Wow… How sad.
Her first post kind of came across that way, but she clarified later, so I don’t know why you’d fixate on the earlier ambiguity. There are no points to be won.
That said, I don’t body shaming men is a good sort of “punching up.” It reminds me of ZPG’s nonsense about how she’d use racist epithets because she wanted to hit her alleged assailants where it hurt. Sure, it’s a bad idea, but reinforcing bigotry in the service of hurting jerks is…good?
Body-shaming in the sense of mocking people for not adhering to gender norms ultimately strengthens the gender norms. To the extent that such insults are effective, they’re effective because they validate the victim’s belief that gender norms are important. Way better, IMO, to mock their desperate need to be thought of as big-dicked, than to tease them for being small-dicked.
It really was. He was my firsthand introduction to just how fucked up bad war injuries can be–his scar map was…complicated. I honestly don’t know how he survived all the surgery in the first place, he was so messed up and had to be dragged out of the tunnel in order to be medevacked out. I think that only now with the 20+ veteran suicides per day and the homeless crisis are we seeing anything close to the kind of horrifying carnage that war brings and the fact that it gets shrugged off just because the military is all volunteer these days makes me fucking sick.
Thank you so much for this paragraph. It needs to be read very slowly and thoroughly understood.
That’s not exactly what they’re saying.
They’re saying “You want sympathy for being body-shamed? Sure. Get in line. Yes, at the back.”
Oh, I think it is - the patriarchy is happy to eat its own to feed itself.
The same way all Whites benefit from white privilege, even though they themselves are not racists, may in fact be active anti-racists.
Just as an example - a culture that constantly body-shames women to the degree ours does leads to a lot of insecure women who put up with a lot more from men than they ought to. So even men who don’t themselves body-shame only have to put minimal effort into relationships. “I have to do all the cleaning and cooking and childrearing and be a whore in bed because otherwise he’ll leave me because I’m fat. Ugly. Old. Everyone else says so, so he must be thinking it.” You don’t have to be the asshole when society is happy to be the asshole for you.
It is never OK to put people down for a trait that they have no way of changing. Shaming and bullying of any sex for such reasons is not OK. Being an arsehole for the purpose of hurting people is never OK
That it happened in the past more to women is irrelevant when considering what should be tolerated towards men now. Eradicating it for women while tacitly allowing it against men is not equality, it is revenge and that leads nowhere good. Worse. It is revenge on people that mostly had nothing to do with past abuse.
It doesn’t set an example that all such abuse is bad, it just promotes the idea that certain groups deserve it by dint of their supposed group identity (which they have no control over)
If you want to criticise an individual about their body shaming behaviour then fine, they deserve it in that case but best ensure that they are actually doing it in the first place.
Ultimately this harms everyone no matter who perpetrates it. Having an increased field of hurt, damaged, insecure potential partners does not help human flourishing. We all suffer.
I think the push-back is because the OP made is sound like he thought body shaming used to be a thing women had to deal with, but we got that fixed, so now let’s deal with body shaming against men. He perceives what men currently deal with as qualitatively and quantitively worse that what women have to deal with. I am not sure if he’s walked back that position.
For those of you talking about “listing” preferences, do you mean in a dating profile? Because I have no idea what’s appropriate in those forums. But I would say that “listing” preferences in normal day-to-day life is the sort of thing that should only happen very privately and with close friends: publicly opining that you’d never date [whatever] is going to be hurtful to anyone [whatever] in earshot, and even if no one is personally described, it perpetuates a cultural idea that [whatever] is shameful.
Another thing: my husband is under 5’ and severely bow-legged, and on one hand, he’d tell all you 5’5" fuckers to quit your bitching. But on the other, post middle-school, he’s almost never been teased about height. It’s like he’s so short, no one mentions height at all, in the way no one says “wheelchair” in front of someone who is in one. In a lot of ways, I think it’s insulated him from feeling like his height was a major factor in how others perceive him. The problem with being sorta short is that people think that since it isn’t “that bad”, it’s fair game for good-natured ribbing. But it’s not, obviously. If nothing else, it perpetuates the idea that being short (or whatever) is shameful, if if the target isn’t quite “one of them”.
If that was the general thrust of the argument then sure, It is right to challenge it. I don’t think the level of body-shaming in general towards men today compares to what is and has been inflicted on women.
Of course, even if it is less it is of no comfort to the individual suffering from crippling anxiety and depression because of it and it would be doubly wrong to suggest to such an individual that, because of what other men do and have done he has no right to complain. That’s a terrible view to hold.
I also have to say (and I’m not sure if it has been covered in the rest of the thread) that the concept of men as the exclusive perpetrators of body-shaming women to be a bit of a red-herring. Or perhaps at least slightly pinkish. My wife and daughter confidently inform me that women themselves are equally to blame, I don’t know how much that is true seeing as I’m not privy to those sorts of comments. I’d be interested to hear more from the women in this thread on that.
I think it’s been said throughout the thread that body-shaming of both genders is part of a societal system that is about reinforcing gender norms. Groups participate is all sorts of things that perpetuate their own marginalization. Certainly men body shame men, as often and as brutally as women body shame men.
Yeah, fair.
True, and very often it is done with a plausibly deniable veneer of humour and the expectation that you just have to take it. Not a healthy situation.
You asked and answered your own question succinctly.
It’s just ridiculous when someone wants awareness/sympathy for an issue that bothers them, but loudly declares that they deny sympathy to anyone in the class that they blame for it. That’s a really good way to get nobody to give a shit about your issue.
Hey, I am 5’5", as well. Actually, I’m 59 now, and may have shrunk down to 5’4". My penis is small and deformed. I just don’t care! As you get older, things like this matter less and less. Just concentrate on things that you actually have control over, and you can be happy. And make sure never to be cruel to others! Body-shaming isn’t cool.
Because everyone knows we must triage sympathy.
This is what’s been bothering me most about this thread. OP would get a lot more of my sympathy if he weren’t so insistent that his problems are worse than mine.
Triage it? No. I said nothing about anyone making any triage-ish kinds of judgements. It’s FIFO or FO. Women have been in that queue for millennia.
And remember - human emotions aren’t an infinite resource. Compassion fatigue can be a real thing. And it would not surprise me if many women develop a new, chronic form of it - especially in response to denizens of the manosphere suddenly being all “But maah feelzzz”.
I’m sorry for the misunderstanding. I NEVER thought that body shaming for women is over and done with. What I guess I meant was, I often see people get upset when women get shamed, but rarely men. Of course women deal with it more and it’s still horrible.
That clarifies it.just so you’re aware, there are a lot of MRA types out there that argue that society is dramatically biased against men and that women are privileged on most every axes. So there’s a bit of a knee-jerk concern about that rhetoric.
I think it was the “I don’t think people understand” comment that caused a reaction in me. I’m sure being 5’5" sucks for a guy. I honestly think I can emphasize pretty well. Feeling ugly and unlovable is probably more the norm than the exception.