this post was submitted on 29 Nov 2024
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Sometimes I need to see the twitter feeds of people like this, as a reminder of exactly what women mean when they talk about men being scum.
Sometimes it hurts to be generalized into a category I don’t feel I belong to and it’s tempting to push back, but knowing that people are out there spending what appears to be all of their free time being horrible online and harassing women is a good reminder that women are pretty justified in having a low opinion of men in general.
Now I can go back to pretending twitter doesn’t exist for a while again.
The easiest way to see if it's OK is to swap out "men" with any other protected characteristic. If, having done that it suddenly becomes problematic, it was always so and they should've known better.
I think youre right not to engage them though. For all their talk of equality, anyone who talks like that just wants to be at the top of a new hierarchy. Remove or subjugate the men and most women (who haven't decolonisated their minds) will just replicate the same power structures, adopting the position of patriarch without a hint of self awareness. The way forward is to help other men see the pain caused to them by the patriarchy, as its only then that we can see the pain we cause through the patriarchy, due to the rituals of disregard and empathy killing we go through as boys.
I'll finish by saying the same thing I said to my dad, shortly after he lost his job" "yes dad, of course I've heard of the phrase 'sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.' However, you can't always do that, especially when you're meant to be firefighter, you doughnut.
You should reference my other comment in this thread. You're correct that statements like "all men are trash" are unjustly prejudiced, but you're making a false equivalence.
My point is that is that both are wrong, not that they are or are not both equally wrong. So, would you mind explaining where the equivalence is please?
I mean, I know its more of a case that some people don't like that both of those things are wrong to do but I'm gonna need a little more than that and a misunderstanding of an informal fallacy, sorry.
In your comment, whether intended or not. It's not a long comment. By "whatabouting" the idea of replacing men with any marginalized group, you are making a false equivalence via equivocation. By leaving out the crucial aspect of power imbalance, you minimize its role by implication. See: all lives matter in response to BLM.
No. You are making an equivalence argument that misses the reality of power dynamics and the context of like centuries of documented social oppression.
Edit: Fuck I didn’t see erin beat me to it.
No, really that doesn't make it ok. You're generalizing half the population. It's not my fault that other people are and have been trash, it's not my fault that I was born male, and it sure feels great to be generalized with the assholes when I wish every night to just magically wake up with a cis woman's body (for various reasons am not transitioning and run around as male presenting).
So just because shitty men exist, we're supposed to say "welp generalizing us is fair because technically men like this exist"?
I have found pushing back is useless. People are just waiting for you to be a horrible "fragile man" instead of just realizing that being accurate in who you blame for being shitty matters. So yeah I wouldn't really conclude that if you see one example of someone being disgusting then you have to allow yourself to be falsely aligned with them.
You can just know the shitty generalizers are bigoted, and hope it's a phase for them. I certainly have never seen any value in either supporting that generalization or fighting against it.
People on the Internet love thinking they're better than you and that you're scum. The only way I know to deal with it is just by accepting it
This definitely misses the power imbalance of punching down vs up. If someone genuinely believes all men are "scum," yeah, that's prejudiced. However, there is a big difference between a group that has less power in society pushing up against the class that has more power or oppresses them and the reverse. The idea that "y group is (insert pejorative)" and "x group is (insert pejorative)" are equally bigoted statements assumes that x and y groups are equal in social power. Statements like "men are trash" or equivalent don't necessarily represent an individual's true opinion of all men, but a general pushing back against a group with more power, many individuals of which attempt to exercise their perceived privilege over women.
Women that say "all men are trash" or similar might not be thinking with this level of introspection and subtlety, but it's a subconscious reaction to their position as a group with less power. They rarely hold that on a personal level against every individual man, unless they've been deeply hurt. I have experienced things that make it harder for me to trust men. My friends have experienced things that make it harder to trust men. I do not think every man is evil. When you see the damage around you on societal levels, see the people calling for your rights to be taken away, see how they treat you like an object or property because of who you are, and you see it in the lives of many many people like you, it creates a resentment of the group that is responsible.
I am not suggesting that there are no women that take advantage of men. I am not suggesting that men cannot be abused. I am not suggesting that it's okay to make men feel responsible for the actions of people that share only a gender with them, nothing else. However, I am explaining why women might feel hurt or disempowered enough to push back against men in general, and why "men are trash" and "women are trash" (though far more often, the phrase when targeted at women takes a sexual connotation: whores, etc) are not equivalent statements. Both the women that have been hurt and the men that feel hurt by the byproduct of their resentment are victims of the patriarchy. Until everyone, regardless of gender, holds the same societal power, there will always be people of all groups being hurt by the imbalance.
TLDR: Don't resent the women who are a product of their environment saying "men are trash," resent the patriarchy that hurts men and women alike.
Additionally, statements like men are trash can hurt other marginalized groups. I've heard "men are trash" be followed or countered with "except trans men." This is transphobic. I'd like to make it very clear that "men are trash" is an unjustly prejudiced statement, but it is one that is a product of a broken system. See: ACAB.
Thanks for saving me the keystrokes here, I appreciate you (for real, which I’m having to say because text and… you know… how online people are).
<3
Yep.
See the sibling reply from @[email protected] here for a great explanation about how power dynamics work on this topic, but also:
One example? Really? That’s horse shit and you know it. Misogynistic behavior is a rampant, massive problem everywhere; online and in real life.