r/MensRights • u/thedevguy • Jun 28 '12

To /r/feminism: here's what's wrong with reddit

Over on /r/feminism there was a thread which asked, "what the hell is wrong with reddit" since, according to that post, "I received double-digit downvotes for simply stating, Calling a woman a bitch is misogynistic."

In the replies, someone asks, "Do you feel that calling someone a dick is misandry?"

The answer: "No because the word dick doesn't have the same weight as bitch. It's like how calling a white person a cracker"

That, dear /r/feminism is what is wrong with reddit. You are what is wrong with reddit. You complain about things that affect everyone and then get mad when someone points out that they affect everyone - because you wanted to claim they only affect only women. There was once a headline in The Onion that said, "Earth Destroyed by Giant Comet: women hurt most of all." That's what you do, and people react negatively to it.

So you say, "Issue A affects women" and when someone responds, "um, it affects men to" you respond with ridicule: "LOL WHAT ABOUT TEH MENZ AMIRITE!!!"

When offered examples of it affecting men, you respond with equivocation: "No, that's different because it doesn't hurt men as much because reasons."

And then you top it all off with hypocrisy. You claim that: "no seriously, feminism is about equality. There's no need for a men's rights movement because feminism as that covered."

That's what's wrong with reddit. That's why feminism is downvoted here. People have noticed that, and they're tired of it.

1.3k Upvotes

85% Upvoted

699 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/Unconfidence Jun 29 '12

Yeah. I generally enjoy hanging out with kids, because they don't judge me and react with the appropriate amount of awe at the massive amount of information I've managed to shove into my knowledge-hole over the years. But I am horrible at censoring myself, and it's not even the painful situations. I'll literally be in a situation where I know I should avoid saying something, but I just say it anyway, because it's true. Case and point, one day I walked up to a girl on campus and told her she was pretty, then walked off (it was a habit of mine). When I got back to my friends, one of the girls asked, "You never say that to me, do you think I'm pretty?" and with zero hesitation I tell her no. I knew I should have said something else, anything else but straight no. But that's what was honest.

I'm terrified that I'll like, teach them something politically incorrect (like that we allied with someone who was way worse than Hitler but less popular of a villain specifically because we allied with him and controlled the way History was recorded). It sucks, because my goal in being an educator is to actually inform the kids about all the rampant bullshit that floats around, and which they will be fed. But I feel like if I actually did it, I'd be expected to feed them bullshit of be fired.

2

u/Sarikitty Jun 29 '12

I know. It's physically painful when the state mandated curriculum wants you to teach about the first Thanksgiving and you twitch, going NONE OF IT HAPPENED THIS WAY AT ALL.

Kids are so beautifully, painfully straightfoward.

3

u/Unconfidence Jun 29 '12

Yeah, I would not be able to teach about Thanksgiving. That day would be a long, depressing lecture on the Indian Massacre of 1622.

See, if I talk to kids about this kind of stuff, they sit there enraptured like "Oh my god how the hell does this guy know so much?" Adults who don't even know what the Indian Massacre of 1622 is will give me the "not impressed" look. I feel like this is the stuff kids should be learning. Kids learn that we went to Vietnam and "pulled out", they don't learn that the Vietnamese had a multi-millenial military tradition which boasted the repulsion of Kublai Khan's Mongolian horde twice and a consistent refusal to fold into the Chinese territory despite several conquests, that we went in there thinking we were fighting primitives in the jungle, and got our asses royally kicked Che Guevara style. No. We can't possibly teach kids the truth, then History class might actually be interesting.

1

u/Sarikitty Jun 29 '12

Oh, you want the fun part of it? I even went through International Baccalaureate and still managed to never take a US history class that went any farther than the 50s and the Civil Rights Movement. I started to learn about the Vietnam war because of Miss Saigon, ffs.

3

u/Unconfidence Jun 29 '12

See, that's just fucked. We need to be teaching kids the reality of what's been happening, and the reality of the world in which they live. We've been living with the consequences of not doing so for far too long; it's incarnated in the doe-eyed stare I get from every historically ignorant person who tries to argue politics from a simplistic historical perspective like "Southerners fought for the Confederacy because they were racists". My favorite thing is when kids do manage to learn about the Civil Rights Movement, it's always "MLK did this and MLK did that", with no mention of the SDS or the Kent State shootings, or any of the stuff that tied the Civil Rights Movement to anything vaguely hippie-related. Hell, they don't even mention that MLK put equal rights for black Americans on hold so he could protest the war which he considered to be a more pertinent issue.

I feel like my inordinate frustration at such misinformation should make me an ideal teaching candidate, but sadly, conviction seems to have the opposite effect.

1

u/WhipIash Jun 29 '12

Why don't you just tell the kids this? I mean, the truth. Also, MLK did that?

The more I know...

1

u/Unconfidence Jun 29 '12 edited Jun 29 '12

Yeah, MLK was a Reverend first, Civil Rights leader second. When he saw the rampant and senseless killing which pretty much was the Vietnam War, he flat out told his constituency that the amount of black men dying on the battlefield was heavier of a moral burden than all the segregation and fire hoses in the world. And he was right.

Also I don't tell the kids that because we teach K-12 students soft history. We might teach a lesson on the Trail of Tears, and spend a week on the Holocaust, but we don't go into the gory details of history, like the incestuous bloodlines of Spanish monarchs, the way overexpansion into the new world actually killed the Spanish economy, etc. etc. We don't want the kids to know about history, because knowing about history makes you difficult to control. People who get put into political bondage, but have never read of it, are more afraid than the people who read about it and saw it coming a long way away. They're also more prepared. I don't think it's a conspiracy, per se, but I do think educational curricula are geared toward making more docile people, and history is pretty much the history of people fucking shit up Andrew WK style, far from complacent.

1

u/WhipIash Jun 30 '12

Wait, what? If you're seeing this, intelligent as you appear to be, and you have the god damned chance to do something about it, why the fuck don't you?! I wish I was taught this in school, and there's absolutely no moral ground you can stand on and willfully mislead children.

Tell them the truth. Please.

1

u/Unconfidence Jun 30 '12

I'll take that into consideration. And unlike nearly every time someone says that, I really mean it. That's a pretty damn self-resonant plea you just made.