MRA versus healthy acknowledgement of male issues
Last edited Tue Aug 5, 2014, 05:32 PM - Edit history (2)
I will state upfront that I'm no expert on the term MRA. That being said, I think one can acknowledge the issues we men face without being an MRA, a sexist or a misogynist.
Let me list a few:
1- Prostate cancer
2- Men as the default fodder for all American wars, justified or not
3- The cult of machismo
4- How to be a good father/brother/husband/son/grandfather/uncle/partner
5- How men deal with mental health issues and feelings
That's just off the top of my head. We men can deal with our issues without being anti-female or anti-feminism. Being a healthy male in American culture is great, but I don't think it's easy, at least not for those of us of my generation.
At any rate, hopefully this thread is constructive and helpful.
ETA: Changed wording of #2 to be less inflammatory.
= new reply since forum marked as read
3...2....1 until someone tells us that that's what Feminism is all about.
threads in the Men's group that sank pretty fast. It's a shame. 
But complaining women don;t want to hear about men's issues in a thread about women's issues is just silly.
She basically came out and accused him of using his personal experience of male suicide (he has had several close friends and relatives end their lives, all male) as a way of gaming the site. Not even "That's horrible, I hope you were okay". It was yucky.
And yeah, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding on this site, a lot of the time feminists post threads that appear to rest on the assumption that there's something uniquely immoral about a phenomenon happening to women that isn't unique to women at all wholesale, but has a particular twist that only affects women. There's clearly nothing wrong with selecting one gender's experience of such phenomena but some take the intent of the isolation of female experience from the wider discussion of the phenomenon as a subtle form of sexism.
Violence against women might be a typical example, there's clearly a prosaic understanding of the necessity for a discussion about it in that women, usually being physically smaller than men, face in violence a danger of a completely different kind than men in a similar situation. But if you assume that genders are supposed to be "perceived" as equal and look at the stats the story is much more that men are the victims of violence, i.e. the wider phenomenon of violence as a whole, because there are far more male victims of violence. So you can easily imagine someone making the mistake of assuming that women talking about violence against women is a subtle way of devaluing male victimhood rather than addressing the inherent assymmetries underlying violence against differing genders.
Violence against men isn't an emotionally charged topic. Everyone just accepts it. Whenever a man's assaulted it's just an assault. If a women's assaulted it's seen as much more unnacceptable and unfair... but that's because it is! A women is, in ordinary terms of capacity for self-defense, far more likely to come off second best if assaulted by a man than the other way round (currently accepted social norms of "not hitting women" and the possible consequences for a man in not retaliating as the victim of domestic assault laid aside, for now...). But what that often results in, via the ever-present, magical, preconscious nonsense of "men and women are the opposites of each other" is a backhanded perception that violence against men is kind of just normal by comparison. And, you know... that's sexism.
"complaining women don't want to hear about men's issues in a thread about women's issues is just silly" - that's not an unfair observation but I think sometimes things come up in women's issues that intersect with men's issues. We can't really establish which and when and how and what, I think we have to sort of muddle through each issue on it's own.
Sorry, I used your post as a springboard...
I ask mainly because I very much DO regard men as having an occulted experience that isn't publically acceptable. But then, I'm gay. I'm familiar with men not feeling able to say what they think or how they feel. I also think there's an array of templates to which men are allegedly supposed to aspire that have almost nothing to do with how being male actually is, starting with their sexuality, discussion of almost all of which seems to result in squeals of horror or
I don't think your original point about war in your OP stands without that observation. I don't really see what else you would call men being used as cannon fodder for rich people if not oppression.
"YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU" is aimed at men. It's a universal and grotesque distortion of male emotional processes.
Says I.
I should qualify that. There's a necessity for self-sacrifice in times of invasion and when the security of the nation is at stake, but this capacity for male self-sacrifice is ripe for exploitation.
