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Desrtopa comments on Factions, inequality, and social justice - Less Wrong
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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.
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.