eg “not all men” weirdos
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Edit: to further clarify the example above since it set off some brainworms, this can be seen when people respond to discussions about patriarchy and the way it shapes toxic masculinity with defensive “not all men” statements.
When we discuss systems, we are aware that not everyone who has privilege within them internalizes it the same way.
Men are not somehow evil. Masculinity is not somehow evil. Feminism is about liberation of everyone from patriarchy. The issue is that you can wind up needing to “protect” or cater to very fragile expectations of individuals and that can sometimes wind up recentering discussion on purely men and their feelings about patriarchy.
That is an important aspect of the discussion, but it cannot be the only one. Given that one of the patriarchal behaviors that many men are taught is to talk over anyone who is not a man, space must be intentionally created for others.
Anyway, this would be better covered in a dedicated effort post on feminism and positive masculinity.
This is however a meme featuring Josie and the pussy cats with a comments section that proves the meme is accurate lol
I don’t understand how this relates to the meme I posted?
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it’s a similar thing to how people saying “all lives matter” are weird and missing the point lol
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Interesting, I’ve only seen it brought up in response to folks talking about toxic masculinity. Wasn’t aware it was also attached to awful 2nd wave feminism shit
“Not all men” is sort of a meme or a cliche. This comic explains it better than I could http://listen-tome.com/save-me/
Explaining a meme with a meme
It’s my learning style
'Not all men,' as a phrase usually refers to the act of objecting to a casually unqualified statement about men.
Although systems of oppression degrade all participants, there's often a hierarchy. People of all genders are subordinated to capital, but within that system all other genders are subordinated to cis men. So when people criticize 'men' as an identity they generally mean cis men in the context of their societal role as mid-level oppressors. Men aren't forced to participate in the oppression, and many do their best not to with wildly-varying degrees of success.
'All men are predators,' for instance is reactionary. 'Men are predators,' is not reactionary by virtue of referring not to 'all men,' but to 'men' as a social construct at the peak of its own hierarchy of predation.
In short, it isn't 'all men,' so much as 'it's not necessary to qualify which men.'
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It's similar to 'Black lives matter.'
Virtually no one's saying that to mean 'only Black lives matter,' but people respond to it as though that's the implication. It could be qualified each time we say it as, 'Black lives matter the same as all lives do, but Black lives in particular are being treated as though they don't matter in accordance with our longstanding policy of white supremacism,' but that that isn't necessary. In fact, the reaction that 'Black lives matter' evokes from sensitive crackers helps to illustrate the fact that they're more concerned with their own image than they are with drawing attention to systemic oppression.
Men are predators. We're taught and encouraged at every turn to be predators, and way way too many of us are. Sure, I'm not. My friends aren't. I'd bet your friends aren't.
But then, most men I know (US deep south) are vocally fine with 'non-violent' kinds of rape. When I hear people talk about a huge, systemic problem with our concept of manhood including predation, I'm not concerned with whether or not they make sure to explicitly leave room for me in their complaint. I have all the room I need in society for my identity as a white cisman. I don't need even more of it from discussions around toxic masculinity, but those discussions need succinct messaging for reach.
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I also said that people respond to 'Black lives matter' as though it meant that only Black lives matter. Did I accuse all people of doing that, or did I say that people do it? You know, particularly the people who do it?
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I'm not trying to reiterate that point here, though. I'm noting that "people respond to 'Black lives matter' poorly" doesn't refer to all people any more than "men are predators" refers to all men.
'Men are predators' and 'not all men are predators' are compatible statements. The reason why I think it's about the right level of specificity - which is to say it's ambiguous - is that specifying one facet of toxic masculinity reduces the discussion to only that facet. We're taught to be predators, allowed to be, encouraged to be, incentivized to be, enabled to be... It's a much broader problem than can be laid out succinctly in any specific terms.
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Gender is fake. "Men" as a cultural institution is a toxic concept that needs to either die or be reformed to the extent it's unrecognizeable. There is an ACAB kind of function happening here: not all men do bad things, but if you hold being a man in higher regard than being human, whether explicitly through beliefs or implicitly through the kinds of behaviors you defend, you are effectively a gender cop.
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Oh no, a lady on the internet was mean to me. I'm so oppressed. In one paragraph she upturned 500 years of white supremacy and chattel slavery, 10000 years of patriarchal violence, and completely obliterated the rape culture that results in 1 in 3 women experiencing sexual violence. How will I ever recover?????
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Okay, so in that case, why do you identify with an oppressive class of people? What do you get out it other than contradictions? This isn't me saying "be trans", btw, it's me saying "question what being a Man is." Should men be in childcare? Yes. Should masc rape victims be recognized and empathized with? Yes. Should men be allowed to break away from toxic masculinity and feel true freedom to be whatever they want? Also yes. But Men as a class of people needs to be dismantled completely for that to happen to a degree that establishes true equality. Tbh, I'm getting on board with abolishing gender in general.
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It sounds like you’re dealing with a lot of internalized dysphoria and unprocessed trauma. I’m sorry you’ve experienced those things.
I hope you’re able to work through those as it’s currently being expressed in a pretty reactive way. Masculinity and men are wonderful when decoupled from toxicity.
Patriarchy harms all of us and an important step to dismantling it is acknowledging how it harms, which is why it’s necessary to talk about things like predatory behaviors.
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I’m confused what the disagreement here is then?
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hmm? We must be talking past each other because that’s not what I described as reactive at all.
I’ll need to look back at who added the “men are predators” as an example, because that’s honestly a poor example as its liable to raise hackles.
I'm sorry that your personal situation sucks, and I hope you can figure it out. But everything else you said is just complacency.
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"I don't want to interrogate masculinity because it's hard and everyone else is doing it, so actually you're bad for wanting to change the status quo." Like, cool for you that you get to choose to ignore this sort of stuff rather than wonder if the place you live is going to turn fash and make your existence illegal.
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You are, though. You're taking the enlightened centrist stance. And while there's nothing wrong with being cis or masc in itself, the fact that you don't question your own gender even if as a thought experiment says a lot. One really interesting take I saw from a cis guy is: "You know, I realized that I've never had to question my gender and who I was in society, and that in itself feels like a kind of privilege I have over other people."
Gender, as it exists, enforces the patriarchy, and not even thinking about the fundamental questions of who you are and how your identity is propagandized, but rather going "I identify with this group to the extent I think these detractors are talking about me and need to defend myself" is supporting that gender ideology.
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Now that my main point is snarked out at you, yeah of course. Gender essentialism is deeply destructive and completely untethered from reality.
I'm not saying 'all or almost all,' I'm saying 'way, way too many for reasons that are deeply rooted in our concepts of what constitutes a man.' I'm sorry you've got guilt tied up in that - it's probably undeserved in the first place. But unless you mean gender essentialists like TERFs making sweeping statements about 'male nature' or other kook shit, I haven't even once encountered anyone talking about men who, upon my asking, didn't explain some variation on 'we're talking about the concept of manhood that men are taught to emulate, as well as the social structures propping that concept up.'
And I did ask a few different people. It pained me as a kid to see those statements, because I knew I wasn't like that, but the only people who ever clarified that they really did mean categorically all men were gender essentialists. So eventually, I just adjusted my understanding of 'men' as an unqualified group in accordance with how sane, non-gender-essentialist people were using it.
To me it mirrors the reactionary narrative of 'Black rights activists want you to feel guilty for being white.' The activists don't say that - their opponents do. The activists can and will explain systemic oppression until the sun burns out, but it will always be misrepresented in public discourse as 'white bad' because reactionaries eat it up, refuting it is longer and more boring to observe, and unfamiliar white audiences will enter the conversation in a defensive posture.
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What? No you can't. That's been the whole point here - that 'not all men' is a reaction to 'men' more often than to 'all men'. You don't get to define other people's ideas for them by adding an incorrectly-inferred 'all' even if you do feel reflexively defensive about it.
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Oh, lol no worries then.
In that case, my reply would be that this kind of messaging has limited use depending on context. This thread is the only occasion I've ever had to say the phrase 'men are predators' and it isn't a wording I'd usually go for. The times I've seen it brought up, though, have generally been decontextualized comments out of larger discussions surrounding toxic masculinity.
I grew up with an endless stream of, "Here's what the feminists/gays/etc think of you," media, so I very much default to asking the feminists/queer folks/etc to elaborate when they say something that doesn't sit right with me. Though, back when I was concerned enough about the phrase to ask people what they meant by it, TERFs hadn't really congealed into the grotesque mass we know and loathe today. At that time, the argument I usually saw was between 'our traditional gender roles are toxic' and 'our traditional gender roles are not toxic.'
Now there's usually some terf looking to assert that trans women are predators in disguise. I can't imagine that discussions of toxic masculinity go quite the same way they did back when I was reading more of them.
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I'd pretty much agree with all of that, particularly if you count small communities as semi-private. My experience with it had generally been outrage-mill (often Fox News specifically) pieces where some so-called reporter had trawled small, publicly-accessible communities to grab screencaps out of larger discussions.
Meanwhile, the only left-ish organization I've had access to is a branch of the DSA that, shortly after I joined, purged all members who had been critical of the Steering Committee's anti-voting decisions. Being one of those people, this nipped my interaction with them in the bud. I don't meet many people left of John McCain, so I assume you're right about identity shitfights in progressive groups
You've got a real problem with English if you think that an unspecified quantity means 'all'
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You’re on a leftist website discussing systemic patriarchy… these aren’t uncommon ways to talk about systems of oppression.
“Man” as we understand it when discussing patriarchy systemically is referring to that gender role in relation to the patriarchy.
Similar to discussing whiteness or class. We can understand that discussing the currents of those concepts is not necessarily a value judgement on the individuals within it.
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Eh, I’m not going to defend the phrasing “men are predators”. I don’t particularly like that phrasing but can understand what was intended in context.
Regarding class, sure. The scenario I was thinking of was one where a person is born into wealth and decided to be the good kind of class traitor
Appreciate the systemic aspect you outlined here, although the example of men as predators is a pretty intense one. I also want to emphasize that I most often hear the “not all men” line in response to conversations about patriarchy and how it conditions men to behave and act.