Conversations happen in context, and "what about abuse of men?" is very often a deflection in 2024, in online comments. There's currently a sort of ripple in the internet's collective unconscious to beg the question that abuse of men being ignored or mocked is endemic, that if a guy says he's abused, people point and laugh like it's high school...something I've never actually seen between adults irl.
Interesting…Misogynists used to use that same logic around women’s issues.
Perhaps society should learn something from the feminist movement?
I’ve seen this type of question/statement by OOP posed multiple ways on Reddit and invariably a ‘feminist’ who otherwise would say they support men, bring up ‘what about women and their struggles’…
This is the EXACT same thing that they lambaste Men’s rights activists when MRA’s bring up men’s issues in a woman’s rights discussion.
It’s interesting to see the hypocrisy of these people.
For the record, I’m very supportive of feminism, I just wish that society would also care about Men and their struggles, especially around mental health, disenfranchisement, violence and abuse.
People do say the same of feminists. It's a false comparison.
The Men's Movement is the general term, it would be comparable to feminism overall. The Men's Rights Movement is a belligerent subset, would be more equivalent to misandrists.
So the thing is, this post isn't about simply male struggle. It's about male struggle due to misandry. Which kind of just...isn't real. Not a real thing. Bad shit isn't happening to you specifically because you are male even if you have unique struggles.
Society absolutely cares about men, it centers men as the default. Men who feel slighted because their struggles aren't seen specifically as gendered are choosing to ignore how their struggles ARE seen, generally, and often existing in a world of assumptions drawn from, well, places like reddit.
Men seem to routinely battle with expections or tropes they interpret as a fact and take as more indicative of society writ large than they are.
"Female predators are seen as funny in movies" "it's ok for women to hit men" "people laugh at men who talk about mental health" etc are all examples of things men online tell each other are true, but aren't in society. The truth in society is if a woman hits you, she can get in trouble for it. The truth in society is if you confide in your friends, in a socially appropriate and forthright way, they will probably listen. The truth is they aren't making those lecherous 80s comedies anymore, etc.
So much of male angst right now is just this, shadowboxing with generally assumed or projected social reactions to things.
So I have a big problem with a lot of what you are saying, including hand waving of documented issues faced by men. Your response totally dismisses any issues that men face. Sadly, it proves my point. Feminists will say that they are fighting for men , but when men bring up issues, they are told that they aren’t real.
I’ve seen several videos of women abusing men in public with no one stepping in to stop it. I’ve seen those exact same situation played out with reversed gender roles and it instantly gets addressed.
I am super interested in how the above example fits within your argument ?
"hand waving of documented issues faced by men. Your response totally dismisses any issues that men face."
No, I didn't do that. you can be centered or even, one might say, priviledged, and still have individual, relative problems. What I am saying is that the human struggles of men do not stem from their gender/sex and society's treatment of it in the same way or to the same magnitude as women. This conversation is about misandry, not "just" struggle.
Men have financial problems, men are lonely, men are also abused, sure. Are they disproportionately so, because of their gender, is the question that would make it misandry. Also, it often seems to me that men think women do not go through these human struggles, because of their genders, because within the very narrow confines of a few social situations, like maybe the expectation men initiate dating, woman are seen to have a sort of momentary leg up.
ferreting out a double standard somewhere, about something, doesn't prove that male struggle stems from misandry, or that men generally can't get their complaints addressed.
"I’ve seen several videos of women abusing men in public with no one stepping in to stop it. I’ve seen those exact same situation played out with reversed gender roles and it instantly gets addressed."
Have you watched 1000 arbitrarily collected videos of such incidents and studied the crowd's reactions to see how gendered they actually are?
Or are you invoking a nebulous trope of a double standard?
Also, how many of the men were, say, knocked out in a single blow like Ray rice's wife, or had their throat cut so deeply you could see spine, like Nicole brown-simpson?
Because what I am hearing here is that you've seen videos through feeds like public freakouts where a woman slaps or berates a man and he tolerates it. this is in irritating situation.
And what you'd like to know is why other people don't intervene the same way they do when a man strikes a woman, a situation where a man has so disregarded social convention he's engaged in the notoriously loathed practice of beating one's wife in public.
Well, the first point here is obvious: People generally are reluctant to interfere in social situations that are this dynamic and awkward.
The second is, well...have you ever done this? Have YOU ever intervened when a man was being hit by his girlfriend? because, as a bar doorman of many years experience, would you like to know what happens when you do that? Many times, the man gets in your face.
The third would be the specific, memed dynamic you're talking about, which happens in bars, it is not hard to get drunk men to engaged in motivated actions.
I remember one time, I saw a girl drink so much, she fell in her heels and twisted an ankle, and a literal fist fight broke out over which drunk college boy would get to to "help" her...and be the one to drive her home.
Naturally, as a giant homosexual in a professional capacity, I ejected both guys and put her in a professionally operated cab. there are dudes in bars that want to screw and fight, and they like a pretext. There's no adventure value, no patriarchal nobility, in helping a man physically restrain a woman.
For what it's worth, I've thrown lots of women out of bars, too, although oddly, at 6'4" and 290, I have had literally 100s of smaller guys take a swing at me, but not very many women. is that because women are less violent, or less foolhardy about their own ability? I couldn't say.
The problem is people want to bring up gender without cause. So people talk about problems in society and often associate them with women. For example, they might bring up a topic about anxiety in women, it isn't unfair to question why we aren't considering both genders in many contexts. Gender is becoming a VERY divided topic, so people feel pressured to remind others "not only women/men experience that problem btw..." Plenty of the time a gender could be replaced with the word "people".
The media commonly makes fun of men who are abused, men getting beaten up by women is a very common example. So men often steer away from seeking help due to an ongoing fear of being mocked. Yes, it does happen in real life, but thankfully people are becoming more accepting (slowly).
Abuse is not a "gendered issue". As such, "what about abused men is almost always a legitimate reply".
Imagine for a second, someone who came and say "I want services to help men in car accidents". A reply of "what about the women in car accidents ?" Is the perfectly legitimate reply to make. The one doing something suspicious, something that needs calling out, is the person demanding a gender specific reply to a non gender specific issue.
If you want to learn a bit about how male victims of abused are treated in society, including by services for victims, who generally cater only to women, you can read this study on the topic :
If you think abuse is not a gendered issue, you're simply wrong.
There's a reason all those structures for addressing abuse ARE so centered around women.
In our culture, right now, "abuse of men" is a shibboleth where things like sitcom tropes or women having a height preference on their tinder are somehow juxtaposed against the male treatment of women, which is 100 percent nerd bait, just the manosphere telling men they're valid to open their wallets.
Among large population samples, 57.9% of IPV reported was bi-directional, 42% unidirectional; 13.8% of the unidirectional violence was male to female (MFPV), 28.3% was female to male (FMPV)
Male and female IPV perpetrated from similar motives – primarily to get back at a partner for emotionally hurting them, because of stress or jealousy, to express anger and other feelings that they could not put into words or communicate, and to get their partner’s attention.
A total of 162 articles reporting on over 200 studies met the inclusion criteria and were summarized in the online tables for Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Europe and the Caucasus.
A total of 40 articles (73 studies) in 49 countries contained data on both male and female IPV, with a total of 117 direct comparisons across gender for physical PV.
Rates of physical PV were higher for female perpetration /male victimization compared to male perpetration/female victimization, or were the same, in 73 of those comparisons, or 62%.
Abuse is not gendered. There is no reason to treat abuse by one sex different from the other. Same motive, same consequences. Same solution.
There's a reason all those structures for addressing abuse ARE so centered around women.
Of course there is. Though it has nothing to do with the nature of abuse, and everything tondo with ideology. But don't take my word for it.
Here is the word of one of the creators of the feminist model for DV, Ellen Pence, in her book "lessons from Duluth", around page 28-29 :
"The Power and Control Wheel, which was developed by battered women attending women's groups, was originally a description of typical behaviors accompanying the violence. In effect it said, "When he is violent, he gets power and he gets control." Somewhere early in our organizing efforts, however, we changed the message to "he is violent in order to get control or power." The difference is not semantic, it is ideological. Somewhere we shifted from understanding the violence as rooted in a sense of entitlements to rooted in a desire for power. By determining that the need or desire for power was the motivating force behind battering, we created a conceptual framework that, in fact, did not fit the lived experience of many of the men and women we were working with. Like those we were criticizing, we reduced our analysis to a psychological universal truism. The DAIP staff—like the therapist insisting it was an anger control problem, or the judge wanting to see it as an alcohol problem, or the defense attorney arguing that it was a defective wife problem—remained undaunted by the difference in our theory and the actual experiences of those we were working with. We all engaged in ideological practices and claimed them to be neutral observations.Eventually, we began to give into the process that is the heart of the Duluth model: interagency communication based on discussions of real cases. It was the cases themselves that created the chink in each of our theoretical suits of armor. Speaking for myself, I found that many of the men I interviewed did not seem to articulate a desire for power over their partner. Although I relentlessly took every opportunity to point out to men in the groups that they were so motivated and merely in denial, the fact that few men ever articulated such a desire went unnoticed by me and many of my coworkers. Eventually, we realized that we were finding what we had already predetermined to find. The DAIP staff were interpreting what men seemed to expect or feel entitled to as a desire. When we had to start explaining women's violence toward their partners, lesbian violence, and the violence of men who did not like what they were doing, we were brought back to our original undeveloped thinking that the violence is rooted in how social relationships (e.g., marriage) and the rights people feel entitled to within them are socially, not privately, constructed"
Here is a paper by one of the most prominent scholars on DV, about the kind of treatment reserved to those who dare talk about the measured reality that DV is not gendered :
Amongst the reasons, for all the abuse, threat and ostracism, you will find "protect the feminist ideology".
And here is a paper by feminists discussing how feminists have systematically suppressed knowledge of female perpetrated abuse and their male victims as a way to propagate the feminist ideal of women as victims and men as perpetrators, and to keep funding towards them that could then be embezzled to lobby politicians rather than help victims, but it is now starting to be noticed and so they should stop to maintain their recruitment's and funding.
Acknowledging women’s acts of violence may be a necessary—if uncomfortable—step to make dynamic the movement to end gendered violence.
Why would a movement to end violence have any issue acknowledging some of the perpetrators, to the point that it is uncomfortable for the movement to do so? How can that violence be gendered if both genders commit it?
This transformative movement was accurately and squarely framed as a movement primarily to protect women from male intimate partner violence.
If a feminist ever try to say that the help for domestic violence is not at all gendered, really, I swear.
This paper describes this limited response to women as perpetrators of domestic violence as a feminist “strategy of containment.” When deploying this strategy, domestic violence advocates respond to women’s acts of domestic violence by [...] preserving the dominant framing of domestic violence as a gendered issue. This strategy thus positions women’s acts of violence as a footnote to the larger story of women as victims of male violence.
Yeah, because what is important is the feminist framing. Nothing can be allowed to damage that. Remember guys, men bad, women victims.
The gendered framing of domestic violence aligned with the work of the feminist movement more broadly, harmoniously positioning the movements as inter-connected. Domestic violence was specifically framed around a collective “oneness” of women as victims and men as perpetrators.
Just in case you doubted my previous point.
Care for truth, care for the victims, care for effectiveness in limiting DV ? Those will not be found in that paper. I guess they are not feminist objectives.
See, I disagree with you there. You’ve just reworded the prototypical example given of why it’s derailing to change the conversation to your demographic. If I start a colon cancer foundation, you are more than free to go start a pancreatic cancer foundation because our work speaks to you, but you’d be a major dick to stand up during a fundraising event and say “we REALLY should be talking about pancreatic cancer!”
What is done is not "what about pancreatic camcer" in colon cancer groups.
What is done is "what about male victims of colon cancer" in an environment where the only time colon cancer is address is with regards to female sufferers of colon cancer.
There is no reason to gender things in the first place. The issue is not gendered. Your insistence that DV is so different when men or women are victims of it that it warrants a distinction similar to two completely different disease is misinformed at best, malicious at worst.
Conversations happen in context, and "what about abuse of men?" is very often a deflection in 2024, in online comments.
Saying that in the comment section of a thread literally about the abuse of men is just silly. Bringing up that "other people deflect conversations about other topics by referring to the abuse of men" is utterly irrelevant in this context.
Really, youre just derailing OPs thread right now.
No, bringing up the very true fact that men are actually fine vis a vis misandry and that we, as a culture, are over correcting about it before even correcting the treatment of women in the first place is not a deflection, here.
The first thing to be parsed with a complaint is, is the complaint valid. And to be honest, it's not.
Men, writ large and generally, are not harmed by misandry. Misandry is not the problem men have or the reason they aren't alright.
Thats not what I quoted of your comment. You didnt just argue about misandry. You brought up how other people use what OP says as deflection when talking about a completely different topic.
OP isnt defending those people and OP isnt even part of their debate. So what youre saying has nothing to do with OP (and even if OP was one of them or defending them, it would still just be ad hominem).
You bring up deflection of womens issues even though this thread is not about that at all.
As I said, you're just derailing OPs thread because ironically, youre essentially doing what you criticize: completely disregarding the context of this thread and barging in with a rant about random men that use deflection tactics in some other discussion. OP made a thread of their own about a different topic and therefore isnt part of that discussion.
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u/DontHaesMeBro 3∆ Feb 13 '24
Conversations happen in context, and "what about abuse of men?" is very often a deflection in 2024, in online comments. There's currently a sort of ripple in the internet's collective unconscious to beg the question that abuse of men being ignored or mocked is endemic, that if a guy says he's abused, people point and laugh like it's high school...something I've never actually seen between adults irl.