He said that people shouldn't be so dismissive about men's issues. He said men and women are more equal now and people act like it's still the 80s. I said if it's 80s to worry about women's issues what is it to worry about men's issues? Are we worried about when the fertility cults were so big in Europe? You are worried about men's issues? That's so 10k BCs of you! Things really progressed when the pharaohs took over! Time to move on!
From now on, whenever I hear anything about men's issues I am going to say, "Stop being so retro! this isn't the 10k BCs!"
Obviously this post was in jest, but...
I agree that they are important, but I dont think that they should be a priority. There is only one me and I am just going to get burnt out if I expend mental energy on every single social issues facing the species.
He was mad because I said "While in acknowledge that men's issues exist in the school system and media, for the most part, I don't care about men's issues."
If you don't care about the issues that affect your comrades, then it's much harder to form working class unity. We need to unite behind a set of common goals.
Yeah idk how you build relationships and explain how capitalism causes their grievances by dismissing the things that affect them as unimportant(even if it is 'true')
What am I supposed to do? Go to the store and buy a can of empathy? I acknowledge there are problems, I'll be supportive of people who take principled actions to improve the conditions of men, but personally, as a man, I just don't see men's issues as a priority. I honestly found being a man overwhemlingly to be a net positive.
I personally just don't care and I'm not going to do some special buddhist loving kindness meditations daily until I do care.
I agree, which is I care more about people that are further from having a basic minimum and I care less about those that are closer to having a basic minimum. It is neither possible to care about everything equally nor does it even make sense. Anyone who claims that they care equally about all issues is a bullshitter as far as I am concerned.
Capitalists and proletariat are both harmed by capitalism, but I am not going to start to bemoan the woes of capitalists. Destabilizing contradictions of capital, such as the pressure of capitalists to drive down wages or outsource labour and therefore destroy the markets for their own goods definitely harms capitalists, but marxists are always going to ultimately frame this as proletarian issues because they are the ones that bare the brunt of the negative impacts of a unstable capitalist economy and as such they are going to be the driving force behind revolution
What you are saying is that patriarchy should also be viewed dialectically, but the revolutionary changes are also in this case going to be driven by those that bear the brunt of problems of patriarchy, women. I just find it rather unlikely that men themselves are going to deconstruct patriarchy since they are the material benefactors of patriarchy. I think it is more constructive to frame it has patriarchy issues than men's issues or perhaps issues of gender normativity, both terms are able to encompass the dialectical nature of the problems.
You seem to be convieniently skipping the smashing the state and forming a dictatorship of the proletariat part. You cant build the new genders from the corpse of the old.
When I say I'm a "man" I mean I have a penis and I use the term for simplicity sake, but I totally reject the idea of maleness whole cloth. There is nothing from the old patriarchal gender relations that I have any interest in.
You mentioned it, but skipped the implications. You skipped right to a classes less society which, presumably, is a genderless society in this case.
The analogue of the dictatorship of the proletariat would be the oppresed classes, homosexuals, trans, women, rising up to utterly crush the patriarchy and they very concept of male in the process.
What's hard to get about the last part? I reject the concept of maleness so why would I concern myself with men's issues. What aspect of "maleness" would we even want to preserve? It's essentially a set of patriarchal gender normative stereotypes.
The exact context was that there was a side by side picture of two fighting game characters, one male and one female. One was a male that was very buff with large muscles and the other was a female that way thin with large breasts. Both were the so called western ideal of beauty, more or less. His point was to show that it's the same for men and women that we had unrealistic beauty standards. I responded that while that is true, there is a deeper layer here whereby the are both difficult to achieve standards, but they also perpetuate patriarchy because despite being a supposed fighting character, the female is represented as weak looking relative to the male. I linked some random pictures of male and female MMA fighters and showed that, while the male fighter seemed pretty accurate to real life, the female didn't seem to represent the norm for a trained fighter.
At this point he said I was being hypocritical and that it's the same for both genders that it's unrealistic standards, I'm favoring women, it's not the 80s etc. At this point that argument that male save female representations in pop culture art conveyed differing and layered meanings, which to me strikes me as a bit of a truism, had gone on for over an hour and I was sick of it and came up with the 10k BCs bit as a means of "trollin'."
