crypticracer said:
It's not a double standard. All things being equal, it would be. Women start from a place of disadvantage. Discrimination against oppressors is one of the only real ways to equal things. You say play on an equal playing field but the field is not equal form the get go.
White people are not allowed to says the N-word because they lost that right after hundreds of years of slavery and oppression. Men lost the right to complain about gender discrimination after thousands of years of refusing women their rights. Equality will never happen when those in power use all of their privilege and the oppressed have to play fair. They have to follow rules written by the very people oppressing them. That's bullshit.
If you don't agree, then tell me how we can have equality when the oppressors refuse to give up their privilege.
(Also, while I am gonna apologize for how I have said things. Along with all the stuff thats been going on in politics in the real world, I have been in a fowl mood. But that's my problem, not youse all.)
Then who are these aforementioned oppressors, because it sounds like you're blaming white men as a demographic, as a group, for the issues women and non-whites face. You forget that in those hundreds and thousands of years of history, most people had no power at all. Those who established most of the structures we currently are trying to unravel were a small, usually wealthy, and powerful elite who lived hundreds if not thousands of years ago that had almost complete control over things like education, law, religion, philosophy, trade, and other cornerstones of a society that defined how people thought and worked. Your average individual, be they male or female, white or black, had little to no say on how things turned out or what rights they could enjoy whether they benefited or not. While some groups were obviously propped up at the expense of others, both were fenced in by these structures that they had no choice to not abide by. Just because you're part of a privileged groups doesn't mean you support the systems that benefit you at the expense of other human beings. I didn't make the decisions that make life difficult for people who happen to be female, non-white, or genderqueer anymore than your average heterosexual did when it came to my lack of rights and privileges as a gay person. If anything it's heterosexual support of gay rights that's helped things like DATD come to an end and the fast legalization of gay marriage in this country. More often not, that's how change happens.
You don't get equality by discriminating, that's like saying you get peace by nuking. Equality is gained when the privileged willingly change their laws and structures to include groups that those systems discriminated against. Most whites are not racist, most men are not misogynist, most heterosexuals aren't homophobic, and most cisgender people aren't transphobic. You can certainly argue that people in power tend to be prejudiced at worse or ignorant at best, but you're hard-pressed to find people that actively think things like women should be subservient to men, or that blacks belong in the back of the bus. Such attitudes are unacceptable by pretty much any demographic, be they in power or otherwise. If that wasn't the case, we wouldn't have all these straight, white, heterosexual, cisgender men making all these laws for the past hundred years to fix the wrongs of the past. Association by sharing a common phenotype or chromosomes or pronouns or brain chemistry is not endorsement of oppression, and accusing people of such a thing is only going to make them defensive and less likely to, as Tumblr would say, "check their privilege" that would push them to help others in the first place. Such an attitude only hinders progress.