WOMEN ONLY COMMUNITY MEN PLEASE DO NOT COMMENT
I totally get the joke, and Pedro can only be a good thing (huge fan, pray daily that he adopts me). But I do understand why some men would find it insulting. What’s your thoughts?
WOMEN ONLY COMMUNITY MEN PLEASE DO NOT COMMENT
I totally get the joke, and Pedro can only be a good thing (huge fan, pray daily that he adopts me). But I do understand why some men would find it insulting. What’s your thoughts?
It’s weird… I like you comparison to guns but also I hate it. It really does make a point but I think it just enforces the bad generalization point?
NOTE: I’m autistic and miss the point sometimes (a lot) I’m more asking questions here than trying to claim I’m correct. I’m very open to the conversation.
There are lots of problems with it I think. Guns are tools. Tools used to kill and nothing else. Guns aren’t capable of thought and reasoning and so on. Guns should be treated as loaded as a respect think, not a fear thing. Guns kill when people use them to kill.
Men are not that. Men can be so many things. Also I’d assume more men have never even come close to hurting or killing women then those that have hurt or killed women. Women have also killed men. Some women don’t fear men.
Why treat things as an absolute when it’s a complicated spectrum like any other. Generalizations are just bad I think… They just kind of lead to tribalism in a bad way.
My brother pointed out something that happened to him. A woman crossed the street to not walk on the sidewalk where he was waiting for a bus. General advice we give out to each other, right? But then he asked how different would that be if he crossed to street if a black person was waiting for the bus? I’ll be honest I didn’t have an answer for him. Like if he did that people would call him racist for making a generalization, and I don’t think he’s wrong…
What’s different?
Yeah I see what you’re saying. Agree even! (Also autistic so tone, and missing points and stuff like that, I also struggle) I am also here primarily to learn, not preach.
The only thing I’m pondering is your point about guns being a tool, not doing the killing themselves. I think that’s interesting. Like it’s an application of the saying “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” So the metaphor breaks down when the “treat every gun like it’s loaded” is applied to men. The only twist I’ll maybe add is that men are the gun and patriarchal capitalism is the person wielding it? Like men have been so conditioned by the ruling class, but I’m not going to really dig into my personal politics here, just seeing if that helps blend the two approaches.
Like I do not think every individual man is responsible for the lack of safety women understandably feel around men. I think “the system” is responsible for that, but it’s going to take active work on the part of men to undo that, otherwise it just functions as them playing along with it.
The crossing the street thing is interesting. This gets brought up in trans masc circles semi regularly. Trans men talking about hitting a point in passing where women cross the street to avoid them, and the discussion often comes down to, “I’m sad about it, but I get it, men suck.” I think the amount of societal healing that needs to happen for things like that to shift is immense. Basically I’m not sure exactly what is different, if anything.
I don’t think I really took a particular stance in this post, just kind of dropped info I have that’s loosely related to what we were chatting about…
Idk if I’m still making sense. Words are hard.
Yeah. You’re making a lot of sense.
At the end of the day I don’t have the answers or solutions sadly just more questions and doubts.
I fully understand why we use the language we do and the mass generalization and I hate it. Subtilty doesn’t get points across most of the time and hyperbolic arguments do and that also sucks.
You make such a great point with society meeting SO SO MUCH healing. I guess I just have this wish we would all just be better to each other and take people as they come. But then I see how you do that and surprise that one IS a bad person…
Just feel like we’re racing to the bottom. :(
Oof yeah. The race to the bottom is real :(
Removed by mod
thanks for your contribution, but unfortunately this community has a rule that only women are permitted to comment or post. Hope you understand 💛
We have time and energy for nuance with people we care for and people we can’t avoid. Men are individuals with complex inner lives and nobody can appreciate that for 3 billion men on this planet or even, in my right now, the three strangers in the room with me.
We don’t need to, I won’t be talk to them and they won’t talk to me.
Without the nuance, we make generalizations.
I have a difference right here: a rather sizable fraction of women experience violence at the hands of men. A very small fraction of people in the USA experience violence at the hands of black people.
A study performed by Statistics Canada put the number of women over the age of 16 who’ve experience violence at the hands of men at 50%. Now this study had some very deep flaws in the interpretation so take that number with a huge grain of salt. Statistics Canada being, however, a respected organization for statistical information (until Unka Steve gutted it about a decade and a half ago at lest) had its questionnaire, its methodology, and its raw data available for acquisition.
And me being the obsessed lunatic that I am acquired it all. And went over the numbers and methodology with a fine-toothed spork. Once I found the biggest flaw (conflating everything from a single shove once in their life after the age of 16 to aggravated and repeated sexual violence as “violence against women” and being put into the pool), I recalculated the number with just the violence that was any kind of assault, sexual or otherwise, that resulted in bodily harm.
And even there that number was shockingly high. It was just a hair under 24%. One woman in four, basically, had experienced some form of violence from men that could have been a court case with a jail sentence.
One. In four.
Look around you, wherever you are right now. Count the number of women in sight. Divide that by four. In Canada at least that’s how many of them have experienced violence from men. (Actionable violence, note, punishable by detention in a penitentiary.) Count the number of women in this community. Divide that by four. That’s how many of us here in this community have done so. (And the rest who weren’t so unlucky as to have experienced the violence almost certainly know several who have.)
Now I personally don’t have access to any studies’ raw data for acts of violence committed by blacks against non-blacks, but I have a very deep suspicion that this number is nowhere near 25% of white people, or even just white guys.
That’s the difference right there. Most women have either been assaulted by a man or know someone who has. Most white guys do not have similar experiences, direct or vicarious, with black guys. That’s why it’s racist to cross the street when a white guys sees a strange black guy, but not necessarily sexist to cross the street when a woman sees a strange man. (And also why it’s the bear, duh.)
You make some good points, but the statistics you provide are really lacking sadly. For example the victim rate is high. I wonder what the offense rate is, I’m assuming it’s much lower. A few rotten apples spoil the bunch taken to extremes comes to mind here.
I don’t deny that there are a lot of women who have been victims of abuse by men. But writing off half the human race seems like the wrong approach and absolutely a race to the bottom. Especially when we can do better and promote good behavior and a dismantling of the systems that cause this in the first place without alienating a non-problematic majority.
Again it’s not so much this meme. This is is mostly fine. Something to aspire to basically. I’m just not a fan of people making massive negative generalizations against other people. There are very few absolutes in life.
This “race to the bottom” is called “risk management”. When literally one person in four of your social group has been attacked by men, only an idiot assumes good faith when faced with men.
This is not saying that all men are bastards. This is not saying that all men should be jailed (as some very extreme 2nd generation feminists said once). This is saying that you absolutely must be very careful when dealing with men. Let’s look at the payouts, shall we?
Me? Personally? I’m very averse to violent injury and/or death. That’s kind of the -♾ payout that basically overrides all others. And when one in four of my sisters have already experienced this outcome, you can’t even say that the probability is low. Any strange man (and, tragically, often even those you think you know) is a potentially violent thug with a game-ending outcome in the game theory analysis. Suspicion and assumption of bastardry until proved otherwise is a survival strategy.
And men who are really allies? They get this. They understand that the woman’s calculus of navigating the world around them is very different from the man’s. (And let’s not even start down the path of what happens to the sisters who are trans.) And while maybe it may grate on them a little, they’re not going to start whining about it except possibly to their closest SOs, etc.
The men who do whine? The men who use this, and I can’t stress this enough, survival strategy as an excuse to go the direction of the Tates or down the MRA/PUA/Incel/whatever rabbit hole? They never were allies. They never will be allies. And they can rot in Hell.
Nobody is writing them off, FFS! As strident as I am about this (again, for emphasis) survival strategy, I have an SO that I have been together with since 2003. Before that I dated. I partied. I met men and enjoyed their company.
But one in four. One. In. Four.
You can bet that my eye is on the exits and my knife is not far from my grasp.