“I’m a tall white American male, so sometimes it takes a bit of work for me to understand what it’s like to be a member of a suppressed group.”
Females are suppressed, and so are males. Gender roles suppress both genders. They also offer advantages to both genders.
List of male privileges: http://www.amptoons.com/blog/the-male-privilege-checklist/
List of female privileges: http://masculistadvice.blogspot.com/2008/06/female-privilege-list.html
It is true that popular discourse paints females as the suppressed group and males as the non-suppressed group.
“So I’ve always thought of myself as a feminist.”
Feminism goes beyond technical gender equality of having the same rights and privileges. I’m a feminist too, because I think politics should solve problems facing women. And I’m also a masculist (or a men’s rights activist), since men’s problems should be solved too.
“Of course, some activists (the word has positive connotations to me, BTW) pushed too far, as is the case in all large movements.”
The main problem with feminism today is that all the political gender equality resources are directed to feminism. It should be evenly distributed between masculism and feminism.
“Women suffer more unfairness so presumably most resources would be directed towards them anyway, but there could easily be a number of low hanging fruit on the male side.”
This claim is often made, but I haven’t seen any calculations to back it up. I’m active in the gender equality debate in Finland, so I can only talk about Finnish statistics:
Men are forced to serve on average 8,5 months in “slave work”. No modern work regulations apply. I personally witnessed many broken bones and other health problems which happened to my friends during my service. Work was often 24⁄7 for weeks. Psychological stress is commonplace.
Men make 80 % of suicides, and 80 % of the homeless are men.
Women have higher wages by 2 percent.
Men have less success in studying
Men don’t have sexual power
Men face the majority of violence (and men face as much domestic violence as women)
Mutilation of boys for religious reasons is legal, but mutilation of girls is illegal.
Men die seven years earlier
60% of unemployed people seeking work are men
(I can provide sources for these, but they would be in Finnish, so I don’t think most people are that interested, check http://mies.asia for more information though)
Obviously, women also face problems like rape and lack of leadership positions in corporations. On the political front, we have a female president and a female prime minister.
I’m not claiming definately that men suffer more, but this non-technical examination seems to imply it. At least it has not been proven that women suffer more nowadays.
Until such calculation has been made, I think it should be reasonable to direct 50% of equality resources for feminism, and 50% for masculism.
EDIT: There have been a downvote, but I don’t really understand why. Of course, Finland is only one nation, but similar lists have been made in USA for example. If this site assumes that we should only talk about USA, I think that’s unfair, since there’s a significant Finnish representation. I’m clearly talking about the situation in Finland, and the situation differs from country to country.
There are of course some countries, where women have less freedom than men etc. I don’t think it makes sense to talk about a global average here, since equity politics are not a global, but local question.