on gender
over here i was talking about the gender option on google+, and a nagging question arose while i was explaining my opinion. the prompt is that google+ has a "gender" option for your profile that (a) is unavoidably public and (b) offers only the choices "male", "female", and "other".
my complaint with the system is that while i am male, i am not ( Read more... )
my complaint with the system is that while i am male, i am not ( Read more... )
I read the "over here", and in particular, the first section of the first post there, and I felt almost shocked at the level of blame conveyed by the author. He says: Enter the professional victim, the high-conflict person (HCP) and/or the abusive personality disordered individual [...].
What an insulting way to put that. In this, he almost seems to imply to me that the "professional victim" wants to behave like that; that she is almost excited by the prospect of putting another human being under incredible strain. People who behave like that, and in abusive fashions in general, are very sick -- both men and women. Both deserve sympathy and compassion -- the impulses that they suffer from are not something I would wish on anyone.
Recently, in my hometown, Wayland, there was the first murder in some 25 years -- a recently-graduated high school senior killed his ex-girlfriend in a particularly gruesome way. (She had also just graduated; both were going to college.) The father of the ex-girlfriend had this to say:"When someone takes it in their hands to take someone’s life, it comes out of needs that were never recognized and never met."
To me, this guy seems to have it right. When I saw that quote on the news, I was just bowled over by the fact that a guy could say that 24 hours after his daughter was strangled and stabbed four times in the neck; but I think he probably sees an important point.
Anyway, I digress. There is a lot to that blog that is interesting reading, probably, but that post... rubbed me the wrong way.
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that's an amazing news story.
a few other lines from it strike me, in particular: "it’s unusual for someone to be able to articulate and exhibit such constructive feelings this early on in the process".
this is exactly what the blog post is failing to do. the "in our society, men also have it rough" idea is also fairly young, as far as i've seen.
the writing is targeted at the abused male, who has a more immediate problem than needing to give their abuser sympathy or compassion. yes, an abuser can be 99% good at heart, but in the abused's world, that's not at hand; the abused first needs to blame someone other than himself. sometimes what helps best is to demonise the other person completely. if you're seeing past that already, then grains of salt are in order.
if the post were trying to pave the path for total equality and abuse-free relationships, it'd be doing a very bad job. all it does is raise awareness - with extreme words and gestures - that society isn't just women-oppressing, it's everyone-oppressing.
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Yes, and this is a point that I wish more people would recognize. But I wish they would then go on to recognize that in our society, while everyone is oppressed, not everyone is oppressed *equally*. Being a man is a privilege in our society. Privileged people can still be victims, but it's important to recognize both, not just one or the other. I'm still not sure of the best way to do so, though.
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people don't like when a disease runs in multiple places. we want to be able to point fingers, and say "men are responsible for all that's wrong in our society", or "women are responsible ...". a lot of breath is wasted.
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+1.
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I think that the post could do a much better job of empowering abused men without throwing women under the bus quite so much. For instance, using "there exist" language rather than "look at all these scientific terms for large groups of women who are deliberate fake victims." Perhaps mentioning that these psychological disorders are harmful to the woman involved, not just her boyfriends.
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this is exactly what the blog post is failing to do. the "in our society, men also have it rough" idea is also fairly young, as far as i've seen.
Even the parts of the world where feminism has made great progress still have a long way to go. But even so... the first (and almost every subsequent) time I saw this idea expressed, it was in feminist writing. Essentially "We women have had and still have the short end of the stick, but men also have it rough; we need to work to make things not suck for everyone." Let's-fix-things-for-everyone.
That shrink4men post really hit me as ascribing to women, all of the miserable things that can happen to a man. Cue anger.
the writing is targeted at the abused male, who has a more immediate problem than needing to give their abuser sympathy or compassion. yes, an abuser can be 99% good at heart, but in the abused's world, that's not at hand; the abused first needs to blame someone other than himself. sometimes what helps best is to demonise the other person completely. if you're seeing past that already, then grains of salt are in order.
Wish I'd read this before reading that post, it might have allowed me to read it with a grain of salt. Without this context, that post made a terrible first impression on me WRT the entire site. The About page is much better but I'm almost side-eying it, wanting to dislike it and the whole out of spite over the first post I read.
if the post were trying to pave the path for total equality and abuse-free relationships, it'd be doing a very bad job. all it does is raise awareness - with extreme words and gestures - that society isn't just women-oppressing, it's everyone-oppressing.
To me it reads more that society is women-engineered to be men-oppressing. Which could say something about reading comprehension decreasing while angry, perhaps.
Which is a lot of text about a small part of a very thought-provoking post.
(Is there a way to edit comments I'm missing? I just deleted and am re-posting this comment, not noticing a more elegant way.)
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As for the site, it looks relatively reasonable, but that first post is really, *really* heavy on the "men have it so hard, women have it so easy, being a man in this world sucks". Now, maybe he's (I'm assuming the author is male (oh, hmm, just checked and their name is Tara, so maybe not. Can't check the profile at the link, though (definitely a woman - whoops! apologies for my stupid assumption))) only trying to talk about a limited range of situations, but I particularly like the line:
"A professional victim’s, HCP’s and/or APDI’s entire emotional landscape revolves solely around herself, her feelings and having things her way."
Yes, because it's only possible for women to have these disorders, not men. Oh, hold on a second...
I am pretty sure that in a large proportion of cases where a woman claims to have been victimized (regardless of whether or not it's true), it's dismissed out of hand, anyway. I don't know the exact numbers, or whether or not they exist, but from knowledge I've gleaned from reading feminist blogs over people's shoulders, it appears to be a nontrivial problem.
At the risk of godwinning myself, take sexual assault as an example. The overwhelming majority (again, I don't have numbers, but they probably are not too difficult to find) of victims don't even *attempt* to report it, either out of misplaced affection for the offender or because they blame themselves or, and this is probably the most predominant reason, because they are afraid no one will believe them. And what happens when they do report it? Surprise, surprise, the defendant's attorney does their damnedest to make sure nobody believes the victim.
Now, that's not to say that false reports of sexual assault don't happen. But it is to say that when it does happen, there is not this culture of "the man is guilty!" that the author suggests exists. Rather, the opposite culture is more prevalent.
I wholly support being aware that men can be victims, too, and that it is possible for situations like the ones the author describes to come up. But I wish someone would talk about it in a more holistic manner. It's still a (white, upper-class) man's world, and from reading that post, it sounds like the author has lost sight of that.
Oh, um, and in relation to the original purpose of the post: gender roles are a...hmm, let me start over. Gender roles suck. People are people, and chromosomes (or genitals, or even the chromosomes/genitals you *wish* you had!) should have no bearing on how much pain you claim to feel, or whether you seek therapy, or any of these things. This is true for men as well as women - presumably stoicism is just as damaging as the concept that women have to be super-emotional about everything.
But I guess it's this lack of acknowledgement that men are not the only victims (and maybe it gets better on other posts, I don't know) that gets to me about that site. Feminists are capable of acknowledging that there are, in fact, societal norms that oppress men, too. Men are capable of abusing women in those exact same ways, by the way, but you wouldn't guess that from reading the article. Upon further investigation, the 'about' page is much more reasonable than that first post.
Anyway, I am not super-knowledgeable on the topic, so maybe I am overreacting to nothing. Certainly there should be support structures out there for men in abusive relationships, just as there are for women. And in general, we should be aware that, like so many other things, abuse is not an inherently male trait - it's an inherently human trait, and I think everyone falls victim to discussing more of one side than the other. It would just be nice to know what the right balance is; I suspect that everyone is at least slightly off in their estimate.
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No; he's saying the guy's life up until that point lacked something or somethings that he needed, whether from his family, his friends, his schooling, his own support of himself, ...
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Just to follow up on this thought with an example of just how horrible our culture can be, even when a woman is not dismissed out of hand, even when people agree that something really bad happened, there's a nonzero chance that the community still hates her afterward.
Anyway, I do think it's important to remember that men can absolutely be the victims of domestic violence, rape, or "just" prejudice (ugh the "sitcom dad" stereotype ugh). It's also worth noting that some of the ways in which female-on-male violence are tragic are different from the ways in which male-on-female violence are tragic: in addition to the physical trauma, male victims of female attackers tend to be thought of as especially weak, emasculated, or even just a joke. (Now, of course, a lot of that comes out of how society sees women as the "right" victims, and how becoming more like a women is shameful, but that's cold comfort for men in that situation. There are a whole lot of men harmed in this way, even subtly, and not a lot of common knowledge on the topic. The patriarchy sucks for almost everyone.)
Seconding Chrisamaphone, I can think of some really great feminist blogs that you may enjoy reading. None of them are really beginner/101-friendly, but it seems to me by your comment here that you might not need that anyway. Off the top of my head, Yes Means Yes (not high-volume, but check out the posts in the "Top Posts" sidebar), Shakesville (warning: can come across as acerbic), and Alas!.
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