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OrphanWilde comments on LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny - Less Wrong Discussion

27 [deleted] 10 April 2013 07:54PM

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Comment author: OrphanWilde 12 April 2013 02:44:13PM 10 points [-]

I haven't accused you of misandry. (Seriously, this should be an "I am confused" moment. Please stop trying to fit what I am saying into a predefined narrative.)

What I've accused you of, effectively, is supporting a dominance hierarchy that dehumanizes me, that makes my experiences less significant. More than one guy has said in this post that he finds the term "mansplaining" to be offensive, and a strong signal that his gender will be held against him, and anything he says will be ignored. Why do you persist in defending it? Because you insist on a dominance hierarchy that makes their experiences matter less than... what exactly? The ability of feminists to be offensive? Because you think being in a dominant class confers an immunity against hurt?

The dominance hierarchy didn't protect me from an emotionally abusive misandrist. It didn't protect me from the college professor who routinely flunked or kicked out every male student who ever made the mistake of taking a class with her without asking around about her reputation first. It doesn't protect me from rape or violence. It does not, in fact, confer any protections at all. Instead, it strips them away, and then I get thrown to the bottom of the pile and told "We'll get to you when we're satisfied everybody else's problems are solved first".

And hell, I don't even demand anybody fix the problems; I'm not a crusader, nor do I want to be, because the pay is shit and everybody hates people who stand up for men, if only because they think it's distracting attention from the "real" problems. All I want is for the people who claim to be fixing these problems in general to stop heaping shit on top of me, actively working to make things worse. I really don't think it's all that unreasonable, nor do I think it's unreasonable to call out the people who -are- actively making things worse.