Non-Boston-area Pervocrats, and Boston-area Pervocrats that already looked below!
Today instead of posting, I'm just going to link to something Ozymandias wrote, because it's pretty powerful.
Who Cares About Men's Rights?
I care because this is not about men, this is about my father and my boyfriend and my best friends and the guys whose books I've stolen and the guys whose hearts I've broken and the guy who broke mine and the greatest English teacher the world has ever known and my Greek professor and next year's roommates and Neil Gaiman and Gerard Way and Joey Ramone and Jim Butcher and half of the people I have ever loved or hated or feared or wanted to be.
Now it is time for the yelling.
Feminists? You know what you are, as a movement, right now? You are that's not my department says Wernher Von Brauhn. I mean, have we learned nothing from when we got black people in the movement, and poor people, and queer people, and trans people, and disabled people? The side of "well, we shouldn't help with that, it's not our thing really" has never, ever, ever, ever turned out to be the right side! You would think we would have caught on to the trend by now!
It's definitely worth reading the whole thing.
I am amused that I seem to be the first person in the history of the Pervocracy to be right on the Internet.
ReplyDelete...more like the first person in the history of the Internet.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the shout out. Ozy wrote a great piece.
ReplyDeleteawesome. Equality only happens when everybody's inherent value and rights are recognized.
ReplyDeleteSometimes you're right on the Internet, Holly! And Figleaf, and Clarisse Thorn, and Svutlana, and...
ReplyDeleteGreat Post!
ReplyDelete"Someone is right on the internet." I was heartwarmed.
I tried to post something but I accidentally deleted it, so sorry if this somehow ends up posting twice.
ReplyDeleteI agree with pretty much the entire post, except for the part that you quoted, actually. I've never heard or read a feminist say that the problems men and boys face because of the patriarchy aren't important. Sometimes they choose not to talk about those problems because they're talking about different ones, and I think that's perfectly acceptable. Everyone has to prioritize their battles. The rest of the post really nicely explained how the patriarchy hurts pretty much everyone (women/men/married/straight/trans/gay/unmarried/cis/whole bunch of other people), and I really liked the part talking about how some men feel they have to be jerks or Nice Guys (tm) or pick up artists and the part talking about MRAs. But when almost all (maybe even all) of the feminists I've spoken to or whose work I've read talk about the importance of intersectionality, it seems unfair to accuse feminists of taking a "well, we shouldn't help with that, it's not our thing really" approach.
Typical. I find pervocrats and they're in a different country !
ReplyDeleteIt's a great post, but the comments have devolved into people bashing feminism. Their imaginary take on feminism, that is.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I'm surprised at the criticisms levelled at feminism... feminist texts are where I learned about hegemonic masculinity and its oppression of men who resist it / can't live up to its expectations.
ReplyDeleteI dunno. The whole rant got really incoherent to me around hereabouts:
ReplyDelete"The point is not an equivalent distribution of shit to everyone, the point is to find out who's throwing the shit on everybody and get them to stop!
...as it turns out with a few shining exceptions men don't hate women. Sometimes they have mistaken beliefs about women, and sometimes incentive structures are set up so that sexist behavior is rewarded, and sometimes a lot of other stuff that's nobody's fault, but very rarely is someone like "aha! I will go oppress women today!" In fact, it would be easier if it was, because we could just go shoot that guy and then the problem would be solved and candy and kittens would fall from the sky."
Find the oppressor! The oppressor is everywhere! The oppressor is no one!
Maybe the oppressor is all of us. Which is something feminists and feminism have been driving home for awhile. The real ones, I mean, not the ~it's not my department!~ strawman that Ozy sets up even as she takes down the "crazy shit some women said in the seventies" feminist strawman that MRAs use.
I want some links to these Wehrner Von Feminists, or I ain't buying.
Feminism is concerned with men's rights a decent amount of the time. Not to be too mean, Holly, because you're clearly smart, but sometimes I'd rather read Twisty Faster for all her insanity than you because it seems like you're so desperate to be accepted by people who will never really respect you, i.e. Men's Rights people.
ReplyDeleteAnon - I think the Men's Rights people are a joke, but men's rights is an important issue. So I tend to run into them, and although I don't want their acceptance (I've also started to realize there's about twelve of them and they don't go outside), I sort of have to get them out of the way.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I'll admit a certain weakness for easy targets.
I agree with Galatea. Patriarchy does hurt men, too, but the real enemies for men are gender binarism and gender essentialism, and no movement has done more to combat those things than feminism.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to respect Ozymandias' post at first, but the more I think about it, the more I feel it's BS. Yes, prison rape (and the way it's ignored) is a horrible problem, as are many of the other things she mentioned, but are we really going to pretend that "men's rights" as a whole don't get enough attention or respect in our culture? Of course they do! The reason feminist spaces are often loathe to address male issues is because men often invade feminist spaces specifically to drown out the female voices and divert attention from the female issues.
It seems that that blog is now invite-only.
ReplyDeletesadface :(
I can haz canonical static page somewhere for that post?
What bugs me is that Men's Rights Activists don't get that Feminism works towards the exact same goal that they (allegedly) work towards: The end of sexism.
ReplyDeleteWhat bugs me even more is that most of Men's Rights Activism is actually Misogynist Rights Activism.
And I think that the guys who have actually thought about this, would suggest a common term for an Anti-Sexism movement that sheds the gendering inherent in the word Feminism, instead of sulkingly say "Well, WE have a movement to, bitches. It's Masculism and you don't get to be part of it."