The Male Inequality Problem

[Great_Antibob]

@msmith537

the conversation feels more like some combination of women don’t know how to tell the difference

This seems naive and uninformed.

MEN don’t know how to tell the difference, either. How many seem shocked when it turns out somebody they know well turned out to be a sexual predator? Or dismiss it because they “know” so and so wouldn’t do that. That describes the vast majority of men - almost all have known men who they would never have guessed did anything like that. It’s a cliche at this point - the news crew finding some neighbor or friend or something quoted as saying “there was never any sign of” or similar.

In the past, the standard was “it happens, but not as much as you think, suck it up”, which seems to be your take. We’ve figured out it’s not true (it does happen as much, if not more, than you think), that we can’t “just tell” who is a creep or not on sight or by their ‘normal’ behavior, and that we’re no longer ok with that.

[Odesio]

@msmith537

But the conversation feels more like some combination of women don’t know how to tell the difference and men don’t know how to approach a woman without coming across as creepy or rapey.

To be fair, it’s not always immediately obvious the intent of someone approaching you. Many years ago, I was in a parking lot at night putting something in my trunk when someone approached, calling out to me. My immediate thoughts were something along the lines of, “This is weird. I don’t know this guy. Why is he trying to engage me while I’m alone in the dark?” I reacted as if he was a danger, squaring off with the guy, but it turns out he was just panhandling.

But as a general rule, I’d rather run into a random man than a bear.

[Filbert]

@msmith537

But the conversation feels more like some combination of women don’t know how to tell the difference and men don’t know how to approach a woman without coming across as creepy or rapey.

Are you under the impression that men who rape are obvious? Women can pick out the obvious creeps a mile off. But guys can be charming, funny, act like friends for years then suddenly they’re not.

The protective, supportive, always helpful guy in my friend group, the one who jumped in (and got his jaw broken) while trying to calm the situation when someone tried to hit one of my friends, the guy who worked as a councillor at the university who would always make sure everyone got home safe raped three underage girls that I know of. Only three reported it anyway.

The drummer in my housemate’s band, funny, naive, always up for a laugh. Knew him for years; crazy, but harmless. He dated another of my housemates for a few months and was sweet and kind to her before she dumped him as he really was just too childish. A few months afterwards he tried to forcibly rape the band’s new singer and she had to fight him off.

No, women often can’t tell who is ‘rapey’ and neither can you.

[thorny_locust]

@msmith537

Which is not to say that women shouldn’t be cautious of creepy, rapey men. But the conversation feels more like some combination of women don’t know how to tell the difference

Joining the chorus, I see:

Some creepy rapey men do come off that way. But some creepy rapey men are very good at not coming off that way until it’s too late. That’s the whole damn point.

You can’t tell who’s a thief by looking at them, either. Or a murderer. Or a deadbeat. Human society would be a whole hell of a lot different if you could.

[puzzlegal]

This is not a thing I’ve ever kept track of or counted. And I’m really not sure what you are trying to get at.

I think it’s better think of it as like a man is a car and a woman is a pedestrian. And when a pedestrian crosses the street, she is wise to be cautious of the cars. I mean, some cars are speeding and in the wrong lane (like obviously creepy men). But any driver might not be paying attention, and it’s just wise for a pedestrian to take precautions to not be where a car can hit her. Even if none of the cars are doing anything wrong. Similarly, a woman is wise to avoid being trapped alone with a strange man. Even if he seems perfectly normal (and probably is perfectly normal.) And a man shouldn’t take offense and take it personally any more than a driver should take offense and feel it’s a personal insult when a pedestrian with the right of way doesn’t step in front of his car. This is what i meant when i said, “don’t take it personally”.

[msmith537]

@puzzlegal

I think it’s better think of it as like a man is a car and a woman is a pedestrian. And when a pedestrian crosses the street, she is wise to be cautious of the cars. I mean, some cars are speeding and in the wrong lane (like obviously creepy men)

I don’t think I’m in disagreement with anything anyone has said. But what the conversation sounds to me (using your analogy) like women don’t want to get on the road at all (perhaps justifiably so) because most of the cars are malfunctioning and / or undrivable anyway. As others pointed out, you can’t always tell by looking at the car.

[Great_Antibob]

No, it’s more like Russian Roulette. The chances are low enough you probably won’t get the chambered round but still way too high for comfort. And for the most part, society says you can’t not play, either.

[Der_Trihs]

@Calder

I had no clue that women do the elevator thing or duck into a building for a random man walking behind them. Don’t get me wrong. I understood it happened if a woman’s danger sense got activated for any reason, but I didn’t know this was a standard mode women operated in certain situations.

Women in our society are taught to be highly paranoid about men, and to fear the men less likely to actually harm them.

And as I said earlier it’s bigotry, and would be treated as such if the target was another group. Just exchange the word “men” for something like “black” or “Catholic” and suddenly all those “reasonable” fears aren’t so reasonable anymore.

[Frilly_Heck]

Ahem:

The Male Inequality Problem

Since I am a woman who gets around mostly by bicycle, I tend to think of the threat men can pose as being similar to the threat cars pose to me. Most drivers are fine. The majority of them can coexist with me on the street. Still, I assume there’s a chance that every single driver I encounter could harm me, and behave accordingly. It doesn’t mean I have a problem with drivers, or I hate them. It’s not personal at all. Does that help clarify things for anyone?

[thorny_locust]

@msmith537

women don’t want to get on the road at all (perhaps justifiably so) because most of the cars are malfunctioning and / or undrivable anyway

Not most. Where on earth are you getting “most”?

And we are on that road. So are you. All of us of any gender are on that road. There isn’t anyplace else to be.

[LSLGuy]

Agree that @Frilly_Heck and @puzzlegal have a good metaphor there. Which probably does not originate with either of them.

Compared to most people who do not live in downtown DC or on Manhattan, I do a LOT of pedestrianing. And have my whole life. In many places, familiar and otherwise.

It is totally a given to me that most of the USA is not built for pedestrians foremost; it’s cars first, pedestrians maybe … barely. At the same time, in any car / pedestrian interaction, I have all the disadvantages and they have all the advantages. They can kill or cripple me totally inadvertently with zero malice or even awareness. That’s simply built into the situation with no blame attaching to the specific individual.

Living life as a ped is not the same as living life as a car driver. Motorcyclists are somewhere in the middle. As between any of the three flavors, the situation is not symmetrical.

As a ped, I can look at a car and sometimes make an assessment of how careful / clueful that driver is or isn’t. But the truth is that I can readily identify the worst few percent, but the entire rest of the continuum, encompassing 95% of the drivers at large, look just fine until their bumper is crushing my hip. So I must operate defensively against entities showing zero sign of malice and zero sign of incompetence / indifference. I’m just playing the odds versus the clueless foks hiding amongst the regular ones.

As noted in many threads by many posters, this leads to things like a driver trying to be courteous by waving the ped across in front of them. Nope, I refuse your courtesy and insist you proceed first so I can pass unattackably behind you. I don’t necessarily doubt your motives, but I utterly doubt your competence. And must do so if I hope to live to be elderly w all intact limbs.

In a sense, @Der_Trihs is right that ordinary drivers aren’t nearly as deadly as your alcoholic uncle, your step-parent when you’re a minor, or your wacky neighbor with a gun fetish. So choosing to treat random drivers defensively is not attacking the biggest snake. But it is attacking the most ubiquitous snake. And the law of large numbers says that behavior will be rewarded in a statistical sense by reduced harm.

For sure women ought to be even more concerned about uncles, step-parents, and ex-boyfriends. The risk whose name you know, in addition to the risk whose name you do not.

[puzzlegal]

@LSLGuy

Agree that @Frilly_Heck and @puzzlegal have a good metaphor there. Which probably does not originate with either of them.

I absolutely stole it from @Frilly_Heck , though. I intended to agree with her, not to take credit for it.

And also, i use the streets as a pedestrian. And I’m also a driver, i don’t have any animus towards drivers.

[puzzlegal]

@Der_Trihs

And as I said earlier it’s bigotry, and would be treated as such if the target was another group. Just exchange the word “men” for something like “black” or “Catholic” and suddenly all those “reasonable” fears aren’t so reasonable anymore.

If the world were designed for blacks or Catholics, and they were the default, you might have a point.

I had a weird experience the first time i visited Japan. I was the height of the average Japanese man. And i realized that everything was more convenient than I’m used to. Everything was easy to reach, everything fit. It was very odd. I’d never really noticed that the environment i live in at home is built for people larger than i am. Until suddenly it wasn’t.

The rules and social expectations are made for men, too, not just the physical world. If a man rapes a woman, there are a lot of assumptions that she must have done something wrong.

I’ll give you another metaphor. I left some luggage in a car in NYC, and the car was broken into and a suitcase stolen. It was very disruptive to lose that stuff and i told a lot of people about it. And they all said, “how horrible”. Except the new yorkers. They all said, “you did WHAT‽” Sadly, violence against women is like breaking into a car in NYC. It’s expected enough (whether fairly or not) that it’s the woman’s fault when it happens.

[Der_Trihs]

@puzzlegal

I’ll give you another metaphor. I left some luggage in a car in NYC, and the car was broken into and a suitcase stolen. It was very disruptive to lose that stuff and i told a lot of people about it. And they all said, “how horrible”. Except the new yorkers. They all said, “you did WHAT‽” Sadly, violence against women is like breaking into a car in NYC. It’s expected enough (whether fairly or not) that it’s the woman’s fault when it happens.

That’s the opposite of reality. There is much, much more concern over harm that happens to women that to men. If a man is hurt or killed the usual response is either disinterest or “he must have deserved it”. Men are more likely to be the victims of violence than women (especially the attacks by strangers people keep going on about here), but people seldom even notice, much less care.

Shoot an animal and people will care more about it than if you shoot a man (a major reason why riot police often use horses, people are more reluctant to hit an animal than a man). If somebody wants to create sympathy for an issue, they’ll use women or children as its “face”, not men because people don’t care what happens to men. The “damsel in distress” trope is so enduring in entertainment because people tend to care what happens to female characters far, far more than what happens to male ones. Black men get hammered much harder than black women because there’s far less pushback agaisnt it, and much more willingness to blame the targets. A third of black men end up with a felony record (and often prison time) and you barely hear about it even from the Left because after all, they are men and therefore are unworthy of sympathy and probably deserve it anyway. Instead they are accused of abandoning their women in children because after all, they are men and therefore unworthy of consideration or sympathy.

Just look at how a thread on “Male Inequality” turned into a thread on “Men are Rapist Murderers And Deserve It”. Sympathy for men is antithetical to our culture.

[Mighty_Mouse]

It seems like the thread first turned into “women are paranoid, misandrist snowflakes” but I guess if that’s your worldview, it seems like a perfectly normal situation, but to most people that’s la-la land.

It’s only rampant misanthropy that made the Central Park Karen incident about race, not gender. It’s just as reasonable a take that she was targeting him because he was MALE rather than BLACK, amirite?

[thorny_locust]

@Der_Trihs

a thread on “Men are Rapist Murderers And Deserve It”

If that’s what you’re seeing in this thread, I don’t even know where to start.

[Der_Trihs]

@thorny_locust

If that’s what you’re seeing in this thread, I don’t even know where to start.

It’s classic "I’m not being bigoted, I’m being realistic. Don’t take it personally" rhetoric.

“Gender realism” instead of “race realism”. It’s practically identical to the claim that since there’s so many black men in prison, it’s reasonable to treat all black men as criminals; just focusing on the gender instead of the race. Complete with lecturing the target on how unreasonable they are to be offended.

[msmith537]

@thorny_locust

Not most. Where on earth are you getting “most”?

And we are on that road. So are you. All of us of any gender are on that road. There isn’t anyplace else to be.

I don’t know. I’m not arguing the minutiae of the metaphor with you.

My point is that, taken as a whole, it leaves an impression of a dysfunctional society full of men who don’t know how to meet women, women who are afraid to be around men because they might get raped, and men who are afraid to talk to women because they’re worried about being accused of rape.

Which is not to say it’s something women shouldn’t be concerned about or take precautions against.

[LSLGuy]

By coincidence, The Economist’s Weekend Roundup email for today highlights a number of their semi-recent articles on dysfunction in male / female relationships.

Western men are going abroad to find traditional wives w teaser “Frustration with modern dating has fuelled the rise of “passport bros””

Making sense of the gulf between young men and women w teaser “Better schooling might narrow the gulf between young men and women. Educating boys will help girls, too”

Why young men and women are drifting apart w teaser “Diverging worldviews could affect politics, families and more”

The rise of singlehood is reshaping the world w teaser “The great relationship recession - The rise of singlehood is reshaping the world. In good ways and bad”

All over the rich world, fewer people are hooking up and shacking up w teaser “Social media, dating apps and political polarisation all play a part”

[puzzlegal]

@msmith537

My point is that, taken as a whole, it leaves an impression of a dysfunctional society full of men who don’t know how to meet women, women who are afraid to be around men because they might get raped, and men who are afraid to talk to women because they’re worried about being accused of rape.

There are tons of venues where men and women can talk. At a crowded bar. At parties. At business meetings. At a group exercise class. Volunteering at a soup kitchen. At a social dance. These are just a few examples. What these places have in common is that a woman doesn’t feel trapped alone with a man, and there’s enough “slack” in the activity for people to talk to each other. No one will accuse you of raping a woman if the two of you chat while in plain sight of a dozen other people, i promise.

I have met dozens of men at square dances. Many have become good friends.