Sometimes I need to see the twitter feeds of people like this, as a reminder of exactly what women mean when they talk about men being scum.
Sometimes it hurts to be generalized into a category I don’t feel I belong to and it’s tempting to push back, but knowing that people are out there spending what appears to be all of their free time being horrible online and harassing women is a good reminder that women are pretty justified in having a low opinion of men in general.
Now I can go back to pretending twitter doesn’t exist for a while again.
The easiest way to see if it’s OK is to swap out “men” with any other protected characteristic. If, having done that it suddenly becomes problematic, it was always so and they should’ve known better.
I think youre right not to engage them though. For all their talk of equality, anyone who talks like that just wants to be at the top of a new hierarchy. Remove or subjugate the men and most women (who haven’t decolonisated their minds) will just replicate the same power structures, adopting the position of patriarch without a hint of self awareness. The way forward is to help other men see the pain caused to them by the patriarchy, as its only then that we can see the pain we cause through the patriarchy, due to the rituals of disregard and empathy killing we go through as boys.
I’ll finish by saying the same thing I said to my dad, shortly after he lost his job" "yes dad, of course I’ve heard of the phrase ‘sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.’ However, you can’t always do that, especially when you’re meant to be firefighter, you doughnut.
You should reference my other comment in this thread. You’re correct that statements like “all men are trash” are unjustly prejudiced, but you’re making a false equivalence.
My point is that is that both are wrong, not that they are or are not both equally wrong. So, would you mind explaining where the equivalence is please?
I mean, I know its more of a case that some people don’t like that both of those things are wrong to do but I’m gonna need a little more than that and a misunderstanding of an informal fallacy, sorry.
In your comment, whether intended or not. It’s not a long comment. By “whatabouting” the idea of replacing men with any marginalized group, you are making a false equivalence via equivocation. By leaving out the crucial aspect of power imbalance, you minimize its role by implication. See: all lives matter in response to BLM.
You should read my longest comment within this larger thread. Truly read the whole thing, and its child comments, before forming your opinion. I clearly and explicitly state
I am not suggesting that it’s okay to make men feel responsible for the actions of people that share only a gender with them, nothing else.
and that doing so is unjust. Nuance isn’t the same thing as taking an opposing stance. I even go into the fact that women making such blanket statements likely do not hate all men. If you feel the same way after reading my full comment and understanding it, I’m happy to have a discussion about it, but by the context of your comment, I don’t believe you understand my stance, and therefore I don’t want to engage with it further.
Again, you don’t understand what a false equivalence fallacy is. So, you should really stop attempting to use it because doing so is make you look like a fool.
Whatabouting and false equivalences aren’t the same thing. I feel like I’m witnessing the death of irony here.
No, something wrong is still wrong, even if you feel bad about historical injustices. The power imbalance does not change this and also ignores every other intersection a white person could have.
You even drew a false equivalence the BLM which is the only actual false equivalence on this chain.
See the wiki pages of the fallacies you clearly don’t understand.
God forbid a rhetorical argument fall into multiple categories. I never said whataboutism and false equivalences are the same thing. You happened to do both. Equivocation has nothing to do with setting two things as equal, it’s the use of ambiguous language to avoid the bigger picture of an issue or to avoid committing to a stance. It is another form of logical fallacy. Via equivocation (omission and vague language) you omitted key facts (social power imbalance) that makes bringing up a connected, but not equivalent, issue (replacing men are trash with any other group, which is a form of whataboutism) a false equivalence.
You can say I don’t know what I’m talking about. That doesn’t make it true. Your equivocation of your whataboutism argument led to forming a false equivalence.
All lives matter in response to BLM is both whataboutism and a false equivalence. Just because someone didn’t say “what about” or "these things are equal doesn’t make those facts untrue. There is an implied “what about all those other lives, don’t they matter?” which in itself implies that the societal inequalities BLM rose in response to are equal to the pressures felt but the rest of “all lives.”
It’s always amusing to me to watch someone like the person you’re responding to try to browbeat an argument into submission by referencing pedantic technicalities and yet be so fundamentally wrong about what those technicalities actually mean.
Although on the topic of being pedantic, I kinda miss when whataboutism was called tu quoque. Really made the logical fallacy guys at least sound eloquent.
The easiest way to see if it’s OK is to swap out “men” with any other protected characteristic. If, having done that it suddenly becomes problematic, it was always so and they should’ve known better.
No. You are making an equivalence argument that misses the reality of power dynamics and the context of like centuries of documented social oppression.
No, really that doesn’t make it ok. You’re generalizing half the population. It’s not my fault that other people are and have been trash, it’s not my fault that I was born male, and it sure feels great to be generalized with the assholes when I wish every night to just magically wake up with a cis woman’s body (for various reasons am not transitioning and run around as male presenting).
No, it’s not an equivalence argument. I didn’t say they were equally wrong or the same thing. Also, nether power dynamics nor oppression make those things right.
You’re telling me that you see no problem with black people saying the same about all white people then?
Yes, I see no problem with black people saying the same about white people; because white people have a manufactured generational power gap supporting them which is designed around keeping black people poor, underrepresented, and under served in their communities.
Much the same way as how men have manufactured a generational power gap supporting them which is designed around keeping women underrepresented.
Just because it sucks for me personally doesn’t mean it’s an invalid sentiment.
If you’re a white male, and I think I can safely assume that you are from your comments in this thread, you are the direct beneficiary of a system that has propped you up over literally everyone else. Understanding that system, and your role in it, is critical to trying to finally tear it down to make room for a fair and equitable one.
I didn’t manufacture the system, but I acknowledge it and all I can do now is continue to undermine it by pointing it out constantly.
It’s absolutely right to criticise the system that provides dividends for white people; for men; for straight, cis, able, neurotypical, tall, pretty people; and so on and so on… But even though I don’t fit into all those boxes, I don’t think that gives me the right to attack people that do.
The only person in this entire topic who could remotely be conceived as being attacked is the original poster of that twitter comment… who, if you look at his actual post history, absolutely deserves to be mocked for it.
Those statements are very much equivalent in this context, the confusion you have is rooted in a false conclusion. You assert one statement is true, and the other is false. The reality is that both statements are false.
If you have a history of dealing with shitty landlords you may draw a conclusion that every landlord must be shitty. That is objectively false—there are many many landlords from all backgrounds and cultures who will behave differently from each other in virtually every way—but it’s an understandable emotional reaction to your personal experiences.
If you have a history of dealing with shitty women you may draw a conclusion that every woman must be shitty. That is objectively false—there are many many women from all backgrounds and cultures who will behave differently from each other in virtually every way—but it’s an understandable emotional reaction to your personal experiences.
Calling all women parasites is indeed sexist bullshit, but calling all landlords parasites isn’t fundamentally better. Generalizing people trends towards nonsense in most cases.
I like my current landlord, he’s my friend and we live together. When I say Landlords are parasites, I’m just saying something that, according to me, is a relatively descriptive statement. From a functional point of view, they could very well be described as functioning like parasites do.
But that’s not all. Generalization may have different semantic meanings. That’s something political movements have elaborated a lot in the last 60 years. If you read about ACAB, you’ll see quite soon that it’s nowhere near a judgment of all individuals.
But the most important argument follows. I’ll gladly say landlords are parasites or ACAB. There are many other variants I’ll never say. One could say it’s arbitrary but it’s far from it, imo. Generalizing on people who are subjects of systematic violence is furthering said violence. Generalizing about powerful interest who are in position to use individualisation and scapegoating of one or their members to ensure the continuation of their power cannot, and it’s not an ideological point, it’s a matter of social science for me, be said to be identical.
I recommend reading Howard Becker’s Whose side are we one, a different, but close and related, demonstration.
So just because shitty men exist, we’re supposed to say “welp generalizing us is fair because technically men like this exist”?
I have found pushing back is useless. People are just waiting for you to be a horrible “fragile man” instead of just realizing that being accurate in who you blame for being shitty matters. So yeah I wouldn’t really conclude that if you see one example of someone being disgusting then you have to allow yourself to be falsely aligned with them.
You can just know the shitty generalizers are bigoted, and hope it’s a phase for them. I certainly have never seen any value in either supporting that generalization or fighting against it.
People on the Internet love thinking they’re better than you and that you’re scum. The only way I know to deal with it is just by accepting it
This definitely misses the power imbalance of punching down vs up. If someone genuinely believes all men are “scum,” yeah, that’s prejudiced. However, there is a big difference between a group that has less power in society pushing up against the class that has more power or oppresses them and the reverse. The idea that “y group is (insert pejorative)” and “x group is (insert pejorative)” are equally bigoted statements assumes that x and y groups are equal in social power. Statements like “men are trash” or equivalent don’t necessarily represent an individual’s true opinion of all men, but a general pushing back against a group with more power, many individuals of which attempt to exercise their perceived privilege over women.
Women that say “all men are trash” or similar might not be thinking with this level of introspection and subtlety, but it’s a subconscious reaction to their position as a group with less power. They rarely hold that on a personal level against every individual man, unless they’ve been deeply hurt. I have experienced things that make it harder for me to trust men. My friends have experienced things that make it harder to trust men. I do not think every man is evil. When you see the damage around you on societal levels, see the people calling for your rights to be taken away, see how they treat you like an object or property because of who you are, and you see it in the lives of many many people like you, it creates a resentment of the group that is responsible.
I am not suggesting that there are no women that take advantage of men. I am not suggesting that men cannot be abused. I am not suggesting that it’s okay to make men feel responsible for the actions of people that share only a gender with them, nothing else. However, I am explaining why women might feel hurt or disempowered enough to push back against men in general, and why “men are trash” and “women are trash” (though far more often, the phrase when targeted at women takes a sexual connotation: whores, etc) are not equivalent statements. Both the women that have been hurt and the men that feel hurt by the byproduct of their resentment are victims of the patriarchy. Until everyone, regardless of gender, holds the same societal power, there will always be people of all groups being hurt by the imbalance.
TLDR: Don’t resent the women who are a product of their environment saying “men are trash,” resent the patriarchy that hurts men and women alike.
Additionally, statements like men are trash can hurt other marginalized groups. I’ve heard “men are trash” be followed or countered with “except trans men.” This is transphobic. I’d like to make it very clear that “men are trash” is an unjustly prejudiced statement, but it is one that is a product of a broken system. See: ACAB.
Ah, the kid brother defence. “But big brother did it, I had the right to!”
Still wrong! Someone else being shitty and prejudiced does not in any way, shape or form excuse your prejudice. I’m sorry you’ve had to face prejudice, but this way you are paying it forward.
I have never said or meant “men are trash.” I don’t know who gave you that idea. I explicitly didn’t excuse the behavior, I stated it was wrong and unjust, yet explained the societal nuance and why it isn’t okay to equate “men are trash” and “women are trash.” I’m paying nothing forward.
I think she “had to” write that much because she knew the thickness of the skull she was trying to penetrate. And your counter-“argument” only proves that point.
P.S. Just because you think something is intuitive to you doesn’t mean it’s correct. It just shows you’re part of the system that needs replacing.
This is reductive. I do not disagree with the fact that generalizing diverse groups is wrong, and I made that fact clear in my comment. You either didn’t read my comment, didn’t understand it, or are maliciously choosing to misrepresent it.
And if you took the time to read my messages, you’d recognize that I agree that saying “all men are trash” is an unjustly prejudiced statement. What you aren’t realizing is the societal pressures and power imbalances which you’ve conveniently ignored in your argument. You’re taking the same rhetorical role as the “all lives matter” people in response to BLM. I’m not arguing with you. I’m explaining to you. It’s your choice to learn or to stick your head in the sand, and it makes no difference to me.
“Extrapolating things I didn’t say” is called inference, and you can claim something is beside your point but it doesn’t change the fact that your omission commits a logical fallacy. I do not defend shitty behavior, I demonstrate nuance, and yet I constantly see this response online to it. A nuanced position that contrasts your own does not necessarily agree with your opponent, and the ad hominem is just immature.
Committing the same logical fallacy as a “all lives matter” person does not mean I believe you to be the moral equivalent of one, regardless of my disagreement.
Pointing out something objectively shitty as shitty is not in debate. Doing so in omission of other key facts is the problem. Let me provide an example conversation, featuring person A and B, who are both going to be parents soon:
A: “I hope I have a girl!”
B: “I’d support whoever my child is!”
A: “I’d support my child even if they were born very sick!”
Both A and B are using a poor form of argument, which I don’t have a better name for than whataboutism, but is very adjacent to it. By saying “I’d support whoever my child is,” B is implying that A would not. By saying “I’d support them if they were sick,” A does the same. This is the same thing you’re doing when you say:
Dodges the point which was simply that something which is objectively shitty is shitty
You use this same rhetoric throughout your arguments, as do other commenters agreeing with you. I agree that thing is shitty because it was shitty. This is more equivocation. The point is not simply that “thing is shitty because of self evidence,” it’s that by saying this you form a false equivalence and minimize women’s experiences.
If you read nothing else, read this: My argument has nothing to do with whether or not pejorative generalizations are wrong, or to do with defending women who make such arguments. I agree with you on both of these points! My entire argument is that your response of “what if you did this to another group” while omitting the power imbalance that is intrinsic to this issue equates both groups, and therefore dismisses the existence of the power imbalance entirely.
You cannot reply to trans people saying “cis people are trash” with “what if you said that about trans people,” to black people saying “white people are trash” with “what if you said that about black people,” or the above example, or any other similar situation, without also including the nuance that a power imbalance does exist. To do so is to minimize their experience in a defensive position of privilege.
I do not want to be at ideological odds with you. I do not think “men are trash” is an okay thing to say. However, I understand that there is nuance here, and that hurt women are not the target of my ire; the unjust system that hurt them is.
I beg you, read this comment in full. You’ve painted me in your mind as a self righteous egotist, which couldn’t be further from the truth. I won’t continue a back and forth, but I do at least want you to understand that I’m just another person with a set of lived experiences, not a feminist demon from hell here to kick little boys. Men and women are both victims of the patriarchy. Have a good day.
All of this is exactly what I take issue with. You seem to make several assumptions, chiefly that I need a lecture about privilege. I don’t. Just because something can be more easily explained or understood doesn’t make it okay. I have been the target of racial and sexist hatred as a white male. The power imbalance explains it but makes it 0% less shitty. I make no excuses for those people who sought to make me feel awful and I think any defense or letting them off the hook is hurting society. This way of thinking teaches us that shitty misguided attempts at retaliation for mega shitty societal issues are okay as long as they can be understood.
I just read your comments multiple times and all I can come away with is that you think I don’t understand power imbalances which is completely wrong. Make whatever assumptions you want, but preaching something I already get… Is proving my point perfectly. The up and votes in this thread prove it further.
People just cannot seem to grasp that I can say “ya know what that’s shitty and shouldn’t be excused” without piles of other implied baggage which isn’t there. I don’t want or need to defend myself, I wanted to remind someone talking about needing to browbeat themselves for things they didn’t do that it’s really of no value to do that and further, that it’s actually harmful to uphold this unspoken belief that two wrongs make a right.
So just because shitty men exist, we’re supposed to say “welp generalizing us is fair because technically men like this exist”?
Yep.
See the sibling reply from @[email protected] here for a great explanation about how power dynamics work on this topic, but also:
So yeah I wouldn’t really conclude that if you see one example of someone being disgusting then you have to allow yourself to be falsely aligned with them.
One example? Really? That’s horse shit and you know it. Misogynistic behavior is a rampant, massive problem everywhere; online and in real life.
You can’t justify racism or sexism in any direction without indirectly justifying it in the other direction.
Blaming an entire group for the acts of a subset of that group removes the disincentive to become a part of the subset and adds a disincentive to support those who want to fight the injustice that gets reduced to another racial or gender conflict.
I think it’s no wonder that many gen z males have decided to reject the mindset that demonizes white men in general, even though that mindset is often quick to add, “there’s some good ones!”
And the whole justification of “they have more power” means dick all to individuals that fall in the group that feel powerless in their life. Plus there’s that little voice wondering if the racism will fade if the power balance does shift or if it will be the same thing but with oppression going in the other direction.
And you sound suspiciously like you don’t want anything to get better and want to see increased racial and gender tensions by rebutting with a series of strawman arguments of the worst ways you could interpret anything I was saying.
I very much want things to get better, I suspect we just have different ideological definitions of “better”.
My version of better is a world where women don’t have to worry about every interaction that they are going to have with men, where they feel safe and secure and no woman ever gets trod upon so often that they feel compelled to lash out. We do this by lifting people up and empathizing with their frustrations, and calling out shitty behavior where we see it.
It sounds like your version of better is where we pretend that everything is ok and carry on like normal, condemning those who make any attempt to empathize as agitators.
Feel free to cite where I have strawman’d you, because I’m only inferring from what you have presented.
We want largely the same outcome, though I don’t believe that the ones doing the shitty behaviour largely care about what others think about what they want to do and require responses more severe than being called out. Like even castration for repeat or more blatant offenders, and if they lash out even more in response to that, execution because they are a lost cause.
I want my daughter to never have to go through the same shit her mother did and so many others.
I also don’t want her growing up in a society where bitter men support laws that make it easier for abusers to control women either and get away with rape on top of it.
The fact that pieces of shit like Andrew Tate have large followings tells me that something about how we’re doing things is wrong. If it wasn’t, then things would be improving. Instead gen Z, which was looking so open minded and promising just a few years ago, is getting bitter and has a divide where a much larger portion of men support(ed) Trump than women.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I don’t think it’s blaming a larger group because it’s difficult to tell which members of that group are the ones causing the problems. Maybe a part of it would be to improve the tools through which proof can be established, like a mechanism for proof of consent or something like that, to reduce the he said/she said aspect that create doubt abusers can use to escape consequences.
Have you tried not to hate yourself? WTF are you even on, there is a high chance that it’s a joke, and even if it isn’t why would “men” be scum here instead of individual?
No, “men” aren’t harmful any more than “women” are, unless you are completely delusional. People don’t assume that random “men” are going to hurt them unless they have serious problems, or living in the active war zone. This over-dramatization doesn’t help anyone and isolates you from absolute majority if you really think that way. You can isolate yourself, just don’t act like it’s normal in any way.
Sorry but if you don’t see how that comparison is beyond not ok somethings wrong here. Which isn’t to say you can’t feel like that bc that’s just the natural result of bad experiences.
Easily half the turkish immigrants I’ve interacted with were people begging or threatening me on the street, that doesn’t mean I assume turkish immigrants are assholes. Because I know it’s both selection bias (most normal ppl just mind their business and don’t randomly talk to you, immigrants are poorer on avg so there are more homeless immigrants). And even if 95% were pieces of shit I’d still at most be more careful, but not somehow try to include all the ones that aren’t a problem in the group that I’m complaining about.
I hate that enough men out there are such amazing assholes that it has created a generational issue which understandably has led to the assumption that as a man I’m probably an asshole too.
I hate that women understandably see me in public and make assumptions about my risk factor to them because victimizing women is way too common place.
Unless you are an asshole, why would you say that you are asshole, if you aren’t sure you can ask.
Statements like ‘I don’t hate myself, but actually I think that I’m an asshole because someone else is’ are somewhat conflicting.
Are you going to try to weasel out of your own words by saing that probably here means that you aren’t actually an asshole and you don’t believe you are?
So you assume that other people think that you are an asshole doesn’t actually mean that you think that you are an asshole? It isn’t cherry-picking when discussion started with you generalizing about “men” being not_good by default. There is little that is understandable about such a position, have you tried not to have negative assumptions about yourself and other people that you don’t know?
I really think you should go read the comment feed from the original twitter post. Don’t pretend to do it, actually go read it. Then read the rest of his posts. Then read the comments from many, many other men on his posts.
Then come back and tell me you genuinely do not understand the complaints being made about men.
If you read all that and still just can’t understand why so many women don’t trust men and generalize about them, well, I don’t think there’s any point in continuing this thread anyways.
You’ve cherry-picked that out of context, they were clearly trying to say “other people assume that all men are probably assholes, therefore they assume that that I’m probably an asshole”
Sometimes I need to see the twitter feeds of people like this, as a reminder of exactly what women mean when they talk about men being scum.
Sometimes it hurts to be generalized into a category I don’t feel I belong to and it’s tempting to push back, but knowing that people are out there spending what appears to be all of their free time being horrible online and harassing women is a good reminder that women are pretty justified in having a low opinion of men in general.
Now I can go back to pretending twitter doesn’t exist for a while again.
The easiest way to see if it’s OK is to swap out “men” with any other protected characteristic. If, having done that it suddenly becomes problematic, it was always so and they should’ve known better.
I think youre right not to engage them though. For all their talk of equality, anyone who talks like that just wants to be at the top of a new hierarchy. Remove or subjugate the men and most women (who haven’t decolonisated their minds) will just replicate the same power structures, adopting the position of patriarch without a hint of self awareness. The way forward is to help other men see the pain caused to them by the patriarchy, as its only then that we can see the pain we cause through the patriarchy, due to the rituals of disregard and empathy killing we go through as boys.
I’ll finish by saying the same thing I said to my dad, shortly after he lost his job" "yes dad, of course I’ve heard of the phrase ‘sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.’ However, you can’t always do that, especially when you’re meant to be firefighter, you doughnut.
You should reference my other comment in this thread. You’re correct that statements like “all men are trash” are unjustly prejudiced, but you’re making a false equivalence.
My point is that is that both are wrong, not that they are or are not both equally wrong. So, would you mind explaining where the equivalence is please?
I mean, I know its more of a case that some people don’t like that both of those things are wrong to do but I’m gonna need a little more than that and a misunderstanding of an informal fallacy, sorry.
In your comment, whether intended or not. It’s not a long comment. By “whatabouting” the idea of replacing men with any marginalized group, you are making a false equivalence via equivocation. By leaving out the crucial aspect of power imbalance, you minimize its role by implication. See: all lives matter in response to BLM.
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You should read my longest comment within this larger thread. Truly read the whole thing, and its child comments, before forming your opinion. I clearly and explicitly state
and that doing so is unjust. Nuance isn’t the same thing as taking an opposing stance. I even go into the fact that women making such blanket statements likely do not hate all men. If you feel the same way after reading my full comment and understanding it, I’m happy to have a discussion about it, but by the context of your comment, I don’t believe you understand my stance, and therefore I don’t want to engage with it further.
Again, you don’t understand what a false equivalence fallacy is. So, you should really stop attempting to use it because doing so is make you look like a fool.
Whatabouting and false equivalences aren’t the same thing. I feel like I’m witnessing the death of irony here.
No, something wrong is still wrong, even if you feel bad about historical injustices. The power imbalance does not change this and also ignores every other intersection a white person could have.
You even drew a false equivalence the BLM which is the only actual false equivalence on this chain.
See the wiki pages of the fallacies you clearly don’t understand.
God damn bougouise feminists.
God forbid a rhetorical argument fall into multiple categories. I never said whataboutism and false equivalences are the same thing. You happened to do both. Equivocation has nothing to do with setting two things as equal, it’s the use of ambiguous language to avoid the bigger picture of an issue or to avoid committing to a stance. It is another form of logical fallacy. Via equivocation (omission and vague language) you omitted key facts (social power imbalance) that makes bringing up a connected, but not equivalent, issue (replacing men are trash with any other group, which is a form of whataboutism) a false equivalence.
You can say I don’t know what I’m talking about. That doesn’t make it true. Your equivocation of your whataboutism argument led to forming a false equivalence.
All lives matter in response to BLM is both whataboutism and a false equivalence. Just because someone didn’t say “what about” or "these things are equal doesn’t make those facts untrue. There is an implied “what about all those other lives, don’t they matter?” which in itself implies that the societal inequalities BLM rose in response to are equal to the pressures felt but the rest of “all lives.”
Lol
It’s always amusing to me to watch someone like the person you’re responding to try to browbeat an argument into submission by referencing pedantic technicalities and yet be so fundamentally wrong about what those technicalities actually mean.
Although on the topic of being pedantic, I kinda miss when whataboutism was called tu quoque. Really made the logical fallacy guys at least sound eloquent.
If one is to engage in pedantry, it can’t hurt to at least be correct. Calling me a “bougouise feminist” was hysterical though.
No. You are making an equivalence argument that misses the reality of power dynamics and the context of like centuries of documented social oppression.
Edit: Fuck I didn’t see erin beat me to it.
No, really that doesn’t make it ok. You’re generalizing half the population. It’s not my fault that other people are and have been trash, it’s not my fault that I was born male, and it sure feels great to be generalized with the assholes when I wish every night to just magically wake up with a cis woman’s body (for various reasons am not transitioning and run around as male presenting).
No, it’s not an equivalence argument. I didn’t say they were equally wrong or the same thing. Also, nether power dynamics nor oppression make those things right.
You’re telling me that you see no problem with black people saying the same about all white people then?
Yes, I see no problem with black people saying the same about white people; because white people have a manufactured generational power gap supporting them which is designed around keeping black people poor, underrepresented, and under served in their communities.
Much the same way as how men have manufactured a generational power gap supporting them which is designed around keeping women underrepresented.
Just because it sucks for me personally doesn’t mean it’s an invalid sentiment.
But I didn’t manufacture that and neither did you. It also, intentionally, ignores every single other intersection a white person could have.
Don’t worry, the sentiment invalidates itself. That kind of backwards bougouise feminism died in the 80s and should’ve stayed that way.
If you’re a white male, and I think I can safely assume that you are from your comments in this thread, you are the direct beneficiary of a system that has propped you up over literally everyone else. Understanding that system, and your role in it, is critical to trying to finally tear it down to make room for a fair and equitable one.
I didn’t manufacture the system, but I acknowledge it and all I can do now is continue to undermine it by pointing it out constantly.
It’s absolutely right to criticise the system that provides dividends for white people; for men; for straight, cis, able, neurotypical, tall, pretty people; and so on and so on… But even though I don’t fit into all those boxes, I don’t think that gives me the right to attack people that do.
The only person in this entire topic who could remotely be conceived as being attacked is the original poster of that twitter comment… who, if you look at his actual post history, absolutely deserves to be mocked for it.
Thank you.
All landlords are parasites. All women are parasites.
One is rather true, in a metaphorical way. The other is a sexist, misogynistic slur.
I’m never quite convinced by this equivalence argument.
Those statements are very much equivalent in this context, the confusion you have is rooted in a false conclusion. You assert one statement is true, and the other is false. The reality is that both statements are false.
If you have a history of dealing with shitty landlords you may draw a conclusion that every landlord must be shitty. That is objectively false—there are many many landlords from all backgrounds and cultures who will behave differently from each other in virtually every way—but it’s an understandable emotional reaction to your personal experiences.
If you have a history of dealing with shitty women you may draw a conclusion that every woman must be shitty. That is objectively false—there are many many women from all backgrounds and cultures who will behave differently from each other in virtually every way—but it’s an understandable emotional reaction to your personal experiences.
Calling all women parasites is indeed sexist bullshit, but calling all landlords parasites isn’t fundamentally better. Generalizing people trends towards nonsense in most cases.
Three objections :
I like my current landlord, he’s my friend and we live together. When I say Landlords are parasites, I’m just saying something that, according to me, is a relatively descriptive statement. From a functional point of view, they could very well be described as functioning like parasites do.
But that’s not all. Generalization may have different semantic meanings. That’s something political movements have elaborated a lot in the last 60 years. If you read about ACAB, you’ll see quite soon that it’s nowhere near a judgment of all individuals.
But the most important argument follows. I’ll gladly say landlords are parasites or ACAB. There are many other variants I’ll never say. One could say it’s arbitrary but it’s far from it, imo. Generalizing on people who are subjects of systematic violence is furthering said violence. Generalizing about powerful interest who are in position to use individualisation and scapegoating of one or their members to ensure the continuation of their power cannot, and it’s not an ideological point, it’s a matter of social science for me, be said to be identical.
I recommend reading Howard Becker’s Whose side are we one, a different, but close and related, demonstration.
So just because shitty men exist, we’re supposed to say “welp generalizing us is fair because technically men like this exist”?
I have found pushing back is useless. People are just waiting for you to be a horrible “fragile man” instead of just realizing that being accurate in who you blame for being shitty matters. So yeah I wouldn’t really conclude that if you see one example of someone being disgusting then you have to allow yourself to be falsely aligned with them.
You can just know the shitty generalizers are bigoted, and hope it’s a phase for them. I certainly have never seen any value in either supporting that generalization or fighting against it.
People on the Internet love thinking they’re better than you and that you’re scum. The only way I know to deal with it is just by accepting it
This definitely misses the power imbalance of punching down vs up. If someone genuinely believes all men are “scum,” yeah, that’s prejudiced. However, there is a big difference between a group that has less power in society pushing up against the class that has more power or oppresses them and the reverse. The idea that “y group is (insert pejorative)” and “x group is (insert pejorative)” are equally bigoted statements assumes that x and y groups are equal in social power. Statements like “men are trash” or equivalent don’t necessarily represent an individual’s true opinion of all men, but a general pushing back against a group with more power, many individuals of which attempt to exercise their perceived privilege over women.
Women that say “all men are trash” or similar might not be thinking with this level of introspection and subtlety, but it’s a subconscious reaction to their position as a group with less power. They rarely hold that on a personal level against every individual man, unless they’ve been deeply hurt. I have experienced things that make it harder for me to trust men. My friends have experienced things that make it harder to trust men. I do not think every man is evil. When you see the damage around you on societal levels, see the people calling for your rights to be taken away, see how they treat you like an object or property because of who you are, and you see it in the lives of many many people like you, it creates a resentment of the group that is responsible.
I am not suggesting that there are no women that take advantage of men. I am not suggesting that men cannot be abused. I am not suggesting that it’s okay to make men feel responsible for the actions of people that share only a gender with them, nothing else. However, I am explaining why women might feel hurt or disempowered enough to push back against men in general, and why “men are trash” and “women are trash” (though far more often, the phrase when targeted at women takes a sexual connotation: whores, etc) are not equivalent statements. Both the women that have been hurt and the men that feel hurt by the byproduct of their resentment are victims of the patriarchy. Until everyone, regardless of gender, holds the same societal power, there will always be people of all groups being hurt by the imbalance.
TLDR: Don’t resent the women who are a product of their environment saying “men are trash,” resent the patriarchy that hurts men and women alike.
Additionally, statements like men are trash can hurt other marginalized groups. I’ve heard “men are trash” be followed or countered with “except trans men.” This is transphobic. I’d like to make it very clear that “men are trash” is an unjustly prejudiced statement, but it is one that is a product of a broken system. See: ACAB.
Thanks for saving me the keystrokes here, I appreciate you (for real, which I’m having to say because text and… you know… how online people are).
<3
Ah, the kid brother defence. “But big brother did it, I had the right to!”
Still wrong! Someone else being shitty and prejudiced does not in any way, shape or form excuse your prejudice. I’m sorry you’ve had to face prejudice, but this way you are paying it forward.
I have never said or meant “men are trash.” I don’t know who gave you that idea. I explicitly didn’t excuse the behavior, I stated it was wrong and unjust, yet explained the societal nuance and why it isn’t okay to equate “men are trash” and “women are trash.” I’m paying nothing forward.
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Show me when I said it was okay. I can show you several times I said the explicit opposite.
Honestly if you have to write paragraphs to defend something that is intuitively ignorant and bigoted to do, you’ve lost the argument by default
I think she “had to” write that much because she knew the thickness of the skull she was trying to penetrate. And your counter-“argument” only proves that point.
P.S. Just because you think something is intuitive to you doesn’t mean it’s correct. It just shows you’re part of the system that needs replacing.
We all know that grouping people together is shitty. I don’t have to make any argument
This is reductive. I do not disagree with the fact that generalizing diverse groups is wrong, and I made that fact clear in my comment. You either didn’t read my comment, didn’t understand it, or are maliciously choosing to misrepresent it.
I didn’t read it. Because it was defending the indefensible.
Again, you can stick your head in the sand. It’s your prerogative. I’m not going to argue with you. You can choose to learn or not, it’s your life.
This
https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/11782965
And if you took the time to read my messages, you’d recognize that I agree that saying “all men are trash” is an unjustly prejudiced statement. What you aren’t realizing is the societal pressures and power imbalances which you’ve conveniently ignored in your argument. You’re taking the same rhetorical role as the “all lives matter” people in response to BLM. I’m not arguing with you. I’m explaining to you. It’s your choice to learn or to stick your head in the sand, and it makes no difference to me.
See I made the mistake of reading this one and it’s emblematic of exactly what I was getting at:
“Extrapolating things I didn’t say” is called inference, and you can claim something is beside your point but it doesn’t change the fact that your omission commits a logical fallacy. I do not defend shitty behavior, I demonstrate nuance, and yet I constantly see this response online to it. A nuanced position that contrasts your own does not necessarily agree with your opponent, and the ad hominem is just immature.
Committing the same logical fallacy as a “all lives matter” person does not mean I believe you to be the moral equivalent of one, regardless of my disagreement.
Pointing out something objectively shitty as shitty is not in debate. Doing so in omission of other key facts is the problem. Let me provide an example conversation, featuring person A and B, who are both going to be parents soon:
A: “I hope I have a girl!”
B: “I’d support whoever my child is!”
A: “I’d support my child even if they were born very sick!”
Both A and B are using a poor form of argument, which I don’t have a better name for than whataboutism, but is very adjacent to it. By saying “I’d support whoever my child is,” B is implying that A would not. By saying “I’d support them if they were sick,” A does the same. This is the same thing you’re doing when you say:
You use this same rhetoric throughout your arguments, as do other commenters agreeing with you. I agree that thing is shitty because it was shitty. This is more equivocation. The point is not simply that “thing is shitty because of self evidence,” it’s that by saying this you form a false equivalence and minimize women’s experiences.
If you read nothing else, read this: My argument has nothing to do with whether or not pejorative generalizations are wrong, or to do with defending women who make such arguments. I agree with you on both of these points! My entire argument is that your response of “what if you did this to another group” while omitting the power imbalance that is intrinsic to this issue equates both groups, and therefore dismisses the existence of the power imbalance entirely.
You cannot reply to trans people saying “cis people are trash” with “what if you said that about trans people,” to black people saying “white people are trash” with “what if you said that about black people,” or the above example, or any other similar situation, without also including the nuance that a power imbalance does exist. To do so is to minimize their experience in a defensive position of privilege.
I do not want to be at ideological odds with you. I do not think “men are trash” is an okay thing to say. However, I understand that there is nuance here, and that hurt women are not the target of my ire; the unjust system that hurt them is.
I beg you, read this comment in full. You’ve painted me in your mind as a self righteous egotist, which couldn’t be further from the truth. I won’t continue a back and forth, but I do at least want you to understand that I’m just another person with a set of lived experiences, not a feminist demon from hell here to kick little boys. Men and women are both victims of the patriarchy. Have a good day.
All of this is exactly what I take issue with. You seem to make several assumptions, chiefly that I need a lecture about privilege. I don’t. Just because something can be more easily explained or understood doesn’t make it okay. I have been the target of racial and sexist hatred as a white male. The power imbalance explains it but makes it 0% less shitty. I make no excuses for those people who sought to make me feel awful and I think any defense or letting them off the hook is hurting society. This way of thinking teaches us that shitty misguided attempts at retaliation for mega shitty societal issues are okay as long as they can be understood.
I just read your comments multiple times and all I can come away with is that you think I don’t understand power imbalances which is completely wrong. Make whatever assumptions you want, but preaching something I already get… Is proving my point perfectly. The up and votes in this thread prove it further.
People just cannot seem to grasp that I can say “ya know what that’s shitty and shouldn’t be excused” without piles of other implied baggage which isn’t there. I don’t want or need to defend myself, I wanted to remind someone talking about needing to browbeat themselves for things they didn’t do that it’s really of no value to do that and further, that it’s actually harmful to uphold this unspoken belief that two wrongs make a right.
Your wrote an equal amount of paragraphs defending your take, albeit smaller ones lol.
Yep.
See the sibling reply from @[email protected] here for a great explanation about how power dynamics work on this topic, but also:
One example? Really? That’s horse shit and you know it. Misogynistic behavior is a rampant, massive problem everywhere; online and in real life.
Your comment proves my point. Hoping in vain that some day I’ll block all of you
I’d much rather you realize that your position here is rooted in emotion rather than reality than just have you block me.
You can’t justify racism or sexism in any direction without indirectly justifying it in the other direction.
Blaming an entire group for the acts of a subset of that group removes the disincentive to become a part of the subset and adds a disincentive to support those who want to fight the injustice that gets reduced to another racial or gender conflict.
I think it’s no wonder that many gen z males have decided to reject the mindset that demonizes white men in general, even though that mindset is often quick to add, “there’s some good ones!”
And the whole justification of “they have more power” means dick all to individuals that fall in the group that feel powerless in their life. Plus there’s that little voice wondering if the racism will fade if the power balance does shift or if it will be the same thing but with oppression going in the other direction.
Your argument sounds suspiciously like someone looking to justify shitty behavior.
“You can’t acknowledge an extremely well documented culture of hate because that’s reverse sexism/racism”
“You can’t say men are bad because some men are good and if you don’t give them special attention for being good they might start being bad.”
“Some men have it hard too so power imbalance doesn’t exist and you can’t use it to explain why some women are mistrustful of men in general”.
“We need to leave the status quo because if we don’t maybe the others will get control and then they’ll treat us like we treat them now”
All of the above are shitty arguments.
And you sound suspiciously like you don’t want anything to get better and want to see increased racial and gender tensions by rebutting with a series of strawman arguments of the worst ways you could interpret anything I was saying.
I very much want things to get better, I suspect we just have different ideological definitions of “better”.
My version of better is a world where women don’t have to worry about every interaction that they are going to have with men, where they feel safe and secure and no woman ever gets trod upon so often that they feel compelled to lash out. We do this by lifting people up and empathizing with their frustrations, and calling out shitty behavior where we see it.
It sounds like your version of better is where we pretend that everything is ok and carry on like normal, condemning those who make any attempt to empathize as agitators.
Feel free to cite where I have strawman’d you, because I’m only inferring from what you have presented.
We want largely the same outcome, though I don’t believe that the ones doing the shitty behaviour largely care about what others think about what they want to do and require responses more severe than being called out. Like even castration for repeat or more blatant offenders, and if they lash out even more in response to that, execution because they are a lost cause.
I want my daughter to never have to go through the same shit her mother did and so many others.
I also don’t want her growing up in a society where bitter men support laws that make it easier for abusers to control women either and get away with rape on top of it.
The fact that pieces of shit like Andrew Tate have large followings tells me that something about how we’re doing things is wrong. If it wasn’t, then things would be improving. Instead gen Z, which was looking so open minded and promising just a few years ago, is getting bitter and has a divide where a much larger portion of men support(ed) Trump than women.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I don’t think it’s blaming a larger group because it’s difficult to tell which members of that group are the ones causing the problems. Maybe a part of it would be to improve the tools through which proof can be established, like a mechanism for proof of consent or something like that, to reduce the he said/she said aspect that create doubt abusers can use to escape consequences.
I personally am offended by your user name.
Ok.
Have you tried not to hate yourself? WTF are you even on, there is a high chance that it’s a joke, and even if it isn’t why would “men” be scum here instead of individual?
He clearly doesn’t hate himself. Stop trying to us vs them.
“Men” are harmful in the same way that you don’t put your hand on an electric stove. You assume it’s going to hurt you until you find out otherwise.
No, “men” aren’t harmful any more than “women” are, unless you are completely delusional. People don’t assume that random “men” are going to hurt them unless they have serious problems, or living in the active war zone. This over-dramatization doesn’t help anyone and isolates you from absolute majority if you really think that way. You can isolate yourself, just don’t act like it’s normal in any way.
Sorry but if you don’t see how that comparison is beyond not ok somethings wrong here. Which isn’t to say you can’t feel like that bc that’s just the natural result of bad experiences.
Easily half the turkish immigrants I’ve interacted with were people begging or threatening me on the street, that doesn’t mean I assume turkish immigrants are assholes. Because I know it’s both selection bias (most normal ppl just mind their business and don’t randomly talk to you, immigrants are poorer on avg so there are more homeless immigrants). And even if 95% were pieces of shit I’d still at most be more careful, but not somehow try to include all the ones that aren’t a problem in the group that I’m complaining about.
You don’t understand pounding down vs punching up.
I don’t hate myself.
I hate that enough men out there are such amazing assholes that it has created a generational issue which understandably has led to the assumption that as a man I’m probably an asshole too.
I hate that women understandably see me in public and make assumptions about my risk factor to them because victimizing women is way too common place.
Me, however, I’m pretty ok with.
Unless you are an asshole, why would you say that you are asshole, if you aren’t sure you can ask. Statements like ‘I don’t hate myself, but actually I think that I’m an asshole because someone else is’ are somewhat conflicting.
You can go ahead and cite your source for me saying I’m an asshole. I’ll wait.
Are you going to try to weasel out of your own words by saing that probably here means that you aren’t actually an asshole and you don’t believe you are?
Cherry picking out parts to remove context is a pretty lame way to “win” an argument bro.
Here’s that segment which doesn’t intentionally remove relevant context:
Which is—fairly clearly—saying that I understand why others might make an assumption about me.
So you assume that other people think that you are an asshole doesn’t actually mean that you think that you are an asshole? It isn’t cherry-picking when discussion started with you generalizing about “men” being not_good by default. There is little that is understandable about such a position, have you tried not to have negative assumptions about yourself and other people that you don’t know?
I really think you should go read the comment feed from the original twitter post. Don’t pretend to do it, actually go read it. Then read the rest of his posts. Then read the comments from many, many other men on his posts.
Then come back and tell me you genuinely do not understand the complaints being made about men.
If you read all that and still just can’t understand why so many women don’t trust men and generalize about them, well, I don’t think there’s any point in continuing this thread anyways.
You’ve cherry-picked that out of context, they were clearly trying to say “other people assume that all men are probably assholes, therefore they assume that that I’m probably an asshole”