when you’re in need for more arguments for feminism, take this

  • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
    143·
    2 days ago

    I assume this is supposed to be a jokey thing, but I’m gonna say, I’ve never quite understood this approach to feminist / anti-patriarchal thought and there are times people are more serious about it (though this is one of the only times I can recall seeing it come up on here - mainly I remember it as a Twitter thing).

    Like there is a lot of damage done by men under patriarchy and patriarchy needs to be dismantled, but patriarchy isn’t quite like white supremacy, for example, where the idea of whiteness is made up purely to do a racial hierarchy. There’d still be some concept of gender even without patriarchy. So it’s more like conceptions of gender become very distorted and narrowed under patriarchy (like erasure of nonbinary people). Taken in this context, the “haha, don’t men suck?” online stuff can look a bit strange to me. Because “men” isn’t the suck inherently; patriarchal men is. And beyond that, the broader system/culture of patriarchy, not just how individual men behave. It’s also a thing that women can be enablers of patriarchy / help reproduce it, such as in how they raise kids, how they encourage or discourage other women to act, etc.

    The complexity of it, and the multi-pronged reproduction of it, is probably one of the reasons it seems so hard to get past. I wonder about how much it really furthers the cause when there’s a pretense of “women venting about men” being the same thing as promoting feminism / anti-patriarchy. That’s the best way I can think to put it at the moment anyway. I mean, there are standup comics who do bits that say men this and women that, and roast both, but it seems to only entrench status quo ideas of gender roles rather than challenge them.

    Men need to see it as possible to be something different than the patriarchal role. Women need to see it as possible to liberate from the role patriarchy thrusts upon them. I’m not gonna be naive and say they can just organize with each other on this; women’s organizations are needed because men as a whole are not going to voluntarily give up on patriarchy. The occasional man who is trying to be better is not enough.

    But I guess my concern boils down to that stuff like this is little different than the standup comic roasting X gender and it’s not really going anywhere beyond that. There are wives who complain about their husbands for decades but still cling to a patriarchal “man in charge” dynamic that is part of the source of their complaints in the first place; I’m not saying it’s their fault, but is a thing like this going to lead them more toward liberation or just give them a brief catharsis like their complaining does?

    • Maeve @lemmygrad.ml
      3·
      21 hours ago

      Cishet woman here, and this post definitely made me uncomfortable, even though I’m volcel for almost four years now, because of the toxic masculinity “ideal” in my area.

      • VoidStar_@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
        21·
        17 hours ago

        I agree lmao. I don’t understand why people need to bring this up everytime like god forbid a woman makes a joke and I say this as a cisman

        • amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml
          3·
          16 hours ago

          bring this up everytime

          Before it was X, I use to hang out on Twitter. It was (to the credit of some of the people there) a significant help for educating me further left. However, I did sometimes see things that in retrospect, I’m not sure I’d align with even now, as an intentional marxist-leninist. The way people sometimes approached dialogue on gender was one of them, but I pretty much never commented on it on Twitter, that I can recall. Partly because it seemed to be a very charged thing with people who had high follower counts ready to weaponize retweets, ratio’ing, and so on, to undermine any attempt at discussion into a heated dunking session. And partly because I was trying to shut my mouth more and learn and not be the “um ackshully” guy.

          By this point, I feel a fair bit more confident in the views that I have. I was still nervous of posting what I did with how upvoted this thread is and it probably coming across as challenging it in some way, but I figured that with how this place is historically and the interest in serious analysis, maybe deeper discussion can be safely and calmly had. It was a genuine challenge putting into words what my concern is, I’m still not sure I explained it very well, and it comes from far more than just this thread (but as I alluded to - my main experience with this kind of thing was on Twitter, not here).

          So you can see it as “bring this up everytime” if you want, but that’s far from the truth of what I’m doing here. I tried really hard to bring up what I wanted to say while making it abundantly clear how important it is to challenge and dismantle patriarchy. And when I said what I did about husbands and wives, it came from a real place of pain of seeing up close how a woman can, despite encouragement from her grown kids to the contrary, cling to an unhealthy relationship dynamic rooted in patriarchal teaching, even when she chronically has clear issues with it.

  • burlemarx@lemmygrad.ml
    126·
    2 days ago

    While I understand this meme was made with the intention of fun, this kind of criticism is based only in identity, and does not address the conditions that produce and reproduce patriarchy. And this kind of identity-only criticism can be used upside down by reactionary forces, which basically reinforces the idea around men that feminism is only about hating men, and not about how patriarchy negatively affects all our lives. And we also have the reverse of anti-men identity politics movement, with anti-women identity politics by incels and red pills, which itself is a reaction against liberal feminism.

    The other problem regarding this type of politics, is that it isn’t actionable. Yes, men are terrible, but can you get rid of them? Is it a desirable thing to have a society with women-only? What are you going to do with the existing men? Are they just going to disappear?

    It was common during the German social democratic world in the late 19th century, which was still male-dominated, the view that woman’s emancipation would advance society. That paved way for many feminist Marxists that joined the movement and worked alongside men to criticize and attack the existing exploitative patriarchal structures. And this has made them to have real impact in society with politics like female suffrage, equality in pay, maternity leave, divorce rights, abortion rights etc. This approach is much more effective than dividing men and women into different camps that antagonize each other.

    • Makan@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      E.g. usage of the word

      “You know, if you think about it, the problems with the prequel trilogy of Star Wars honestly go back to The Phantom Menace 🤓”