LogFAQs > #951291540

Philip027 posted...

I really don't care what you or anyone else in this topic chooses to interpret those words as, or what they think the "central point" is.

You don't care about the actual meaning behind what's being said? That's not the most effective way to approach communication.

Philip027 posted...

Unless you are the mom in question, you can only make guesses as to what she "really" means.

This is true of all communication: You're only ever making the best guess you can based on the information you have available, including the words chosen, the conversational context the speaker provides for the words, and the socio-cultural context in which they are speaking. Limiting yourself to strict literal interpretations of words while ignoring context is going to result in you sacrificing a sizable amount of your ability to understand the people and world around you.

deoxxys posted...

I like how everything is somehow about how its harmful to women, it can never just be for "people".

To be fair, that's kind of the point of feminism: Addressing problems that harm women. Complaining that they focus on that over looking at how problems harm men is roughly akin to complaining that your plumber didn't install your new lamp while they were fixing your leaky tub. It also really doesn't help that a whole lot of very legitimate men's rights issues often only get brought up to discredit feminists and dismiss whatever they're complaining about, not in a genuine effort to recognize them as problems and look for solutions. "Stop complaining about your problem because I also have a problem" is a thoroughly unproductive approach, but that's how a lot of "MRA" types respond to feminism.

That said, pretty much everything you're talking about there falls under the umbrella of "toxic masculinity," which gets plenty of attention. Also, any effort to effect a cultural shift away from treating sex and virginity like such a big deal is inevitably going to affect everyone whose sense of self-worth is being attacked based on how much sex they do/don't have. That's the fun thing about feminism: when you fix society believing too strongly that women should be/act a certain way and do certain things, those things stop being associated with femininity and therefore become more acceptable for men to do.

That doesn't mean feminism will single-handedly fix every problem men have (perhaps most notably, could we stop normalizing male genital mutilation?), but it does mean that characterizing them as being opposed to one another is often pretty silly.

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