• How to raise boys to be good men.
    183 replies, posted
[QUOTE=hexpunK;43328195]It's really not if you bother to read and stop believing your delusions are true. What most people argue is that it's harder to discriminate against men, not impossible, as we have a higher standing in society already. For everything we are "discriminated" over, we still have some privilege in other areas.[/QUOTE] No one sane has ever said that there's a systematic oppression of men. But the fact that men are privileged is not something that would stop a person from crossing all male names from applicants list for a job or something. You imply that people confuse individual cases with the systematic oppression yet you do the same exact thing, in the opposite direction but still.
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3m3t_PxiUI[/media] Related
[QUOTE=hexpunK;43328195]It's really not if you bother to read and stop believing your delusions are true. What most people argue is that it's harder to discriminate against men, not impossible, as we have a higher standing in society already. For everything we are "discriminated" over, we still have some privilege in other areas.[/QUOTE] making buy and large observations like that are difficult. consider, for example, that a woman can get away with raping a man scot free, whereas our society is mostly sympathetic towards female victims of rape. the reason for this problem is, of course, still sexism against women, but social problems such as these are not so cut-and-dry as one side simply being more advantaged than the other, even if it has general sense to it on the surface level. now, to suggest that men are equally harmed as women in a (fortunately decreasingly) patriarchal society such as ours is a ridiculous statement, and i can't in good faith make any numeric 'oppression & disadvantages ratio' because i am not a sociologist or a psychologist or an anthropologist. however, i think i can put forth a different assertion that must be recognized if we're to effectively mitigate forms of oppression: in an oppressive society, all parties are harmed, just in different ways and varying amounts. the current social constructs on gender, gender roles, and gender stereotypes do privilege men in the more concrete aspects, but the highest amount of privilege only inherently goes to a minority of men in general. our society has traditionally favored an aggressive, powerful, take-no-shit attitude. the few people who are actually born to be that way, they can end up privileging pretty heartily from the system. then you have everyone else. the men who aren't naturally assertive. the men who aren't physically or emotionally powerful. in school, they got the shit kicked out of them. in the workplace, they're ignored and shortchanged - not as much as women have been, but so. and, in fact, they themselves may find themselves unable to find someone to get into a relationship with. there's also the fact that privilege corrupts by osmosis. men who are naturally assertive and take-no-shit-like (as referred to in the paragraph above) may have no interest in being oppressors, but they are forced to anyway. i'd like to use a more concrete and extreme example for the sake of making a point: slavery. the privileged class (whites) were not born abusive people, but made to be so. they were expected to be. they were indoctrinated into the idea of systematic racism and oppression. if they didn't use the whip, they could (metaphorically) fall under it themselves. it's doubtful that everyone in the privileged class in the South were okay with slavery - but they had to deal with it if they wanted to be accepted by their peers and their families, as with everyone else. who knows, the racism could have been simply a justification for the apparent necessity to use cheap labor. finally, oppression creates the concepts of enemies and allies. it breeds hate between both parties of the other sides. it gives the oppressor an ill-conceived justification to oppress. in the event of social restructuring, it allows the oppressed to become the oppressors themselves. take the french revolution for example. the suffering that was inflicted upon them by the ruling class of the aristocrats was then turned around and used as a reason to execute thousands of individuals simply for being affluent, regardless of their individual characters. another example is in communist countries, where the proletariat were made to cheer on the executions of wealthy landowners. point is, oppression is a machine that churns some groups of people into victims and others into monsters. neither want to be either, but the alternatives end up far worse, in their minds. that's why it took extraordinary people and extraordinary courage to work against it - they had to spit in the face of social machinery and accept the possibility of death. they had to work against the powerful forces that maintain conformity. that is not very easily expected of the majority of people. i feel like many discussions about privilege and oppression don't quite go in-depth enough at one time. the ideas that i put above aren't new, but they're dispersed in separate packets that can be easily forgotten, so the dots don't connect, especially when you have a bunch of people replying to one another at once in descending order of frequency. it does with me, because i'm scatterbrained and dumb. hence, this post. it's important in the sense that finding solutions to problems requires a comprehensive look at every issue involved.
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