
The internet's men who hate feminism: here's what they're like in person - smacktoward
http://www.vox.com/2015/2/5/7942623/mens-rights-movement
======
angersock
It's the closing of the article that is pure gold:

 _"...You feel bad about it the next day."

"You do?"

"Sure."

"Do you apologize?"

"For being critical? No, I mean, they were still wrong."_

And that is, in a nutshell, everything about arguing with people on the
internet.

------
b6
I'm not an MRA. I don't like the Reddit anti-feminism scene. I don't hate
feminism, but I strongly oppose a lot of the ideas it comprises. It's an
incoherent mess, a circular, self-defending hall of mirrors that shames people
for not caring _more_ about ethnicity and _more_ about gender than they do
now, when I think we should be trying to care _less_ about those things.

Why isn't it rape when a woman has sex with a man too drunk to give consent?
Because men can't be the victims of rape. Why not? Because it's not really
rape unless it's done by men to women as a way of maintaining a rigid
hierarchy of domination.

Why isn't it female privilege when women aren't required to sign up for the
draft, or can comfort a stranger's young child, or are one tenth as likely to
be incarcerated, or enjoy any of a thousand other undeserved advantages
conferred by society? Because, by definition, those advantages are all benign
sexism. _Anything_ that appears at first glance to your ignorant eyes to be
female privilege is actually benign sexism, and the fact that you thought it
might be female privilege is just more evidence of how deeply entrenched the
patriarchy is.

Why isn't it racism when someone makes blanket statements about all white
people? Because racism isn't just discrimination on the basis of race, it's
discrimination on the basis of race by members of a relatively privileged
class against members of a relatively less privileged class. And how do we
know what the classes are, and their levels of privilege? Well, feminists will
be glad to tell you. But the criteria for deciding may never be revealed, and
they certainly wouldn't be open for debate.

If feminists make statements about, e.g., "men", and you are a man, and the
statement is clearly not true in your case, and not true of your dad, or your
granddad, or any of your male friends or male coworkers, you would be wrong to
be upset, because they _obviously_ weren't talking about you, or them. If you
told them that their machine gun seemed to be hitting 90% innocent bystanders,
that would be an attempt at derailing.

I'm being a little snarky, and I really don't like that. I want to be positive
and not add to the noise. But in this case I think it's important to try to
express how infuriating it is to come in contact with this stuff. It's toxic
waste. It's a mental virus.

Needless to say, everything I've said here is invalid, because I'm a cis white
male. It's irrelevant how difficult my life has been. I'm still privileged,
and one of the best things I could do would be to shut up [1].

[1] [http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2014/02/4-ways-push-
back-p...](http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2014/02/4-ways-push-back-
privilege/)

