It's really not being dealt with at all by feminists, that's why MRA is there in the first place. Feminists only acknowledge male issues only insofar as how they relate to what they perceive as the bigger issue of female oppression, and even then the coverage is lackluster. So why not have a movement specifically focused on these things? Why must feminism be the only game in town when it comes to gender equality?
I would agree that feminism is not necessarily focusing on these issues, but when I say that feminism addresses these issues, I mean that the explanations that feminism uses to explain problems that women have or had as women can equally be used to explain the vast majority of the issues faced by men.
The Men's Rights Movement does not address these issues. It does not address issues of academic underachievement or of masculine violence towards other men and towards women. Even where the MRM might have legitimate grievances, such as the fact that women are far more likely to receive custody of children, it fails to actually address the problem. If we have a society in which women are understood to be caregivers, where women in relationships primarily raise the children, where women are the ones who are more likely to put their career on hold, where women are the ones more likely to take time off work, who is likely to be awarded custody? The wife is.
The problem with the MRM is not that it never has legitimate grievances, but that the movement, such as it is, provides no solutions for the problems it poses. Instead, the movement blames all of these problems on feminism. It does not suggest a problem for male violence against other men; it merely uses this fact to argue that men suffer from violence more than women in order to argue that the epidemic of sexual violence suffered by women is not exceptional or problematic. It does not treat the fact that men are committing violence against other men and against women as an interconnected issue that needs to be addressed but as a rhetorical cudgel to win arguments. It does not consider that academic achievement problems among boys are not due to a new feminization of the classroom, where unequal treatment favoring boys is still the norm
because of gender stereotypes (e.g. boys being allowed to call out of turn; boys being more likely to be called on; boys receiving more encouragement to participate; girls being less likely to be competitive when boys are around because of socialization around appropriate female behavior), but because of socialization that
does effect boys from a very young age and the different ways male and female rambunctiousness occur and the way young boys and girls beginning performing for members of their own gender from a very young age. Instead the only arguments the MRM attempts to make when suggesting that boys are the ones who have an academic problem are that feminists do not care about boys, that we have tilted too far in the direction of helping girls and now we need to help boys (in spite of the continued disparate treatment in the classroom), or that because boys are so essentially different from girls we need to have separate classrooms in spite of the fact that gender segregated classrooms do not address the problems. And we could go on. Their argument in every instance is: This is all feminism's fault, and if only they hadn't gotten so uppity everything would be just peachy.
And on top of this, the MRM also makes ugly grievances I have talked about before regarding domestic abuse, where they lie
repeatedly:
Such assertions are not supported by empirical research at all, and the inferences drawn from them are even more unwarranted. For example, in the original study of "The Battered Husband Syndrome," sociologist Susan Steinmetz surveyed fifty-seven couples. Four of the wives, but not one husband, reported having been seriously beaten. From this finding, Steinmetz concluded that men simply don't report abuse, and that here must be a serious problem of husband abuse, and that some 250,000 men were hit every year - this, remember, from findings that no husbands were abused. By the time the media hoopla over these bogus data subsided, the figure had ballooned to twelve million battered husbands every year!
One problem is the questions asked in the research. Those studies that found that women hit men as much as men hit women asked couples if they ever, during the course of their relationship, hit their partner. An equal number of men and women answered yes. The number changed dramatically, though, when they were asked who initiated the violence (was it offensive, or defensive), how severe it was (did she push him before or after he'd broken her jaw?), and how often the violence occurred. When these three questions were posed, the results looked like what we knew all along: the amount, frequency, severity, and consistency of violence against women is far greater than anything done by women to men - Lorena Bobbitt notwithstanding.
Another problem stems from who was asked. The studies that found comparable rates of domestic violence asked only one partner about the incident. But studies in which both partners were interviewed separately found large discrepancies between reports from women and men. The same researchers who found comparable rates have suggested that such results be treated with extreme caution, because men underreport severe assaults. (Perhaps it is felt to be equally unmanly to beat up a woman as to be beaten up by one, since "real men" never need to raise a hand against a woman.
A third problem results from when the informants were asked about domestic violence. The studies that found comparability asked about incidents that occurred in a single year, thus equating a single slap with a reign of domestic terror that may have lasted decades. And while research is clear and unequivocal that violence against women increases dramatically following divorce or separation, the research that found comparable results excluded incidents that followed separation or divorce. About 76 percent of all assaults take place then, with a male perpetrator more than 93 percent of the time.
Finally, the research that suggests comparability is all based on the Conflict Tactics Scale (CTS), a scale that does not distinguish between offensive and defensive violence, equating a vicious assault with a woman hitting her husband while he is, for instance, assaulting their children. Nor does it take into account physical differences between women and men, which lead to women being six times more likely to require medical care for injuries sustained in family violence. Nor does it include the nonphysical means by which women are compelled to remain in abusive relationships (income disparities, fears about their children, economic dependency). Nor does it include marital rape or sexual aggression. As one violence researcher asks, "Can you call two people equally aggressive when a woman punches her husband's chest with no physical harm resulting and a man punches his wife's face and her nose is bleeding and broken? These get the same scores on the CTS."
The opposition of feminists to the MRM is not some unfair demonization of them because they dare to bring up men's issues. The opposition exists because the MRM is ideologically opposed to the successes of feminism and blames those successes for whatever problems they perceive, goes out of its way to lobby against protections for abuse victims, lies about rape and an epidemic of false rape reports, engages in widespread apologia for sexual assault, and only brings up men's issues in the context of opposing feminism.
I literally just mentioned one but it is clear that you see feminism as some all-encompassing movement that it is not.
I think the intersectionality espoused by the feminism I support
does encompass multiple other issues including race and class, the feminists I read do concern themselves with these issues as much as issues of gender, and their concern for these issues grows in part out of feminist ideas about kyriarchy.
You can't rule out nature over nurture, especially when some of the work done involves young children (who have not yet had much time to be affected by society and gender roles), showing clear differences in learning pace, style and interests.
As Dev said, this is false. I think that before turning to nature as your default explanation, you need to keep in mind that an explanation that uses nature cannot be particular to a particular society, but must be able to explain the full range of masculinities and femininities around the world. It also needs to address the fact that there is a significant overlap among men and women even in societies where men and women are treated as if gender were essential. It needs to address the - very few admittedly, but their existence still matters to this conversation - societies in which male and female gender roles from dress to competitiveness to assertiveness are jumbled up relative to what we would expect in the West.
I think that people who propose nature as primary over nurture are missing the point. The evidence from anthropology suggests that there is a massive possible range from what we can expect from "men" or "women" in a particular society, and while it
might be true that there are some baseline differences between men and women in some areas, the overlap is so significant and so much broader than the differences that what ultimately matters more is the way in which boys and girls are socialized into a particular society.
And I have definitely been talking about actual patriarchy.
