The Men's Rights Movement: I Just Don't Get It.

[Zazzy]

This is exactly what I am talking about. I gave you a few good examples and instead of responding to any of them you dismissed them and said I am living on another planet.

There are certainly areas of cultural bias against men- we agreed on several of them.
If you see this cultural bias as tilting toward men in such a way that they are a fundamentally oppressed group, you seem to be unaware of the world I live in. Who is oppressing all these men- sending them to war, causing them to work in mines, etc. Women? I don't think so. If you are oppressed, then you are oppressing yourselves. This is not women against men.

I have no problem when people disagree with me, what I do have a problem with is people disagreeing with me, dismissing me, calling me delusional, a whiner and asinine, and without so much as a response to the topics I brought up.

So you don't like how I disagreed with you. Your experience is so alien that I'm not sure we can see eye to eye. I didn't call you delusional, however.

Do you not see how this is the very problem I am talking about? How men are simply dismissed if we decided to bring up anything about how we may be treated unfairly.

I see that you don't like me saying you're full of it. I am not saying you can't express yourself. I'm saying you can't always expect to express yourself without some pushback, especially when you seem to be claiming that women as a group are oppressing men as a group- which IS an asinine claim.

And what is so offensive about that statement really? I said we used to be the oppressors but we are not anymore (at least in Western culture).

And you're dead wrong (although I appreciate your confining this to Western culture). Are men less oppressive than they used to be? Yes, and they're far more enlightened in the educated areas of the US. But if you're saying that men don't oppress women anymore, or that women have turned the tables and now oppress men, you're just wrong. Women should NOT turn a blind eye to inequities in media portrayals, or reproductive issues, or war issues. But they are not responsible for these as a group systematically trying to keep men down.

But it's not a competition anyway. Areas of inequality don't have to be equal in numbers to be wrong. 1 in 6 boys sexually assaulted is not as many as 1 in 4 girls, but it's still way too fucking many. And a vanishingly small percentage of those assaults are by women. MEN are abusing boys and men, as they abuse girls and women. MEN send men to war. MEN are predominantly judges who favor women in court decisions (30% of judges are women). Physician, heal thyself.

Again, part of any movement like this is learning how your own group is participating in its own subjection and rejecting those tendencies- like bra-burning.

Instead of bitching about how oppressive women are, think about how to fight the real oppressors in our world: culturally ingrained stereotypes set by a patriarchy that has no place in a modern culture that strives for equity, and people themselves who participate in and prop up these stereotypes, partly because it suits them, and partly because they're brainwashed. All of us do this, and all of us have a responsibility to re-educate ourselves and others around us.