As if the major issues & inequalities facing boys today are not being 90% of the homeless, 80% of the suicides, 94% of all deaths at work, false rape accusations, far longer sentences than women across the board for exactly the same crimes, institutionalized misandry, institutionalized genital mutilation as infants, being told your whole life you are going to grow up to be a rapist or child abuser simply because you were born with a penis, the knowledge that if you have children, you are enormously more likely than a woman to lose access to them after divorce, the knowledge that in time of war only your sex will be considered disposable cannon fodder & forced to murder other boys or be murdered yourself…...
No no no… none of that... the main issues boys have today is that they would like to cry, bake cookies and paint their fingernails once in awhile.
This poster purports to be speaking out on behalf of both males & females but in actual fact is wholly about the wimminz, & only the feminist wimminz at that.
Because its author is incapable of seeing even the existence of the actual issues boys growing up have to face - much of it generated (or exacerbated) by feminist lobbying itself - this is just more of the same old feminist hate, blame & shaming language dressed up on this occasion with insincere compassion & a sad face smiley.
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I think you're right that the poster doesn't totally get male problems, but I think it's somewhat on the right track.
ReplyDeleteI think a big reason why men have many of the problems they do is that men are told they are valued for their strength, ability, competitiveness etc. If you aren't strong you aren't valued. If you have to ask for help you aren't valued.
So looking at some men's issues:
90% of the homeless - likely explained due to men that don't ask for help or protection and society not offering it
80% of the suicides - same
94% of all deaths at work - same (combined with the expectation that men should support their families financially)
majority of high school dropouts - same
majority of prisoners - same (a lot of crime is due to be down and out and having few other choices)
Well, it DOES get Brownie points for at least starting to think about trying to CONSIDER the possibility of beginning to give a shit, I guess... (smiley face)
ReplyDeleteI think where we may perhaps differ here is in the assumption that males & females are fundamentally the same (as in, interchangeable), rather than the product of millions of years of evolving & adapting to two different biological, hormonal & psychological roles in order to give the greatest chance of survival to their offspring & so the human race.
By laying the fault of universal male disposability at men's door, it looks to me like you are getting the cart before the horse AND kind of victim blaming: if you reverse the genders in your list of men's issues it becomes immediately apparent that neither you nor anyone you know would respond to a situation where 90 out of every 100 of the people sleeping on the streets/dying at work/ taking their own lives were women & girls by saying "it's their own fault, they never bothered to ask for help". To speak of such an enormous gendered disparity, resulting in so much death on such a vast scale, would be considered unthinkably callous. Correct?
So we see a disparity demonstrated there in how we all see men & women - an 'empathy gap' - that actually appears to be biological in origin, not societal (as it is present in ALL societies, in wildly differing & unconnected conditions).
The question is not how to rid ourselves of it (we can't) but how to create a society in which those differences are fully acknowledged & accepted, where for instance our natural bias on behalf of women & against men in the issues mentioned is understood to be something hardwired into us but steadfastly not allowed to get in the way of justice, compassion & equal treatment in the eyes of the law, education, business etc, so as not to additionally penalize either males or females for their natural differences.
Another thing to consider is, to artificially create a society of spineless men incapable of defending the women & children is simply asking to be wiped out by any other society NOT engaged in such an suicidally-unhinged Thelma & Louise roadtrip all the way up its own arse.
And you know what? Even IF what the poster says IS right & all boys & men need to do to solve all their problems is weep a little & ask for help more, feminists are the very, very, very LAST people who would ever actually do anything to help them when they did.
What's wrong with the poster is not that the people making it have necessarily hateful intent, only that they have a set of assumptions about nature & the human race that are for the most part wildly untrue & so wholly incapable of bringing about any fundamental beneficial change.
indeed this is the real issue that so called "egalitarians" need to face for themselves, before they can be considered trustworthy.
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