JFTR - hating on women has thousands of years of history and social acceptance behind it. In fact, it’s still the default position of big chunks of the planet. Think of all the places right now where women can’t show their faces in public without being attacked by “morality” police.
It’s an extreme example - but not by any means an isolated one - right now in India, a woman and a man were attacked on bus. The man was beaten and tossed off. The woman was gang-raped for an hour while the bus tooled around the city. The bus encountered three police vans, but the police did nothing. Protests in the days following the news were attacked by police forces with water canons. While most Indians are appalled by this, still some of them can’t refrain from wondering why women insist on going out at night.
Cites -
Also check out Eve Teasing - for further depressing reading
I’m not trying to single India out here. I’m trying to say - women in the west and the freedoms we enjoy are an historical anomoly. We’re the exception. So it’s not surprising that there’s still a large contingent of men in the west who disapprove of women or our increasing freedom.
It’s important for women in the west to remember this and understand how fast we could lose our privileges if we don’t stand together.
But has “freedom” even really been a thing that most people meaningfully had (male of female) before recently? Take career choice, a big issue when we talk about women’s rights. But for most of history, men were expected to be working (usually very crappy, dangerous) jobs to support a stay-at-home wife and kids (or the whole family worked the farm to varying degrees). Women didn’t really have the choice to work, no, but men didn’t exactly have much of a choice either. You must work and supply an income to support your family – would you like to pave roads, work in a sweatshop, till the farm (mind you this was before sunscreen and being able to go inside to the AC when you got hot) or be in the military?
Unless, of course, we’re talking about the upper class. In which case things were fairly cushy. Women were worse off than men, to be certain, but it wasn’t exactly unheard of for noblewomen to do things. Jane Austen, Mary Shelly, and George Sand were writers, Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, even more recently Grace Hopper worked on the first compiler, not to mention got a legit Math PhD from Yale in 1934 (and Naval service on top of that in the 40s). To be sure this wasn’t the norm, even for noblewomen, but it’s not like 100% of women were locked in the closet until the husband had need of them and beaten within an inch of their lives if they were the least bit unladylike like some people like to make it out. Yeah, women were used as a political bartering tool for marriage, and that’s sick, but even stuck in often bad marriages it wasn’t universally the totality of their existence.
To be sure, in India or the Middle East women’s rights at the moment are in shambles. But I’m not really convinced that things were ever near that bad for women in the west – or at least UK/US. It seems like for the vast majority things sucked pretty royally for everyone except the nobles/wealthy in which case things sucked slightly more for women than men, but even then many noblewomen who wanted to write books or talk about theoretical calculator machines went and did so. Hell, England had Queens as non-puppet heads of government at points – Elizabeth I wasn’t exactly a slouch. Yeah, the queen only ruled if there was no king, so like I said, worse off, but not completely and utterly marginalized.
Like I said, yeah, women were worse off without question, but I’m not convinced that (in the UK/US tradition) it was as completely and hilariously lopsided as some people make it out to be. It’s not like stoning women out in public and mutilating their genitals is something my granddad did and he’s just itching to get back to it if we let our guards down for half a second.
None of your examples are relevant to what I’m discussing, which is the fundamental right of women to be able to walk down the street free of harassment or assault, or if they are harassed and and assaulted, to be free from being told that it’s their own fault they and only sluts walk around in public. If you’re saying that such attitudes weren’t present in your grandfather’s day, or aren’t still present today, then that’s simply wrong.
Anyway, your representation of women’s place in the workforce is also incorrect. Women have always worked outside the home - the difference is they weren’t allowed to have careers. They were “helping out” or “making ends meet” - all while being responsible for working inside the home, back when “housework” and childcare was far more labor intensive than it is today. Even during the more genteel post industrial age, it was only very recently that the middle classes could afford to support an abundance of women who don’t cook, clean, or sew.
Minimizing the danger and difficulties women face is part of the general attempt to keep women in their place.
Absolutely. Historically, lower-class women have never had the luxury of being idle. Post-industrial revolution, they were often the preferred choice for unskilled, low-wage assembly-line jobs, particularly those involving textiles.
Do men sometimes get shafted for being men? Sure. Is it likelier you’ll be disadvantaged for being a woman? You bet.
The reason MRA groups are fringe groups is exactly the same reason that there are no legitimate “Rights for Whites” groups - because men are better off. Not all the breaks go our way, but the majority of them do. The old saw is correct; you’re born a white male, you’re playing the game of life on its lowest difficulty setting.
I was a full – time MRA during 1999 – 2002, half – time MRA during 2003 – 2006, and still support the movement. I had been in many arguments on many boards over every MRA – feminist issue for a total of about five to ten thousand posts. I have been much less active since 2006, but I am still an expert.
In my opinion, men are disadvantaged in many significant ways, and most men will recognize some MRA issues as reality. These issues were not allowed in the mainstream media, but in the age of social networks the movement grows.
My prediction is that either the movement will become mainstream in the next two decades, or feminists will find some way to make it illegal.
I think de jure it’s not anti-woman, but these groups tend to attract the kind of people that are. Me, I’m pro-woman, pro-man, pro-equality. I’ve also seen it happen with people who claim to be anti-zionist but then go on a tirade against Jews in general.
Right. There are certainly issues where men are getting screwed (custody etc.), and men should fight back. But everywhere else, men still hold the reigns. The issues where men get the shaft pale compared to where women get the shaft. There is no need for a (general) “mens’ rights movement”. The idea is ridiculous. Pushing back in those rare instances where men aren’t getting fair treatment? Sure. But it’s no puzzler why any movement attracts misogynists. You almost have to be to think there needs to be a movement.