Animyr said:
Lightknight said:
And yet here you are, helping fulfill them.
and all you need to think to qualify as an MRA is that Feminism has overshot its goals in some areas in a way that harms men and actual equality
You didn?t contest my assertion that MRAs are oriented around anti-feminism; you just argued that antifeminism was justified.
No, I explained that the only qualifications to be part of the movement is to believe that some works of feminism have led to discrimination against men. This is in contrast with the image that the term "anti-feminism" evokes. It conveys the idea of a person who does not believe that women deserve equal rights. That is often times not the case in MRM and there are frequently people who would absolutely call themselves both feminists and MRAs because many of us define feminism as the pursuit of equality and any self proclaimed feminist groups seeking to appropriate the movement of feminism to obtain superiority over men rather than equality would be decidedly non-feminist by that definition. However, feminism is a broad term that includes both the women who diligently/correctly pursue equality where it is lacking and the women who would see men lick their boots of power. To criticize the more nefarious elements should not automatically classify us as anti-feminist as long as we support the original ideals of equality for women too. Yet it does.
In fact, you went further than I did! I merely asserted that in practice many MRAs end up being anti-feminist; you say they all are in principle, to the point that anti-feminism is their one unifying factor. It seems I was too cautious in my assessment.
I'm unsure why you're debating this point if you don't know the history of MRAs. Originally it was the Men's Liberation Movement which dissolved into two groups: The profeminism men's movement and the Men's Right Movement. The former specifically defines itself around feminist philosophies. The latter is a group which is not pro-feminism. Now, individual members of MRM may be very much in favor of the feminist ideal of equality, but the intent of the organization is to focus on men's rights rather than to focus on women's philosophies which is what a special interest group should be focused on.
You assume the distinction between anti-feminist and anti-woman is obvious. It?s not. One easily and often blends into or follows behind the other. For instance, criticisms of feminism?s possible excesses are often used to castigate not the excesses, but feminism as a whole.
Sounds like an issue of stereotyping if you decide to demonize a movement over having difficulty distinguishing between the two. You might as avoid all black people just because they get charged with a disproportionate number of violent crimes and is ergo difficult to tell a "regular black person" from a "criminal black person". Granted, ideological bigotry is certainly a far cry racial bigotry so please don't think that me using this analogy is equivocating the gravitas of your current line of stereotyping with that line of stereotyping. I'm just trying to show the similarities of rhetoric.
Then, of course, there is the question of whether or not feminism has, in fact, overshot.
It's philosophical and is a question. It isn't bigotry to question it. Whether or not it is fact is entirely irrelevant.
Finally, many of the people you (and I) would castigate as ?anti-equality? will probably contest that label and argue that they merely think that feminism has gone too far, like you. They just have different conceptions of what ?equal? and ?fair? are.
It's possible, but that has to be evaluated on a case by case basis rather than to construct and perpetuate a stereotype. For example, if women make the same amount of money for a job they perform as a man when experience and education are the same, then I would call the scenario equal. If a person of the same same experience and education gets paid more or is more likely to be hired just because of what genitals they hold then I would see this as unequal. There are more caveats to consider though. Like just because there are 50/50 male/female ratios in the world doesn't mean that the jobs should be hiring 50/50. It just means that the distribution of males and females should match the distribution of applications. So if 80% of applicants with the same qualifications are male then 80% of hired employees should be male and 20% should be female or vice versa.
So does there appear to be a clear gender bias in teaching and social work? Yeah, there does. But I don't know what the rate of application is by gender in those fields.
For example, why should women be hired at a 2:1 ratio in STEM related areas just because they're women? Why should single women under the age of 30 make more money than single men under the age of 30?
Citations? I don?t mean to condemn you for not including them, but I'm not sure what you're talking about.
Sure, though please understand that these are specific examples one might list and then be qualified as "anti-feminist" in the current definition of MRA
STEM faculty hiring's prefer female candidates 2:1 when credentials are the same: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/17/5360.abstract (keep in mind that in real life, the number of female applicants are incredibly low so this sort of preferential treatment isn't even close to be noticed unless you adjust for that. You also have people who have been in the STEM field since before we became mindful of women's absence in it and began to change our ways).
Single women up until the age of 30 make 8% more than their male peers in 147 of 150 major US cities: http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2015274,00.html
http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/02/24/childless-women-in-their-twenties-out-earn-men-so/
Note that in cities like Atlanta and Memphis that number is over 20% more than men in the same demographic. It's quite fascinating to see.
More and more studies are beginning to find that the gender gap isn't consistent across demographics and also isn't necessarily being caused by discrimination so much as so many other factors. Women do seem to pursue lower paying jobs that have a greater social benefit and do tend to prefer taking time off to care for kids of their own free will. People erroneously think men and women are the same and will always want and do the same things in aggregate. But we aren't. We are a sexually dimorphic species with differing average tendencies. We have a hell of a lot more in common than different, but I don't think it's healthy for us to ignore our differences and then try to leverage them in a manner that disproportionately benefits one gender over another.
Again, what I want is equality. I don't want women to have a higher vote if they show up in smaller numbers to an election (actually, women are the majority of voters by a significant margin), but I DO want to make sure that every single person who shows up counts for one vote. The latter is equality, the former is not. A woman should not be twice as likely than me to be hired for a position when we're equally qualified. But she sure as hell should have the same chance.
So you see how you can easily be a feminist in pursuit of equal equality for women while potentially disagreeing with certain movements founded within feminism?
What's more is any time anyone says anything which a feminist disagrees with, then it is automatically placed in the misogyny category even though it may just be a difference of opinion, difference of philosophy, or even just plain ol' ignorance on a topic.
But more recently we've instead begun to hear more and more of the fringe elements?counter to the original principles of pursuing equality.
the agenda of established groups are currently using their prior success to press ahead beyond equality into superiority.
For someone who doesn?t stereotyping and strawmen, you start appealing to both awfully quick.
Citing that we've begun to see more vocal fringe groups pursuing anti-equality goals isn't stereotyping or strawmanning. Stereotyping and strawmanning would be if I said that feminism is becoming more and more anti-equality because of these groups existence like you did with the MRA.
