Sexism against Men in Media/Entertainment/Culture (Feminism and Misandry Gone Wild)

Yes please continue to tell us of the great oppression faced by us males in all levels of society.

 

Yeah I'm too busy enjoying my assumed status and easy access to economic and cultural capital to really analyze how all of that is still just so unfair!

 

Calling one's masculinity into question for the purpose of advertising is actually in support of the overall masculine ideal. It creates a perceived need for the product in order to maintain or restore one's masculinity.

 

I am a man. And that isn't happening. On the whole, men are treated WAY better by the media than women are.

What you're saying would be a valid point if we were working from a level playing field in the first place, but we're not.

Men are dominant in our society.

Most media is geared toward men.

Depictions of sexuality in media are, nine times out of ten, geared toward heterosexual male sexuality and no other kind.

Most of our leaders are men.

Women are shamed for their sexuality while men are praised for it.

Female soldiers still aren't allowed to fight on the front lines.

Women can't compete in professional athletics.

Women, on average, make less money than men.

Women are victims of sexual assault far more often than men. What's worse, women who are victims of sexual assault are regularly accused of lying and "overreacting."

You can't find a single article online that's written by a woman on the subject of sex or sexuality, that's free to be commented on by the public, where no one is criticizing her and attacking her based on her gender ("***** just needs to get laid" and other such horrid comments). And it's not like there are a few comments like that, they dominate the comment sections of such threads.

And, historically, up until very recent history, women have been systematically portrayed by the media as being weak, stupid, and emotionally unstable.

Women come to the table already at a serious disadvantage. Portraying the reverse, a smart cool woman with a doofy husband, does level the playing field, because it works to undo centuries of the media burning the notion that women are useless for anything but housework and sex into the public consciousness.

It's not saying "women are superior," because our culture is still stuck on "men are superior."

We weren't talking about domestic abuse before. We were talking about commercials where the woman is portrayed as smart and cool and the man is portrayed as dumb and lazy. I never once said that women hitting men in the media was a good thing.

I agree that male victims of domestic abuse aren't taken seriously, especially when their abuser is female, and that's an absolute tragedy.

But that doesn't stem from any kind of "conspiracy" to portray women as superior to men, it in fact stems from misogyny. It stems from the notion that women are weak and harmless, and that any violence inflicted by a woman on a man isn't worth taking seriously, and is in fact comical because the man wasn't man enough to defend himself when a girl tried to hit him.

Male victims of domestic abuse who's abusers are female aren't taken seriously because it's still burned into our brains that women are weak and "real men" should be strong enough to defend themselves from a "little girl."

That attitude isn't misandrist , it's misogynist.

Sure, there are misandrists in the world, and they're bigoted jerks, but misandry isn't a systematic form of oppression in our society. Misogyny, on the other hand, is.

 

There are of course many intersecting status markers of gender, class, race, age and many others, and many men are indeed marginalized along those other axes.

The selling out of other men is actually a major component of the predominant masculine ideal, which is centered around the domination of others.

Historically, emasculation has been used as a tool to dominate other races cultural groups and classes as well. The same forces that have often prevented minority groups from positions of status or from entering areas of the economic process that allow for advancement also in turn prevented the males of such groups from meeting the culturally prescribed standards for male behavior as dictated by the dominant groups (i.e. providing for ones family, involvement in the community, involvement in politics etc.) On occasions in which religion and cultural patterns have been forced upon conquered groups, such attacks have disrupted the roles that males played prior in their families and communities.

Dominant groups dismantle the male role within the groups, withhold the ability to enter into the masculine roles of the dominant groups and then heavily criticize them for their ability to perform as "men" as defined by the dominant group.

The work of men is detrimental to men. It is ultimately detrimental to all except for the elite few who are actually able to achieve and therefore dictate the ideals within our culture. It is for this reason, that it is detrimental to the vast majority of everyone, that feminists and other theorists oppose traditional conceptions of patriarchy, not for some kind of prejudice towards men.

 

Absolutely none of that is true.

 

Before I explain how wrong you are, I just want to lead in with this:

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And there are a wide variety of reasons depending on the particular career. For many of which there are factors that have historically and currently act against women entering such fields.

And the patterns shift. Clerical work was formerly considered high paying work and was mostly performed by men. It wasn't until a devaluing of clerical work that women entered into the profession in large numbers. Similar patterns exist in a number of other professions. There are positions that require the same amount of physical labor and education and yet there are predictable patterns of pay ratio between the different positions and the ratio between men and women filling the positions.

As a society, we still tend to devalue economically the roles we define as "women's work."

 

This is going to be good.

 

You notice how little movement there actually is when it comes to actually work as policy makers? Also, you act as if this "feminist agenda" of people being fairly paid for their work is some terrible force.

 

Please, cite some works of feminist theorists that would in any way bear this out.

You wish to critique feminism but you apparently have not a single clue as to what the term indicates. You speak of some conspiracy, of a "feminist agenda" and yet you incorporate exactly 0 of the themes and actions of modern feminist movements. You are, in short, completely operating from a stance of prejudice and literal ignorance.

Feminism, in its many incarnations, is fundamentally a critique of the forces of domination. While originally this was centered around a critique of traditional conceptions and enforcement of patriarchy this has developed to further critiques not just of domination along gender lines, but of sexuality, of race, of class, of age, of ability. Its aim, along with the understanding of such systems is to alleviate the influence of forces marginalization.

 

Again have you considered why?

I will get into them if you wish, but there are a wide number of forces at work that lead to the science fields continuing to be male dominated even as fewer men go to college.


Also yes, women do seek out more flexible positions, and that is closely tied to the fact that even as families rely on two incomes we expect far more work within the home from working women and mothers than we do from working men and fathers.

This will of course kick off debates about gender roles and theories about whether maternal roles are natural, and fine, I'll open that can of worms, but the fact of the matter is, house work has little to do with biology and yet expectations for domestic work remain squarely on the shoulders of women. Even as more and more women tend to have employment patterns more closely reflecting those of men, there has yet to be a corresponding shift of men taking the labor needed to raise children and maintain household chores.

Un-married, childless women statistically make wages more similar to men.

As a society, even as we increasingly depend on the work of mothers, we penalize them for it.

 

I didn't see that. I also don't see what the problem with that is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaze#The_.22male_gaze.22_in_feminist_theory

http://it.stlawu.edu/~global/glossary/gaze1.html

http://www.slideshare.net/fleckneymike/the-male-gaze-laura-mulvey

http://bechdeltest.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLF6sAAMb4s

No, the problem is that you're completely sidestepping the fact that it's significantly harder for a woman to be elected to public office than men. That's a very clear indicator of how deeply rooted in our culture misogyny still is. If women have as much influence as you say, then there would be more female politicians, period.

Also, if women exert that much control over policy, then why is it that we're constantly teetering on the edge of reproductive rights being taken away, and why states are able to pass laws that make it mandatory for doctors to verbally shame women for getting an abortion before they actually perform it? If women exert as much control over our politics as you imply, then you'd think it'd be easy for them to promote feminist issues, not a constant tooth and nail fight to the death.

Yeah, that's not what I was talking about at all.

If a man sleeps with a lot of women, he's considered a "stud" and praised for it. If a woman sleeps with a lot of men, she's labeled a "****" and shamed for it. That is a very real and very pervasive thing in our society.

While you bring up a good point with your (unrelated to my point) example, you're still wrong.

First of all, most men have been conditioned by society to view women largely in a sexual context, and to believe that they are to some degree entitled to a woman's sexuality. That's not to say men are inherently that way, it's a result of misogyny in our culture warping people's development in a negative way. Because of this, women are very often victims of sexual assault perpetrated by a man. Studies show that one and four women have been sexually assaulted in some way, ranging from being groped on the street to coerced intercourse to being violently raped.

Most men who commit an act of sexual assault aren't soulless psychopaths. They're guys who, because of lousy conditioning they received as children, viewed themselves as more entitled to a woman's sexuality than that woman was entitled to not be touched if she didn't want to. These are the guys who fondle a drunk girl at a club, these are the guys who emotionally blackmail their dates into having sex with them, these are the guys who inappropriately touch a woman passed out on a couch. All of these things are sexually abusive and all of them are things that a lot of men have been conditioned to see as "harmless fun."

When you see a sign like that, nine times out of ten it's not saying "all men are rapists deep down." It's saying "our society teaches young men that certain activities are 'harmless fun' when in fact they're acts of violation of a woman's body. Make sure you don't go too far in the heat of the moment."

Secondly, when people do say that men are inherently animalistic sex fiends that can't control their urges, that's a result of misogyny in our society, not misandry. That's a reaction to a society saying that men are the only ones with any sexual drive or agency, that they're the only ones who ever desire and initiate sex, that women have no sex drive of their own and are only sexual for the pleasure of them, and that society then justifying acts or rape that happen because people with that way with "well, boys will be boys."

It all comes from a culture saying that men are the ones who want to **** and women are the ones who get ****ed, and that's pure misogyny.

Well, yeah. She was a soccer player trying out for pro football. They're not even the same sport. It seems like the issue isn't that she's a woman, the issue is that she tried out for a sport she didn't know how to play.

On average, yeah. But there are women who're physically capable of playing any professional sport. There are quite a few of them. And they do play those sports, foobtall, baseball, basketball, hockey, all of them, in semi-pro leagues, but they never have the chance to play for any of the big teams.

And since pro sports deal with physically exceptional people anyway, I really don't see how it would be "unfair" to allow women who are able to play pro sports well to play pro sports.

... which stems from the cultural standard that women are the nurturers and homemakers and that men are the breadwinners.

Which is still pretty damn misogynist.

Also, that link ignores the fact that it's also a result of it being more difficult for women to be promoted to higher payed possessions due to institutionalized sexism in the workplace.


Dude, men aren't a marginalized minority being oppressed by women. You have it completely backwards.

 

No, feminism is about equality, and the notion that it's about "female superiority" is a bold faced lie.

Addendum: Cite some works of a feminist theorist who ISN'T Valerie Solanas, because she was a fringe lunatic and absolutely no one with any credibility in the feminist community takes her seriously.

 

Oh sentinelmind, you make such wonderful threads.

 

Seriously, this is some Poe's Law level ignorance of the topic of discussion.