Firstly, I would like to say that I really enjoyed this post, and hope to see more like it!
It seems to me that (sane) MRA’s and (sane) feminists should be natural allies. The “generic” version of feminism officially points to gender equality (NOT female supremacy), and feminists have previously allied with the LGBT movement, and racial suffrage (though that alliance went south when one group got suffrage before the other), and taken other social justice fights on as well.
As a sane feminist, I was happy to discover sane MRA type sites such as ozy’s No Seriously, What About teh Menz?, and the over-arching The Good Men Project. These sites opened my eyes to the valid concerns of the MRA movement, such as issues regarding male rape, child custody, and the censure and unavailability of feminine style toys (dolls, dresses, EZ Bake Ovens, etc) for little boys.
These issues fit perfectly into my gender egalitarian style of feminism, and I thought that if it weren’t for the bad blood between the two sides, that feminists should/would have taken up these particular issues the same way they often pick up other social justice issues.
The problem is that, (pulling numbers out of the air) let’s say 1% of each gender is insane Haters of the Opposite Sex. So 1% of women think everything wrong with the world is the fault of men, and 1% of men think that the rise of masculinized women will lead to the “Fempocalypse”. Each of those 1% join their respective movements.
Now, let’s say half of all women identitfy as “feminist”. This means the feminist movement is large enough to contain the crazy 1% of Man Haters while still being over-all sane (although allowing for unfortunate “straw feministi-ng”, where insane MRA’s make arguments of “Feminists say...”)
However, the men’s rights movement is not so large. Say only 1.5% of males are MRAs. This means that 2⁄3 of their movement is the insane 1%, and only 1⁄3 are sane. The MRA movement is not large enough to contain the crazy 1% while still remaining overall sane. So MOST MRA stuff out there is the insane stuff.
This unbalance harms the men’s rights movement, because the valid concerns get tarred by the less valid ones (“masculinized women are bringing about the end of society!”), and lumped together with the crazy.
There needs to be a way to filter out the insane, in order to actually reach every(sane)one’s common goals. I call myself a “Gender Egalitarian Feminist”. Perhaps instead of being “(sane) feminist” or “(sane) MRA”, the sane gender-issues people should all just call themselves “Gender Egalitarians”.
Perhaps instead of being “(sane) feminist” or “(sane) MRA”, the sane gender-issues people should all just call themselves “Gender Egalitarians”.
Unfortunately, this label already seems to be undergoing the same connotation creep that quickly happened to “Race realism” and is about to happen to “Human Biodiversity”. Both of those are—justly or not—suspected to be cover labels that racists adopted when the old “Scientific Racism” became disreputable, so now many people with “mainstream” views on racial differences equatethe three.
From what I’ve read of MRA discussions, some of them are definitely trying to trade the label for “Gender Egalitarianism”, which they position as neutral or hostile to all kinds of feminism—so, as dumb and ridiculous as this might be, the words “gender egalitarian” might acquire a connotation of “feminist-hater”, or simply “misogynist”.
However, the men’s rights movement is not so large. Say only 1.5% of males are MRAs. This means that 2⁄3 of their movement is the insane 1%, and only 1⁄3 are sane. The MRA movement is not large enough to contain the crazy 1% while still remaining overall sane. So MOST MRA stuff out there is the insane stuff.
Even if there’s a much larger proportion of sane, reasonable MRAs to start with, if the proportion of crazy ones is high enough, the reasonable ones are liable to start distancing themselves from the movement to avoid being tarred by association, increasing the proportion of crazy ones identifying with the movement. This is exactly why I personally exercise a great deal of caution in letting anyone know that I sympathize with the movement at all.
What was the proportion of sane feminists in those days when the feminism was new?
I am not asking how many sane women agreed with the proposed women rights, but what kind of women was the first to publicly self-identify with the label, and do something that drew attention to them.
Looking at the Wikipedia article on “Suffragette”, I read about “setting fire to mailbox contents, smashing windows and occasionally detonating bombs”. Imagine what would be the public opinion about MRA movement if the first MRAs did this, if merely expressing their opinions impolitely on internet is enough to label them as insane.
Most sane men do not join MRA movement because, honestly, most men don’t give a shit about other men in general. We often see each other as competitors, and we focus on our jobs and families, and a few friends. A man usually becomes a MRA activist when something bad happens to him personally. Now of course such person is extremely prone to mindkilling; that should not be surprising.
There were feminists who said that all men are rapists, or that in a perfect world 90% of men would disappear from the planet… and they are still considered a legitimate part of the movement which is supposedly not against men, but for fairness, equality, and everything good. And if you see something suspicious about this, and you have a penis, then your opinion is irrelevant, because you have this brain disorder called “privilege” which makes everything you say automatically wrong.
To avoid misunderstanding: I think that many things said by many MRAs are stupid, and I disagree with them. I just disagree that it makes MRA movement worse than a feminist movement, because the feminist movement also contains different opinions and crazy people. New movement is more attractive for extreme people, later it becomes more known and accepted by moderate people, and I think this is enough to explain the higher ratio of crazy people in the MRA movement today.
and they are still considered a legitimate part of the movement which is supposedly not against men, but for fairness, equality, and everything good.
Well, these days, more feminists are inclined to do whatever they can to marginalize them, claim that they’re not “real” feminists, or that they flat out do not exist. Yvain discussed this in a very interesting livejournal post
What struck me most about that very interesting post was how “legalistic” the MRA controversial claims were. I’m a lawyer, that’s not a slur. It’s an interesting contrast between the feminist controversial claims, which are mostly about social dynamics, and the MRA controversial claims, which I could write a model statute to fix in practically no time at all.
And since writing statutes to fix social dynamics is a crude tool at best, and often counter-productive, reasonable MRA activists and reasonable feminists have a great deal of trouble avoiding talk-past-each-other-itis.
That’s a good point, but it’s worth noting that the “obviously reasonable” MRA claims are mostly social issues that are not effectively addressed in our society. A lot of the “obviously reasonable” ground for feminism has already been won, and many of the more uncontroversially reasonable matters that could be addressed by statute already have been. Earlier generations of feminism have eaten up a lot of the low hanging fruit, whereas MRA hasn’t really accomplished much.
Nonetheless, that’s very different from asserting that the issues haven’t been addressed. Things once were closer to what the MRA now advocates, society considered the issue, and the position now adopted by MRA activists lost. My sense of the history is that most of the more legalistic desires of MRA listed in Yvain’s post are also attempts to reverse previous defeats.
I don’t see that this addresses my comment. The “currently controversial” claims are controversial because there are plenty of people who’re convinced that they’re going too far in the wrong direction, so it’s no surprise if some of them are lost ground to people who think, for instance, that the relative levels of protection should be more favorable to women.
The “controversial” issues have seen more social and legal address than the “uncontroversial” ones, because feminists are a much more effective lobby group, and have mostly moved past the “obviously reasonable” issues on their own end and are moving the borders of the “currently controversial,” while MRA has more or less failed to effectively agitate for even their “uncontroversial” positions, let alone the “controversial” ones, so the activists addressing the “controversial” issues are almost all coming from the feminist side.
In my original comment, I wasn’t trying to divide controversial from non-controversial. I was dividing MRA from feminist.
In brief, my perception was feminist = social dynamic, MRA = legalistic. That’s an over-generalization, but I thought it was interesting—and a partial explanation of the difficulties you noted with alliances between the reasonable on each side.
Analytically, this helps one explain the interactions between MRA and feminists without assuming oppression is a necessary part of the human condition, it’s all status games, or that either side is innately evil.
My response to that point was that feminism seems less legalistic now because the low hanging fruit which could readily be addressed by legislation largely already has been, so social dynamics and things that are not easy to address with legislation (at least in the current political climate) are what’s left.
“Equal pay for equal work” is sort of a holdout, in that an employee can legally sue their employer for discriminatory practices for not providing equal pay for equal work, but on the other hand, companies aren’t required to divulge their pay standards, either to all their employees or to any oversight body charged with ensuring equal salaries. So while it’s generally regarded as “uncontroversial,” its legal protection is very incomplete in large part because the measures necessary to guarantee it are opposed to business interests which are themselves a powerful lobbying force.
It’s not that feminism is inherently less legalistic than MRA (at least, I don’t think we have the evidence to conclude that,) but that the difference in focus is largely due to the gap in the amounts of ground the movements have already covered.
I think that “feminism” is a very counter-intuitive label for that memeplex (imagine anti-racism was called “blackism”), and that that might have contributed to people misunderstanding what (‘sane’) feminists are about. (In Italian it’s even worse -- sexism is usually called maschilismo, so people assume femminismo is reverse sexism, and even use it as a slur against people they perceive to be misandrist, and MRAs call themselves anti-femministi.)
As a sane feminist, I was happy to discover sane MRA type sites such as ozy’s No Seriously, What About teh Menz?, and the over-arching The Good Men Project.
Me too. I’m pleasantly surprised to find out that there are people who can discuss certain issues with extremely low levels of mind-killing, which made me change my mind about what I wrote earlier. (Well, this too.)
I wish I could upvote this more than once; it aligns neatly with several things I’ve been wanting to say for months but haven’t found a chance to. There’s just a couple things I’d like to add.
First, I suspect the relatively small size of the MRA sphere distorts outsiders’ perception of it in ways other than making hateful personalities proportionally more common. Specifically, it’s too small and too new for well-developed sub-movements to be self-sustaining: there are identifiable tendencies (compare the average comment on Spearhead to the average on Owning Your Shit [ETA: or not; see below]), but there’s far more cross-posting between them than on comparable feminist sites, and I’d attribute this directly to feminism’s far greater age, size, and level of development as an ideology. Since not a few prolific cross-posters fall into the “hater” category, and since offensive comments are always going to be disproportionately salient to readers, this ends up tarring the whole community.
But that’s just a perception thing, more or less. Even if a viable egalitarian-looking men’s advocacy programme manages to magic itself into existence, I think problems might be still caused by the likelihood that both these movements conceptualize themselves as the true standard-bearers of equality, and blame any remaining inequalities the other side’s concerned about on failures to incorporate their own theoretical frameworks. Probably the most common feminist objection I’ve seen to more moderate (i.e. non-traditionalist, positive-sum) MRA ideas is precisely this: feminism objects to the same problems (discrimination against men as caregivers, narrower culturally acceptable affect and presentation, etc.) and they’d allegedly vanish in a fully feminist society, so why not just call yourself feminist and work with established approaches to privilege, misogyny, etc.? And this isn’t one-sided, either; I’ve seen almost identical sentiments from moderate MRA sources, with appropriate nouns and theory swapped.
The answer, as best I can figure, is that each theoretical framework is built up to explain a particular set of salient experiences, and since few data points outside those experiences make it into the working set we end up with a tendency to overfit. This is of course exactly the problem that third-wave feminism already confronted regarding intersections with queer theory, race, etc., but intersectional integration seems harder in this case—perhaps because MRA, even the moderate kind, doesn’t draw upon the same intellectual traditions.
I just looked at a few comments on the two sites you linked (never having visited either before) and I couldn’t tell the difference. I’m not sure what you intended to say by comparing them.
I’ll admit I didn’t review any recent comments on Spearhead before posting. I visited the site months ago and was so annoyed by the commentariat that I haven’t read much there since.
It’s possible that I caught a bad patch or that they’ve gotten more moderate since, in which case I’ve misrepresented them and I apologize. But I have seen similar sentiments expressed towards them elsewhere in the interim.
The comments were unpleasant to awful there, but they were mediocre to awful on the other site too. There were a few more “This is a great post.” style comments on Owning Your Shit but that was the main difference that I saw from clicking through a couple articles.
Fair enough. The comments are indeed awful on both sites, but that’s true in broad strokes for most political blogs. I was mainly trying to point up accusatory and gender-essentialist strains I remembered from Spearhead that seemed much attenuated in OYS, but in light of this the difference evidently either isn’t there or isn’t glaring enough to be clear to first-time readers from context-free links.
Since I don’t particularly feel like doing the muckraking myself and I can’t expect people to do it for me, I retract that comparison. Pity we can’t strikethrough portions of a post.
Since when are “No Seriously, What About teh Menz?”, and “The Good Men Project” MRA sites?
I believe those are the sites where I learned about men’s rights issues such as male rape, child custody, etc, so I put them under the MRA umbrella, though they may not identify themselves that way (probably due to not wanting to be tarred with the same brush as the insanity)
If you DON’T think that those sites are MRA, then I would update towards ALL MRA to be of the insane kind, since those sites are the only ones I’ve seen on that side that I consider to be sane. (Though I welcome links to the contrary)
The MRA label very quickly became stabilized as an antifeminist identifier, such that I’d guess “male ally” and “MRA” are almost perfectly exclusive self-descriptors. But the intension of MRA as a typical self-descriptor and as you’ve been using it may not perfectly cohere either, so this may not be a “real” update that you’re forced into.
Thank you, apparently I’ve been using the wrong words.
I had been reading “men’s rights” as “you care about the rights of men, and male-specific gender issues”, NOT as “you don’t like feminism.” I would like to edit my post with a better term that is actually accurate for what I am trying to get at (the first definition I listed above). Do you know what a better term is? “Male ally” doesn’t seem right, since most of them ARE males.
And also, in that case, it’s actually useful that the insane “People Who Care About Men’s Rights” are considerate enough to separate themselves out from the sane “PWCAMR”, which leaves the sane ones free to develop their own movement! lol
I had been reading “men’s rights” as “you care about the rights of men, and male-specific gender issues”, NOT as “you don’t like feminism.”
It’s probably worth remembering that names are not catalog numbers that facilitate filing into categories. Attempting to reverse-engineer a compound noun phrase by looking only at its parts will often swing you wide of the actual target.
It’s probably worth remembering that names are not catalog numbers that facilitate filing into categories. Attempting to reverse-engineer a compound noun phrase by looking only at its parts will often swing you wide of the actual target.
Agreed. Most science fiction has little or no science.
That’d be an example of making the error I’m trying to point out here. “Science fiction” is not “fiction about science”; the term has a long and varied history and in point of fact, no single, well-defined rigorous use has predominated. Indeed, there are so many currents, subgenres and subsubgenres contained within the umbrella term that it’s simply not very specific. Here are a bunch of big names in the field offering different ideas about what constitutes science fiction; when you read it, keep in mind it’s a small slice of the pie.
I’m not sure whether you’re agreeing with me or not. I was bringing up the lack of science in science fiction as an example of the sort of thing you were talking about.
I read a lot of discussion of “what is science fiction?” on usenet. [1] There were two results for me: a theory that people base their prototypes on strong emotional experiences, but don’t recognize that it’s their internal process, so they think their idea of “real science fiction” is an objective fact. They get very upset when someone else makes a strong claim that real science fiction is something else.
Actually, I do the same thing. I know someone who believes that science fiction is optimistic. How can he say that Kornbluth and Dick weren’t writing science fiction?
The other thing I learned from those discussions on usenet was that I want to avoid discussions of “who’s a Jew?”. I have successfully avoided them.
Oddly enough, there was one successful definitional discussion—it was settled that milsf is science fiction about people in a chain of command. This explains why I don’t like milsf generally, but do like Bujold’s Miles stories.
[1] Is Pern science fiction? It has dragons! On another planet! The dragons are telepathic and can teleport, but (perhaps as a mercy) people tended not to get into the question of whether psi should count as fantasy.
I’m not a fan of letting MRA take over the term ‘men’s rights.’ It’s useful to maintain parity with women’s rights.
A simple, broad term for the salient grouping MRA falls into is ‘antifeminists.’ Feminists recognize that women are systematically disadvantaged, and desire gender equality; so antifeminists will reject either the former fact (sex/gender inequality denialism) or the latter value (male supremacism), or both. You could pick out the MRAers who aren’t just supremacists as ‘antifeminists who happen to care a lot about men’s rights,’ but this may not actually be a useful category, since it glues a harmful value to a virtuous one.
As for men’s rights supporters who aren’t ‘MRA,’ these will simply be feminists (or, if you prefer, ‘profeminists’) who have an interest in men’s rights. Speaking phrasally is uncatchy, but also diminishes misunderstanding and essentialism.
That’s a very interesting response, but I think the issue of ‘natural kinds’ is more pertinent to fundamental physics and metaphysics than to classifications of high-level phenomena like social groups and ideologies. The more complicated the phenomenon, the harder it is to single out clear joints of Nature. That said, I think the above terms (‘feminist,’ ‘antifeminist,’ ‘denialist,’ ‘supremacist,’ ‘egalitarian’...) are useful starting points for their relative precision and simplicity.
If you don’t follow “nature”, then the definition is kind of arbitrary. The arbitrary definitions can be used to help or hurt the cause. If you complain about “gluing a harmful value to a virtuous one”, I feel like you have already decided to dislike A and like B, and you are biased to think about definitions that will hurt A and/or help B. The definition itself becomes a weapon. (Related: this article.)
As an example, imagine there is a movement around some concept C consisting of a sympathetic person P1, average people P2, P3, P4, and an unsympathetic person P5.
If you like C, you are motivated to invent a definition that includes P1, P2, P3, P4 and excludes P5. Then “C is movement popular among many people, including such paragons as P1”.
If you dislike C, you are motivated to invent a definition that includes P5 and excludes P1. Inclusion of P2, P3, P4 depends on whether you prefer to describe it as “a dangerous movement” (include) or “a fringe belief” (exclude).
A simple, broad term for the salient grouping MRA falls into is ‘antifeminists.’
My translation: “In my opinion, C pattern-matches P5.”
You could pick out the MRAers who aren’t just supremacists as ‘antifeminists who happen to care a lot about men’s rights,’ but this may not actually be a useful category, since it glues a harmful value to a virtuous one.
My translation: “You could pick out other member of C, such as P1, P2, P3, P4, but this may not actually be a useful [for what purpose exactly?] category, since it glues P5 to P1”.
If you don’t follow “nature”, then the definition is kind of arbitrary.
What could “arbitrary” mean here? Paraconsistent logic is not “arbitrary,” though it is hard to say in what sense it follows nature. As it happens, no human being employs a language that has been completely purified of all interests, all values, all pragmatic considerations, of everything but the Truth. But from this it does not follow that all the non-joint-carving terms in human language are completely arbitrary; they may even be universalizable, if the prudential or moral values they are predicated on happen to be shared among the relevant linguistic community.
If you complain about “gluing a harmful value to a virtuous one”, I feel like you have already decided to dislike A and like B, and you are biased to think about definitions that will hurt A and/or help B.
Guilty as charged, I suppose. I do indeed dislike denialism and male supremacism, and I do indeed like supporters of men’s and women’s rights. Is this an unacceptable leap? Does intellectual seriousness demand that I maintain perfect neutrality at all times regarding the existence or moral character of systemic sexism? Absent an argument for taking denialism seriously as a factual claim, or for conferring respect upon supremacism as a scalable moral project, I see no reason to even consider actively linking these practices to productive social activism, any more than I see a reason to coin a catchy new term for ‘environmentalists who deny the occurrence of anthropogenic climate change,’ or ‘white supremacists who regularly give to charity.’ Certainly there are such people, but we have no responsibility to rhetorically fortify their position for them by gerrymandering a more respectable slice of peoplespace in their honor. That goes well beyond steel-manning.
Remember, I did not suggest inventing a term merely to promote gender egalitarianism or human well-being or what-have-you. All I noted was that the values in question are potentially hindered if we go out of our way to coin a new term linking denialism or supremacism to the general idea of the promotion of men’s (or women’s) liberties, rights, welfare, etc. As it happens, this also isn’t a natural kind, isn’t one of Nature’s privileged Joints; but I thought that point was relatively obvious, so I stuck to the pragmatic question of the utility of the coinage.
My translation: “In my opinion, C pattern-matches P5.”
It was already suggested earlier in the discussion that P5 is a kind of C (i.e., that ‘MRA’ is a specifically anti-feminist movement). My addition was to suggest that insofar as that’s the case, it’s clearer to regularly speak of ‘C’ in place of ‘P5.’ ‘MRA’ is already being used as a term of abuse; my addition just lets us note a more natural grouping of the intended targets of the abuse, while conferring the advantage of not giving up the meme of men’s rights to the Dark Side, and the secondary advantage of allowing people who happen to identify as feminist ‘Men’s Rights Advocates’ to clarify that they belong to a special P5* that isn’t really C at all. So much the better.
My translation: “You could pick out other member of C, such as P1, P2, P3, P4, but this may not actually be a useful [for what purpose exactly?] category, since it glues P5 to P1”.
Again, you aren’t applying your own analogy schema to the case at hand. I already allowed P5 into the Big Feminist Tent alongside P1-4. I can’t* allow anti-feminism into the feminism tent, on pain of logical contradiction. And I see no reason to define a new property D for an arbitrary and complex intersection of other properties. You give no principled reason to revise this policy; it’s not as though we can define a new term for every possible intersection of properties in the Universe, so it is inevitable that our interests and desires will play a role in which intersections we pay heed to.
As it happens, no human being employs a language that has been completely purified of all interests, all values, all pragmatic considerations, of everything but the Truth.
Fallacy of gray. Just because we are not perfect, does not mean that some ways are not better than other ways. Humans are not perfectly unbiased, but we could still avoid the most obviously biased arguments.
Liking or disliking a group is not a problem per se. The problem for a rationalist would be if your liking or disliking motivated you to change your own perception of reality (for example by intentionally using non-natural categories) in a way that would make you more likely to believe false statements.
For example, if X% of MRAs believe that women should be chained in kitchens, we should want to believe that the number of them who believe so is X. Not X+1. Not X-1. This is unrelated to whether you consider women chained in kitchens to be the most horrible idea ever, a neutral culture-specific choice, or the best idea ever. One way to change the value of X is to include or exclude the people from the original set, so that the ratio within the new set becomes smaller or greater than X.
Usually, when people do this, they only report the number, and not the difference between the original set and the new set. For example one could say: “I have statistically proved that 100% of MRAs want women to be chained in kitchens (and here are the raw data)” and omit the part ”...because I used a definition that only those who want to chain women in kitchens are the true MRAs.” There could be other numbers for other definitions, for example “people who self-identify as MRAs”, or “people recognized as MRAs by other people who self-identify as MRAs” or “people who agree with MRA ideas, regardless of the fact how they self-identify” (and then we also have to include our definition of “MRA ideas”). And for even greater justice one should also include a number of non-MRAs who want to have women chained in kitchens (instead of silently assuming that it must be zero).
On object level:
‘MRA’ is a specifically anti-feminist movement
Feminism is not clearly defined, so neither is anti-feminism. Does anti-feminism mean “opposing the voting rights for women” or “opposing job quotas for women” or “opposing how the divorce is typically handled by the courts” or “opposing the idea that all men are rapists and should be castrated”? Any of this? All of this?
‘MRA’ is already being used as a term of abuse
By some people, yes. By other people, no. Should we also use the word “feminist” to mean “a woman who refuses to shave her legs, and talks about it all the time” just because some people use it this way?
Or does the majority decide? Then most likely for any new movement, the outside definition is “those crazy people”.
Generally, opponents of X will typically use X as a term of abuse, and readily provide strawman definitions of X.
EDIT:
I already allowed P5* into the Big Feminist Tent alongside P1-4. I can’t allow anti-feminism into the feminism tent, on pain of logical contradiction.
Perhaps the ability or inability to be included in the Big Feminist Tent is not the essence of MRA. We should look at the essence independently.
Imagine that you already have a category called Apples. Now someone proposes a category of Green Things. It would be strange to say: “Let’s define Green Things as those things which are green and are not apples… because the green apples are already included in the category Apples.”
Some green things are apples. Some green things are not apples. Even if there is a correlation between green things and apples, it is still better to define Green Things as being green, instead of being green non-Apples. (That is not the same as asking someone to include also the green non-Apples into Apples, which would be a logical contradiction.) The definition of Green Things is unrelated to the definition of Apples.
General principle: When people like something, they assume that the best examples are typical of it. If people don’t like something, they assume that the worst examples are typical of it.
Sturgeon’s Law (90% of everything is crud) is an attempt to break out of that habit.
So taken together, there are at least three big problems with describing a set of things.
1) People are more likely to notice and remember the things which match their biases. This will be reflected in their descriptions, even with honest intentions.
2) People are likely to further shift the description for political reasons to make the described thing appear better or worse.
3) The results may significantly differ according to what weight we assign to the individual items of the set. When speaking about books, do we consider all published (or even unpublished? unfinished?) books as equal, or do we weigh them by number of exemplars printed (or sold?) or by how many people read them (and how often?) or liked them? When speaking about a political movement, do we weigh opinions by the number of people who hold them, by the number of articles (or books? or lectures?) expressing them, or by the number of members who read those articles / books / listen to lectures and agree with them?
Fallacy of gray. Just because we are not perfect, does not mean that some ways are not better than other ways. Humans are not perfectly unbiased, but we could still avoid the most obviously biased arguments.
Straw-man fallacy. (And fallacy fallacy. A word to the wise: Your arguments so far have been extremely vague and have only rarely intersected with my specific claims. You may be relying too much on general pattern-matching of vaguely similar argument types, rather than grappling specifically with what I’ve suggested here.)
Nowhere did I suggest that we should make ‘obviously biased arguments.’ But what is meant by ‘biased’ here? If admitting that we believe ‘sex-based discrimination exists’ and ‘sex-based discrimination is bad’ immediately makes us ‘obviously biased’ in the context of any discussion about sex and gender, then we seem to have committed ourselves to a rather untenably austere True Neutrality stance. Would admitting that I believe the Holocaust occurred, and that the Holocaust was bad, similarly call into question my credibility and objectivity as a reasoner? I think that’s a bit over-the-top.
The problem for a rationalist would be if your liking or disliking motivated you to change your own perception of reality (for example by intentionally using non-natural categories) in a way that would make you more likely to believe false statements.
You’re reifying categories too much. The way we group the world is almost never a completely neutral, interest-free sorting of empirical clusters. The take-away lesson from that isn’t ‘Despair of ever identifying any of Nature’s joints,’ nor is it ‘Despair of ever being unbiased.’ The take-away lesson is to beware of essentializing, i.e., of treating groupings we adopted for convenience as ultimately real. The advice you give is good in broad strokes, but unworkable if it requires that we simply stop having any terms we’ve defined as we do for purposes of convenience. Our choice of everyday terms is not (nor should it be) in all cases a deep worldly matter, even if the things we assert using those terms is indeed in all cases a deep worldly matter.
For example, if X% of MRAs believe that women should be chained in kitchens, we should want to believe that the number of them who believe so is X. Not X+1. Not X-1.
Yes. Nothing I’ve said suggests otherwise. Coining a new term specifically for people who care deeply about the welfare of men and think sexism (or female-directed sexism) doesn’t exist would not help us better understand the world or its property clusters. Respond to my assertions, not to the most proximate schematic memes my words can be fitted into.
″...because I used a definition that only those who want to chain women in kitchens are the true MRAs.”
Yes. Fortunately, my recommendation helps address and correct for precisely this problem.
Feminism is not clearly defined, so neither is anti-feminism.
I defined feminism in the very post you’re responding to. I even explicitly defined anti-feminism using exactly this consideration. This again suggests to me that you aren’t reading my posts with much care, but are just trying to pattern-match me to the nearest fallacy you can think of. That isn’t a good way to persuade someone. Fortunately, I already agree with the good points you’ve raised, though not their relevance here.
By some people, yes. By other people, no. Should we also use the word “feminist” to mean “a woman who refuses to shave her legs, and talks about it all the time” just because some people use it this way?
If we’re continuing the fallacy kick: Slippery slope fallacy. The fact that we shouldn’t accept everything as a term of abuse doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t accept anything as one. ‘Neo-nazi,’ for instance, seems rightly pejorative. When the referent offends us, and for good reason, the term can acquire a pejorative character; but since it’s the world and not the word choice that’s causing the bad aftertaste, there’s little to be gained via the euphemism treadmill.
This is also a distraction. My original argument corrects the problem of treating ‘MRA’ as a term of abuse. Whether we should take a principled stance against All Pejorative Words Forever is not my concern; I sidestep the issue when I propose the pragmatic resolution of adopting clearer and more natural terms for the subject matter in question. This conversation will be rather confusing if you continue to make my points for me while thinking they’re repudiations of my practices or views.
I’m not a fan of letting MRA take over the term ‘men’s rights.’
That’s a funny way of characterizing it, since MRA was just “men’s rights activist”, which seems like a perfectly sensible thing to call someone who tries to organize people to action because she cares about men’s rights. It was turned immediately into a pejorative, and I’m surprised there are circles where non-abbreviated “men’s rights” is even something you can say without being associated with Nazis.
There are other terms in the neighborhood that haven’t been contaminated in this way, like ‘men’s studies’ and ‘men’s liberation.’ On the other hand, ‘masculinist’ seems to have followed very much the same trajectory as ‘men’s rights (activism).’ My proposal is intended to refocus the discussion on the points of substantive, specific disagreement, while also incrementally remedying the stigmatization of ‘men’s rights’ as the counterpart of ‘women’s rights.’
As I mentioned here, the criterion you use for sanity appears to be way too weighted towards agreeing with you. The example you gave of an MRA being “insane”:
the rise of masculinized women will lead to the “Fempocalypse”
is not encouraging here. While this position does sound absurd, that’s not the same as insane. The way to test insanity would be to look at their arguments for the above position.
Having said that I don’t actually know much about the official men’s rights movement except that they have legitimate grievances and that the PUA community says nasty things about them. Nevertheless, you might want to start here.
The mistake daenerys is actually fairly common. She wants to talk to some “sane” MRA people, where by “sane” she means ones who more-or-less agree with her. The problem is that real Men’s Rights Advocates don’t agree with her positions, so she finds people who do who are talking about men and declares them the “sane MRA faction”.
As a sane feminist, I was happy to discover sane MRA type sites such as ozy’s No Seriously, What About teh Menz?, and the over-arching The Good Men Project. These sites opened my eyes to the valid concerns of the MRA movement, such as issues regarding male rape, child custody, and the censure and unavailability of feminine style toys (dolls, dresses, EZ Bake Ovens, etc) for little boys.
In my view, these are not MRA issues. These are feminist issues. There doesn’t need to be a “Men’s Rights Movement”; because men’s rights should be an inherent component of the feminist perspective, which is that femininity should be nurtured and encouraged instead of being stamped out. Whether a feminine [i.e., nurturing, compassionate, cooperative and socially-conscious] personality happens to bud within a body with a vagina or a penis should be irrelevant.
It should be part of the feminist foundation, at the “bedrock” as it were, that people have the right to choose their orientation, their personality, their gender, and their social roles regardless of what kind of dangly bits they have, and that judgments about the worth or suitability of a particular person should be made based on that person’s actual capabilities, rather than based on social assumptions or even aggregate statistical stereotyping. If rape is bad, then feminism should be against rape, not merely against rape of women. If gender stereotyping is bad, then feminism should be against gender stereotyping, not merely against gender stereotyping of women. If external reproductive control is bad, then feminism should be against external reproductive control, not merely against external reproductive control of women.
If using gender norms to devaluing the personhood of human beings is bad, then feminism should be against any process that would use a gender norm to devalue the personhood of human beings, including processes within so-called “feminism” that would say “our concern is only what happens to women.”
This is why, as a human being with a penis, I feel that I can legitimately say “I am a feminist”, rather than merely saying “I am a feminist ally”.
In my view, these are not MRA issues. These are feminist issues. There doesn’t need to be a “Men’s Rights Movement”; because men’s rights should be an inherent component of the feminist perspective, which is that femininity should be nurtured and encouraged instead of being stamped out. Whether a feminine [i.e., nurturing, compassionate, cooperative and socially-conscious] personality happens to bud within a body with a vagina or a penis should be irrelevant.
Personally, I think the idea that being nurturing, compassionate, and socially conscious, are inherently feminine and thus the natural province of feminism, is just as unreasonable and offensive as saying that courage and proactiveness are inherently masculine and therefore causes like getting more women involved in the military or police work are naturally not the province of feminism.
I would agree that there was no need for a Men’s Rights Movement if there were a Gender Egalitarianism Movement that reliably functioned as such, but feminists do not reliably support addressing all issues of gender inequality. I think most people would agree that women are, on net, more societally disadvantaged than men, but from this, many feminists conclude “therefore, bias and discrimination faced by men is not an important problem to deal with now,” whereas I think that a more appropriate Gender Egalitarianism Movement would take the position “we should address issues of bias and discrimination in order of the importance of the specific issues and the return on the investment in addressing them, not on the basis of which gender is more disadvantaged.”
I may identify myself as a Feminist rather than a Gender Egalitarian depending on what connotations I feel will be advantageous in a particular discussion, but I’d sooner get behind an argument that with a proper Gender Egalitarian Movement, there is no need for Feminism, than one that with a proper Feminist Movement, there’s no need for a Men’s Rights Movement.
Whether a feminine [i.e., nurturing, compassionate, cooperative and socially-conscious] personality happens to bud within a body with a vagina or a penis should be irrelevant.
I can see where you’re coming from here, but I think that the work should instead be put into broadening masculinity. To make a loaded analogy, saying “it’s okay for boys to act feminine” when they want to do something traditionally female is like saying “it’s okay for black people to act white” when they want to do something traditionally european. You can define the words so that the sentence parses, but you can’t remove the additional meaning to make the sentence a good idea.
Besides, it’s fine to use different words to describe people focused on different things, even if they use the same toolbox.
Once you describe “feminine” as “nurturing, compassionate, cooperative and socially-conscious” and define feminism as a movement to protect all things feminine, I think you have gone far beyond what most people mean by either word.
As Eugine_Nier just stated, it isn’t the feminists who want to place “nurturing, compassionate, cooperative and socially-conscious” solely within the label “feminine.”
If we could stop labeling virtues by sex, that would be a definite improvement.
Actually “nurturing, compassionate, cooperative and socially-conscious” is pretty close to the definition of “feminine” traditionalists use when arguing in favor of separate spheres for men and women.
In other words, traditionalists deny men the right/obligation to be nurturing, compassionate, cooperative and socially-conscious—exactly like feminists always say. Lol.
Using feminism to refer to issue’s of men’s rights is like using the phrase white power to refer to issue’s about african american rights. Whatever argument you then make about broadening the meaning of the term is obviously and instantly undermined by the linguistic problems present.
Also: a LOT of people use feminism to mean “more rights for women and who cares about men?”. Your more broad species of feminism is inclusive almost to the point of being meaningless. It’s like using the word feminism to mean “good”.
Perhaps instead of being “(sane) feminist” or “(sane) MRA”, the sane gender-issues people should all just call themselves “Gender Egalitarians”.
I’d like that. It would allow me to take such professions of tribal affiliation as net evidence that the speaker is not sexist, rather than the reverse.
Firstly, I would like to say that I really enjoyed this post, and hope to see more like it!
It seems to me that (sane) MRA’s and (sane) feminists should be natural allies. The “generic” version of feminism officially points to gender equality (NOT female supremacy), and feminists have previously allied with the LGBT movement, and racial suffrage (though that alliance went south when one group got suffrage before the other), and taken other social justice fights on as well.
As a sane feminist, I was happy to discover sane MRA type sites such as ozy’s No Seriously, What About teh Menz?, and the over-arching The Good Men Project. These sites opened my eyes to the valid concerns of the MRA movement, such as issues regarding male rape, child custody, and the censure and unavailability of feminine style toys (dolls, dresses, EZ Bake Ovens, etc) for little boys.
These issues fit perfectly into my gender egalitarian style of feminism, and I thought that if it weren’t for the bad blood between the two sides, that feminists should/would have taken up these particular issues the same way they often pick up other social justice issues.
The problem is that, (pulling numbers out of the air) let’s say 1% of each gender is insane Haters of the Opposite Sex. So 1% of women think everything wrong with the world is the fault of men, and 1% of men think that the rise of masculinized women will lead to the “Fempocalypse”. Each of those 1% join their respective movements.
Now, let’s say half of all women identitfy as “feminist”. This means the feminist movement is large enough to contain the crazy 1% of Man Haters while still being over-all sane (although allowing for unfortunate “straw feministi-ng”, where insane MRA’s make arguments of “Feminists say...”)
However, the men’s rights movement is not so large. Say only 1.5% of males are MRAs. This means that 2⁄3 of their movement is the insane 1%, and only 1⁄3 are sane. The MRA movement is not large enough to contain the crazy 1% while still remaining overall sane. So MOST MRA stuff out there is the insane stuff.
This unbalance harms the men’s rights movement, because the valid concerns get tarred by the less valid ones (“masculinized women are bringing about the end of society!”), and lumped together with the crazy.
There needs to be a way to filter out the insane, in order to actually reach every(sane)one’s common goals. I call myself a “Gender Egalitarian Feminist”. Perhaps instead of being “(sane) feminist” or “(sane) MRA”, the sane gender-issues people should all just call themselves “Gender Egalitarians”.
Unfortunately, this label already seems to be undergoing the same connotation creep that quickly happened to “Race realism” and is about to happen to “Human Biodiversity”. Both of those are—justly or not—suspected to be cover labels that racists adopted when the old “Scientific Racism” became disreputable, so now many people with “mainstream” views on racial differences equate the three.
From what I’ve read of MRA discussions, some of them are definitely trying to trade the label for “Gender Egalitarianism”, which they position as neutral or hostile to all kinds of feminism—so, as dumb and ridiculous as this might be, the words “gender egalitarian” might acquire a connotation of “feminist-hater”, or simply “misogynist”.
(Great post btw!)
Do you have any links? None of the first few Google hits for “gender egalitarianism”, at a first glance, look like that.
I’d go with “anti-sexism”. No, wait… That might sound like I’m in favour of sexual abstinence. “Anti-genderism”?
(Belated edit: looks like the word we’re looking for is “sex-blindness”.)
That sounds like you’re against gender.
(For certain values of “gender”, that’s not terribly far from truth.)
Even if there’s a much larger proportion of sane, reasonable MRAs to start with, if the proportion of crazy ones is high enough, the reasonable ones are liable to start distancing themselves from the movement to avoid being tarred by association, increasing the proportion of crazy ones identifying with the movement. This is exactly why I personally exercise a great deal of caution in letting anyone know that I sympathize with the movement at all.
What was the proportion of sane feminists in those days when the feminism was new?
I am not asking how many sane women agreed with the proposed women rights, but what kind of women was the first to publicly self-identify with the label, and do something that drew attention to them.
Looking at the Wikipedia article on “Suffragette”, I read about “setting fire to mailbox contents, smashing windows and occasionally detonating bombs”. Imagine what would be the public opinion about MRA movement if the first MRAs did this, if merely expressing their opinions impolitely on internet is enough to label them as insane.
Most sane men do not join MRA movement because, honestly, most men don’t give a shit about other men in general. We often see each other as competitors, and we focus on our jobs and families, and a few friends. A man usually becomes a MRA activist when something bad happens to him personally. Now of course such person is extremely prone to mindkilling; that should not be surprising.
There were feminists who said that all men are rapists, or that in a perfect world 90% of men would disappear from the planet… and they are still considered a legitimate part of the movement which is supposedly not against men, but for fairness, equality, and everything good. And if you see something suspicious about this, and you have a penis, then your opinion is irrelevant, because you have this brain disorder called “privilege” which makes everything you say automatically wrong.
To avoid misunderstanding: I think that many things said by many MRAs are stupid, and I disagree with them. I just disagree that it makes MRA movement worse than a feminist movement, because the feminist movement also contains different opinions and crazy people. New movement is more attractive for extreme people, later it becomes more known and accepted by moderate people, and I think this is enough to explain the higher ratio of crazy people in the MRA movement today.
Well, these days, more feminists are inclined to do whatever they can to marginalize them, claim that they’re not “real” feminists, or that they flat out do not exist. Yvain discussed this in a very interesting livejournal post
What struck me most about that very interesting post was how “legalistic” the MRA controversial claims were. I’m a lawyer, that’s not a slur. It’s an interesting contrast between the feminist controversial claims, which are mostly about social dynamics, and the MRA controversial claims, which I could write a model statute to fix in practically no time at all.
And since writing statutes to fix social dynamics is a crude tool at best, and often counter-productive, reasonable MRA activists and reasonable feminists have a great deal of trouble avoiding talk-past-each-other-itis.
Depends, if the social dynamics where themselves created by bad statues, fixing or repealing the statute seems like at least a start.
That’s a good point, but it’s worth noting that the “obviously reasonable” MRA claims are mostly social issues that are not effectively addressed in our society. A lot of the “obviously reasonable” ground for feminism has already been won, and many of the more uncontroversially reasonable matters that could be addressed by statute already have been. Earlier generations of feminism have eaten up a lot of the low hanging fruit, whereas MRA hasn’t really accomplished much.
I don’t really agree with your history. Consider the first of the “controversial” MRA claims:
In the United States, one way to create immediate improvement (from the MRA perspective) would be repeal of Federal Rule of Evidence 413 or its state law equivalents. Historically, this rule is actually quite recent, dating from 1995 - Congress actually overruled the Rules Committee recommendation not to have Rules 413-415. Personally, I think 413-15 are inconsistent with how the criminal justice system normally deals with prior bad acts of the defendant.
Nonetheless, that’s very different from asserting that the issues haven’t been addressed. Things once were closer to what the MRA now advocates, society considered the issue, and the position now adopted by MRA activists lost. My sense of the history is that most of the more legalistic desires of MRA listed in Yvain’s post are also attempts to reverse previous defeats.
I don’t see that this addresses my comment. The “currently controversial” claims are controversial because there are plenty of people who’re convinced that they’re going too far in the wrong direction, so it’s no surprise if some of them are lost ground to people who think, for instance, that the relative levels of protection should be more favorable to women.
The “controversial” issues have seen more social and legal address than the “uncontroversial” ones, because feminists are a much more effective lobby group, and have mostly moved past the “obviously reasonable” issues on their own end and are moving the borders of the “currently controversial,” while MRA has more or less failed to effectively agitate for even their “uncontroversial” positions, let alone the “controversial” ones, so the activists addressing the “controversial” issues are almost all coming from the feminist side.
In my original comment, I wasn’t trying to divide controversial from non-controversial. I was dividing MRA from feminist.
In brief, my perception was feminist = social dynamic, MRA = legalistic. That’s an over-generalization, but I thought it was interesting—and a partial explanation of the difficulties you noted with alliances between the reasonable on each side.
Analytically, this helps one explain the interactions between MRA and feminists without assuming oppression is a necessary part of the human condition, it’s all status games, or that either side is innately evil.
My response to that point was that feminism seems less legalistic now because the low hanging fruit which could readily be addressed by legislation largely already has been, so social dynamics and things that are not easy to address with legislation (at least in the current political climate) are what’s left.
“Equal pay for equal work” is sort of a holdout, in that an employee can legally sue their employer for discriminatory practices for not providing equal pay for equal work, but on the other hand, companies aren’t required to divulge their pay standards, either to all their employees or to any oversight body charged with ensuring equal salaries. So while it’s generally regarded as “uncontroversial,” its legal protection is very incomplete in large part because the measures necessary to guarantee it are opposed to business interests which are themselves a powerful lobbying force.
It’s not that feminism is inherently less legalistic than MRA (at least, I don’t think we have the evidence to conclude that,) but that the difference in focus is largely due to the gap in the amounts of ground the movements have already covered.
I think that “feminism” is a very counter-intuitive label for that memeplex (imagine anti-racism was called “blackism”), and that that might have contributed to people misunderstanding what (‘sane’) feminists are about. (In Italian it’s even worse -- sexism is usually called maschilismo, so people assume femminismo is reverse sexism, and even use it as a slur against people they perceive to be misandrist, and MRAs call themselves anti-femministi.)
Me too. I’m pleasantly surprised to find out that there are people who can discuss certain issues with extremely low levels of mind-killing, which made me change my mind about what I wrote earlier. (Well, this too.)
That and sane people in general speaking less hysterically and drawing less attention than insane people.
Yeah. That place just went to hell (although it seems like everybody I consider an ally is Not Daring To Urge Constraint).
Thanks. I knew I had read a post by EY describing exactly that failure mode, but couldn’t remember which it was.
I spoke too soon. I’ve been seeing plenty of mind-killed people on the GMP lately.
I wish I could upvote this more than once; it aligns neatly with several things I’ve been wanting to say for months but haven’t found a chance to. There’s just a couple things I’d like to add.
First, I suspect the relatively small size of the MRA sphere distorts outsiders’ perception of it in ways other than making hateful personalities proportionally more common. Specifically, it’s too small and too new for well-developed sub-movements to be self-sustaining: there are identifiable tendencies (compare the average comment on Spearhead to the average on Owning Your Shit [ETA: or not; see below]), but there’s far more cross-posting between them than on comparable feminist sites, and I’d attribute this directly to feminism’s far greater age, size, and level of development as an ideology. Since not a few prolific cross-posters fall into the “hater” category, and since offensive comments are always going to be disproportionately salient to readers, this ends up tarring the whole community.
But that’s just a perception thing, more or less. Even if a viable egalitarian-looking men’s advocacy programme manages to magic itself into existence, I think problems might be still caused by the likelihood that both these movements conceptualize themselves as the true standard-bearers of equality, and blame any remaining inequalities the other side’s concerned about on failures to incorporate their own theoretical frameworks. Probably the most common feminist objection I’ve seen to more moderate (i.e. non-traditionalist, positive-sum) MRA ideas is precisely this: feminism objects to the same problems (discrimination against men as caregivers, narrower culturally acceptable affect and presentation, etc.) and they’d allegedly vanish in a fully feminist society, so why not just call yourself feminist and work with established approaches to privilege, misogyny, etc.? And this isn’t one-sided, either; I’ve seen almost identical sentiments from moderate MRA sources, with appropriate nouns and theory swapped.
The answer, as best I can figure, is that each theoretical framework is built up to explain a particular set of salient experiences, and since few data points outside those experiences make it into the working set we end up with a tendency to overfit. This is of course exactly the problem that third-wave feminism already confronted regarding intersections with queer theory, race, etc., but intersectional integration seems harder in this case—perhaps because MRA, even the moderate kind, doesn’t draw upon the same intellectual traditions.
I just looked at a few comments on the two sites you linked (never having visited either before) and I couldn’t tell the difference. I’m not sure what you intended to say by comparing them.
I’ll admit I didn’t review any recent comments on Spearhead before posting. I visited the site months ago and was so annoyed by the commentariat that I haven’t read much there since.
It’s possible that I caught a bad patch or that they’ve gotten more moderate since, in which case I’ve misrepresented them and I apologize. But I have seen similar sentiments expressed towards them elsewhere in the interim.
The comments were unpleasant to awful there, but they were mediocre to awful on the other site too. There were a few more “This is a great post.” style comments on Owning Your Shit but that was the main difference that I saw from clicking through a couple articles.
Fair enough. The comments are indeed awful on both sites, but that’s true in broad strokes for most political blogs. I was mainly trying to point up accusatory and gender-essentialist strains I remembered from Spearhead that seemed much attenuated in OYS, but in light of this the difference evidently either isn’t there or isn’t glaring enough to be clear to first-time readers from context-free links.
Since I don’t particularly feel like doing the muckraking myself and I can’t expect people to do it for me, I retract that comparison. Pity we can’t strikethrough portions of a post.
Since when are “No Seriously, What About teh Menz?”, and “The Good Men Project” MRA sites?
I believe those are the sites where I learned about men’s rights issues such as male rape, child custody, etc, so I put them under the MRA umbrella, though they may not identify themselves that way (probably due to not wanting to be tarred with the same brush as the insanity)
If you DON’T think that those sites are MRA, then I would update towards ALL MRA to be of the insane kind, since those sites are the only ones I’ve seen on that side that I consider to be sane. (Though I welcome links to the contrary)
The MRA label very quickly became stabilized as an antifeminist identifier, such that I’d guess “male ally” and “MRA” are almost perfectly exclusive self-descriptors. But the intension of MRA as a typical self-descriptor and as you’ve been using it may not perfectly cohere either, so this may not be a “real” update that you’re forced into.
Thank you, apparently I’ve been using the wrong words.
I had been reading “men’s rights” as “you care about the rights of men, and male-specific gender issues”, NOT as “you don’t like feminism.” I would like to edit my post with a better term that is actually accurate for what I am trying to get at (the first definition I listed above). Do you know what a better term is? “Male ally” doesn’t seem right, since most of them ARE males.
And also, in that case, it’s actually useful that the insane “People Who Care About Men’s Rights” are considerate enough to separate themselves out from the sane “PWCAMR”, which leaves the sane ones free to develop their own movement! lol
It’s probably worth remembering that names are not catalog numbers that facilitate filing into categories. Attempting to reverse-engineer a compound noun phrase by looking only at its parts will often swing you wide of the actual target.
Agreed. Most science fiction has little or no science.
That’d be an example of making the error I’m trying to point out here. “Science fiction” is not “fiction about science”; the term has a long and varied history and in point of fact, no single, well-defined rigorous use has predominated. Indeed, there are so many currents, subgenres and subsubgenres contained within the umbrella term that it’s simply not very specific. Here are a bunch of big names in the field offering different ideas about what constitutes science fiction; when you read it, keep in mind it’s a small slice of the pie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_science_fiction
Here’s a map of the history of the genre. Take note of its variety:
http://www.wardshelley.com/paintings/pages/jpegs/histSciFi-mid1smweb.jpg
I’m not sure whether you’re agreeing with me or not. I was bringing up the lack of science in science fiction as an example of the sort of thing you were talking about.
Possible incorrect pattern-match, then—I’ve heard been party to a few too many genre-definition squabbles.
I read a lot of discussion of “what is science fiction?” on usenet. [1] There were two results for me: a theory that people base their prototypes on strong emotional experiences, but don’t recognize that it’s their internal process, so they think their idea of “real science fiction” is an objective fact. They get very upset when someone else makes a strong claim that real science fiction is something else.
Actually, I do the same thing. I know someone who believes that science fiction is optimistic. How can he say that Kornbluth and Dick weren’t writing science fiction?
The other thing I learned from those discussions on usenet was that I want to avoid discussions of “who’s a Jew?”. I have successfully avoided them.
Oddly enough, there was one successful definitional discussion—it was settled that milsf is science fiction about people in a chain of command. This explains why I don’t like milsf generally, but do like Bujold’s Miles stories.
[1] Is Pern science fiction? It has dragons! On another planet! The dragons are telepathic and can teleport, but (perhaps as a mercy) people tended not to get into the question of whether psi should count as fantasy.
I’m not a fan of letting MRA take over the term ‘men’s rights.’ It’s useful to maintain parity with women’s rights.
A simple, broad term for the salient grouping MRA falls into is ‘antifeminists.’ Feminists recognize that women are systematically disadvantaged, and desire gender equality; so antifeminists will reject either the former fact (sex/gender inequality denialism) or the latter value (male supremacism), or both. You could pick out the MRAers who aren’t just supremacists as ‘antifeminists who happen to care a lot about men’s rights,’ but this may not actually be a useful category, since it glues a harmful value to a virtuous one.
As for men’s rights supporters who aren’t ‘MRA,’ these will simply be feminists (or, if you prefer, ‘profeminists’) who have an interest in men’s rights. Speaking phrasally is uncatchy, but also diminishes misunderstanding and essentialism.
The important thing is whether this category reflects reality or not. Let’s start the analysis there, not with the bottom line.
That’s a very interesting response, but I think the issue of ‘natural kinds’ is more pertinent to fundamental physics and metaphysics than to classifications of high-level phenomena like social groups and ideologies. The more complicated the phenomenon, the harder it is to single out clear joints of Nature. That said, I think the above terms (‘feminist,’ ‘antifeminist,’ ‘denialist,’ ‘supremacist,’ ‘egalitarian’...) are useful starting points for their relative precision and simplicity.
If you don’t follow “nature”, then the definition is kind of arbitrary. The arbitrary definitions can be used to help or hurt the cause. If you complain about “gluing a harmful value to a virtuous one”, I feel like you have already decided to dislike A and like B, and you are biased to think about definitions that will hurt A and/or help B. The definition itself becomes a weapon. (Related: this article.)
As an example, imagine there is a movement around some concept C consisting of a sympathetic person P1, average people P2, P3, P4, and an unsympathetic person P5.
If you like C, you are motivated to invent a definition that includes P1, P2, P3, P4 and excludes P5. Then “C is movement popular among many people, including such paragons as P1”.
If you dislike C, you are motivated to invent a definition that includes P5 and excludes P1. Inclusion of P2, P3, P4 depends on whether you prefer to describe it as “a dangerous movement” (include) or “a fringe belief” (exclude).
My translation: “In my opinion, C pattern-matches P5.”
My translation: “You could pick out other member of C, such as P1, P2, P3, P4, but this may not actually be a useful [for what purpose exactly?] category, since it glues P5 to P1”.
What could “arbitrary” mean here? Paraconsistent logic is not “arbitrary,” though it is hard to say in what sense it follows nature. As it happens, no human being employs a language that has been completely purified of all interests, all values, all pragmatic considerations, of everything but the Truth. But from this it does not follow that all the non-joint-carving terms in human language are completely arbitrary; they may even be universalizable, if the prudential or moral values they are predicated on happen to be shared among the relevant linguistic community.
Guilty as charged, I suppose. I do indeed dislike denialism and male supremacism, and I do indeed like supporters of men’s and women’s rights. Is this an unacceptable leap? Does intellectual seriousness demand that I maintain perfect neutrality at all times regarding the existence or moral character of systemic sexism? Absent an argument for taking denialism seriously as a factual claim, or for conferring respect upon supremacism as a scalable moral project, I see no reason to even consider actively linking these practices to productive social activism, any more than I see a reason to coin a catchy new term for ‘environmentalists who deny the occurrence of anthropogenic climate change,’ or ‘white supremacists who regularly give to charity.’ Certainly there are such people, but we have no responsibility to rhetorically fortify their position for them by gerrymandering a more respectable slice of peoplespace in their honor. That goes well beyond steel-manning.
Remember, I did not suggest inventing a term merely to promote gender egalitarianism or human well-being or what-have-you. All I noted was that the values in question are potentially hindered if we go out of our way to coin a new term linking denialism or supremacism to the general idea of the promotion of men’s (or women’s) liberties, rights, welfare, etc. As it happens, this also isn’t a natural kind, isn’t one of Nature’s privileged Joints; but I thought that point was relatively obvious, so I stuck to the pragmatic question of the utility of the coinage.
It was already suggested earlier in the discussion that P5 is a kind of C (i.e., that ‘MRA’ is a specifically anti-feminist movement). My addition was to suggest that insofar as that’s the case, it’s clearer to regularly speak of ‘C’ in place of ‘P5.’ ‘MRA’ is already being used as a term of abuse; my addition just lets us note a more natural grouping of the intended targets of the abuse, while conferring the advantage of not giving up the meme of men’s rights to the Dark Side, and the secondary advantage of allowing people who happen to identify as feminist ‘Men’s Rights Advocates’ to clarify that they belong to a special P5* that isn’t really C at all. So much the better.
Again, you aren’t applying your own analogy schema to the case at hand. I already allowed P5 into the Big Feminist Tent alongside P1-4. I can’t* allow anti-feminism into the feminism tent, on pain of logical contradiction. And I see no reason to define a new property D for an arbitrary and complex intersection of other properties. You give no principled reason to revise this policy; it’s not as though we can define a new term for every possible intersection of properties in the Universe, so it is inevitable that our interests and desires will play a role in which intersections we pay heed to.
On meta level:
Fallacy of gray. Just because we are not perfect, does not mean that some ways are not better than other ways. Humans are not perfectly unbiased, but we could still avoid the most obviously biased arguments.
Liking or disliking a group is not a problem per se. The problem for a rationalist would be if your liking or disliking motivated you to change your own perception of reality (for example by intentionally using non-natural categories) in a way that would make you more likely to believe false statements.
For example, if X% of MRAs believe that women should be chained in kitchens, we should want to believe that the number of them who believe so is X. Not X+1. Not X-1. This is unrelated to whether you consider women chained in kitchens to be the most horrible idea ever, a neutral culture-specific choice, or the best idea ever. One way to change the value of X is to include or exclude the people from the original set, so that the ratio within the new set becomes smaller or greater than X.
Usually, when people do this, they only report the number, and not the difference between the original set and the new set. For example one could say: “I have statistically proved that 100% of MRAs want women to be chained in kitchens (and here are the raw data)” and omit the part ”...because I used a definition that only those who want to chain women in kitchens are the true MRAs.” There could be other numbers for other definitions, for example “people who self-identify as MRAs”, or “people recognized as MRAs by other people who self-identify as MRAs” or “people who agree with MRA ideas, regardless of the fact how they self-identify” (and then we also have to include our definition of “MRA ideas”). And for even greater justice one should also include a number of non-MRAs who want to have women chained in kitchens (instead of silently assuming that it must be zero).
On object level:
Feminism is not clearly defined, so neither is anti-feminism. Does anti-feminism mean “opposing the voting rights for women” or “opposing job quotas for women” or “opposing how the divorce is typically handled by the courts” or “opposing the idea that all men are rapists and should be castrated”? Any of this? All of this?
By some people, yes. By other people, no. Should we also use the word “feminist” to mean “a woman who refuses to shave her legs, and talks about it all the time” just because some people use it this way?
Or does the majority decide? Then most likely for any new movement, the outside definition is “those crazy people”.
Generally, opponents of X will typically use X as a term of abuse, and readily provide strawman definitions of X.
EDIT:
Perhaps the ability or inability to be included in the Big Feminist Tent is not the essence of MRA. We should look at the essence independently.
Imagine that you already have a category called Apples. Now someone proposes a category of Green Things. It would be strange to say: “Let’s define Green Things as those things which are green and are not apples… because the green apples are already included in the category Apples.”
Some green things are apples. Some green things are not apples. Even if there is a correlation between green things and apples, it is still better to define Green Things as being green, instead of being green non-Apples. (That is not the same as asking someone to include also the green non-Apples into Apples, which would be a logical contradiction.) The definition of Green Things is unrelated to the definition of Apples.
General principle: When people like something, they assume that the best examples are typical of it. If people don’t like something, they assume that the worst examples are typical of it.
Sturgeon’s Law (90% of everything is crud) is an attempt to break out of that habit.
So taken together, there are at least three big problems with describing a set of things.
1) People are more likely to notice and remember the things which match their biases. This will be reflected in their descriptions, even with honest intentions.
2) People are likely to further shift the description for political reasons to make the described thing appear better or worse.
3) The results may significantly differ according to what weight we assign to the individual items of the set. When speaking about books, do we consider all published (or even unpublished? unfinished?) books as equal, or do we weigh them by number of exemplars printed (or sold?) or by how many people read them (and how often?) or liked them? When speaking about a political movement, do we weigh opinions by the number of people who hold them, by the number of articles (or books? or lectures?) expressing them, or by the number of members who read those articles / books / listen to lectures and agree with them?
Only if there are exactly 100 MRAs in the world. ;-)
Straw-man fallacy. (And fallacy fallacy. A word to the wise: Your arguments so far have been extremely vague and have only rarely intersected with my specific claims. You may be relying too much on general pattern-matching of vaguely similar argument types, rather than grappling specifically with what I’ve suggested here.)
Nowhere did I suggest that we should make ‘obviously biased arguments.’ But what is meant by ‘biased’ here? If admitting that we believe ‘sex-based discrimination exists’ and ‘sex-based discrimination is bad’ immediately makes us ‘obviously biased’ in the context of any discussion about sex and gender, then we seem to have committed ourselves to a rather untenably austere True Neutrality stance. Would admitting that I believe the Holocaust occurred, and that the Holocaust was bad, similarly call into question my credibility and objectivity as a reasoner? I think that’s a bit over-the-top.
You’re reifying categories too much. The way we group the world is almost never a completely neutral, interest-free sorting of empirical clusters. The take-away lesson from that isn’t ‘Despair of ever identifying any of Nature’s joints,’ nor is it ‘Despair of ever being unbiased.’ The take-away lesson is to beware of essentializing, i.e., of treating groupings we adopted for convenience as ultimately real. The advice you give is good in broad strokes, but unworkable if it requires that we simply stop having any terms we’ve defined as we do for purposes of convenience. Our choice of everyday terms is not (nor should it be) in all cases a deep worldly matter, even if the things we assert using those terms is indeed in all cases a deep worldly matter.
Yes. Nothing I’ve said suggests otherwise. Coining a new term specifically for people who care deeply about the welfare of men and think sexism (or female-directed sexism) doesn’t exist would not help us better understand the world or its property clusters. Respond to my assertions, not to the most proximate schematic memes my words can be fitted into.
Yes. Fortunately, my recommendation helps address and correct for precisely this problem.
I defined feminism in the very post you’re responding to. I even explicitly defined anti-feminism using exactly this consideration. This again suggests to me that you aren’t reading my posts with much care, but are just trying to pattern-match me to the nearest fallacy you can think of. That isn’t a good way to persuade someone. Fortunately, I already agree with the good points you’ve raised, though not their relevance here.
If we’re continuing the fallacy kick: Slippery slope fallacy. The fact that we shouldn’t accept everything as a term of abuse doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t accept anything as one. ‘Neo-nazi,’ for instance, seems rightly pejorative. When the referent offends us, and for good reason, the term can acquire a pejorative character; but since it’s the world and not the word choice that’s causing the bad aftertaste, there’s little to be gained via the euphemism treadmill.
This is also a distraction. My original argument corrects the problem of treating ‘MRA’ as a term of abuse. Whether we should take a principled stance against All Pejorative Words Forever is not my concern; I sidestep the issue when I propose the pragmatic resolution of adopting clearer and more natural terms for the subject matter in question. This conversation will be rather confusing if you continue to make my points for me while thinking they’re repudiations of my practices or views.
That’s a funny way of characterizing it, since MRA was just “men’s rights activist”, which seems like a perfectly sensible thing to call someone who tries to organize people to action because she cares about men’s rights. It was turned immediately into a pejorative, and I’m surprised there are circles where non-abbreviated “men’s rights” is even something you can say without being associated with Nazis.
There are other terms in the neighborhood that haven’t been contaminated in this way, like ‘men’s studies’ and ‘men’s liberation.’ On the other hand, ‘masculinist’ seems to have followed very much the same trajectory as ‘men’s rights (activism).’ My proposal is intended to refocus the discussion on the points of substantive, specific disagreement, while also incrementally remedying the stigmatization of ‘men’s rights’ as the counterpart of ‘women’s rights.’
As I mentioned here, the criterion you use for sanity appears to be way too weighted towards agreeing with you. The example you gave of an MRA being “insane”:
is not encouraging here. While this position does sound absurd, that’s not the same as insane. The way to test insanity would be to look at their arguments for the above position.
Having said that I don’t actually know much about the official men’s rights movement except that they have legitimate grievances and that the PUA community says nasty things about them. Nevertheless, you might want to start here.
That was my first thought as well. I like both projects a lot, but I wouldn’t have placed them in the MRA sphere.
The mistake daenerys is actually fairly common. She wants to talk to some “sane” MRA people, where by “sane” she means ones who more-or-less agree with her. The problem is that real Men’s Rights Advocates don’t agree with her positions, so she finds people who do who are talking about men and declares them the “sane MRA faction”.
Note that this can be a rhetorical strategy as well as an honest mistake! (I make no claims about what was going through particular posters’ heads.)
In my view, these are not MRA issues. These are feminist issues. There doesn’t need to be a “Men’s Rights Movement”; because men’s rights should be an inherent component of the feminist perspective, which is that femininity should be nurtured and encouraged instead of being stamped out. Whether a feminine [i.e., nurturing, compassionate, cooperative and socially-conscious] personality happens to bud within a body with a vagina or a penis should be irrelevant.
It should be part of the feminist foundation, at the “bedrock” as it were, that people have the right to choose their orientation, their personality, their gender, and their social roles regardless of what kind of dangly bits they have, and that judgments about the worth or suitability of a particular person should be made based on that person’s actual capabilities, rather than based on social assumptions or even aggregate statistical stereotyping. If rape is bad, then feminism should be against rape, not merely against rape of women. If gender stereotyping is bad, then feminism should be against gender stereotyping, not merely against gender stereotyping of women. If external reproductive control is bad, then feminism should be against external reproductive control, not merely against external reproductive control of women.
If using gender norms to devaluing the personhood of human beings is bad, then feminism should be against any process that would use a gender norm to devalue the personhood of human beings, including processes within so-called “feminism” that would say “our concern is only what happens to women.”
This is why, as a human being with a penis, I feel that I can legitimately say “I am a feminist”, rather than merely saying “I am a feminist ally”.
Personally, I think the idea that being nurturing, compassionate, and socially conscious, are inherently feminine and thus the natural province of feminism, is just as unreasonable and offensive as saying that courage and proactiveness are inherently masculine and therefore causes like getting more women involved in the military or police work are naturally not the province of feminism.
I would agree that there was no need for a Men’s Rights Movement if there were a Gender Egalitarianism Movement that reliably functioned as such, but feminists do not reliably support addressing all issues of gender inequality. I think most people would agree that women are, on net, more societally disadvantaged than men, but from this, many feminists conclude “therefore, bias and discrimination faced by men is not an important problem to deal with now,” whereas I think that a more appropriate Gender Egalitarianism Movement would take the position “we should address issues of bias and discrimination in order of the importance of the specific issues and the return on the investment in addressing them, not on the basis of which gender is more disadvantaged.”
I may identify myself as a Feminist rather than a Gender Egalitarian depending on what connotations I feel will be advantageous in a particular discussion, but I’d sooner get behind an argument that with a proper Gender Egalitarian Movement, there is no need for Feminism, than one that with a proper Feminist Movement, there’s no need for a Men’s Rights Movement.
I can see where you’re coming from here, but I think that the work should instead be put into broadening masculinity. To make a loaded analogy, saying “it’s okay for boys to act feminine” when they want to do something traditionally female is like saying “it’s okay for black people to act white” when they want to do something traditionally european. You can define the words so that the sentence parses, but you can’t remove the additional meaning to make the sentence a good idea.
Besides, it’s fine to use different words to describe people focused on different things, even if they use the same toolbox.
Once you describe “feminine” as “nurturing, compassionate, cooperative and socially-conscious” and define feminism as a movement to protect all things feminine, I think you have gone far beyond what most people mean by either word.
As Eugine_Nier just stated, it isn’t the feminists who want to place “nurturing, compassionate, cooperative and socially-conscious” solely within the label “feminine.”
If we could stop labeling virtues by sex, that would be a definite improvement.
Actually “nurturing, compassionate, cooperative and socially-conscious” is pretty close to the definition of “feminine” traditionalists use when arguing in favor of separate spheres for men and women.
In other words, traditionalists deny men the right/obligation to be nurturing, compassionate, cooperative and socially-conscious—exactly like feminists always say. Lol.
Using feminism to refer to issue’s of men’s rights is like using the phrase white power to refer to issue’s about african american rights. Whatever argument you then make about broadening the meaning of the term is obviously and instantly undermined by the linguistic problems present.
Also: a LOT of people use feminism to mean “more rights for women and who cares about men?”. Your more broad species of feminism is inclusive almost to the point of being meaningless. It’s like using the word feminism to mean “good”.
I’d like that. It would allow me to take such professions of tribal affiliation as net evidence that the speaker is not sexist, rather than the reverse.