About 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever, according to new government data posted Thursday.
About 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever, according to new government data posted Thursday.
Expecting women to help men is like expecting men to give women the right to vote suddenly on their own initiative.
If you’re essentializing the left you’re stuck in meaningless ideology. “Kill All Men” is a good T-shirt and let’s not pretend women shouldn’t look out for women. Intersectional Feminism might have good ad copy but expecting an ideology to cure all problems is a broken (and male-oriented) way of viewing the world.
“If we just get the ideology right the hard work will disappear!” No, men are still going to have to help other men and “Intersectional Feminism” is still going to be either 1) a way to a more nuanced feminism (a good thing for those feminists to develop, don’t get me wrong), or 2) an Extremely Online project of no real consequence.
Why do you think men aren’t participating in feminism? We’re men helping men over here.
No, you’re posting online.
Do you personally volunteer at a battered women’s shelter? Then you’re a male ally.
Do you personally volunteer at a suicide hotline? Then you’re a man helping other men (when those men call in).
Otherwise I suspect, admitting that I don’t know you, that you think that you’re on a team that’s the good guys, and that you’re the only game in town, and you’re threatened that I don’t expect feminism to be something that it can’t and shouldn’t be, no matter how much ideological gymnastics are performed to try and convince men that feminism is on their side.
If you (or your ideology) profess a belief that you’re capable of being on everyone’s side you are grandiose and delusional. Help the people you can help, especially offline, but don’t be an ideological evangelist online because that isn’t meaningful participation in our society.
Yes we should try and make a society by everyone, for everyone. Intersectional feminism teaches us that the way to do this is to listen to the people with the experience, not to listen to the ideology which you, @surewhynotlem, are centering.
What I do is speak with troubled anti-women men online to help them understand it’s not us vs them, it’s all of us vs the system.
Don’t gatekeep assistance by setting an arbitrary bar. It’s unhelpful.
And what I do is speak with anti-women men online without trying to convert them to an ideology which is based around helping women.
fuck off? like do you understand how incoherent you are here? no, how could you, your entire ideology is based on the incoherent contradiction of feminism-for-women and feminism-for-everyone.
This is weak.
You claim to want to help men but you insult weakness and drag down people trying to help? I’m sorry, but this undermines everything you’re trying to say. At this point I can’t even be sure you’re not simply a misogynist troll play acting as a leftist.
If you truly care about helping people, consider that attacking other people trying to help is counterproductive. Also consider that your approach is clearly combative, and that anger is something you need to address.
I’m not blocking you because I don’t know if you’ll see this if I do. But if you reply, I’ll know you have.
You need to accept the discomfort of disagreement or you don’t have my respect. This isn’t just weak shit, it’s repugnant: stop trying to police tone. I’m not a misogynist troll just because your feelings got hurt or whatever it is you’re trying to cover up.
Weakness doesn’t stop existing just because you’ve read enough theory.
Don’t delegitimize anger, that’s basically why you’re failing here and generally. No shit it’s combative. So what?
Just because you’re trying to help doesn’t mean you’re good at helping. You feel motivated to block me, that’s another man for the trash can who thought his feminist credentials would, by themselves, prevent his opinions from being critiqued.
it’s not tone policing, honey, you’re just being an asshole on the internet
Listen to yourself.
How dare you deprive women of the right to hate men for the shitty things that men do?
It’s not like it’s not a “well actually” just because you omitted the “well.”
You absolutely can delegitimize the experience men have at the hands of feminism which is composed of humans who don’t always get it right. You can do it, with this “well actually,” but you’re performing an ideological dance for yourself to try and salvage a feminism that doesn’t need the help.
Feminism kicks ass and tells women to fuck up men when they deserve it, omni-feminism is weak sauce like this.
What a healthy outlook.
Yes.
I think it is healthier to respect the expression of rage of women and men.
I think it’s healthier to expect and understand and embrace the contradictory nature of such expression than to bury it in ideological false unity.
I disagree almost entirely. If you’re going to arbitrarily reduce 50% of the population to “those people are the reason for my suffering”, then you’re a dumb tool, and your rage is childish and shouldn’t be encouraged.
You seem to be conflating, “Uh, don’t be sexist because you’re angry,” with “Your emotions are invalid and you shouldn’t pursue your own betterment”.
I don’t think you’ve understood what I’m trying to say.
If a woman’s experience with most of the men in their life is that men are violent rapists, then you had damn well better not tell those women that their rage is childish and shouldn’t be encouraged. Should that rage be allowed to guide policy? Yes. Should that rage be allowed to direct policy? No.
Guiding and directing policy are no different for someone who doesn’t hold office. I will reiterate again that using your trauma as an excuse to hold bigoted views is childish and that it shouldn’t be encouraged.
If in my experience most of the black people in my life were violent rapists, you wouldn’t be like, “Wow, yes, you should blame all black people for the actions of the small group that you have interacted with”. You would tell me that I was being a dumbshit for idk, blaming an entire group of people for the actions of a few.
I’m not about to play coddle Olympics towards someone who is directing their trauma and frustrations in an unhealthy way. I’m going to sympathize but also direct them towards a healthier approach.
And all (well, most) of that is well and good! But:
All politics is trauma mitigation. And you don’t get to tell people that they should just not have their trauma, that they can not bring their trauma to the discussion table, because that isn’t actually mitigating the trauma, just suppressing it. Since trauma is experienced intersectionally the unpacking of that trauma necessarily occurs contra another intersection.
If the contest is over who gets to unpack their trauma, you aren’t going to succeed at bringing everyone to the table by forcing one ideology (in this case, ‘feminism-for-everyone’) into a position that is untenably ‘omnivorous’ (because it contradicts with ‘feminism-for-women’).
And there is this spectre in your thinking: there is no pure thought, there is no position free from bias, there is no exculpation you can perform to absolve yourself from contamination with the bigotry attendant upon trauma. You can’t ask someone who has been robbed at gunpoint by a Black person to be less afraid of Black neighborhoods, regardless of the hurtful bigotry of their acquired bias.
As I heard it, you don’t get to have a place free of racism. You can only mitigate its destructive effects.
Because of this, the online tendency to gather ideology into a perfect model rational reasonable list of beliefs is doomed.
I think this is plain wrong but I’m having difficulty articulating precisely why.
The struggle isn’t men vs women. It’s different mindsets. There are men, women, and other identities who view things in an us vs them bigoted way and then there are those who don’t look at what someone is, but how they treat others. The latter tend to be capable of getting along just fine together and use communication skills and emotional maturity to create solidarity with each other rather than pointing fingers at each other and creating absolutist rules and narratives. They show what is possible and are creating change and progress through being the solution of unity and solidarity by simply being cool with each other and not assuming anything about each other based on whatever identities they have.
you tell yourself a pretty story to make you feel better
I think maybe less time on the internet and more time dealing with normies. I seriously doubt the women in my life would be happy to see me suffer even a bit let alone driven to end it because they read militant feminist manifestos.
On average people are average.