Who runs the universities nowadays?

[Simon Paynton]

@davis – I think the ideology is toxic, and the leaders of the movement are usually assholes, but the grass-roots men on the ground I see as “lost boys” who have been misled and manipulated by the malignant narcissists in charge.  It’s all pretty scary, and does men no favours at all.

At the same time, there needed to be a corrective to the “all men are evil” narrative that had developed within a legitimate feminist movement.  Somebody needed to push back against that.

[_Robert_]

The whole red pill men’s rights thing was largely initiated by feminists who became disillusioned by the man-hating agenda which permeates universities. YouTube misogynists have hijacked the movement. This seems to happen to every movement that started out with valid goals to better society. Feminism, BLM protests, MRA have all turned extreme. We even have feminists fighting LGBT activists; some are boycotting Harry Potter these days.

Then there are the moronic ideologies that are just no good to start with such as white nationalism, religious fundamentalism and anti-mask-ism. And the worst, tRumpism. All liberal minded Americans need to get together and vote that tangerine Idi Amin out of here. I would to love to see a social democratic Euro style governance take hold in the US. Extreme liberals will only hinder that cause IMHO.

[Davis]

Simon the “all men are evil” trop is mostly a hyper-counter reaction by some men who cannot handle the fact that women are pointing out the high prevalance of sexual harassment, assault, domestic violence and inequality in the work place. Yes, there is a very tiny minority of women who say stupid things like “all men are pigs” but that is basically the same with every group of reactionary people. There are conservatives who say “all leftists are communists” but it would be ridiculous for people on the left side of the spectrum to take that as a “all conservatives are attacking us”. That is an absurd overreaction. The same is the case of some men who take a tiny fraction of feminists who hyper-generalize and take that as a larger attack.

But even if we ignore that, there are still a notable amount of men who take even the most bening quoting of sexual assault statistics as an attack on men. I see it ALL the time. It goes like this:

person a: A new report shows that 1 in 3 women report being the victim of sexual assault by men

hyper counter reactionary defensive male: Hey I’m so sick of this shit. Not all men are rapists. I’m not a rapist.

____

If that is also your default reaction then you are a total part of the problem. A sensisble caring human being would react to the simple statement of a statistic as:

sensible caring human male: Wow. That’s fucking crazy. 1 in 3! How can that number be so high. What can I do to help stop that?

Instead of geting stupidly defensive and taking a general statement about the prevalence of an injustice as a blanket attack on you if you happen to be in the same class as those committing the injustice, is to help end that kind of culture among the minority of people in your class. Call out other men when they make disgusting comments or extreme-locker-room-talk. Call out other men who outright dismiss rape claims as inherantly a lie, don’t laugh at the most extreme sexist jokes, step in if you see a drunk person being sexually taken advantage of, call the police if you hear domestic violence, teach your children about consent at an early age.

The same works when racism is being quoted. Too many westerners go: I never see racism, this whole BLM stuff is overblown, we live in a tollerant society, I’m not racist. That’s a shitty reaction. Same with homophobia or Islamophobia. Denying that it is prevalent, pretending society is now an advanced biggotry-free one and taking the quoting of cases and statistics as an attack on you is bullshit. The younger generation has become so much more proactive. So should our generation.

[Simon Paynton]

There was a trope going around in feminism, maybe 20 years ago, of “men are stupid, men are evil, why can’t they be more like women” etc.  But I don’t really hear it these days.

These days, like you say, it’s annoying when men get defensive about #MeToo or domestic violence statistics.  I don’t get defensive, I just try to play my part.  It’s a constant learning curve on the part of society, mainly male society, and it just goes to prove my point: over history, cooperative thriving tends to win out in the end.

Now, males and females are arranged slightly differently.  There is the Patriarchy which benefits men and oppresses women, although it does have its upsides: for example, chivalry, and the male who looks after his family.

[jakelafort]

The way Davis has reasoned through those issues is precisely the way we as a species do not. If all humans approached issues in the way Davis does we would not be so contemptible, so tribal, so easily led.

How do we go from the 1 to 5 percent of human population who reason (wild guess) to a majority? How do we go from being infants to being adults?

[Reg the Fronkey Farmer]

How do we go from being infants to being adults?

Atheism is a sign of maturity.

[_Robert_]

It is pretty fucked up to take the evolutionary role of the male as protector and provider for the child bearing partner and helpless children and twist it into toxicity.

I don’t know if any of you guys have ever been married to a woman, but if not you probably don’t know much about so-called male domination, LOL. Men love their women dearly. It is women and children first. Legally and socially. If that has become patronizing according to our huge brains and our separation from the natural world and then we need to embrace and teach young males to be better (e.g. more feminine, LOL) and not demonize and isolate them.

 

[Simon Paynton]

I was saying it is an “upside” of Patriarchy – something positive about it.

But I maintain that still, the power structures in society benefit males more than females.

[Simon Paynton]

jakelafort wrote:

How do we go from being infants to being adults?

Self-knowledge and understanding.

People get personally invested with ideas, so that if the ideas lose, the person loses.  We need to be less precious about being wrong.

Tribalism is deeply ingrained into the group-oriented human race.  It’s hard to overcome.  But we are doing so more and more.  Scientific knowledge about tribalism is a good place to start – learning about empathy.

[_Robert_]

Simon Paynton wrote:

I was saying it is an “upside” of Patriarchy – something positive about it.

‘The Patriarchy”.  Is that some sort of secret club? Newsflash ! Women make up half of the patriarchy. They go for tall, strong, rough and tough potential providers. Got a six pack, square jaw and big biceps? Huge bankroll. Good for you. They are attracted to healthy progenitors; sometimes like moths to a flame. It is all very superficial. I have played the part, it is very comical. I even knew what ‘scents’ work best, it’s a science. Not sure the gender studies programs go into all of that.

[Unseen]

Simon Paynton wrote:

@unseen – we all like someone who makes us laugh.

But men use it in a way women don’t need to.

[Simon Paynton]

@robert – I’m sure you’re right, but it’s not the whole story.  Women like other kinds of men as well.

The classical scenario for the Patriarchy “in the wild” is (I believe) the situation in non-human primates where: 1) males attempt to control and protect as many females as possible, for reproductive purposes (mate-guarding); 2) the alpha male has exclusive access to the fertile females; 3) the alpha male protects “his” females and infants.  In humans, we achieve these things through a system of social norms, and that’s the human Patriarchy.

Is that some sort of secret club?

As I see it, it’s a society-wide sexual repression and control, especially of females.  The aim is to make females compliant to males.  In egalitarian societies, relation between the sexes is more or less equal, but as soon as there are power structures, males take advantage of them to repress females.

[Simon Paynton]

Unseen wrote:

But men use it in a way women don’t need to.

A female friend said to me that picking up a man at an evening class would be as easy as falling off a log.

It seems that in the natural world, broadly speaking, the males do the impressing and the females do the choosing.  This makes a lot of evolutionary sense, since it’s expensive to carry and bring up a baby.

[Unseen]

A couple applicable and possibly relevant vids:

The reason the vast majority of creative geniuses are men has little to do with male oppression of women. Rather, it’s due to male insecurity:

There’s no denying that Paglia is one of the leading classical and socio-cultural scholars/critics of the age. And because she’s a tenured professor and successful author, being denied speaking gigs is the only handle those who’d like to silence her have over her. Ultimately, she does get the occasional small gig like these, but there are many vids of her out there.

[Unseen]

Germaine Greer was de-platformed over her views on transgenderism:

[Author]

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