(May 3, 2014 at 5:26 am)Insanity Wrote: This doesn't make sense, I'm not sure how you can blame all men for constructs set up hundreds or even thousands of years ago in some cases. It takes both men and women to continue these kinds of things by teaching them to each generation.
And I hope you realize how hard that might be when the status quo benefits men and disempowers women to the point that their say in how society is run is significantly weaker. To characterize this as an equal blame thing is to simply ignore the actual facts at play here; you can't sit at the tail end of a system that for the longest time made it difficult, if not impossible, for women to ascend to positions of power, and for that system to be bolstered by a male class that became used to a certain level of assumed power and respect (this is a human trait, not specifically a male one, but it did its work on males here) and then assign women equal blame for not crawling out of that rut.
I don't think anyone sensible would blame any individual man for the existence of this system, nor even present day men at all; we're all just inheriting a centuries-old apparatus, after all. This isn't the fault of anyone living, and it would be hard to point fingers at specific groups in the past because of how diffuse culture is, but when we just ignore that there are imbalances here, on both sides, because it's "not our fault," well, then it becomes our fault for perpetuating a system we could improve.
A lot of the things on the OP's list have, at their heart, roots in assumptions made about gender that aren't realistic, and end up harming everyone: why do men get substantially less in custody and divorce cases? Because of the assumption that women are the nurturers of children, that men shouldn't be interested in that, and that women can't fend for themselves. All of those are problematic to the cause of feminism, and all of them should be dispelled in favor of a more egalitarian system. Ditto pretty much everything else on that list.
There's this bizarre outlook that the people who cry "misandry!" have, where feminism has to be the enemy because they're a gender-based movement that isn't focusing on helping men. This completely misses the point, because the endemic assumptions that feminism wishes were gone are the things that harm both women and men; if you're bitching that feminists are campaigning for, say, equal pay rather than addressing that disparity in divorce cases, then I have to say bullshit, and point out that without tearing aside the underlying notion that women can't fend for themselves without a man by giving them the ability to do so, that divorce thing will be much, much harder to change.
I think that's the issue here in a nutshell: real, non-rabid feminism wishes to attack the root causes, while the men's rights activists just want us all focusing on the branches. But only the branches that might hit a guy.
"YOU take the hard look in the mirror. You are everything that is wrong with this world. The only thing important to you, is you." - ronedee
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Want to see more of my writing? Check out my (safe for work!) site, Unprotected Sects!