Still, how is it in the interests of feminists (the sociopolitical movement) to pick and choose fights, Because, as you've already pointed out, our time and our energy and our resources are limited and because, as I've already pointed out, one of the things we're fighting _against_ is the idea that while our issues are just for us to deal with, men's are universal.
Sexual identity is very obviously a feminist issue, because trans women are women. And feminism hasn't adopted people of colour as an issue; third wave feminism is recognising that _women_ of colour have their own set of issues on top of those faced by women more generally.
Fixing one issue is fixing all the issues. No, it isn't; if we start spending our time fixing men's issues, we'll be taking a big step backwards.
Yes it really is true. This is one of the many, many reasons why they don't test drugs on prison inmates, for example. Well, that and because it's monumentally unethical to do so.
It's really bad study design to use at risk populations, and children are a huge quagmire for researchers.
Well, I can tell you for a fact that a lot of medical trials don't accept women during menstruation, or insist that any women who take part must be on hormonal birth control (as if neither menstruating women nor women who aren't on hormones need medication). It really is true that the medical standard is based not on a gender-neutral, but on male physiology, even now, and it really does still cause problems. As an example, I know a quite frightening number of women who have gone to see their doctor with a medical issue and been dismissed because it's "women's troubles". The fact that they were vomiting from the pain, for example, is apparently just something that women deal with and not something a doctor should be concerned about. In other words, being female is treated, in and of itself, as a medical oddity; we're not people, we're dysfunctional men with strange anatomies that (some) doctors don't really want to have to thing about. Dismissing the idea of gender bias in medicine with a wave of the hand in the way you've done really isn't helping your claim to be a feminist, y'know.
Hey, everyone wants to be the next big name. No, actually, not everyone does. Some of us are just tying to get through the day without being patronised by some guy who thinks he knows our lives better than we do,a nd that he gets to decide where we put our time and effort in. Once again, feminism is not about academic study of an interesting but purely theoretical field, as you seem to be treating it. It is our lives. Perhaps you could try to respect that?
And I hope I won't get mistaken for a steriotypical male trying to save the wimminz if I get involved too. Save? No, I don't think there's much danger of that. Explain to the wimminz what's what? Yeah, I think you might be accused of that. Tell the wimminz to stop wasting their time on women's issues and start thinking about the menz? Yes, that's going to happen too.
Seriously, if you don't want to be seen as that kind of guy, don't act like that kind of guy.
if it's a good argument it'll suffer my questioning, right? As long as you don't mind being told really very comprehensively to fuck off. No-one owes you an education, and no-one wants to be the subject of your disinterested study. If you want to study something interesting, go to school, don't look for some feminists to poke with sticks.
Focusing on feminist issues is fighting against the ideas that feminist ideas are just ours to deal with? No. Read what I actually wrote, both times.
How so? I've already answered this in previous comments and above. Go back and read it again if you need to, I don't feel like wasting my time explaining it _again_. Or you could google for "What about the menz", that also might help.
If you admit that men benefit from feminist actions, then how isn't it a universal action? Because the benefits to men are incidental; they're a nice bonus, but they're not the goal.
Hormones can throw off or occlude results. Yes, that's right, they can, which is why it's _really_ problematic to insist that women should be using artificial hormones in order to take part in a medical trial.
Oh? Wasn't aware that there were that many anatomical differences between the sexes. Well, perhaps your spouse can explain to you what "gender bias in medicine" means, and why your idea of the universal neuter is so far off.
Nobody in research But, as I _keep_ pointing out, we're not talking about research, we're talking about activism. Why are you trying so hard to derail this?
I'm fairly certain that I have, in no way, made little of women's issues. Really? You don't think that suggesting that feminism should focus on men is making light of women's issues? Or brushing off gender bias in medicine? Or claiming that a misogynistic hate crime in which the criminal released a manifesto outlining his misogyny isn't _really_ about misogyny? Or citing inaccurate figures on domestic abuse and then throwing a self-pitying tantrum when they're challenged? Or claiming that no-one is really saying all the shitty things various women here have been told because _you_ haven't heard them so it can't be true? Seriously, dude, your behaviour in this thread is not going to make you welcome in any feminist arena, so if you want to be welcomed, you really need to adjust your attitude in a fairly radical way.
No, I don't, because as I've stated before, it's really the same thing. No, it isn't, and frankly, it isn't up to you, as a man, to make that call. If you want to be an ally, you're going to have to let women decide which issues they want to address and what feminism is about, and learn to take a back seat. Which is precisely why I'm not comfortable with men calling themselves feminists; because inevitably it means they want to determine the direction feminism takes, which usually means diverting it away from the issues women want to address.
This does not mean that if I break my toe that I will get a different treatment then your broken toe just because of genders. I can't speak for broken toes, but I have certainly been given different treatment from that given to a male friend who had pretty much identical symptoms, because of gender, for a medical issue which was not in itself gendered. So no, sorry, you're wrong. You are a man, you don't see what women experience, so don't try to tell us what we experience. OK?
I don't think anyone claimed it wasn't misogynist. Your whole schtick about how he killed men too certainly came across that way.
aka 'letting my depression and exhaustion get the better of me' Then I suggest you back away from the internet before you get to that point.
There is a huge difference when you are driving in a car and your friend says "it's faster to take the freeway" vs. the guy in the back saying "Driver, take the freeway". That's me. But not only are you not the driver or the owner of the car, but you don't actually know where we're planning to go and you don't know the roads. So when you say "It's quicker to take the highway" what you're actually saying is "My opinion as someone who doesn't know the terrain here is worth more than yours, even though these are your roads, and your destination". And in fact, what you've been saying is not "It's quicker to take the freeway" but rather "I don't think we should go where you want to go, I've decided you should drive me to my chosen destination instead", to which my answer is, get out and walk, buddy.
I prod, poke, take things for a spin and that's how I understand things. But apparently what you don't do is listen to the people who actually _live_ this.
...you mean they actually are saying that they should close down women's shelters to replace them with men's You're really not reading very carefully at all. It's incredibly frustrating trying to have a discussion with you when you keep twisting what is being said like that; please try to read more carefully before replying. Although in a way, it's a perfect example of why it's not OK for you to tell us to take the freeway; your understanding of the drive (or the conversation) isn't good enough for you to be able to do that, and that's at least in part because you're quicker to give your opinion than to listen to other people's.
No, "we" haven't. You may have done so; I'm objecting to you twisting what has been said, for no apparent reason. That's not a stereotype, and it's not in my head. Go back and read again, and you'll see what I mean.
But yes, frankly, it probably is time for you to sit down and shut up; We're driving, we know where we're going, we don't need any backseat navigation.
i've been away from LJ so i've only just read this thread. but i wanted to say that i'm so impressed with the way you handled this conversation, the patience you showed, and how well you articulated yourself here. and also, thank you.
Because, as you've already pointed out, our time and our energy and our resources are limited and because, as I've already pointed out, one of the things we're fighting _against_ is the idea that while our issues are just for us to deal with, men's are universal.
Sexual identity is very obviously a feminist issue, because trans women are women. And feminism hasn't adopted people of colour as an issue; third wave feminism is recognising that _women_ of colour have their own set of issues on top of those faced by women more generally.
Fixing one issue is fixing all the issues.
No, it isn't; if we start spending our time fixing men's issues, we'll be taking a big step backwards.
Yes it really is true. This is one of the many, many reasons why they don't test drugs on prison inmates, for example.
Well, that and because it's monumentally unethical to do so.
It's really bad study design to use at risk populations, and children are a huge quagmire for researchers.
Well, I can tell you for a fact that a lot of medical trials don't accept women during menstruation, or insist that any women who take part must be on hormonal birth control (as if neither menstruating women nor women who aren't on hormones need medication). It really is true that the medical standard is based not on a gender-neutral, but on male physiology, even now, and it really does still cause problems. As an example, I know a quite frightening number of women who have gone to see their doctor with a medical issue and been dismissed because it's "women's troubles". The fact that they were vomiting from the pain, for example, is apparently just something that women deal with and not something a doctor should be concerned about. In other words, being female is treated, in and of itself, as a medical oddity; we're not people, we're dysfunctional men with strange anatomies that (some) doctors don't really want to have to thing about.
Dismissing the idea of gender bias in medicine with a wave of the hand in the way you've done really isn't helping your claim to be a feminist, y'know.
Hey, everyone wants to be the next big name.
No, actually, not everyone does. Some of us are just tying to get through the day without being patronised by some guy who thinks he knows our lives better than we do,a nd that he gets to decide where we put our time and effort in.
Once again, feminism is not about academic study of an interesting but purely theoretical field, as you seem to be treating it. It is our lives. Perhaps you could try to respect that?
And I hope I won't get mistaken for a steriotypical male trying to save the wimminz if I get involved too.
Save? No, I don't think there's much danger of that. Explain to the wimminz what's what? Yeah, I think you might be accused of that. Tell the wimminz to stop wasting their time on women's issues and start thinking about the menz? Yes, that's going to happen too.
Seriously, if you don't want to be seen as that kind of guy, don't act like that kind of guy.
if it's a good argument it'll suffer my questioning, right?
As long as you don't mind being told really very comprehensively to fuck off. No-one owes you an education, and no-one wants to be the subject of your disinterested study. If you want to study something interesting, go to school, don't look for some feminists to poke with sticks.
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No. Read what I actually wrote, both times.
How so?
I've already answered this in previous comments and above. Go back and read it again if you need to, I don't feel like wasting my time explaining it _again_. Or you could google for "What about the menz", that also might help.
If you admit that men benefit from feminist actions, then how isn't it a universal action?
Because the benefits to men are incidental; they're a nice bonus, but they're not the goal.
Hormones can throw off or occlude results.
Yes, that's right, they can, which is why it's _really_ problematic to insist that women should be using artificial hormones in order to take part in a medical trial.
Oh? Wasn't aware that there were that many anatomical differences between the sexes. Well, perhaps your spouse can explain to you what "gender bias in medicine" means, and why your idea of the universal neuter is so far off.
Nobody in research
But, as I _keep_ pointing out, we're not talking about research, we're talking about activism. Why are you trying so hard to derail this?
I'm fairly certain that I have, in no way, made little of women's issues.
Really? You don't think that suggesting that feminism should focus on men is making light of women's issues? Or brushing off gender bias in medicine? Or claiming that a misogynistic hate crime in which the criminal released a manifesto outlining his misogyny isn't _really_ about misogyny? Or citing inaccurate figures on domestic abuse and then throwing a self-pitying tantrum when they're challenged? Or claiming that no-one is really saying all the shitty things various women here have been told because _you_ haven't heard them so it can't be true?
Seriously, dude, your behaviour in this thread is not going to make you welcome in any feminist arena, so if you want to be welcomed, you really need to adjust your attitude in a fairly radical way.
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No, it isn't, and frankly, it isn't up to you, as a man, to make that call. If you want to be an ally, you're going to have to let women decide which issues they want to address and what feminism is about, and learn to take a back seat. Which is precisely why I'm not comfortable with men calling themselves feminists; because inevitably it means they want to determine the direction feminism takes, which usually means diverting it away from the issues women want to address.
This does not mean that if I break my toe that I will get a different treatment then your broken toe just because of genders.
I can't speak for broken toes, but I have certainly been given different treatment from that given to a male friend who had pretty much identical symptoms, because of gender, for a medical issue which was not in itself gendered. So no, sorry, you're wrong. You are a man, you don't see what women experience, so don't try to tell us what we experience. OK?
I don't think anyone claimed it wasn't misogynist.
Your whole schtick about how he killed men too certainly came across that way.
aka 'letting my depression and exhaustion get the better of me'
Then I suggest you back away from the internet before you get to that point.
...What?
here and here.
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That's me.
But not only are you not the driver or the owner of the car, but you don't actually know where we're planning to go and you don't know the roads. So when you say "It's quicker to take the highway" what you're actually saying is "My opinion as someone who doesn't know the terrain here is worth more than yours, even though these are your roads, and your destination".
And in fact, what you've been saying is not "It's quicker to take the freeway" but rather "I don't think we should go where you want to go, I've decided you should drive me to my chosen destination instead", to which my answer is, get out and walk, buddy.
I prod, poke, take things for a spin and that's how I understand things.
But apparently what you don't do is listen to the people who actually _live_ this.
...you mean they actually are saying that they should close down women's shelters to replace them with men's
You're really not reading very carefully at all. It's incredibly frustrating trying to have a discussion with you when you keep twisting what is being said like that; please try to read more carefully before replying.
Although in a way, it's a perfect example of why it's not OK for you to tell us to take the freeway; your understanding of the drive (or the conversation) isn't good enough for you to be able to do that, and that's at least in part because you're quicker to give your opinion than to listen to other people's.
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(The comment has been removed)
But yes, frankly, it probably is time for you to sit down and shut up; We're driving, we know where we're going, we don't need any backseat navigation.
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