“If men want hugs, they need to start hugging other men.“
There is a type of feminist rhetoric that I have witnessed, namely that (female) feminists should not (have to) care about men or the issues they face. Women have their own much more important issues to solve, so they don’t have the time, energy or inclination to help men with theirs. They have no moral or ethical obligation to care about men, since men are the biggest reason for most the world’s ills, including women’s. Men are the only ones responsible when it comes to fixing issues that impact men. If (almost) all male issues are due to the patriarchy, and since the patriarchy is due to men, the burden to solve male issues should fall on men since they are the ones chiefly responsible for them.
Women are sick and tired of constantly being required to solve men’s issues. Many men struggle to get emotional support and platonic intimacy from their male pears, which results in loneliness, something that seems to disproportionately falls on the shoulders of women to deal with. In cishet relationships, it is the women who does most of the emotional labor. Women are unfairly characterized as more nurturing, caring, soothing and motherly, so men will burden them with their emotional and similar issues.
An example of this mindset:
A different but related aspect is that what many might be called “benign” male bashing (things like “men are trash” or “kill all men”) is dismissed as harmless venting against crappy men or the patriarchy in general. One example of this is here. There is a whole 13 million subscriber subreddit full of generalizations like these against men.
Do these viewpoint have merit or is it needlessly tribalistic and us vs them? Is it misandry? But if women don’t have to care about men, should men care about women? Is it stupid of me to get upset by any of this rhetoric? (Okay, maybe it is but can you help me stop being upset by it?)
That is the core sentence of the paragraph you quote. It doesn’t say “feminists should not have to care about men or the issues they face”. It does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in a world where some people argue that women should put out more to prevent incel movement mass shootings.
That’s not to say that “kill all men” isn’t problematic, but unlike “I can’t get laid!” it has yet to result in mass murder.
Your final paragraph asks some interesting questions, but you are all over the place with them and when your starting point is to conflate “kill all men” and the perfectly reasonable stance that women shouldn’t be obligated to focus on male hurt in a world where men have all the power and women hurt far more, the discussion is unlikely to stay sensible.
I don’t think you’ll find many feminists who literally do not care about men. I am sure most would support things like civil rights or the rule of law or basic human decent for all humans.
Feminists, however, while doing feminism, are concentrating on issues related to women.
When MLK was marching for the rights of Black people he was not at those times concerned about white people’s right, but he certainly did support white people being allowed to leading peaceful lives and having civil rights.
Prioritizing women and “all men are evil” or “kill all the men”. I don’t think it’s problematic that some women want to prioritize women and women’s issues. I think it’s more problematic that women are pressured to help men (or Blacks to help Whites, etc.)
That being said, i have seen some nasty rhetoric from the misandrous branch of feminism, and i find it disturbing. No, i don’t want to carry around scissors to threaten to castrate random men who look at my chest.
But i don’t think the paragraph you quoted is an example of that. It’s just a statement from an activist who had picked her target of activism.
I’d say there are 2 types of feminism, one that wants equal and equatable status in society with various definitions of what that would mean, and the other that wants females to be separate or even in some cases superior to males. That second type would fit the OP’s definition and yes there are some who feel that way, but the first type is the more mainstream version IMHO.
Most feminists would say male behavior is a problem, and men need to change. For the most part, they don’t see those changes taking place in the complete absence of input from themselves (= from feminists). Men only listening to other men aren’t going to arrive at the necessary understandings.
At the same time, most feminists would also say that as feminists they want to devote most of their energy and effort on behalf of women. They tend to feel that throughout history, women have devoted a lot of energy to being supportive of men and helping men. So when it comes to helping men untangle themselves from patriarchal patterns that aren’t good for male people either, a lot of feminist women do have the atttitude that male folks need to help themselves, they can’t expect feminist women to do it for them, etc.
If there’s a disconnect there, it’s in the area between “men, and men’s behavior, have to change” and “men who want to extract themselves from destructive patriarchal patterns need to do it for themselves”. If you want to make an attitude about the difference, it’s about “change in men as feminist women intend it to occur” versus “change in men as they themselves wish it to occur”. The former is a feminist agenda item, with women as a decisive (and objective-defining) force, whereas the latter looks like a male-defined self-help programme with feminist women either recruited as helpful supportive folks or declining to take that role.
You can make a good (if, admittedly, overused) analogy to race here. The extent to which liberation is (or was) achieved by getting people in the oppressor’s group to see reason to change, versus the extent to which it is achieved by standing up against them confrontationally.
It’s not really an either/or proposition, but rather a both/and.
The reason for the response is the expectation. The implication when men tell women that men need more hugs is that women should be required to give more hugs. But women already likely hug as many people as they are comfortable with. If it’s men who feel they need more hugs, they should hug more men.
It’s ultimately a way to call their bluff. Do men really want more hugs, or more hugs from women? If it’s just more hugs, then hugging other men should work. If it’s hugging women, then they’re being deceptive.
Women are tired of men trying to manipulate them into doing things for them. It’s not about not caring about men as people. Just not seeing how men needing more hugs is a problem that women need to solve. Women hug men all the time. It’s men who don’t hug other men as much as women hug other women.
This is like something we saw in the discussion of antiracism back in Summer 2020 - it should not be the burden upon Black People to educate whites in a way the whites can understand and give them a face-saving way to change w/o feeling bad about it. The dominant group is not entitled to “handholding” through the journey, but the group seeking justice CAN care about the dominant group, and may lend them a hand IF it is offered freely and accepted without strings attached, not as an obligation.
10-15 years ago when I had small children I joined the Working Parents Employee Resource Group. To say that the almost exclusively female membership was unsympathetic to my concerns that management was not in the least bit supportive of male parents. My boss and his boss would routinely tell me that my wife should be the one responsible for picking up the kids, taking them to the doctor, etc. I needed to be available 7am to 7pm because “stuff comes up”. They’d be crucified by HR if they said that to a female employee.
Nowadays, both the Women’s and Working Parents groups are much more supportive of men who take on more parental responsibilities than has been traditional.
My wife worked for a company headquartered in a more enlightened country when our kids were little. They were VERY forward about parenting being a joint responsibility
I don’t know if this correlates to “feminism” though. It does correlate with DEI in the workplace.
Every -ism contains extremists. Even the -isms you personally agree with. Getting bent out of shape about the extremists of an -ism is unproductive regardless of which -ism it is.
That realization may help you adopt a position with enough perspective to avoid or reduce your upset-ness. If it (extremism) is par for the course of the human condition, how are you or the rest of us helped by being upset by that? It’s not like you, me, or both of us working together are going to remake human nature. We may as well be pissed that the Sun rises in the east, when rising in the North would be so much prettier.
Another point: the existence of extremists in a cause does not necessarily invalidate the rest of the cause. You can evaluate the cause on its logical merits or on the actions of its non-extremists and come up with a much more accurate judgment.
I can accept the nuance between “men hating” rhetoric, and actual actions. Feminism winning equality and justice will help everybody, including men. A society with equality is good for all except the very few who controlled the unequal society. Sometimes movements employ more extreme rhetoric than the actual desired outcome.
The thing that bothers me is when an oppressed group loses sight of the fact that not everybody in the dominant group is actually dominating. The patriarchy is not all men over all women. It is a few men over everybody else. Often the ones in the dominant group who are being attacked are not in a position to create change anymore than the ones in the oppressed group. That just wastes everybody’s time, and creates lots of hurt feelings on both sides.
Of course there is also such a thing as privilege, so yeah, nuance.
Most men in America are victims of the patriarchy to one degree or another. Not because we’re a dispossessed group, but because toxic masculinity is built into the culture. When we were boys, we were taught that sex and gender created rigid roles, expectations, and guidelines for how we should treat others. That’s how you end up with things like the dreaded man hug. It’s just that society is so tilted in our favor that it often doesn’t matter in terms of socioeconomic success.
There are practical reasons why women shouldn’t be responsible for male pain, even beyond the very real “injustice sherpa” role that oppressed groups are often asked to take on by privileged ones. They aren’t experiencing it. I don’t presume to impose my privileged experiences on groups I’m not a part of. And when it comes to the parts of my identity which place me in a dispossessed group, I generally don’t give a wet shit about external privileged opinions.
Men are responsible for addressing male pain because we’re best positioned to do it. In our current culture, I think “addressing male pain” is - more often than not - confronting the symptoms of toxic masculinity amongst both our adult peers and the young men we interact with. And ironically, the truth is that because of toxic masculinity, men are more likely to listen to other men about their behavior. Advice on acting kindly might be taken as “mentoring” from a “positive make role model” from me, but “scolding” from a woman.
Meanwhile, women are getting raped and mutilated and child-married because of the patriarchy while I’m over here talking about bro hugs. So yeah, they really do have bigger fish to fry.
This is a very good point. I hadn’t thought of that. Although what men really men want is hugs from women and not men (and by “hugs” they probably mean just sex, another dishonest manipulation), saying it out loud will probably not get a sympathetic response. It seems it would be best to for men solve their issues on their own and not bother women about them.
This might be a monster hijack, and if so let’s let it drop. but …
Is there any particular reason to believe that men in a state of nature and women in a state of nature would actually find their respective natural interests equally served by a common and symmetric approach to their co-existence?
The only thing that we truly know is fully compatible between men & women is the genetic biological aspects of reproduction. Egg + sperm → baby works and works with pretty high reliability. How much else of what makes up human maleness and human femaleness works as well together? I honestly don’t know.
Wait, all men are bosses, heads of state, or other leaders in society?
That’s what I mean. If the manager at work is a misogynistic asshole, that’s bad, but the male workers probably don’t have much power to change his behavior.
Yes, this is what I was trying to get at, and I agree with what else you said, too.
I’m not asking to be coddled (or cuddled), and feminists don’t need to watch themselves to avoid hurting my precious feelings. It’s just when I’m told (in many more words) to get on the group chat and tell other men to knock it off, that I’m left wondering why they think it works like that.
Nuance, different situations are different. I’ve been involved in academic situations in which the contributions of women were being minimized. I, and many of my male colleagues, pushed back strongly. There we did have the power and voice to tell other men to knock it off.
I don’t think it is unreasonable to pose the questions “Are male and female people naturally antagonistic and working at cross-purposes?” and “Is it all men, or men as a composite whole, or the majority of men, or a handful of privileged men who are the problem?” – as long as the questions aren’t being tossed into the discussion with the attitude that the answer is so compelling and self-explanatory that by asking them we’ve answered them.
Feminist theory is diverse but there is a lot of support for the notion that gender, reproduction, and sexuality were not set up the way they have been through most recorded history until we embraced agriculture. Outside of feminist theory per se, a lot of anthropology tends to agree with that. That makes it look like patriarchy is an adaptation of sorts – to agrarian society? To the stress of scarcity and the desire and need for control over reproduction and the social-control advantages of being able to restrict and dole out sexual access? Many such ideas are often discussed within academic feminism and other such fields.
I don’t like sociobiology and similar arguments that males and females naturally compete against each other. They tend to lead rapidly to the conclusion that patriarchy is, in fact, the War Between the Sexes and that it’s here to stay and ain’t going away. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider possibilities anyhow, but let’s avoid rushing to embrace beliefs in built-in antagonisms just as we avoid embracing beliefs in built-in differences between the sexes — they merge too easily with explanations that excuse inequality and double standards.
As for who the oppressor is and who is at fault — I find the simplistic notion that patriarchy was dreamed up in the paleolithic Boys’ Bathroom to be unhelpful, as is the protestation that many males aren’t getting a lot of benefit. A lot of progressive liberationist philosophy seems to depend on culprits, evil oppressors who set things up on purpose. But the most radical of feminist thought is where you find the questions about these very value systems — the notion that it is a desirable thing to have power over others in the first place. The feminist notion that this is a value and a belief that is woven into our cultural definitions of masculinity, this obsession with being the winner, the victor, the successful aggressor who beats the others. Oppression is just beating others and coercing them, winning, having your will overpower theirs. We aren’t going to undo it or dismantle it or escape from it, say these feminists, if we start out with the assumption that yeah, anyone who could have that would want it because it’s so intrinsically desirable to be the one with your boot on someone else’s throat.
You think the Patriarchy is just the leaders? Fuck that noise. The Patriarchy is every rapist, every wifebeater, every wolf-whistling construction worker, every sexist pig who tells his son not to cry and his daughter that she can’t throw a ball.
A lot, if not most, men are not victims, they’re willing participants in all that shit.