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ikrase comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - Less Wrong
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The thing that frustrates many people might be that some feminists tend to pay some amount of lip service to the idea that men may get hurt but angrily suppress men who talk about it enough, esp in existing feminist forums; in the worst cases men get told that these issues are always peripheral matters of patriarchy and if men want to escape rigid male gender roles the right thing to do is to totally subordinate themselves to feminism even when it's not helping them.
Further, there is a certain kind of mind to which feminism helping women but not men looks like feminism gradually acquiring the power to oppress men.
A further annoyance is that the movements that are interested in dealing with the male issues in the Overly Restrictive Overall Male Favoring Gender Ssytem often have one of the following drawbacks: - Have their own stereotypes - are too vague, tend to make 'masculinity' a zero-meaning term - or are focused on an unpopularly high level of gender-nonconformity for men. For example, I find it frustrating when discussions about the boringness and lack of self-expression inherent in modern men's clothing leads to alternative men's clothing that is effeminate (another taboo that should break, but not for me) but not expressive.
The response I've usually seen to this is more along the lines of "That's true but it's off-topic here" or "You're disrupting the conversation; we're talking about problems that women have here" — more and more heatedly as the off-topic posters persist.
Part of the trouble seems to be that these men give the impression that they are not willing to allow women (or specifically feminist women) to have a forum that belongs to them, where those women get to define "on-topic" in terms of their own standards, without permission from any man who passes by. That a forum just about women's issues cannot be allowed to exist.
Suppose that every time Less Wrong had a thread about UFAI, a bunch of people showed up talking about fighting breast cancer; how UFAI wasn't the only problem in the world — breast cancer is bad, too! They'd not be wrong — breast cancer is indeed bad — but it's not on topic in a thread on UFAI. And when told "this is off topic, please take it to the optimal medicine thread or something", they responded with hostility: "You FAI people must be bigoted against breast cancer survivors!" Over time, they made it clear that no discussion on LW would be allowed to not include breast cancer; that failing to mention breast cancer in every discussion would be taken as proof that LW was bigoted; that AI-folk had no right to hold discussions about ethics without breast cancer being on topic; and so on.
I think we would get a bit annoyed. Even those of us who care plenty about breast cancer.
This.
Also, it's probably worth noting that many feminists do want to discuss the way sexism impacts men, but find that self-invited men who wish to participate aren't necessarily contributing in a positive way to that. Continuing your analogy, it would be like people who want to talk about UFAI found themselves fielding responses from people who think merely discussing AI makes you shills for the DOD who secretly work on drones and like bombing brown babies.
I understand (and agree with) the "off-topic" objection, but there is still one thing that does not make sense to me. Approximately this:
When men start talking about "men have problems too" within a feminist platform, they are told to shut up, because that is off-topic, an "oppression olympics", etc.
On the other hand, when men start talking about "men have problems too" outside of feminist platform (on their own platform), they are also told to shut up, because either a) their ideas are compatible with feminism, so they should consider themselves a subset of feminism and not start a distinct platform, or b) their ideas are not compatible with feminism, which makes them evil oppressors.
So the discussion about men's problems within feminist circles is labeled off-topic, but the discussion outside feminist circles is labeled anti-feminist, therefore evil. Where exactly is then this discussion supposed to happen? Nowhere?
I apologize for the simplification of the problem, but essentially the question is this: If I notice that feminists complain that X happens only to women, and I am honestly convinced that X happens to men too, which is the best way (preferred by the feminists) to discuss this?
(The analogy with FAI and breast cancer would be if FAI proponents constantly labeled the breast-cancer awareness websites and their participants as evil, because their petty concerns remove attention and resources from the serious problems of x-risks. Also: "cancer olympics" "No, seriously, what about teh boobz?" etc.)
I completely agree actually, although in the specific issue of gender the two sides are bound more to each other, and each side's decision has more externalities, than with most conflicts of bigotry.
One frustration is that most of the male-centric counterparts SUCK compared to the feminist communities, many of the better ones desire an end to gender norms that I do not neccesarily desire, and others and get slagged by feminists even if they don't attack the feminists very much.
The two are pretty closely linked. Obviously I don't have a good idea of what examples you have in mind, but if you don't take considerable care with presentation, a lot of the more obvious tweaks to men's fashion would end up looking femme before they look masculine-but-expressive.
For example: high-contrast patterns are femme unless they're plaids or appear on a necktie. Pastels are femme. A lot of fabrics are femme, especially thin or shiny ones. Embroidered or other eye-catching details are femme, except in the context of Western wear or a few Asian-inspired designs. Most jewelry is femme. Tight clothing is femme except for two or three specific undershirt cuts, and those are borderline. Anything that looks like it's trying to be sexy is femme. The list goes on.
There's enough constraints, in fact, that I'm tempted to just throw this all into a generalization and say that being sufficiently innovative or expressive is considered femme by American sartorial culture (though European fashion seems somewhat better about this, and Asian significantly so). That does sort of break down when you start looking at punk and metal fashion, but for a variety of reasons I'm inclined to treat those as a special case.
On men's clothing: That's often true, but I have been frustrated when the ONLY think they can think of is stuff that is deliberately, blatantly feminine. People with an ideology frequently manage to come up with stuff that looks more femme than 17th century clothing does, and which looks more femme than a woman wearing a tuxedo does. In particualar, I am a little bit annoyed by the praise being heaped on Yoko Ono by somebody I normally respect.
For some examples of stuff I think is kind of cool and which doesn't look too femme, you might want to check out the male clothing in Girl Genius (the female clothing is fairly par-for-the-steampunk, except without punkyness, and also very inconvenient.)
Although it might be just that I am seeing it in the middle of all this other fantastical stuff.
I think I may have read that article. With a couple of exceptions the Ono line mainly struck me as silly, but that's at least as outre as being overtly femme in menswear. (Imagine Brad Pitt in a dress. Then imagine Tom Green wearing a skinned Muppet.)
Then again, that's sort of the point. As best I can tell, clothes coming out of that segment of the fashion world aren't meant to be worn in quantity by mere mortals, they're meant as an artistic statement -- which, the art scene being what it is, almost always means a political statement. And in that context, I think I can get behind (e.g.) nipple cutouts on dudes a lot more easily.
My frustrating isn't with Yoko Ono. It's with a feminist and masculist I normally respect who always comes up with Yoko Ono, or a strange male equivalent of a rave girl, or something when they try to talk about men's clothing.
The third way is retro style.
Yes although you have to go back a very long distance before you get to a very high level of interestingness and it just starts to look too wierd.
Generally it does, but IME higher-status people can pull off a higher level of “weird” than lower-status people. A very unpopular guy wearing a fedora wouldn't look more “interesting”, but many (most?) guys would.
EDIT: There also are geographical differences. In certain cities pretty much all guys in the same age group dress and groom more or less the same way, in others there's much more variation.