Okay, but crowded out by what? If men don’t object to the characterizations because they don’t “owe” women something (which is a very odd way to phrase this), then who does object? And if no one objects, why would anything change?
Crowded out by the positives of being independent, instead of negging on the negatives. There are simply too many assholes in this world to engage with each and every one. I wouldn’t laugh at a rape joke. I’d frown at it’s asininity. But I wouldn’t call the cops and say “this guy is potential rapist!”
Another quote fits: “gratitude is riches, complaining is poverty.” I’m not going to tell anyone they have no right to complain. I’m not going on a crusade to censure inappropriate complaints.
And you must admit that misogyny is not black and white: everyone with a brain knows “slap my bitch up” is misogynous. But is *“why should a make a big deal for someone just because it’s February 14th and she’s the one with the vagina?” *misogynous? I guarantee you you’ll find some people who think it is.
Is there any place this is happening?
The site you linked to above says their core mission is: “AVFM’s core mission has been to change the public narrative about sexual politics; to force a critique of feminism into the cultural consciousness and to chip away at the empathy gap when it comes to the sexes.”
I looked at the front page you linked to. They say a lot about women. It’s a lot of critiques of feminism (or strawmen of feminism) and lots of snarking about women. But there’s very little about men directly. I don’t know. I don’t read those headlines and think “This is about the positives of being independent.” I think “These guys really want to go after women.”
I took a look at the front two pages of Jezebel (to see roughly the same amount of content as the AVFM site). Jezebel’s front page has one article/post/thingie explicitly about males in that it mentions that Kim Kardashian and Kanye West had only male embryos planted. I guess they did IVF (I didn’t read the article). There were articles about racism, homophobia, drugs, a rape trial, some celebrities. Lots of different things.
Now, it’s important to note that I don’t tend to read Jezebel, and I don’t tend to read AVFM. So their respective front pages may not be their norms right now for whatever reason. And their standing in their respective communities may not be similar.
That said, Jezebel’s front pages did not read to me like an attack on men. It read like a progressive bloggy type site with a pro-women and minorities slant.
So, this is how the two sites struck me:
Jezebel: Go women! Go minorities! Go gays! Because we’re awesome!
AVFM: Go men! Because women and feminism suck!
And you didn’t see any misogyny. If you had, you’d have let us know.
Jezebel isn’t the opposite of a MGTOW site. Its a woman’s advocacy site, with some good articles and some real clunkers (as the UVA rape story unraveled, it doubled-down by smearing the journalist who investigated Rolling Stones’ shoddy journalism)
The opposites of a MGTOW site are Plenty O Fish, and OK Cupid. Kind of like how the opposite of a frugal living website would be an online investment site with incredibly poor ROI.
Like I said in my second post in this thread, I don’t agree with a lot of what gets into MGTOW sites. It doesn’t jibe with everything in heaven and earth. But nobody else is telling guys “you don’t have to put up with this bullshit.”
But I still think this falls back on convenient stereotypical thinking. What evidence is there that girls do better in group projects? Being able to work in a team is a skill that develops over time, and boys get a lot of practice at this in sports.
Unless things have drastically changed since I was a kid, most schoolwork (particularly at the youngest ages)l is targeted toward the individual. Homework is individual, testing is individual, and class participation is individual. So I question the assumption that increasing emphasis on peer interaction and group projects has resulted in a major grading changes.
If we’re serious about addressing male underperformance, we need data. Not assumptions based on stereotypes. What factors differentiate the strong performing boys from the weaker ones? It’s perfectly possible that certain factors associated with poor academic performance (like parental reinforcement or lack thereof) have a bigger effect on boys than girls. This isn’t evidence of gender bias, though.
? Or not, since that wasn’t what I was focused on.
So a women’s advocacy site is not the opposite of a men’s advocacy site?
AVFM has articles about feminism, dogs, women, rape accusations, ADHD, etc. I don’t see how this is the opposite of dating sites.
You know, if you didn’t want to talk about it, you could have just not talked about it. I would like to have a conversation, but I would also like not to be near-sighted and to be able to eat ice cream for breakfast.
There’s some truth I what you’re saying. 40 or 60 or 80 years of social engineering isn’t going to change hundreds of thousands or millions of years of evolution. Short of some sort of forced marriage program, women are going to continue to want to date the guy with the nice car, good job, and/or fat bank account over a “basement dwelling loser”. Men, on the other hand, are going to want to date the most attractive woman they can, whether she lives in a basement or not.
As an aside, my 20- something year old, competent, charming, hard-working, highly empathetic assistant, who also happens to be drop-dead gorgeous, has never dated a man her own age. Currently she’s dating a 50- something year old man with a “panty-dropping” (her words, not mine) Lamborghini, who’ll be taking her to NY in a couple weeks.
Just sayin’.
I’m not hating, btw. After seeing where he lives, I’d date him. (I just don’t think he’d have me.) My only concern is I may wind up losing a hard-to-replace assistant.
But if you were a twenty-something guy, and you believe being Mr. Nice Guy would eventually win you a girlfriend… switching from the lies you’ve been told to reality is a bit of an adjustment.
I’m reasonably sure you’re one of the ones who dismissed them as “basement-dwelling troglodytes” (if I’m wrong, I apologize in advance). You may have been one of the ones who compared them to the KKK and the NAZIs.
I remember when Limbaugh first came out with feminazis, and how offended I was and what an ass he was making of himself. (Example #573).
But I say with sincerity, I don’t believe men can be partners in feminism, unless you view your pet as a partner. And you really really don’t don’t like your pet.
I can’t parse this to make any sense at all. I’m guessing you’ve defined “feminism” in your own mind so narrowly that “feminists” have no respect for men.
That’s absurd.
No, you’re right: there’s 37 different flavor of feminism. I know they don’t all hate men. It’s just that the ones who register loudest to me say the same thing over and over: “we hate men.”
Now whether that’s because they’re the loudest, they get the most attention, or I’m especially attuned to that message is up for debate. But they’re definitely out there, and I’ve heard their message again and again. I’m not up for hearing it anymore.
It’s not something I’ve studied enough to really debate of what works, and why; just a general recollection of how the subject has been handled in news articles and interviews. Although I don’t think the bit about different learning styles is pure stereotype. I’m pretty sure that has been studied; I may have just gotten the details wrong in my descriptions.
My point was more to do with the reactions and public perceptions on the issue. When girls and women underperform in some area, it’s seen as a problem. There are efforts even now to increase women’s participation in STEM fields. It doesn’t seem to be the same with boys and men. I see the statistics that women are the majority of college students and graduates, and I can find articles on why boys underperform in school, but it hasn’t mobilized any sort of effort to correct it. If no one is offering a solution, is it because boys’ poor performance isn’t considered a problem?
Or maybe enough time hasn’t passed for people to be sure there is a problem. Or maybe enough time hasn’t passed for anyone to figure out any answers.
Black kids often underperform white kids. Lots of us think that’s a problem and it hasn’t been fixed. Does that mean lots of us don’t think it’s a problem? No. But it does mean that something is missing: knowledge of the problem, knowledge of the cause, knowledge of the solution, or the will to fix it.
It could be because the jury is still out as to whether what we’re seeing in boys is actually new. If boys are doing about the same as they always done–and we’re only now reconizing their performance as a problem because girls are beating them–it’s going to be harder to galvanize the masses to treat this as a serious issue.
It’s all too tempting to see this as zero sum, as if helping girls succeed has to come at the expense of boys. I think this mindset is counterproductive because it’s antagonistic and causes us always conclude bias is afoot rather than other hypothesies…
I think you’re wrong. I think most men just don’t want to be with a woman who thinks she’s better than him, or that she’s “settling”. Many men, I think, would be perfectly happy dating or marrying a woman who makes more money. But they’d want that fact to be separate from the power structure within the relationship. And they’d want to feel like the woman valued him for something; if not the amount of money he makes, then something else. He’d want to think she’s happy to be with him, despite the fact he makes less money, and he’d want to feel like she thinks she’s picked a winner, even if she makes more money than he does.
One thing to consider is there are a lot of ways to be a successful person, other than by making a lot of money. Another thing to consider is that being a “high-achieving woman” may have a lot to do with, say - hard work - for example. But it’s also possible that you’ve been fortunate. Maybe you were born smart. Not everybody is. Maybe you had good parents. Not everybody does. Maybe your parents paid for your education. Not all parents do. Maybe you got a break, at some point, and had the opportunity to take advantage of it.
I’m just throwing some things out there.
If you (and I’m talking about the hypothetical you, not you personally) go around projecting the idea that you’re better than other people, you’re going to turn a lot of people off, including potential suitors. If you think about the ways you’ve been fortunate in life, and consider the ways other people may not have been as fortunate, you’re more likely to draw people in.
Just sayin’ :).
In fairness we all have our moments of hypocrisy, so I’m not going to heap too much salt on the wound. Afterall you do go on to acknowledge, correctly, that feminism has many different faces.
But you seem to be pretty dogmatic in pushing the one view as the dominant one while scolding everyone else for not being more flexible and open-minded about your “own” ( or at least the one you’re implicitly carrying water for ) ideology. If you were previewing your argument for a debate team, you’d probably get a mild rebuke for trapping yourself with your own rhetoric.
In fact in the past few decades there have been an increase of like marrying like. Male execs don’t marry secretaries any more, they marry female execs. That there are more female execs around to be candidates helps also.
There always has been a distribution of brains and opportunity. The difference today is that women with brains don’t get blocked (or not as much as they used to.) The smart woman becomes a doctor today, not a nurse. Perhaps this puts her out of the reach of not-so-smart men who might have had a chance with a nurse. (I am not putting down nurses - it is just a prestige thing. And a money thing. My wife’s aunt could have made a great doctor if she were born 40 years later.)
I’ve never heard any men I know express the wish to marry a bimbo, (even 40 years ago) and they pretty much all married smart and competent women. My two very smart daughters had no trouble getting husbands. If any boys considered them too smart, those boys got rejected immediately.
As for the woman making more money, I suspect this would be fine if the man were doing something interesting or creative that doesn’t pay well. If the man is making less money because he never cared about school or is dumb or is lazy, then he might have a bit harder time attracting a smart woman. Tough.
I think it is good when spouse not only love each other but are also proud of each other.
Slithy Tove is actually the one who introduced the term “humping and dumping” to the discussion; I’ve only been using it because that was the expression he used. I’ll admit that I’m not the heppest cat around, so it’s possible I’ve misunderstood what this means. It seems pretty self-explanatory, but if this:
is not the sort of thing properly described as “humping and dumping” then I apologize for the mistake.
I don’t except myself from having preconceptions. I come to every issue with my own pre-conceptions, just like everyone else.
And I will acknowledge that my own experiences with feminism have darkened my view of it. It’s sort of like, my gut reaction is colored by past experiences, even though I know intellectually not all feminists are the same. Sometimes I have to check myself, and I don’t always do a good job of it.
Anyway, mea culpa.
On the other issue, I don’t know that I’m carrying water for anybody. I understand why it seems that way: to me I was trying to have a discussion about MGTOW, while others were attacking it, without bothering to find out what it was, first. Which, in turn, seemed to validate one of MGTOW’s points: that it’s pointless to engage with the outside world, because nobody gives a shit about them, or what they think.
And at least some - not all - of what they say resonates with me. So I am willing to defend at least those parts.
I agree with most of what you say, so I’ll limit myself to asking a question: if there’s been an increase in “like marrying like”, where do all the stories about “successful” women not being able to find a man come from?
Yeah, like I said before, it’s defensive and antagonistic. I won’t defend the substance, or the tone. In fact, “Single mothers are the number one cause of single mothers.” is obviously wrong, since it takes two (usually) to make a baby. I suspect (and yes, I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt) they’re over-compensating for the “they’re just a bunch of basement-dwelling losers who can’t get any” attitude. It’s still wrong, and stupid.
Edited to add: in my view, being a good father should be the #1 aspect of what it means to be a good man. Making babies and abandoning them is despicable.