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daenerys comments on Factions, inequality, and social justice - Less Wrong
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Comments (171)
Firstly, I would like to say that I really enjoyed this post, and hope to see more like it!
It seems to me that (sane) MRA's and (sane) feminists should be natural allies. The "generic" version of feminism officially points to gender equality (NOT female supremacy), and feminists have previously allied with the LGBT movement, and racial suffrage (though that alliance went south when one group got suffrage before the other), and taken other social justice fights on as well.
As a sane feminist, I was happy to discover sane MRA type sites such as ozy's No Seriously, What About teh Menz?, and the over-arching The Good Men Project. These sites opened my eyes to the valid concerns of the MRA movement, such as issues regarding male rape, child custody, and the censure and unavailability of feminine style toys (dolls, dresses, EZ Bake Ovens, etc) for little boys.
These issues fit perfectly into my gender egalitarian style of feminism, and I thought that if it weren't for the bad blood between the two sides, that feminists should/would have taken up these particular issues the same way they often pick up other social justice issues.
The problem is that, (pulling numbers out of the air) let's say 1% of each gender is insane Haters of the Opposite Sex. So 1% of women think everything wrong with the world is the fault of men, and 1% of men think that the rise of masculinized women will lead to the "Fempocalypse". Each of those 1% join their respective movements.
Now, let's say half of all women identitfy as "feminist". This means the feminist movement is large enough to contain the crazy 1% of Man Haters while still being over-all sane (although allowing for unfortunate "straw feministi-ng", where insane MRA's make arguments of "Feminists say...")
However, the men's rights movement is not so large. Say only 1.5% of males are MRAs. This means that 2/3 of their movement is the insane 1%, and only 1/3 are sane. The MRA movement is not large enough to contain the crazy 1% while still remaining overall sane. So MOST MRA stuff out there is the insane stuff.
This unbalance harms the men's rights movement, because the valid concerns get tarred by the less valid ones ("masculinized women are bringing about the end of society!"), and lumped together with the crazy.
There needs to be a way to filter out the insane, in order to actually reach every(sane)one's common goals. I call myself a "Gender Egalitarian Feminist". Perhaps instead of being "(sane) feminist" or "(sane) MRA", the sane gender-issues people should all just call themselves "Gender Egalitarians".
Unfortunately, this label already seems to be undergoing the same connotation creep that quickly happened to "Race realism" and is about to happen to "Human Biodiversity". Both of those are - justly or not - suspected to be cover labels that racists adopted when the old "Scientific Racism" became disreputable, so now many people with "mainstream" views on racial differences equate the three.
From what I've read of MRA discussions, some of them are definitely trying to trade the label for "Gender Egalitarianism", which they position as neutral or hostile to all kinds of feminism - so, as dumb and ridiculous as this might be, the words "gender egalitarian" might acquire a connotation of "feminist-hater", or simply "misogynist".
(Great post btw!)
Do you have any links? None of the first few Google hits for "gender egalitarianism", at a first glance, look like that.
I'd go with “anti-sexism”. No, wait... That might sound like I'm in favour of sexual abstinence. “Anti-genderism”?
(Belated edit: looks like the word we're looking for is “sex-blindness”.)
That sounds like you're against gender.
(For certain values of "gender", that's not terribly far from truth.)
I think that “feminism” is a very counter-intuitive label for that memeplex (imagine anti-racism was called “blackism”), and that that might have contributed to people misunderstanding what (‘sane’) feminists are about. (In Italian it's even worse -- sexism is usually called maschilismo, so people assume femminismo is reverse sexism, and even use it as a slur against people they perceive to be misandrist, and MRAs call themselves anti-femministi.)
Me too. I'm pleasantly surprised to find out that there are people who can discuss certain issues with extremely low levels of mind-killing, which made me change my mind about what I wrote earlier. (Well, this too.)
That and sane people in general speaking less hysterically and drawing less attention than insane people.
Yeah. That place just went to hell (although it seems like everybody I consider an ally is Not Daring To Urge Constraint).
Thanks. I knew I had read a post by EY describing exactly that failure mode, but couldn't remember which it was.
I spoke too soon. I've been seeing plenty of mind-killed people on the GMP lately.
I wish I could upvote this more than once; it aligns neatly with several things I've been wanting to say for months but haven't found a chance to. There's just a couple things I'd like to add.
First, I suspect the relatively small size of the MRA sphere distorts outsiders' perception of it in ways other than making hateful personalities proportionally more common. Specifically, it's too small and too new for well-developed sub-movements to be self-sustaining: there are identifiable tendencies (compare the average comment on Spearhead to the average on Owning Your Shit [ETA: or not; see below]), but there's far more cross-posting between them than on comparable feminist sites, and I'd attribute this directly to feminism's far greater age, size, and level of development as an ideology. Since not a few prolific cross-posters fall into the "hater" category, and since offensive comments are always going to be disproportionately salient to readers, this ends up tarring the whole community.
But that's just a perception thing, more or less. Even if a viable egalitarian-looking men's advocacy programme manages to magic itself into existence, I think problems might be still caused by the likelihood that both these movements conceptualize themselves as the true standard-bearers of equality, and blame any remaining inequalities the other side's concerned about on failures to incorporate their own theoretical frameworks. Probably the most common feminist objection I've seen to more moderate (i.e. non-traditionalist, positive-sum) MRA ideas is precisely this: feminism objects to the same problems (discrimination against men as caregivers, narrower culturally acceptable affect and presentation, etc.) and they'd allegedly vanish in a fully feminist society, so why not just call yourself feminist and work with established approaches to privilege, misogyny, etc.? And this isn't one-sided, either; I've seen almost identical sentiments from moderate MRA sources, with appropriate nouns and theory swapped.
The answer, as best I can figure, is that each theoretical framework is built up to explain a particular set of salient experiences, and since few data points outside those experiences make it into the working set we end up with a tendency to overfit. This is of course exactly the problem that third-wave feminism already confronted regarding intersections with queer theory, race, etc., but intersectional integration seems harder in this case -- perhaps because MRA, even the moderate kind, doesn't draw upon the same intellectual traditions.
I just looked at a few comments on the two sites you linked (never having visited either before) and I couldn't tell the difference. I'm not sure what you intended to say by comparing them.
I'll admit I didn't review any recent comments on Spearhead before posting. I visited the site months ago and was so annoyed by the commentariat that I haven't read much there since.
It's possible that I caught a bad patch or that they've gotten more moderate since, in which case I've misrepresented them and I apologize. But I have seen similar sentiments expressed towards them elsewhere in the interim.
The comments were unpleasant to awful there, but they were mediocre to awful on the other site too. There were a few more "This is a great post." style comments on Owning Your Shit but that was the main difference that I saw from clicking through a couple articles.
Fair enough. The comments are indeed awful on both sites, but that's true in broad strokes for most political blogs. I was mainly trying to point up accusatory and gender-essentialist strains I remembered from Spearhead that seemed much attenuated in OYS, but in light of this the difference evidently either isn't there or isn't glaring enough to be clear to first-time readers from context-free links.
Since I don't particularly feel like doing the muckraking myself and I can't expect people to do it for me, I retract that comparison. Pity we can't strikethrough portions of a post.
Even if there's a much larger proportion of sane, reasonable MRAs to start with, if the proportion of crazy ones is high enough, the reasonable ones are liable to start distancing themselves from the movement to avoid being tarred by association, increasing the proportion of crazy ones identifying with the movement. This is exactly why I personally exercise a great deal of caution in letting anyone know that I sympathize with the movement at all.
What was the proportion of sane feminists in those days when the feminism was new?
I am not asking how many sane women agreed with the proposed women rights, but what kind of women was the first to publicly self-identify with the label, and do something that drew attention to them.
Looking at the Wikipedia article on "Suffragette", I read about "setting fire to mailbox contents, smashing windows and occasionally detonating bombs". Imagine what would be the public opinion about MRA movement if the first MRAs did this, if merely expressing their opinions impolitely on internet is enough to label them as insane.
Most sane men do not join MRA movement because, honestly, most men don't give a shit about other men in general. We often see each other as competitors, and we focus on our jobs and families, and a few friends. A man usually becomes a MRA activist when something bad happens to him personally. Now of course such person is extremely prone to mindkilling; that should not be surprising.
There were feminists who said that all men are rapists, or that in a perfect world 90% of men would disappear from the planet... and they are still considered a legitimate part of the movement which is supposedly not against men, but for fairness, equality, and everything good. And if you see something suspicious about this, and you have a penis, then your opinion is irrelevant, because you have this brain disorder called "privilege" which makes everything you say automatically wrong.
To avoid misunderstanding: I think that many things said by many MRAs are stupid, and I disagree with them. I just disagree that it makes MRA movement worse than a feminist movement, because the feminist movement also contains different opinions and crazy people. New movement is more attractive for extreme people, later it becomes more known and accepted by moderate people, and I think this is enough to explain the higher ratio of crazy people in the MRA movement today.
Well, these days, more feminists are inclined to do whatever they can to marginalize them, claim that they're not "real" feminists, or that they flat out do not exist. Yvain discussed this in a very interesting livejournal post
What struck me most about that very interesting post was how "legalistic" the MRA controversial claims were. I'm a lawyer, that's not a slur. It's an interesting contrast between the feminist controversial claims, which are mostly about social dynamics, and the MRA controversial claims, which I could write a model statute to fix in practically no time at all.
And since writing statutes to fix social dynamics is a crude tool at best, and often counter-productive, reasonable MRA activists and reasonable feminists have a great deal of trouble avoiding talk-past-each-other-itis.
Depends, if the social dynamics where themselves created by bad statues, fixing or repealing the statute seems like at least a start.
That's a good point, but it's worth noting that the "obviously reasonable" MRA claims are mostly social issues that are not effectively addressed in our society. A lot of the "obviously reasonable" ground for feminism has already been won, and many of the more uncontroversially reasonable matters that could be addressed by statute already have been. Earlier generations of feminism have eaten up a lot of the low hanging fruit, whereas MRA hasn't really accomplished much.
I don't really agree with your history. Consider the first of the "controversial" MRA claims:
In the United States, one way to create immediate improvement (from the MRA perspective) would be repeal of Federal Rule of Evidence 413 or its state law equivalents. Historically, this rule is actually quite recent, dating from 1995 - Congress actually overruled the Rules Committee recommendation not to have Rules 413-415. Personally, I think 413-15 are inconsistent with how the criminal justice system normally deals with prior bad acts of the defendant.
Nonetheless, that's very different from asserting that the issues haven't been addressed. Things once were closer to what the MRA now advocates, society considered the issue, and the position now adopted by MRA activists lost. My sense of the history is that most of the more legalistic desires of MRA listed in Yvain's post are also attempts to reverse previous defeats.
I don't see that this addresses my comment. The "currently controversial" claims are controversial because there are plenty of people who're convinced that they're going too far in the wrong direction, so it's no surprise if some of them are lost ground to people who think, for instance, that the relative levels of protection should be more favorable to women.
The "controversial" issues have seen more social and legal address than the "uncontroversial" ones, because feminists are a much more effective lobby group, and have mostly moved past the "obviously reasonable" issues on their own end and are moving the borders of the "currently controversial," while MRA has more or less failed to effectively agitate for even their "uncontroversial" positions, let alone the "controversial" ones, so the activists addressing the "controversial" issues are almost all coming from the feminist side.
In my original comment, I wasn't trying to divide controversial from non-controversial. I was dividing MRA from feminist.
In brief, my perception was feminist = social dynamic, MRA = legalistic. That's an over-generalization, but I thought it was interesting - and a partial explanation of the difficulties you noted with alliances between the reasonable on each side.
Analytically, this helps one explain the interactions between MRA and feminists without assuming oppression is a necessary part of the human condition, it's all status games, or that either side is innately evil.
My response to that point was that feminism seems less legalistic now because the low hanging fruit which could readily be addressed by legislation largely already has been, so social dynamics and things that are not easy to address with legislation (at least in the current political climate) are what's left.
"Equal pay for equal work" is sort of a holdout, in that an employee can legally sue their employer for discriminatory practices for not providing equal pay for equal work, but on the other hand, companies aren't required to divulge their pay standards, either to all their employees or to any oversight body charged with ensuring equal salaries. So while it's generally regarded as "uncontroversial," its legal protection is very incomplete in large part because the measures necessary to guarantee it are opposed to business interests which are themselves a powerful lobbying force.
It's not that feminism is inherently less legalistic than MRA (at least, I don't think we have the evidence to conclude that,) but that the difference in focus is largely due to the gap in the amounts of ground the movements have already covered.
Since when are "No Seriously, What About teh Menz?", and "The Good Men Project" MRA sites?
I believe those are the sites where I learned about men's rights issues such as male rape, child custody, etc, so I put them under the MRA umbrella, though they may not identify themselves that way (probably due to not wanting to be tarred with the same brush as the insanity)
If you DON'T think that those sites are MRA, then I would update towards ALL MRA to be of the insane kind, since those sites are the only ones I've seen on that side that I consider to be sane. (Though I welcome links to the contrary)
As I mentioned here, the criterion you use for sanity appears to be way too weighted towards agreeing with you. The example you gave of an MRA being "insane":
is not encouraging here. While this position does sound absurd, that's not the same as insane. The way to test insanity would be to look at their arguments for the above position.
Having said that I don't actually know much about the official men's rights movement except that they have legitimate grievances and that the PUA community says nasty things about them. Nevertheless, you might want to start here.
The MRA label very quickly became stabilized as an antifeminist identifier, such that I'd guess "male ally" and "MRA" are almost perfectly exclusive self-descriptors. But the intension of MRA as a typical self-descriptor and as you've been using it may not perfectly cohere either, so this may not be a "real" update that you're forced into.
Thank you, apparently I've been using the wrong words.
I had been reading "men's rights" as "you care about the rights of men, and male-specific gender issues", NOT as "you don't like feminism." I would like to edit my post with a better term that is actually accurate for what I am trying to get at (the first definition I listed above). Do you know what a better term is? "Male ally" doesn't seem right, since most of them ARE males.
And also, in that case, it's actually useful that the insane "People Who Care About Men's Rights" are considerate enough to separate themselves out from the sane "PWCAMR", which leaves the sane ones free to develop their own movement! lol
It's probably worth remembering that names are not catalog numbers that facilitate filing into categories. Attempting to reverse-engineer a compound noun phrase by looking only at its parts will often swing you wide of the actual target.
Agreed. Most science fiction has little or no science.
That'd be an example of making the error I'm trying to point out here. "Science fiction" is not "fiction about science"; the term has a long and varied history and in point of fact, no single, well-defined rigorous use has predominated. Indeed, there are so many currents, subgenres and subsubgenres contained within the umbrella term that it's simply not very specific. Here are a bunch of big names in the field offering different ideas about what constitutes science fiction; when you read it, keep in mind it's a small slice of the pie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_science_fiction
Here's a map of the history of the genre. Take note of its variety:
http://www.wardshelley.com/paintings/pages/jpegs/histSciFi-mid1smweb.jpg
I'm not sure whether you're agreeing with me or not. I was bringing up the lack of science in science fiction as an example of the sort of thing you were talking about.
Possible incorrect pattern-match, then -- I've heard been party to a few too many genre-definition squabbles.
I'm not a fan of letting MRA take over the term 'men's rights.' It's useful to maintain parity with women's rights.
A simple, broad term for the salient grouping MRA falls into is 'antifeminists.' Feminists recognize that women are systematically disadvantaged, and desire gender equality; so antifeminists will reject either the former fact (sex/gender inequality denialism) or the latter value (male supremacism), or both. You could pick out the MRAers who aren't just supremacists as 'antifeminists who happen to care a lot about men's rights,' but this may not actually be a useful category, since it glues a harmful value to a virtuous one.
As for men's rights supporters who aren't 'MRA,' these will simply be feminists (or, if you prefer, 'profeminists') who have an interest in men's rights. Speaking phrasally is uncatchy, but also diminishes misunderstanding and essentialism.
The important thing is whether this category reflects reality or not. Let's start the analysis there, not with the bottom line.
That's a very interesting response, but I think the issue of 'natural kinds' is more pertinent to fundamental physics and metaphysics than to classifications of high-level phenomena like social groups and ideologies. The more complicated the phenomenon, the harder it is to single out clear joints of Nature. That said, I think the above terms ('feminist,' 'antifeminist,' 'denialist,' 'supremacist,' 'egalitarian'...) are useful starting points for their relative precision and simplicity.
If you don't follow "nature", then the definition is kind of arbitrary. The arbitrary definitions can be used to help or hurt the cause. If you complain about "gluing a harmful value to a virtuous one", I feel like you have already decided to dislike A and like B, and you are biased to think about definitions that will hurt A and/or help B. The definition itself becomes a weapon. (Related: this article.)
As an example, imagine there is a movement around some concept C consisting of a sympathetic person P1, average people P2, P3, P4, and an unsympathetic person P5.
If you like C, you are motivated to invent a definition that includes P1, P2, P3, P4 and excludes P5. Then "C is movement popular among many people, including such paragons as P1".
If you dislike C, you are motivated to invent a definition that includes P5 and excludes P1. Inclusion of P2, P3, P4 depends on whether you prefer to describe it as "a dangerous movement" (include) or "a fringe belief" (exclude).
My translation: "In my opinion, C pattern-matches P5."
My translation: "You could pick out other member of C, such as P1, P2, P3, P4, but this may not actually be a useful [for what purpose exactly?] category, since it glues P5 to P1".
That's a funny way of characterizing it, since MRA was just "men's rights activist", which seems like a perfectly sensible thing to call someone who tries to organize people to action because she cares about men's rights. It was turned immediately into a pejorative, and I'm surprised there are circles where non-abbreviated "men's rights" is even something you can say without being associated with Nazis.
There are other terms in the neighborhood that haven't been contaminated in this way, like 'men's studies' and 'men's liberation.' On the other hand, 'masculinist' seems to have followed very much the same trajectory as 'men's rights (activism).' My proposal is intended to refocus the discussion on the points of substantive, specific disagreement, while also incrementally remedying the stigmatization of 'men's rights' as the counterpart of 'women's rights.'
That was my first thought as well. I like both projects a lot, but I wouldn't have placed them in the MRA sphere.
The mistake daenerys is actually fairly common. She wants to talk to some "sane" MRA people, where by "sane" she means ones who more-or-less agree with her. The problem is that real Men's Rights Advocates don't agree with her positions, so she finds people who do who are talking about men and declares them the "sane MRA faction".
Note that this can be a rhetorical strategy as well as an honest mistake! (I make no claims about what was going through particular posters' heads.)
In my view, these are not MRA issues. These are feminist issues. There doesn't need to be a "Men's Rights Movement"; because men's rights should be an inherent component of the feminist perspective, which is that femininity should be nurtured and encouraged instead of being stamped out. Whether a feminine [i.e., nurturing, compassionate, cooperative and socially-conscious] personality happens to bud within a body with a vagina or a penis should be irrelevant.
It should be part of the feminist foundation, at the "bedrock" as it were, that people have the right to choose their orientation, their personality, their gender, and their social roles regardless of what kind of dangly bits they have, and that judgments about the worth or suitability of a particular person should be made based on that person's actual capabilities, rather than based on social assumptions or even aggregate statistical stereotyping. If rape is bad, then feminism should be against rape, not merely against rape of women. If gender stereotyping is bad, then feminism should be against gender stereotyping, not merely against gender stereotyping of women. If external reproductive control is bad, then feminism should be against external reproductive control, not merely against external reproductive control of women.
If using gender norms to devaluing the personhood of human beings is bad, then feminism should be against any process that would use a gender norm to devalue the personhood of human beings, including processes within so-called "feminism" that would say "our concern is only what happens to women."
This is why, as a human being with a penis, I feel that I can legitimately say "I am a feminist", rather than merely saying "I am a feminist ally".
Once you describe "feminine" as "nurturing, compassionate, cooperative and socially-conscious" and define feminism as a movement to protect all things feminine, I think you have gone far beyond what most people mean by either word.
Actually "nurturing, compassionate, cooperative and socially-conscious" is pretty close to the definition of "feminine" traditionalists use when arguing in favor of separate spheres for men and women.
In other words, traditionalists deny men the right/obligation to be nurturing, compassionate, cooperative and socially-conscious - exactly like feminists always say. Lol.
As Eugine_Nier just stated, it isn't the feminists who want to place "nurturing, compassionate, cooperative and socially-conscious" solely within the label "feminine."
If we could stop labeling virtues by sex, that would be a definite improvement.
I can see where you're coming from here, but I think that the work should instead be put into broadening masculinity. To make a loaded analogy, saying "it's okay for boys to act feminine" when they want to do something traditionally female is like saying "it's okay for black people to act white" when they want to do something traditionally european. You can define the words so that the sentence parses, but you can't remove the additional meaning to make the sentence a good idea.
Besides, it's fine to use different words to describe people focused on different things, even if they use the same toolbox.
Personally, I think the idea that being nurturing, compassionate, and socially conscious, are inherently feminine and thus the natural province of feminism, is just as unreasonable and offensive as saying that courage and proactiveness are inherently masculine and therefore causes like getting more women involved in the military or police work are naturally not the province of feminism.
I would agree that there was no need for a Men's Rights Movement if there were a Gender Egalitarianism Movement that reliably functioned as such, but feminists do not reliably support addressing all issues of gender inequality. I think most people would agree that women are, on net, more societally disadvantaged than men, but from this, many feminists conclude "therefore, bias and discrimination faced by men is not an important problem to deal with now," whereas I think that a more appropriate Gender Egalitarianism Movement would take the position "we should address issues of bias and discrimination in order of the importance of the specific issues and the return on the investment in addressing them, not on the basis of which gender is more disadvantaged."
I may identify myself as a Feminist rather than a Gender Egalitarian depending on what connotations I feel will be advantageous in a particular discussion, but I'd sooner get behind an argument that with a proper Gender Egalitarian Movement, there is no need for Feminism, than one that with a proper Feminist Movement, there's no need for a Men's Rights Movement.
Using feminism to refer to issue's of men's rights is like using the phrase white power to refer to issue's about african american rights. Whatever argument you then make about broadening the meaning of the term is obviously and instantly undermined by the linguistic problems present.
Also: a LOT of people use feminism to mean "more rights for women and who cares about men?". Your more broad species of feminism is inclusive almost to the point of being meaningless. It's like using the word feminism to mean "good".