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[G-Flex]

I think the basic question is a little flawed. That is: "Has feminism gone too far?". Like I was saying, most significant social movements get their extremists. There are usually people and subgroups who sort of go off the deep end and take the meaning of the movement past any logical or useful conclusions. I don't think that should be held against the movement as a whole.

[Jackrabbit]

If you have a serious viewpoint, you'll have extremists, fact of life. What's worse than them, arguably, is people who tar the whole group because of them.

[Kay12]

It depends pretty much on the feminist and at the risk of starting the debate about this all over again...

There are many kinds of people who label themselves as feminists. There are people who believe gender is only a social construct, there are people who believe that women must attack the men... and then there are those feminists who care about gender equality and oppose all forms of sexism - including female-on-male hate speech. I identify with the last type.


Again, every movement has the risk of attracting extreme opinions that aren't common with the actual movement.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The issue I take with a lot of feminists is that they miss something important, something people usually will gloss over as unimportant, and that is the small picture. The big picture in feminism is easy to see, male-slanted culture and misogynist attitudes, a "patriarchy" if you wish to call it that. The small picture is made up of normal people, however, and a lot of people who adopt the label of feminist seem to forget that even if there is such a thing as a misogynistic patriarchy poisoning the potential of sex equality in our society, the vast majority of men as individuals are innocent of any wrongdoing in this regard and are not opposing sex equality (and even in the instances where they are, not in a meaningful way).

[Reelyanoob]

I agree the title is a little baiting, but put this down to media sound-byte tendencies (and attention grabbing with a provocative headline). The two women professors interviewed label themselves as a distinct branch of feminism to those they are criticizing, rather than "anti-feminists".

EDIT: You see the same media tendency in reviewing challenges to orthodox evolution theory. These are often labelled with headlines like "Scientists challenge evolution" even though they are usually just challenging specific fossil examples with a slightly different version of the ancestry, but still within the normal darwinian theory.

[Kay12]

I'm not even sure how male-bashing is supposed to advance gender equality...

[Gamerlord]

Wait, that's your position? You need to clarify that right the hell now, Gamerlord, because that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. All feminists? Really?

I meant the psycho ones. Obviously. Do you really think I'm dumb enough to make a generalisation like that on purpose in this thread?

[Jackrabbit]

Well, it sure sounded like it. On the web, clarity is everything.

[G-Flex]

the vast majority of men as individuals are innocent of any wrongdoing in this regard and are not opposing sex equality (and even in the instances where they are, not in a meaningful way).

I'm not sure this is true. When people have privilege in society, they often don't realize it, and that in itself is harmful, as they'll misjudge the nature of society and the character/worth of those around them.

Also, prejudice is, well, pretty insidious. Even people who aren't necessarily "sexist" still have likely been brought up with traditional gender roles, stereotypes, and expectations in mind, and those affect how people think even if they don't realize it. And that's the problem: Most people don't give the subject very much thought, or critically analyze how they view gender (or similar issues).

After all, if this weren't a very pervasive problem, then why is it that there are still so few women in engineering and advanced math, and why a whole slew of other prescribed expectations are still in place and going strong? Sexism affects people in a whole lot of ways, both small and large. It's important not to paint the average man (or woman) as a sexist, but to educate them and get them to think about the subject and how they fit into it in their own, small ways.

I meant the psycho ones. Obviously. Do you really think I'm dumb enough to make a generalisation like that on purpose in this thread?

I don't think anyone has a right to say it's on purpose, but you certainly still did it. If you say "X are Y" people aren't going to assume you mean "Specific group A out of X are Y". You really need to be more precise in your language when talking about these things, because people will take what you say at face value, especially when your posts are short enough that there's little context from which to infer things. For that matter, this is a more minor thing, but saying things like "the psycho ones" doesn't help either. We don't know how you define that, so you might as well be saying "I meant the ones I don't like".

[Kay12]

Males don't have only advantages in society, mind you. There are things where men are clearly disadvantaged - for example, violence. Men are expected to take the punch calmly, especially if the puncher is female. Sexual violence towards men hasn't been recognized as an issue until lately, and so on.

[G-Flex]

Males don't have only advantages in society, mind you. There are things where men are clearly disadvantaged - for example, violence. Men are expected to take the punch calmly, especially if the puncher is female. Sexual violence towards men hasn't been recognized as an issue until lately, and so on.

That is true. Domestic and sexual violence against men aren't treated seriously, they do have unfair social expectations, and they also tend to get the shaft (no pun intended) in custody battles. That being said, it doesn't mean that these problems are anywhere near on par with those faced by women.

It also goes to show how marginalizing one gender tends to harm both. It's hard to expect certain things of women without expecting certain things of men, for example. And if you treat men as the strong, tough decision-makers and women as objects, then of course a man who gets raped will be treated as a failure to his kind. None of this is good for anyone.

[Kay12]

Indeed. And people get the idea that female-on-male hate speech is an effective way to treat male-on-female hate speech... well, as opinions grow more extreme, we'll have female-on-male violence to prevent male-on-female violence and female-on-male rapes to prevent male-on-female rapes.

Not good.

As I said earlier, I consider myself lucky for being a white male in a Western country. However, the disadvantages of women are not the type that'll be solved by hatred. They require collaboration and understanding between the sexes. That's not going to work if women and men fortify in their own respective positions and don't take the other side seriously.

[Reelyanoob]

I knew I has seen this, but took a while to find the link again:

Author: Christina Hoff Sommers

http://www.menweb.org/sommersboys.htm

Gloria Steinem once said, "We need to raise boys like we raise girls," and the NCSEE members are working hard to put Steinem’s idea into practice. NCSEE members consider re-socializing boys to be a matter of urgency.

I learned at the conference that many of these "equity experts" believe that the school yard is a training ground for domestic battery. One keynote speaker identified young male chasing behavior as conducive to future violence.

The Wellesley Center, in conjunction with the National Education Association and the Department of Education, has produced a new teacher’s guide called Quit It! that offers exercises on how to cope with such things as the game of tag and other games involving chasing (p.86): "Before going outside to play, talk about how students feel when playing a game of tag. Do they like to be chased? Do they like to do the chasing? How does it feel to be tagged out? Get their ideas about other ways the game might be played. Then, tell them that they are going to be playing a different kinds of tag ‘one where nobody is ever ‘out.’"

The guide recommends and gives the rules for new, non-violent, non-competitive version of tag called "Circle of Friends."

So there's the source. It's a real theory.

I love the "Get their ideas about other ways the game might be played." then "tell them that they are going to be playing a different kinds of tag". That's politics for you! Solicit feedback then just ignore that feedback and say "We're doing it my way"

[Kay12]

Real theory, perhaps, but whether that's factually accurate is another thing...

At least when I was in school, the games were rather violent. King of the hill and so on. The girls did play tag with us as well, though. Now that I'm mentally back in those days... I was never into those rough games and I preferred spending time with the girls just hanging out and talking. I guess I was a feminine type in that respect.

[Reelyanoob]

Which part do you doubt? We are given a title of the publication and a page number. There's other references to the guide "Quit It!" if you google it (it was published in 1998). I have no reason to assume Cristina Sommers is lying about the content.

So we have

- references in this thread earlier of a TV ad showing playground boys labelled "Potential Abuser"
- anecdotes from other sites that tag is labelled as pathological
- Author Cristina Sommers testimony that this theory is presented in a nationally available guide for educators.

That's 3 separate lines of evidence all saying the same thing.