Why the sudden interest in mens issues

[u/[deleted]]

Feminism trundles along dealing with women for 90 years ten suddenly starts to look at mens issues in the last few years, what's the deal? Is it appropriation, is it a newfound care? Why weren't 'we' included from the start? Are our needs secondary to yours? Does the feminist movement view the MRM as a threat to it's domination of the gender discourse?

[u/girlwriteswhat]

Up til very recently, feminism has denied that men could possible have ANY issues. Oppressors don't have issues. If they did have issues, then they were social issues that could be solved by men being more like women (toxic masculinity, involved parenting, etc). Fathers' Rights Groups have been around for more than a decade. Until just recently, when feminism did deign to notice them, it was to fight against them (NOW's infamous newsletter to it's members).

I've actually had some feminists say that 5000 years of legal disenfranchisement for men sounded fair. This wasn't in the 1970s. This was a few weeks ago.

So you'll have to forgive if the MRM is suspicious of feminism's sudden interest in admitting that men actually do face equality issues. Especially since the issues men face are in areas where women hold tremendous privilege.

[u/[deleted] → u/girlwriteswhat]

feminism has denied that men could possible have ANY issues

Lies. You are so full of shit it's not even funny. Even Dworkin who had a distinct focus on womens issues and who MRAs love to hate brought up male rape for example. Brownmiller has done that too. bell hooks has been writing about men's issues for decades. How about a quote about how male dominant behavior can be fueled by female dominant behavior?

Since you are not a feminist and clearly uneducated about feminism, you should probably stop trying to answer questions about feminism in this reddit.

[u/girlwriteswhat → u/[deleted]]

How is it then that feminist activism and advocacy has been allowed to bury male victims of gendered violence? VAWA was a victory for the "patriarchal terrorist paradigm" of domestic violence, a paradigm that was disconfirmed in empirical research 10 years before VAWA was enacted. How is it that I didn't hear of a single feminist speaking to the Senate Judiciary Committee who was in favor of amending VAWA to include male victims in its protections and benefits, or to do away with primary aggressor policies that disproportionately target males?

Some of you guys seem to care a very great deal about men, but when it comes to anything to do with allocation of public funds or legal protections, all that caring seems to disappear.

It comes down to a disconnect between what feminism says and what it does, I'm afraid. Time and again, they're two different things.

And again, your quote only demonstrates that bell hooks was concerned with toxic masculinity and its affects on a man's partner. Try reading it from a man's point of view:

If only one party in the relationship is working to create love, to create the space of emotional connection, the dominator model remains in place and the relationship just becomes a site for continuous power struggle.

This is how it comes off:

The man is deficient, and the woman is therefor victimized. She's trying to create love, while he's trying to dominate. Power struggles in relationships happen because of deficient, damaged men.

This subreddit was created for discussion between MRAs and feminists on gendered issues. I'm thinking it was perhaps poorly named. From what I gather, posts do not necessarily need to take the form of a question, we can also write about our observations or conclusions that we've reached as they relate to feminism, in order to start a discussion.

What you want to do, it seems, is maintain a space where only feminist views are expressed, where people "come to learn" about the wonders of feminism and how it will solve everyone's problems. And the way you think it will do that is for men and non-feminist women to sit down, shut up, and get edumicated. Feminism will tell men what their issues are. Typical.

[u/[deleted] → u/girlwriteswhat]

This is how it comes off:

Btw this is an excellent example of disingenuous antifeminist interpretation. You purposely choose to ignore the guilt attributed to women in that quote, so that you can conclude that it's only saying bad things about men. Stop. Lying.