Lionheart, to be perfectly frank I am not interested in reading your responses to the remainder of this post. You've demonstrated to me, at least, that you aren't willing to fully participate in this discussion by your refusal to provide anything when asked for examples of the MRM that are acceptable. I don't think you are participating in this conversation with me honestly when you repeatedly dance about like this, and that's something I'm not interested in participating in further. I'm only replying to this for posterity, and only interested in your possible response insofar as you make an attempt to address the issue of identifying a MRM group that is not bogged down in misogyny.
You would have us believe that these trends exist because of cultural assumptions, when there is an extensive pool of information, some of which has already been posted, that strongly suggests there are other factors. You guys seem to live with this assumption that people are blank slates, completely identical until big bad society gets a hold of them and shapes them to it’s liking. As I said you can accept the reality of “essence” and still reject these roles simply on the principle of rationality and fairness. We have the ability to be above these behaviors moreso than any other species.
No, no, no.
You are misunderstanding. I can accept that there could be some mild baseline evidences. I do not have an ideological opposition to this possibility. What I don't accept is that there is firm evidence of this fact, that what Jado has posted is firm evidence of this fact, and the notion that these baseline biological differences are so great that their expression cannot be effected by socialization to the extent that they are neutralized.
My point has only been what I have noted again and again: The differences between women and men as groups, even in a society like ours, are smaller than the range of differences among men and among women. The vast majority of men and women fall along the same general range, and the differences we observe are in aggregate.
As I`m sure you could imagine most guys who advocate these kind of things are not the kind of deadbeats you are talking about but rather people who want to be fathers to their children. Hypothetical or otherwise. Never mind that this child-rearing thing is partially what enforces the idea that female life is more valuable.
I am not calling them deadbeats. I assume most of them work for a living, earn money, and (at least so long as their marriages are intact) contribute the bulk of household income and finances and contribute to raising their child in that way. The problem comes in the domestic sphere, where men vastly overestimate the housework that they do (so do women, but men overestimate by about twice as much), in addition to the discrepancies in child rearing that I mentioned earlier.
I do not consider some individual man who is upset by unfair treatment in family law, who does not get his children despite being a better fit for them and having been as involved as his wife in their raising and is now advocating
solely on that issue to be a part of the MRM. It is only when it becomes bundled up in a toxic stew of misogyny, bitterness, domestic abuse and sexual asssault apologia, anti-feminism, and so forth that I think of it as a part of the MRM. I don't have a problem with father's rights advocates as an implicit part of their "platform", only insofar as they misdiagnose the problem and advocate wrong things.
All of which is debatable and should be left to real scientists rather than idealogues and organizations with obvious agendas. Rape culture is quite possibly the most nebulous concept I have ever seen and it does nothing to actually remedy the crime itself. Poor explanations such as this actually divert more than they fix anything. It’s a lazy means of explaning something that has been around since the dawn of time and has severely declined since then, no thanks at all to feminism.
It is not "scientists" who study these things; there are lots of disciplines which study them, and lines of evidence are drawn from multiple disciplines. Your attempt to dismiss this as ideologues and biased organizations speaks more to your own biases. It rather resembles a creationist dissembling about evolution or a global warming denialist complaining about biased institutions and a grand conspiracy.
And you did not actually address anything concrete about rape culture, so I will have to simply respond to your unsupported assertion with a counter-assertion: Rape culture is not a particularly nebulous concept. We can observe things which are likely to increase the incidence of rape and things which are likely to decrease it. We can see how rape culture is reproduced in school starting at a
very young age:
The sexual harassment discussed here is less common in elementary schools than it is in middle and high schools; nonetheless, the behavior is not isolated and seems to be increasing in severity. Educators, police officers, psychologists, public health professionals, and sociologists assert that the early sexual acting-out by children is a symptom of the increasingly prevalent societal attitudes about violence and sex.
And not to be too blunt about this, but these groups are not all part of a feminist ideological conspiracy to hide The Truth that rape culture doesn't actually have any meaning.
We also have the way this behavior is socially sanctioned by peers and, as described elsewhere in the book, is tacitly sanctioned by the school itself through its failure to properly deal with them. Instead, the response in most schools is ignoring them, treating it as boys will be boys, and essentially leaving girls in the school to the whims of boys.
Sexist harassment, also called gendered bullying by some researchers (defined as sexual harassment for this book), is often directed to girls as a group or individually and can include subtle physical intimidation such as blocking the way or invading personal space. It is sex-based - directed to girls because they are girls. It may begin as fun and joking, and turn into harassment. When a girl doesn't like it and tells the boys to stop, she often hears: "Oh we were just joking" or "Can't you take a joke?" Sex-based harassment is still a form of power "over" another student.
When teaching students about sexual harassment, boys often said they felt pressured by their male classmates to harass girls because, if they did not, they were ostracized and/or became vulnerable to male classmates sexually harassing them by, for example, using homophobic taunts. They were called names like "queer" and "fag," and were the brunt of jokes implying they weren't heterosexual. The harassment of girls by boys was an expected rite of passage, used to assure their sexual masculine identity and to generate acceptable by their male classmates within the male hierarchical power relationships (not just in terms of gender, but race and class as well). The sexual harassment of their female classmates represents hegemonic masculinity or patriarchy (see chapter 9 on causes and contributing factors for further discussion). [Hetero]sexual sexual harassment is a way to demonstrate dominance towards females, not just for the sake of the behavior itself, but to ensure acceptance in the male group. When boys are harassed, it is often because they don't portray themselves as the "right" kind of boy, not being male enough, thereby building hierarchy and enforcing heterosexual masculinity. Sexual harassment can act as a way to police and maintain gender boundaries and hierarchy. It is also a way to put a girl in her place when boys are angry and want to reinforce their own power. Girls are used to enhance a boy's rank in masculinity.
We can see how the above behaviors are reinforced by other boys, by the failure of teachers to prevent it when they see it, by the failure to teach boys basic empathy, and by teaching girls powerlessness. This continues in high school, as discussed in CJ Pascoe's
Dude, You're A Fag, which is discussed on
this blog post; it highlights some of the more egregious examples and it describes the way in which male-female interactions are coded in adolescence around a paradigm that denies girls' autonomy and constructs public male-female interactions as one centered around "overcoming women's bodily desire and control." Compulsory heterosexuality and rape culture go part and parcel.
These attitudes learned in childhood and adolescence are not lost in college and contribute to attitudes of deep entitlement towards sex, self-professed willingness to rape, even higher willingness to force a woman to have sex, the former two being evidence of how little men understand what rape is, and contribute towards significantly higher incidences of rape. This is one aspect of rape culture and there are multiple interconnecting (it is a social issue, after all, and not a biological imperative as the MRM would have us believe) influences. And yes, this is a simplification of the issue. It is not possible to adequately explain all of rape culture to a hostile interlocutor who is gish-galloping up and down the topic.
To suggest that rape culture is meaningless nonsense peddled by ideologues is simply to admit that one should not be taken seriously in this debate. It is akin to arguing that cultural racism does not have an effect on the social attitudes of both all children, and that this racism does not have an effect on many of the aggregate differences we see between white people and black people in the United States.
My MRA realizes that they cannot outright change everything and instead do what they can with what they have. As I said awareness comes first and as evidenced here, there is still a long way to go before solutions are actually implemented to these problems. Most do not even acknowledge the existence of male issues. Yet you expect MRA to do these things feminism has supposedly done with not even a moderate fraction of the resources and level of awareness/support.
I expect them to make
serious suggestions. I'm not asking the world here. Link me to a serious suggestion for these issues made by MRAs that is not misogynistic. And I mean something concrete, not something so nebulous as "We should treat everyone equally." Describe something your MRA group suggests.
Case in point. When most people, at least in spaces like NeoGAF feel as you do, a point is never reached where these things can actually be talked about outside of the “MRA is da werse” context. I’d like to be proven wrong eventually, but I`m not holding my breath.
You want to have a topic about men's issues?
Go ahead, make one. Make a topic, identify what you think the issues are, and explain what you (or the group you belong to) believes are ways of improving these things.
The problem comes when you try to defend "MRM" as a whole, which is a fool's errand given that their misogynistic history isn't the exception to the rule or some unfortunate side story, but it is the main plot of the MRM. If you can make a topic about
issues rather than about a defense of the MRM, you might have some success. I just question whether you actually have the material to make such a topic.
If 1 rape allegation is false (and we know it’s well more than 1), then that is enough that some incentive be there to protect people who might be falsely accussed, and end the idea that you can falsely accuse someone and have them pay for a crime they did not do. I am against the death penalty on similar grounds. If we have executed 1 innocent person that is enough that we work to protect people being punished for things they did not do. You don’t protect the innocent by protecting the guilty, the people who ruin the lives of others. Perjury is perjury. The fact that some rape allegations are false and some people are trying to do things about that does not demean the fact that some people are rape victims. “Hey, we should be more sure about the people we send to jail to rot for decades” does not, nor does it need to create an atmosphere where actual victims are treated less seriously. This idea that people will suddenly ignore potential rape victims is nuts. Most of the other allegations I cannot speak to, there’s not much I can say other than that’s not the movement I know, and that’s not what I’ve seen, and it is most certainly not the one where I sympathize.
You conveniently ignored the point. They
lie about how often false rape allegations take place in the interest of making it less likely that there will be convictions because people will be more doubtful about the veracity of the claims. They explicitly advocate for jury nullification even in cases where a rape unquestionably took place. This is not about an epidemic of false rape reports or bringing attention to a previously unknown issue. This is about a longstanding pattern of MRMs being involved in rape apologetics, and this is merely another chapter in that book. You are whitewashing what they are doing and mounting a defense without even having addressed the charge.
This is pretty much the problem I`m talking about. There is no manner in which male issues can be brought up without it turning into this kind of discussion. It’s a way of distracting from the fact that there are real issues. These things are more or less tied to the MRM and if you see that movement for something that it’s not, go figure we will never actually get to a point where we acknowledge and talk about these things in a progressive manner.
No, it's not.
If you had said, "Yes, the broader men's rights movement is a misogynistic movement that is bent on the destruction of feminism and advocates for a number of terrible things,
but the particular group I belong to is not like that and I think that they still have some issues where they have a point and here they are and here's what we think," I would be
skeptical, but I wouldn't be dismissing you out of hand.
But instead you're still trying to defend the MRM, while engaging in misrepresentations of the movement and of feminism.
That’s a pretty vague explanation. I like most believe that the answer lies somewhere in between. The “softer” sciences should not be ignored and certainly have their applications in these kinds of things, but at the same time we cannot ignore other kinds of science. Here’s the deal though: I will read the book that you’ve been peddling in every post if you read one of my choosing.
Of course it is vague. I was summarizing the subject of a 300 page book into about to a very short paragraph.
I should have clarified: I meant studies in which husbands and wives were interviewed separately, in which they included assault after separation or divorce, in which they differentiated between an isolated slap and years of physical and mental domestic abuse, differentiates between offensive and defensive violence, and differentiates on the basis of severity and injuries sustained?
You know, something honest.
When you frame the question like that? I doubt it. There’s nothing I`m going to show you that will be deemed adequate, I have little reason to believe it won’t just be a wasted effort on my part. I doubt we even agree on what actually constitutes misogyny. Simply not being feminist is considered misogynist it seems. There is material there for people who want to peruse, it’s not many clicks away. People will take away from it what they will.
You
still have yet to produce any evidence beyond this mysterious MRM group you profess to belonging to which is not exactly what I say it is. I think the problem is that there is nothing there for you to produce, and I suspect that the group that you say you belong to is not nearly so pro-feminist ideals as you say.
