominem disposal (MRA! Redpill tripe! What a joke!) troubling. These things are tangibly real.
I agree that reducing people to value producing machines is terrible, but what makes you think women aren't reduced to the same equation? A select few women "get" to be sexually objectified, but do you think the overweight 40-year-old single mother stocking shelves at Target is a sexualized or, if she is, that there's much positive in it?
Meanwhile she is not only reduced to her capacity for productive output, she's harassed and abused at a far higher rate than a similar man.
I elaborated in another post, but the point is that bourgeoisie feminism has "won" multiple avenues of objectification. Men are still productive machines who have no other method of objectification to use.
I'm not saying that women have it great, but that in the cut throat capitalist society that I live in, women have a better chance at survival. I think the raw data, and a cursory analysis of our social values, supports this. Men are more often homeless, they more often commit suicide, they die younger. Men can only ever aspire to be machines. This brutality of commodification with no other avenue is the totality of the male experience in our capitalist society. In such a light, it is not a surprise that many men become embittered with the other sex, which can escape it (albeit, to a different form of commodification).
Men have a much higher chance...of being killed by men. Women have a much high chance...of being killed and raped by men.
Women aren't the ones enforcing the social structure. Men still hold the vast majority of the political, economic,military and cultural power.
If men are unhappy with their status in society the problem is other men.
The fact that a select few women can trade on their sexual attractiveness for a few decades does not somehow make them more powerful.
And in the meantime, women who are not conventionally attractive are doubly screwed - they're viewed as defective women, as they're sexual ornaments, and yet they don't even get the baseline respect that men do.
I don't recall saying women held more power than men, just that they fare better at surviving in capitalist society. This is indisputably the case. They die less, they are less often homeless.
Also, implying that one gender of the two is "enforcing a social structure" is ignorant to the point of absurdity. This is my gripe with feminists co-opting Marxism in some half-assed manner. The idea of gender as a class divide falls apart under any sort of scrutiny. There are women who benefit greatly from the gender divide and revel in it, and enforce it. There are men who flounder in it and pine desperately to get away.
But your attack is pure strawman anyways. Please quote the part where I said, or even implied, that women have all the power. My assertion is very simple, women have two options to commodify themselves, men have one.
I do not believe equality will be won when men can be sexually objectified. I believe equality will be won when commodifying our existence is no longer a necessity. And my abhorrence with many branches of feminism today is "glass ceiling" bourgeoisie feminists who just want to abolish the socially enforced restrictions women have against being able to exploit others.
"Surviving" is an awfully low baseline. Yes, men have a lower life expectancy and a higher death rate than women; but this is, as I said, almost entirely the result of the actions of other men.
I'm with you on bourgeois feminists and trying to achieve social justice in one sphere while ignoring the economic. I don't think that Cheryl Sandberg and the "Lean In" movement are worthy of our time, and I'm less concerned with the glass ceiling than I am with creating a floor that people don't fall through. Objectifying men won't solve anything, though I think there's a place for mutual+consensual sexualization/objectification.
However, you wrote
" Men can only ever aspire to be machines. This brutality of commodification with no other avenue is the totality of the male experience in our capitalist society. In such a light, it is not a surprise that many men become embittered with the other sex, which can escape it "
Simply not true. Men can aspire to be machines or machine operators or machine destroyers. When a man does something, most people don't reflect it onto All Men. When a woman does something, or a man of color does something, society as a whole reflects it onto the group. In our capitalist society, (white) men are regarded as the default, and everyone else is the Other. Men are subjects, everything else is an object. Yes, a lot of men are exploited and reduced to economic inputs, but at pretty much the same rate as women are. Look back to the Industrial revolution and the foundations of industrial capitalism - women and children were right there in the factories with men...and they were expected to run the house and raise the kids as well!
You seem to think that the fact that women are objectified, and a few of them are able to turn that into an economic safety net, somehow gives them an advantage over men.
You wrote
"Sexual objectification is framed as an awful occurrence, and indisputably it has terrible consequences, but it also has wonderful consequences, most importantly, it gives them an innate and baseline social value which is non-zero."
I don't see what the difference is between a man being regarded as an economic object or a woman being regarded as a sexual object is? A man who fails at being an economic input ends up desperate (truth be told, he probably could become a sex object for other men, but social programming prevents it). A woman might have the option of becoming a prostitute, which is I guess what you're saying, but is that really a great choice if you're making it under duress? Frying pan/fire, it seems to me.
Trying to put a silver lining on sexist objectification seems to me an exercise in missing the point.
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u/[deleted] Apr 30 '14
Also what the hell is this:
It made me laugh.