> But let's never forget that we were and can be allies.
Can you share some examples? Honest question, I've never seen this happen in modern day America (it's usually just one side taking and taking instead of give and take).
Based on what you wrote the men's circles you talk about were probably influenced by Sterling Institute, Mankind Project, and the mythopoetic men's movement. I've attended related events in the distant past but I was much too young to "get it" (and honestly still don't get some of it coming from an immigrant family viewpoint).
Men's rights have been denigrated to the point my younger male (Western) friends are Andrew Tate fans because there isn't anything else left.
> Men's rights have been denigrated to the point my younger male (Western) friends are Andrew Tate fans because there isn't anything else left.
OMG, yes. The MRM has successfully redefined the men's movement to be regressive not productive. Any discussion of men's issues has to refer back to this body of worthless propaganda. But you know, we don't actually have to take the bait. Just as that scientist doesn't actually have to debate vaccines with jackass Joe Rogan. If he wants to learn something he can read a book like a normal person.
I don't pretend to have all the answers, but here's a few points off the top of my head.
* Intersectional feminism is a powerful frame. When we look at the places where sexism and classism intersect, for example, then we can begin to explain the fact that the vast majority of homeless people are men. We can see ways that careerist academic feminism fails those who don't have such constraints. And we can see how popular working class feminist movements can benefit from the research that more privileged feminists have had the freedom to do.
* Men who are open to feminist critiques don't often do the research. We don't read feminist authors. We don't know the history of the struggle, nor of men's role in feminism. Second-wave feminism started with consciousness raising groups. Maybe we men could do some self-educating and soul searching.
* First world feminists need to accept leadership from feminists in poorer countries. There is so much right going on with feminism in places like Mexico. These men and women are confronting millennia of machismo. How do they do it? We should know.
* Men need our own organizations. Who are the groups working on paternal rights? I don't know. Are there any? Can we start one? If the MRM is about whining about feminism. A real men's movement could be about actual organizing. We used to hand out anti-circumcision flyers at 24th and mission. We got some weird looks, but even the MRM has carried on the work we started in their ineffective pissy way.
* Feminist men need a popular social media presence. We have ceeded the space to reprobates and literal criminals. Rather than engaging in tit-for-tat with MRM people, we should address regular, reasonable men who might be open to us if we made a reasonable effort. We need to accept that we have dropped the ball and that that the growth of the MRM is significantly our fault. We were too quiet.
* That said, what I don't think we need are sites like "We Hunted the Mammoth" which are about ridiculing the MRM. This is an example of stooping to their level. When we engage with the MRM, we neglect our organizing. They know this, which is why they constantly bait us into making it all about them. Similarly democrats fail by harping on all the stupid things republicans do. We should be focused on our own failures and solutions. Let the idiots argue amongst themselves.
* Feminist men need to be able to critique other feminists. The movement gets plenty wrong. We need to feel free to call that out even when doing so invites blowback from other sectors of the movement. In the past, feminist men were too afraid to confront bullshit in the movement. We deferred too much to women. That needs to stop.
When MRM people bring up straw men like "Why are there no domestic violence shelters for men? See? Feminists hate men." Feminists often respond, "Feel free to get to work cleaning up your own mess." So let's do that. Let's get to work. We're way behind, but there's no time like the present.
> Intersectional feminism is a powerful frame. When we look at the places where sexism and classism intersect, for example, then we can begin to explain the fact that the vast majority of homeless people are men.
Maybe I don't have the background needed, but I don't follow. How does intersectional feminism explain that the vast majority of homeless people are men?
Under traditional patriarchal gender roles, men are seen as self-sufficient, and women as dependent. When men fail to be self-sufficient, they do not tend given the same level of support as women who are expected to need help. Add class relationships into this mess and low-class men are left to rot on the street. Our oligarchs see all poor people as disposable tools. So it's the intersection of gender and class that results in more homeless men. This is an example of a negative result for men under patriarchy.
Keep in mind, that women at the same level of risk may not be on the street, but that doesn't mean they are safe. Women at risk are often preyed on by exploitative men and take refuge from the street in unsafe housing where survival sex and abuse is common. That may be a step up, but perhaps not by a lot.
Intersectionality is also informative when understanding the reaction many poor men have to the line that "men have privilege over women". Poor men don't feel privileged, even if they do enjoy higher privilege than women in the same economic class. But compare Joe Schmoe to Sheryl Sandburg, and it's the CEO lady who has the relative privilege, even if she's much lower status than the Zuckerbergs of the world.
Intersectionality is also the basis for critiques of "White feminism" where relatively privileged women dominate the discussion for women as a whole.
I've read with an open mind through all your line of replies. In the end though it summed up to making it about women and feminism. You forgot this entire thing was supposed to be about men.
Right wing MRM a la Andrew Tate is for sure a scam and toxic extreme. But you can easily find such examples in feminist circles as well. Exaggerating in one direction does not justify exaggerating in the other.
You've derailed the conversation about boys and men needs and made it about women, feminism, intersectionality, etc. That is the reason I am down-voting all you replies.
> When men fail to be self-sufficient, they do not tend given the same level of support as women who are expected to need help. Add class relationships into this mess and low-class men are left to rot on the street. Our oligarchs see all poor people as disposable tools. So it's the intersection of gender and class that results in more homeless men. This is an example of a negative result for men under patriarchy.
and interpret it to be "about women and feminism".
You've cherry-picked one thing out of many replies. I do not want to see feminism, intersectionality, patriarchy, class, women, etc in a discussion about boys' emotional needs. Take your philosophy and politics in topics about these issues, there's plenty of them.
Intersectionism, patriarchy and class absolutely have a part to play in boys' emotional needs. I believe trabant00 explained this pretty well. It reads a little like you've seen some words that you instinctively disapprove of and dismissed the whole argument as a result. That attitude is troubling, as it disregards various social pressures on boys.
It disregards the fact that, as long as most men and women remain heterosexual, there's no divorcing social pressures on one from social pressures on the other, because these will at some point become indistinguishable from the same thing.
Feminism has trod this ground before, with political lesbianism and lesbian separatism. The results of these experiments are not such as to suggest they are worth repeating, which hasn't stopped that from happening in the form of last decade's unsurprisingly abortive "MGTOW" movement.
I'm really struggling to parse your first sentence as it's too convoluted. Are you predicting that men and women will have the same social pressures in future? How does this challenge the idea that feminism may overlap with men's issues today?
Perhaps it would help if I gave a tangible example of how e.g. the patriarchy links to male emotional troubles. Patriarchal norms include the stereotype of the male as a strong, unemotional provider type. As a consequence, parents discourage boys from showing emotion. Thus, boys do not learn to accept, validate and maturely process their emotions.
I'm agreeing with the claim that there can be no serious distinction drawn such that the concerns addressed by feminism are disjoint from those which should be addressed by a masculist movement constituted on grounds of actually addressing men's problems rather than nucleating around a festering contempt for women, and supporting that claim on the grounds that so long as most men and most women remain heterosexual their concerns are necessarily and intimately intermingled - what affects men affects women and vice versa, by virtue of women and men spending their lives together. The implicit conclusion is that it is therefore absurd to imagine that a men's movement which constitutes itself in opposition to feminism can ever be capable of materially improving the condition of men overall.
Thanks. That was still pretty convoluted but I think I'm with you. I agree on a conceptual level but only partly agree on a practical level.
On a conceptual level, the fundamental problem is harmful gender norms. Both movements must challenge that.
On a practical level, the way these norms manifest is very different. Women face more sexual and domestic violence and expectations around care-giving. Men face more emotional suppression and expectations around career.
There are some policies which I believe would dramatically benefit both genders. Equalising maternity and paternity leave, for example. It's absolutely bonkers that men may only be able to take a week or two, given that they might want to spend more time bonding with and caring for their newborn, and their partner might have had a C-section and be house-bound for weeks to come.
There are other policies which target one gender more than another, but I believe are still needed. Women-ony refugees, or workshops for building boys' emotional intelligence, for example. I think I would have benefited as a teenager from messaging that it's ok to accept and explore my emotions. I didn't really get that from home.
Yes of course, my attitude is "problematic", says your intersectional feminist neo marxist ideas. Because I can't have a conversation about men without all that shit popping up.
The patriarchy is successfully being attacked from all directions. Intersectionality is stronger than ever. Class is as fluid as it's ever been in the history of man kind. How do you explain that men issues are getting worse and worse in these conditions? It looks like feminism is not helping the gender it is not about. But that can't be, right? Feminism is for everybody, hence the gender neutral name and constant praise and support for men. Ooooh, that's it, I got it now. I'm the problem. Silly me.
And if all of the above is too wordy for you: get off my gender problems lawn with that toxic shit. Go eat it on a feminist topic and call it strawberry vanilla tasting for all I care. Just don't get too close to me cause your mouth stinks.
I appreciate you feel strongly about this but there's no need to resort to insults. I've never suggested that you're the problem, just that I'm troubled by the offhanded way you dismissed a whole avenue of exploration.
One thing I will say is that whilst some social attitudes are improving, society hasn't come very far in fundamentally challenging the norms and prejudices it hoists on men and women. In England and Wales, 1 in 4 women have been raped or sexually assaulted. Literally a quarter. I know that as men we our own unique set of issues, such as high rates of suicide and substance abuse. But I look at that statistic and am concerned at what it says about the safety of women in society.
> am concerned at what it says about the safety of women in society
HN, being text only, makes it difficult for some people to understand the topic. It's men. The bigger, uglier sex, with a penis and two testicles between their legs. Try to imagine the picture.
See, if I dismiss a post because it's off-topic then it's "troubling". If I address it head on you start with "arguments" and bring the discussion to women. The point here is not to argue, it's clear that the topic is men's problems. There is no room here for women and feminism. And if you wonder why some men to go to MRM it's because of people like you. They can't have a discussion in peace without feminism intruding, so fuck feminism and everybody who pushes it everywhere. It's not exactly rocket science.
After multiple interactions I personally think the extremes deserve each other. Bash your heads in, cancel each other, get each other fired, kill, maim, the worse the better. After the massacre is over the rest of us can finally have dialogue in peace.
Again, please avoid insulting and wishing violence on others. It certainly doesn't help you look like the less extreme, if anything it's what risks derailing the debate.
How I would describe what's happened here:
* corinroyal explains how some concepts which overlap with feminism has helped him understand men's issues
* You dismiss his comments because of the mere mention of feminism
* I point out that this is unfair and argue the case for the overlap being worth considering.
* You repeatedly dismiss any mention of feminism and make various unfounded claims as well as aggressive and violent comments towards me.
With all due respect and love, I think you'd find it helpful to think about why any mention of feminism is threatening to you. I'm not interested in pursuing this if you make any further aggressive remarks.
Feminism is the movement that seeks to free both men and women from traditional gender relations. Feminism isn't the term for the women's side of a war between the sexes. It's an intellectual framework that offers tools and analysis to understand and dismantle the patriarchal system that harms us all.
If you read my post from that perspective, you'll see I'm very much talking about men. Perhaps this is easier for me as a gay man to understand since the harms of patriarchy are VERY clear to me.
Out of my ass opinion is 'the patriarchy' views low status men as completely disposable.
Also in any unfair exploitive system you'll see victimized groups attack other victimized groups instead of going after the system and those that directly benefit from it.
That doesn't explain anything. The same should be true about women, in fact more so. What we see here though is it would seem women are privileged in that ___domain.
It would be interesting to see Facebook Groups divorce from Facebook itself. Maybe allow people to login using an Instagram or Whatsapp identity, or better yet an independent login.
I don't really want my group activity to be linked to my Facebook identity for tracking/advertising purposes.
How is it worse? From a privacy perspective they're both terrible and the data flows to the same Meta servers, but Facebook demands you use your real name (and demands photo ID if it thinks it's fake) while Instagram doesn't care.
Parent commenter is talking about (banned) conservative subs, not r/conservative specifically.
And yes there is a difference, there was a "Never Trump" movement led by conservatives which obviously wouldn't have been popular on places like r/the_donald. It's not a giant monolithic block.
> The abuse is directed at everyone; no matter what opinion you share, no matter who you are, you will be verbally abused in a variety of ways.
Yeah, this is what people misunderstand about 4chan. Obviously my race gets a lot of flak, but I've even seen racial slurs about white Europeans I've never heard anywhere else.
I'm not saying it's morally right, but it feels more of a hazing tactic than legitimate hatred. Once you pass that filter you have access to some interesting information.
I was watching the stream earlier. It was an exciting feeling to have 10,000 people viewing, and cheering on the chat whenever a new subreddit went dark.
I don't know if I should be excited or sad. Reddit is dying, but I'm seeing it live on Twitch with the community cheering on in a festive atmosphere.
The stupidest part of all of this is all Reddit's problems are self inflicted. Reddit the company produces almost nothing. Reddit the users make the site what it is. The users submit all the content, make all the comments, and moderate the site.
Reddit's executives however seem to think they are somehow critical to Reddit's existence and utility. If they all got replaced tomorrow with competent people no one would fucking notice. Everyone would notice if all of Reddit's users disappeared tomorrow.
Reddit is making the same stupid value estimation Digg made.
Reddit has about as much technical complexity in its core product as Twitter—both can be trivially cloned. Alternatives exist.
It’s the network effects that made Reddit valuable: the people, communities, 3rd-party clients, platform integrations, etc.
Most of these things are fairly portable, so I think Reddit execs are mainly gambling in users not wanting to bother with finding a new place to gather.
I have to wonder why they didn’t just start off charging reasonable prices for the API and dial things up over time. Crummy either way, but less likely to alienate literally everyone they depend on to make the system work.
Not only do you lose the community as already mentioned, but you lose the accumulated data (i.e. post content). This might not matter for a social community; it matters a lot if the community is of a more technical nature; i.e. repair/modding, analysis, etc. A lot of really great and useful content has been lost over the years due to forums going dark; lose a site like reddit and... my god. It's just really a huge step backward.
N.B. I have no love for reddit. I generally hate reddit, the site. However there's a massive amount of useful content there.
Creating a decent Reddit clone is a weekend project. I've done similar stuff as a demo teaching an hour long 'Intro to Rails' class at the local code school.
I’ll admit I don’t know much about the back end. I’m not that sort of dev. Is anyone working on a reddit clone to deploy, then? If there was ever a time, it’s now.
There exists Lemmy, which is a fediverse alternative.
From what I've heard, the development of it, is a bit messy, but it seems to work well enough and has potential.
I remember a time when when people actually liked reddit. And would buy reddit gold with the intention of helping out host the site. Seems like Ellen Pao and the IAMA drama was the turning point that soured the users against the company.
I’ve never seen Reddit the company as valuable. People are valuable, and they just happen to gather on Reddit. If Reddit goes away they will gather somewhere else.
2. The data that the communities havegenerated in the past
It seems like reddit is trying to monetize #2 to the point of alienating #1. It's bizarre how large the disconnect is between Reddit the corporation and Reddit the collection of communities
Isn't #2 freely available for anyone to scrape? And even if they shut down access now, presumably everyone training LLMs already has a mostly complete dump of reddit comments/links.
There's no Digg-that-was to move back to. Digg in 2023 is only connected to old Digg by a $500k check and ___domain transfer. They eventually added comments, but it seems sparse.
edit: apparently an ad company bought it in 2018. Doesn't seem to have affected the quality of links.
You can't vote on a poll using a 3rd party app. For example, if you click on a poll using Apollo, it opens the Reddit website as a new window and you have to log in again and vote through that website.
This level of friction means I've never voted in a Reddit poll unless I was on a computer, and many other 3rd party app users probably act similarly.
From what I've seen, only for niche programming or highly technical circles.
My "normie" friends don't even want to try something polished like Signal. Mastodon would have to be heavily simplified, polished, and maybe sponsor some exclusive influencers to actually take the spot of Twitter.
the_donald made it very clear that they were a subreddit trying to mimic a Trump campaign rally. You could even be a conservative, mildly critical of Trump's policy and still get banned. It never claimed to be unbiased and proudly proclaimed the opposite.
On the other hand, we expect some level of fairness and professionalism from Reddit and its administrators.
Can you share some examples? Honest question, I've never seen this happen in modern day America (it's usually just one side taking and taking instead of give and take).
Based on what you wrote the men's circles you talk about were probably influenced by Sterling Institute, Mankind Project, and the mythopoetic men's movement. I've attended related events in the distant past but I was much too young to "get it" (and honestly still don't get some of it coming from an immigrant family viewpoint).
Men's rights have been denigrated to the point my younger male (Western) friends are Andrew Tate fans because there isn't anything else left.