Maybe men are just more vocal about their opinions regarding stay-at-home dads? Women may not exert "societal pressure" against stay-at-home men, but they're ~30% more likely to divorce them than working men (a 3.3% chance of divorce in a given year vs. 2.5%)[0].
> For marriages formed after 1975, husbands’ lack of full-time employment is associated with higher risk of divorce, but neither wives’ full-time employment nor wives’ share of household labor is associated with divorce risk. Expectations of wives’ homemaking may have eroded, but the husband breadwinner norm persists.
[0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0003122416655340
Lo and behold, in the paper they say this too:
"It is possible that husbands’ less than full-time employment is associated with marital disruption more strongly than wives’, not because of gendered interpretations of lack of full-time employment, but because husbands’ part-time employment or nonemployment is more likely to be involuntary. Involuntary nonemployment may negatively affect marriages more strongly than voluntary nonemployment, by affecting outcomes like partners’ mental health. It is not possible to evaluate this perspective with the current data, because voluntary specialization by men in unpaid labor is rare: in 2012, only about one-fifth of stay-at-home fathers were home primarily to care for the family (Livingston 2014). Future research is needed to explore the experiences of deliberately nontraditional households, although their rarity illustrates the consistency of the male-breadwinner norm."
I'm not sure that the study supports this. I think that the terms "stay at home dad" and "stay at home man" implies a male spouse who stays at home to do unpaid housework or child rearing instead of working a full time job.
The study seems to say that, for men, being unemployed is positively correlated with divorce risk, but that doing a larger share of household labor is not.
Not all unemployed men are "stay at home" men.
Indeed, but so is the equivalent feminism subreddit (try "r/askafeminist" for example). And yet "women's rights" don't have the same stigma as "men's rights". What explains this asymmetry? Why is it some movements get defined by their extremists, and others don't?
>: a lot of this societal pressure against men being accepted as stay at home parents comes from men.
Really? Maybe its the company I keep, but I've never felt judged by other men when I share I love caring for my kids. If anything, I get a lot of smiles and nods irl and supportive comments online. If someone like Andrew Tate gave me shade about it, I'd take it as a reason to pity him. It takes a special kind of asshole to throw shade on a father who loves his kids, and who's kids love him.
I’d also question whether /r/askfeminists is “the equivalent”. It has 100k followers, /r/twoxchromosomes has 13 million followers and from a brief read through doesn’t feel like a particularly toxic place, despite discussing feminism/women’s issues. Maybe the key here is that women’s issues are mainlined into general conversation while men’s issues are sidelined to their own area where toxicity breeds.
> What explains this asymmetry?
What explains it is an asymmetrical history: millennia of oppression of women, often violently enforced. E.g., if you read the Iliad, it's basically a who-stole-my-woman story inside a who-stole-my-woman story; at the time, women were pretty close to property with opinions. An easy way to see the through-line to today is the history of "marital rape", where society did not see married women as being able to choose whether or not to have sex with their husbands. That was always the case under English common law, and was not fully outlawed in the US until 1992: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape#Legal_aspect
We may have removed most of the gross legal infrastructure of patriarchy, but the cultural aspects are still only slowly dissolving. We have generations more work to do there. The reasonableness you mention is exactly what amazes me. Think of all the men who haven't been murdered as the slept.
And I think this history also explains why the Men's Rights movement is so bonkers. A shift toward fairness is a loss for the people who used to benefit from the unfairness. This has left a lot of men upset that they aren't getting what they feel they are due. Some handle that well, but the ones who don't are going to fight to turn the clock back. And as Corey Robin points, out, reactionaries like that often cloak their efforts in the progressive language of the day. So we end up with "men's rights" as a bizzaro-world mirror of women's rights. And one of their heroes, one with 4 million Twitter followers, getting arrested as an abusive sex trafficker and international pimp.
Go through the issues in the second section and tell me what Andrew Tate's position was on any of them.
Spoiler alert: you can't. Tate was not an MRA, he was a pickup artist.
Male feminists also tend to find themselves in trouble, by the way. Michael Kimmel used to play the same game of lumping legitimate issues (suicide/education/family courts) in with incels upset they can't get laid. He had to retire after getting #MeToo'd, heh. Tiresome and predictable. Perhaps I should add a Google Alert for your name ;)
And my point isn't that the men's rights people don't have legitimate points about how patriarchy also harms men. They do! My point is that for an awful lot of people, those points are a cloak for a deeply emotional backlash against feminism. So I'm less interested in what they claim motivates them than what we can learn from what they actually spend their time and attention on.
I'd have a hard time denying it because I have no idea what that "sort of person" is even supposed to be. Is it just people you don't like?
I went down the Men's Rights rabbithole because I got sexually assaulted by a woman as a teenager and didn't know how to deal with it. They were the only ones talking about it, and I assure you nobody involved had any interest in relegalizing marital rape.
Rather, that seems to be a bit of DARVO given that feminist thinkers like Mary Koss would see happened to me reduced to "unwanted contact".
> And my point isn't that the men's rights people don't have legitimate points about how patriarchy also harms men.
"Patriarchy hurts men too" is empty handwaving, not a substitute for genuine solutions.
Given your little quip - "think of all the men who haven't been murdered as they slept" - I doubt you'll be interested in providing help for men (or boys, as it was) like myself. If that's the feminist line, then it is clear that feminism, to put it mildly, isn't for me.
I have a hard time believing you can't figure this out on your own, but briefly, the manosphere.
As to the rest, I am truly sorry to hear about your sexual assault. But I'm also sorry that you, like so many of the "sort of person" I'm talking about, have turned a bad experience into a reason to bash feminism rather than a reason to fight things like rape culture. If even with your experience can't figure out why serial rape victims might murder their attackers and why somebody might be surprised that doesn't happen more, then I'm not sure how I can clear up my point for you.
You're talking in circles here - you brought up what "sort of person" are in the manosphere, and your answer is people in the manosphere. Not exactly insightful.
The so-called manosphere is a wildly diverse group with different experiences, complaints, and conclusions. Lumping in Andrew Tate with Men's Rights is just nonsensical.
> bash feminism rather than a reason to fight things like rape culture
I can do both and it's served me very well. When feminists like Koss et al. downplay female abuse of boys, that is rape culture.
> If even with your experience can't figure out why serial rape victims might murder their attackers
This is a schizophrenic strawman. I understand it perfectly and I've said nothing that should lead you to think otherwise.
If you were actually sorry about my experience, you might like to prove it by not making up lies cut from whole cloth about me and men like me. These desperate attempts to paint yourself as One of the Good Ones are transparent.
That is a sub in which nearly every post that rises to this a "my partner/male-acquaintence did x I'm shocked" and it's nothing but a pile on about how "bad men are". Even if not every post is male critical a lot of the positives seem to be shaping on behavior. It hasn't always been radicalized like that, nor has it been focused on that type of content.
The second being the involvement with that White Feather movement. As much as people say "You don't have to put men down to elevate women," that was a prime case of it.
And after that we've still got the "boys are stupid, throw rocks at them" T-shirts, the "male tears" cups, the "#killallmen" hashtag, and so on.
Maybe all of this just escaped you, I dunno, but now that you have it in front of you, please don't ignore it.
A few years ago I tried to bring up this issue in the comments section of a paywalled (and fairly small) magazine where I voiced the view that we should move a little bit "beyond feminism" and look more towards gender relations and have a more "holistic" view on things, rather than look only from a female perspective. Not that there's anything wrong with feminism, but you know, it's just one side.
In the next article my comment was cited to "demonstrate" that men still had a lot to learn with some disparaging and condescending text.
Not the first nor last time I've seen something similar happen. Yes, you can have the occasional constructive discourse on a small scale (such as HN), but bringing the topic to the forefront in the mainstream is difficult, especially as a man. When you do succeed it captures attention for 5 minutes and then we move on and nothing really happens.
So ... I gave up. I don't really talk about it much. Why bother? It's like screaming in a void.
So what are we left with then if many of the reasonable people have given up? The nutjobs. And now it's even harder to bring these issues up.
Any progress and help will always be met with resistance if you lump huge swaths of the population together and view it as a competition.
Is it so difficult to realize those oppressors are dead and these men weren’t alive in 1920?
The internet is very good at amplifying a bunch of very motivated nutjobs. I can, if I wanted to, send death threats and all sorts of horrible things to hundreds of people before breakfast. And tomorrow again. And the day after that. And I'm just one guy with a crummy laptop.
Go out on the street and I'll bet you that most men haven't even heard of gamergate, or have only vaguely heard of it and don't really know much details. And those that do at least roughly know what it was all about will think they're a bunch of idiots.
It's not being amplified without effect, recruitment, and numbers. Jordan Peterson would not be a podcast star without a large population of followers. Those followers are being misled into misogyny and related "red pill" ideologies.
Like my mother, who is very much alive and still working, was 100% a victim of sexism: She was alive in and grew up in times where she couldn't have a credit card or mortgage, when jobs were sex-segregated, and wasn't allowed to go to college to be an engineer like her brother because she was raised to stay at home and pop out babies. (She bailed at 15 instead of conforming.)
On the other hand, that's very different from the experience of a woman born in 2003. They're both adult parts of society.
And that's without getting into the experiences of women in their 30s and 40s which, depending on where they grew up, could go either way.
I get reparations, e.g. for enslaving people. In its simplest form, you break it down to "should have been paid instead" and make that a claim that can be inherited. There are arguments about collective guilt and claims against collectives etc, but that's a second step.
But women aren't an ethnic group. Children are pretty much a 50/50 split between male and female. Those claims (for reparations, and extra privileges because other women elsewhere in a different century were disadvantaged) are very different, and make no sense to me, at all.
Then again, I think reparations in general are a terrible idea.
It's just interesting because our society is moving so quickly that you have some people alive who genuinely were personally oppressed and some in the same group who weren't.
Even if you buy into intergenerational guilt and benefit for groups, each new generation (without exception) must come from both groups.
In contrast, many spaces that are branded as "men's rights" today seem to go for an entire different vision of society, which often looks like a cartoon version of the 50s (if consistent at all). If lots of men find themselves lonely, unfulfilled and unable to find a girlfriend, I think that is a serious issue, but the solution of the "men's rights" groups - that it's the women who have cut back their own goals and ambitions, just so some men they don't even know have a chance to have sex - seems pretty insane to me.
Also note, not all women are feminists either. There are plenty of women who have issues with men taking on traditionally feminine roles because they it violates their own conservative worldview. I believe that's where the "Karen" slur originated from.
That's the thing, that's the branding. The left (with Tucker Carlson's help) managed to get everyone to think of a man tanning his balls with any mention of men's rights. This is a major coup for leftist feminists, and a major loss for human rights.
Men's rights are human rights. They are father's rights. They are worker rights. It means equal protection under the law, protection from rape and violence, protection from discrimination and threats. These are basic human rights that should be afforded to everyone. This should not be a zero-sum game: to give one group rights you should not take them away from another group! There are plenty of rights to go around and they won't run out.
Fully agreed here, I'm just doubting that the resistance against that really comes from the left - my impression is that it more comes from the right (or maybe press outlets who have rebranded to look "woke" on the surface but still promote mostly traditional views).
E.g., I haven't yet seen a feminist sub on reddit excuse a female rapist or deny that a male rape victim is a victim. Though I have read articles that have done exactly that.
Some examples of feminist discussion of men's issues from Reddit:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/AskFeminists/comments/z083j5/the_gu... While the OP is dismissive, the discussion itself is far more nuanced.
- https://www.reddit.com/r/WitchesVsPatriarchy/comments/zz535i...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/z7rsv1/mens_...
Also, I like subreddits like r/menslib which try to provide "non-tate/peterson" communities for men's issues - often arguing exactly like you did.
They don't have to, society already does this for them all the time.
Pay attention to how media frames the crime when a female teacher sleeps with an underage male student versus when a male teacher rapes an underaged female student.
My word choices are deliberate here. In a vast majority of headlines and articles I've seen, if the perpetrator of a sexual crime is female, the language is much softer about the action.
And courts tend to be much softer on them as well than on the men doing the same crime.
This makes me think this kind of narrative stems more from "woke captialist" media or from people pushing the "men are always happy about sexual attention" narrative. That narrative is considered part of "toxic maskulinity" - exactly the mindset that feminists want to get rid of.
Also note that (in the US) the legal definition of rape was changed to include men no earlier than 2012 [1] (i.e. under Obama). Under the previous definition, it was fundamentally impossible to consider a man a rape victim. That previous definition was from 1927.
So the assumption that only women could be raped was the older one. The modern progressive movement was who got men included in that definition.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/blog/updated-definition...
[0]: https://www.met.police.uk/advice/advice-and-information/rsa/...
The left, however, has a compassion problem with men. It seems like very few people actually want to engage in a healthy way in left oriented spaces whereas the right actually talks to young men and offers them advice over a range of topics that a lot of boys feel most insecure about. I think that is something that needs to be addressed otherwise grifters such as Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate will continue to infiltrate spaces of 12 year old boys, with innocuous seeming lifestyle advice.
The advice I see given most frequently to boys and young men by lefties seem irrelevant to their actual interests at best or patronizing at worst (e.g. "Don't rape/make the world a better place"). I rarely see advice on how to engage with their own masculinity in a way that isn't harmful. It feels like the gut reaction of a lot of people is to conveniently label boys as assigned evil at birth rather than to guide them and unpack how interactions with peers, girls, or society work.
This isn't feminists ruining young men, it is society failing to have adequate role models and show compassion to young me.
A related impression I had is that a lot of innovation in understanding and talking about sexuality has happened in queer/LGBT spaces, but relatively little of that has swept over to hetero sexuality. There are tons of highly nuances discussions about queer and feminine sexuality and relationships. This is happening far less for hetero relationships, because traditional role models and traditional ideas of a relationship still exert a strong pressure.
It happens even less for hetero men than for hetero women in my impression. Yes, men have metric gigatons of porn available, and society is still mostly wired to male definitions of attractivity. But at the same time, the the act of actually being sexually attracted is portrayed in the media as shameful and creepy for hetero men. That sort of hypocrisy can be difficult to navigate, especially as a teenager.
For those who are unfamiliar, the basic tenet of radical feminism is that the source of women's oppression is the patriarchy (OK so far, if reductionist), which is run by and for men (broadly true), and thus men are all inherently bad (whoops that's where they lose me).
In many cases, it's an ideology that ends up repeating many of the aspects of Christian fundamentalist patriarchy, just from a different angle: men and women are fundamentally different; biology dictates your role in society; etc.
- for Mormonism: "Numerous Prophets have instructed that a Mormon woman’s place is in the home. Only Federal anti-discrimination laws, which the Church vigorously opposed, and the threat of Federal prosecution, forced the Church in 1970s to stop terminating female employment upon the birth of her first child. While no longer as clearly directed from the pulpit, a women’s place in Mormonism remains very different than that of a man. Even into the 1980s, President Kimball reiterated that “…a mother’s place is in the home!” The idea of complementary spheres for men and women rules Mormon doctrine and is the answer to almost every question about the lack of power for women in the church." [1]
- for the Southern Baptists: "A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation." [2]
This is what these religions teach about women, there is no denying or whitewashing that.
[1] https://www.mormonstories.org/truth-claims/mormon-culture/wo...
[2] https://bfm.sbc.net/bfm2000/report-of-the-baptist-faith-and-...
And quite a few religious women want to be house-makers. Do I personally think that's a rather outdated view of what it means to be a woman? Sure. But it's not my life to live and the women's choice. Let's assign some agency to these women and allow them to live their lives as they see fit before claiming they're "brainwashed". "Being able to make my own choices just like men" is kind of the point of feminism, no?
Toxic Masculinity is men on men hate.
"Toxic masculinity" is men examining themselves and seeking to reject the parts they don't like. There's no hate involved at all. The whole thing is an exercise in self-expression and self-determination.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythopoetic_men%27s_movement
Funnily there’s also research showing that a lot of gender discrimination towards women comes from women.
Perhaps as a social species we all try to keep our group from straying too far from core values.
Even a simple statement like "boys are falling behind in education" can get you implicated as a misogynist. Here's a lovely pull-quote from a recent report, The State of UK Boys:
> There's often an underlying assumption that boys should be attaining higher than girls, and if girls attain higher, then that's a problem. - Louise Archer
I could give examples on a range of issues: from suicide, discrimination in the court system, domestic violence/sexual assault. There's a set of knee-jerk responses (e.g. men only commit suicide more due to firearms/violence) that simply aren't true (men also die more from intentional overdoses). For each and every thing MRAs complain about, there's a knee-jerk, half-baked, feminist reaction.
Not sure if there’s a name for this fallacy but you see it all the time: attributing the opinions/actions of an extreme minority to a whole group. No denying there are some feminists about there spending all their time lying about men’s issues but feminists as a whole don’t.
Same applies almost every time someone says “leftists”, “the right wing” etc etc etc
Fascinating. This is exactly the sort of half-baked lie I was talking about.
Edit: At some point, rubber has to meet road. Either you accept that boys falling behind in education is an issue, or you don't. If you don't accept it as an issue, then you cannot simultaneously claim to be the ones solving it.
Some of those solutions are not easy. It's been known for decades that boys get lower grades in school, and not always for the quality of their work. In the UK we saw girls suddenly shoot past boys in maths results when exams were cancelled for COVID and teacher-assessed grades were given instead. What's the feminist solution for that?
To be honest your entire tone here is an example of really unproductive online conversation, I don't have any interest in participating in it.
The conversation would have ended up the same way had I seen his reply before editing the example in - I'd just have given it afterwards, and he'd still have no answer.
Even in the schoolyard in a progressive area in the 90s, most teachers and social workers were women and literally didn't get it.
It's like, the exact definition of what I would call "implicit bias".
For me, it was positive. When you're going through personal hell, there's a lot to be said for having others in the situation to commiserate with. Do many of the guys there sound like jerks? Sure. Maybe they even are--or maybe they're just blowing off steam in the face of a horrible situation. I think it's often the latter.
One side effect of carefully banning forums that (truly) support men is that we're left with an environment where most places that might seem to be "help" are actually dedicated to gas-lighting and castigating men in this situation. This has created a vacuum where some rather dubious looking options are actually the best available.
May the gods bless my MRAs and the guys at my local dive bar. Without them, I wouldn't have made it.
I'm conflicted about that. Not denying that what you've said is true but I specifically chose the term "red pilled" because there are huge toxic (predominantly online) communities that are openly misogynistic. e.g. in theory I'd like and participate in the "men's rights" subreddit, in reality it's a pit of toxicity. Some of the frustration there is justified (family law definitely seems biased against fathers) but the result is not positive.
I'd also add: a lot of this societal pressure against men being accepted as stay at home parents comes from men.