Multiheaded 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.)