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[GoombaGeek]

My great-grandma compiled a family tree that goes back to the 1600s. Based on direct immigration, I'm mostly Austrian and German - my last name is from the British Isles and other than that it is a mystery.

[Karnewarrior]

At least one branch of my family is from Luxumbourg, A.K.A The country so small the Goodyear can be spotted on a map of the whole damn thing.

When my ancestors left they must have quartered the population right there.

[MantisMan]

I wonder what Bay12 demographics are...

From what I recall from reading that Bay12 meetup thread a while ago, most of us are bizarrely beardless. Basically an almost stereotypical lanky nerd. Vaguely northern european-ish appearances (white skin). I differ from the norm in that I have a sort of mustache-goatee thing going on, kinda like Gordon Freeman.

One side of my family seems to spend one generation in a european country before moving on, while the other side of my family is from Germany. Both sides moved to North America shortly before WW1.

Disclaimer: I wasn't at the meetup, I just saw the report and the pictures on the thread. From what I could tell, there were slightly over a dozen people there, so that implies a very limited non-representative sample. I also do not recall any information about how many of the B12ers at the meetup wore glasses.

Yeah. It's sad reverse discrimination is mainly used by racist assholes to justify their racism since it's actually a real thing. Hence why every TV show on American television has a black guy as a main character, even though logically the guy living in 14th century britian in a small town far away from anywhere anyone with money would keep a slave, or anything that might attract a freed slave, or a immigrant from Africa, any of that, there's a black guy inexplicably friends with the MC.

Then they kill him off quickly and hope people don't look too hard at why.

Yeah, reverse discrimination is just as bad as regular discrimination, but no one takes it seriously because it's taken to extremes by uptight racist assholes who use it to whine about how they're mistreated. No one bats an eye if people talk about "Black history month", say "proud to be black", or add historically out-of-place black people to media for PC cred. But if you say "White history month", "proud to be white", or add out-of-place white people to a history series about Africa, it's some grievous offense.

Same thing as the whole "men's rights" thing. Should just be a counterpoint about how insane, extremist feminists should temper its goals to support actual gender equality, as opposed to female dominance, but instead it's been adopted by misogynists who just think it's a counterpoint to feminism in general.

I think pointing out the inherent hypocrisy in everything related to reverse-discrimination / discrimination is a very worthy thing to do. Let everyone be free to speak their piece, and the absurd, moronic ideas will (hopefully) be seen as absurd and moronic.

The Men's Rights stuff I've read has been remarkably reasonable. Any purely hostile comments I've seen have been downvote bombed, with the authors being banned from the site. The most hostile real-life thing I've read about was people sitting on some official's roof while dressed as superheros. Of the regular posters I can recall, the gender split is about 50/50.

It's entirely possible that I'm misreading what you're saying about this. If so, let me know. Otherwise, It's probably a good idea to just avoid the subject. Political discussions bring politics, which beget politicians, which spawns nobles, which bring about unfortunate accidents.

[kaijyuu]

Men's Rights activists just have far, far less things to complain about. What few things they do have to complain about, though, are very much valid, such as child custody, domestic abuse, and how under reported male rape/molestation is (and considering female rape is already ridiculously under reported...).

[Sirus]

Of course, just like the female-dominance groups, you have the "men's rights" groups that want to go back to the days when women were basically wombs with legs 

[penguinofhonor]

In my experience MR groups are anti-feminist with a dash of caring about child custody.

[MantisMan]

Of course, just like the female-dominance groups, you have the "men's rights" groups that want to go back to the days when women were basically wombs with legs 

I have seen literally no-one seriously say this. The general consensus, from what I can gather, is that things have changed a lot due to the industrial revolution, and this has the potential to make lives for everyone much better. The tricky thing to figure out is how to divide out of home labour (like in the work force) with in home labour (home making, essentially). There are several MRA commenters who are "house husbands" for their wives, and find the lifestyle works out well for everyone involved. There is no insistence among MRAs any significant numbers, afaik, to switching back to the traditional roles.

To explain this another way, we can think about the "old time roles" like this:
Women - Stay at home, make food and raise children
- limiting (few realistic options aside from this), stifling (not much time for hobbies), aggravating. Especially if this individual happens to have an unusual amount of potential.
Men - Work out of the house and be responsible for bringing in the sole support, work in a dangerous environment with no worker's rights.
- Limiting (relatively little education in those days), pressure (the lives of several people depend on the work), dangerous (no worker's rights, potentially life-threatening labour). However, if an individual happens to be lucky and have an unusual amount of potential, they can find themselves at the top of the pyramid, so to speak.

The lives of the majority of all people wasn't that great, and the few people who had all the perks, the ones at the top of society, happened to be a very small number of high-potential men. The lives of the high-potential women tended to be frustratingly unremarkable. The lives of the average woman was very limited, but generally tolerable, to the best of the husband's ability to provide. The lives of the average man can be said to be different from the average woman (assuming everyone marries) in that the responsibility (pressure) of earning the money to keep everyone in the family clothed and fed (remember, they had big families in those days) and the experience of working long shifts (the first set of labour laws I know of was to limit the work day to a maximum of 16 hours - for women and children) in dangerous work environments. I'm assuming that cooking, cleaning, and washing a shit-ton of clothes by hand was, not fun, but less hazardous to the health than working in a coal mine or putting together a high-rise building, or logging.

If we're talking about the few who win the metaphorical lottery, then there's no question that men tend to have it much better than women in pretty much all measurable categories. But when you expand the criteria to include all people in a population, the analysis becomes a lot less simple.

Abstracting the old gender roles into saying that "all the power was in the hands of men" is a logical fallacy, since most of the power was in the hand of a very small number of men, who exercised their power over, for the most part, other men. It turns a class-based complaint into a gender-based complaint. It's about rich vs poor, not men vs women.

The argument boils down to asserting that the complaints about historical gender roles can be made by anyone, and that we should find a new system that works out well for everyone rather than dumping all responsibility on just one person's shoulders.

I kind of hope this is the end of this particular thread of the derail, but something tells me it isn't. I hope this post was coherent, at least. I was flipping through a lot of tabs. Prisoners to disarm, goblinite to melt, etc.

[Hubris Incalculable]

Of course, just like the female-dominance groups, you have the "men's rights" groups that want to go back to the days when women were basically wombs with legs 

No. Men's rights people want true equality, rather than women getting everything handed to them, and men being crushed by a legal system that panders unconditionally to women.

[Sirus]

I can't help but feel you both missed my point. Most feminist and MRA groups, in my experience, seek equality in the workplace, fair child support/custody laws, and similar things. That stuff is fine.

But in every viewpoint, there is an extremist view. You've got websites run by women who think that 90% of males should be forcibly castrated and that women should run everything. Conversely, you've got websites run by men that want to ban women from the workplace, forbid them from voting, and basically keep them chained up in the kitchen "where they belong".

[Flying Dice]

Of course, just like the female-dominance groups, you have the "men's rights" groups that want to go back to the days when women were basically wombs with legs 

I have seen literally no-one seriously say this.

You're very fortunate to live in a place where you don't have people that think that (or at least aren't vocal about it). Though given that you're on the internet, I'm rather surprised that you haven't. In fact, most of the people who are supposedly supporters of men's rights are in fact antifeminists; they don't want equality, they want feminism to go away.

The general consensus, from what I can gather, is that things have changed a lot due to the industrial revolution, and this has the potential to make lives for everyone much better. The tricky thing to figure out is how to divide out of home labour (like in the work force) with in home labour (home making, essentially). There are several MRA commenters who are "house husbands" for their wives, and find the lifestyle works out well for everyone involved. There is no insistence among MRAs any significant numbers, afaik, to switching back to the traditional roles.

What does this have to do with the issue? If anything, this is an indication that we haven't come far enough, that we're only just now realizing that men don't need to be the de facto breadwinners. The goal of gender equality is a society where it is wholly unremarkable that someone is a certain gender in light of their home life, job, etc.

To explain this another way, we can think about the "old time roles" like this:
Women - Stay at home, make food and raise children
- limiting (few realistic options aside from this), stifling (not much time for hobbies), aggravating. Especially if this individual happens to have an unusual amount of potential.
Men - Work out of the house and be responsible for bringing in the sole support, work in a dangerous environment with no worker's rights.
- Limiting (relatively little education in those days), pressure (the lives of several people depend on the work), dangerous (no worker's rights, potentially life-threatening labour). However, if an individual happens to be lucky and have an unusual amount of potential, they can find themselves at the top of the pyramid, so to speak.

You need to read up a bit more on gender roles in medieval and ancient societies. Women were hardly stay-at-home mothers; there was too much work to be done for anyone to devote their time to nothing but child-rearing. For that matter, children tended to start working at very young ages (by our standards) as well. In any case both men and women had a large number of tasks to perform,  though they were fairly disparate in terms of perceived importance. This sort of situation has existed for about as long as human civilization has, and only really began to change around the industrial revolution, where there was a sudden increase in the amount of work away from the household that didn't require remarkable physical strength and endurance combined with a shift of a large amount of former household tasks to factories. However, the potential in the Industrial Revolution for lessening the gender divide didn't really make a massive appearance until the 1900s when there were too many men either dead or at war for factory owners to effectively practice gender discrimination.

The lives of the majority of all people wasn't that great, and the few people who had all the perks, the ones at the top of society, happened to be a very small number of high-potential men. The lives of the high-potential women tended to be frustratingly unremarkable. The lives of the average woman was very limited, but generally tolerable, to the best of the husband's ability to provide. The lives of the average man can be said to be different from the average woman (assuming everyone marries) in that the responsibility (pressure) of earning the money to keep everyone in the family clothed and fed (remember, they had big families in those days) and the experience of working long shifts (the first set of labour laws I know of was to limit the work day to a maximum of 16 hours - for women and children) in dangerous work environments. I'm assuming that cooking, cleaning, and washing a shit-ton of clothes by hand was, not fun, but less hazardous to the health than working in a coal mine or putting together a high-rise building, or logging.

If we're talking about the few who win the metaphorical lottery, then there's no question that men tend to have it much better than women in pretty much all measurable categories. But when you expand the criteria to include all people in a population, the analysis becomes a lot less simple.

Just because the average man wasn't very well off doesn't mean that he wasn't better off than the average woman. There's this little idea called 'civil rights'. Granted, it took quite a while for non-nobility to get serious rights to begin with, but it happened a hell of a lot faster than it did for women. For context, the Susan B. Anthony Amendment (the 19^th) in the U.S. was only barely ratified with the minimum number of states in 1920, after numerous failed attempts. Mississippi didn't ratify it until 1984; the U.S., supposedly one of the freest democratic societies in the world, existed for more than 200 years before every member state recognized that women should be allowed to vote.

The first modern conception of civil rights as such, the Magna Carta, was passed into law in 1225. The first modern nation to give women the vote was New Zealand, in 1893. It took close to 700 years for "Western" society to get from the idea of, "Gee, maybe freemen should have some rights." to "Gee, maybe slightly more than 50% of our population should get some sort of say in our representative government.

This is about relative levels of wealth? Bull. Shit. Don't try to equate "I don't have very much money." to "My country doesn't recognize that I'm a human being capable of rational thought."

Abstracting the old gender roles into saying that "all the power was in the hands of men" is a logical fallacy, since most of the power was in the hand of a very small number of men, who exercised their power over, for the most part, other men. It turns a class-based complaint into a gender-based complaint. It's about rich vs poor, not men vs women.

Read the above. There's no fucking abstraction there, it's historical fact. Nearly every human civilization (with a few notable exceptions) has been exclusively patriarchal. The only reason female rulers in western society were a thing is because they cared about "noble" (read: inbred) blood and divine right more than their other prejudices. 1924 was the year in which Nina Bang was elected as Danish Minister of Education, the first woman to be a minister in a democratically elected parliamentary government. The first female prime minister (Sirivamo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka) was elected in 1960. The first female president (Isabel Perón of Argentina) was elected in 1974.

So yeah, roughly 110 years of history since a nation first recognized that women were capable of being full citizens. Just under 89 years since a nation recognized that women can, in fact, act in leadership roles in government. Recorded human history? ~5,000 years. Humanity began to exhibit behavioral modernity ~50,000 years ago. Think about that.

The argument boils down to asserting that the complaints about historical gender roles can be made by anyone, and that we should find a new system that works out well for everyone rather than dumping all responsibility on just one person's shoulders.

I kind of hope this is the end of this particular thread of the derail, but something tells me it isn't. I hope this post was coherent, at least. I was flipping through a lot of tabs. Prisoners to disarm, goblinite to melt, etc.

Not quite. The argument boils down to a lot of babbling about how most men had a pretty rough time of it too, so what's a little discrimination among friends? What's this about responsibility? Isn't that what you're doing when you say to blame the big, bad leaders who made life shitty for everyone?

It'd be nice if the majority of MRA that are out there were genuinely promoting equality. It'd be nice if they weren't automatically tarred with the brush of misogyny. But then, they would be and they wouldn't be respectively if the vast majority of supposed MRA types weren't in fact raging misogynists who use feminist extremists to justify their own bigotry. If you really don't want to believe, go look at some of the relevant subreddits, but make sure to have a bucket and towel ready if you do it on a full stomach.

[Graknorke]

I'm not entirely following your thinking here.
The past isn't relevant, seeing as it's already happened. And in the present, the people you have problems with are the ones who hate women, but I doubt there's any of them here, so it's not really much use shouting down everyone around here. I'd suggest Youtube or Tumblr or somewhere else where there's a lot of people putting stupid opinions everywhere.

[lemon10]

The first modern conception of civil rights as such, the Magna Carta, was passed into law in 1225. The first modern nation to give women the vote was New Zealand, in 1893. It took close to 700 years for "Western" society to get from the idea of, "Gee, maybe freemen should have some rights." to "Gee, maybe slightly more than 50% of our population should get some sort of say in our representative government.

[minor nitpick]The Magna Carta wasn't really about the rights of those without power, it was about enforcing the rights of the high nobility.
I would say the first real democratic goverment would probably be the US goverment (technically the Corsican Republic beat it by 30 years, as well as having female suffrage, but that doesn't really count because it was so short lived and small). Setting the Magna Carta as the start date seems kind of silly.[/minor nitpick]

[Loud Whispers]

*Ahem*

This'd make a great discussion for the progressive discussion thread, but it kinda stopped belonging in the stupid thread a while ago...

[da_nang]

I can't help but feel you both missed my point. Most feminist and MRA groups, in my experience, seek equality in the workplace, fair child support/custody laws, and similar things. That stuff is fine.

But in every viewpoint, there is an extremist view. You've got websites run by women who think that 90% of males should be forcibly castrated and that women should run everything. Conversely, you've got websites run by men that want to ban women from the workplace, forbid them from voting, and basically keep them chained up in the kitchen "where they belong".

QFT. Although, to avoid confusing the moderates with the extremists, I wonder if it would be worth calling the moderates "gender egalitarians" or just "egalitarians" and the remaining extremists as feminists and masculists. The two latter, literally¹, appears to only concern one of the sexes.

¹Definition 1 used here.

[Xantalos]

*Ahem*

This'd make a great discussion for the progressive discussion thread, but it kinda stopped belonging in the stupid thread a while ago...