LogFAQs > #965185372

Kyuubi4269 posted...

If someone was talking about a bad bowl of cereal and and they called it toxic cereal, I'd wonder what the f*** is wrong with them, cereal isn't toxic. If you're talking about cars, and you talk about "toxic cars", I'd assume you were talking about something about cars that is toxic in some context. If you referred to toxic women, I would assume you're talking about women as a whole as toxic without futher context. The adjective you use is key, you can't use something as definitive as colour the same way as something as subjective as toxicity.

That's... not how adjectives work at all. If you're talking about toxic cereal, it's because the cereal you're discussing is toxic, not an effort to somehow paint all cereal as being toxic (unless you specifically say that). Toxicity has some subjectivity to it, yes, but that doesn't change that using an adjective narrows discussion of its subject, rather than applying to the entire concept.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

The idea of rape culture being able to be described as toxic femininity, and yet it's a term that is essentially only used as a retort and claimed to not even exist by some.

Yes, people kind of suck at words sometimes. It's not a particularly useful option, for the reasons I outlined, but the option exists.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

I'd say it's pretty stupid to bring in gender at all in the term "toxic masculinity" for precisely the same reason, it is gendering behaviours which is completely unnecessary for engaging with the problem. As you say, toxic behaviours are toxic no matter what. So when the intent is call out toxic behaviour, what is the benefit of gendering the language?

Because the problem is that the toxic behaviours are being gendered for the sake of justifying them. The entire concept boils down to "this thing is okay because that's just how men are supposed to be." Engaging with the problem entails challenging that attitude, because it's that attitude that underpins the entire issue.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

I don't see how that isn't also misandrist. Being dismissive or patronising of men isn't not misandry because it's not aggressive, it's equally devaluing of men's autonomy and humanity. Treating women as incompetent or emotionally unstable is very much misogyny, and we rightly call it out as such. I don't see a point where such things can be delineated.

*Shrug* You can argue that. I'm drawing the distinction on the basis of deliberateness and directness, but ultimately that's pretty subjective and arbitrary and you could pretty easily argue in favour of drawing it somewhere else if you think it would work better.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Here's the rub; it's not a hand wave in any way, it's directly responding to the claims

It's roughly the equivalent of answering "why is my basement flooding?" with "because there's water coming in." It's not wrong, but it's such an incomplete answer as to be entirely useless.

Kyuubi4269 posted...

But I'm pretty comfortable in my assumptions why,

And what would those assumptions be?

Kyuubi4269 posted...

That is how profiteering works, yes. There's less profit in manipulating men socially when men's brains are physiologically less developed socially. A businesses' job is to manipulate the market to buy, and men and women are both targetted to the best of marketers' ability. I don't believe the success of manipulating women in this way is in any way toxic on a gendered line, it's just classically predatory, and this bait works better on women.

Absolutely none of which does anything to challenge the idea that women are disadvantaged by that norm. All you've done is say that you don't have a problem with it, which doesn't mean much of anything (especially given some of the other things you haven't had a problem with)

Kyuubi4269 posted...
Yup, and as above, that's a product of demand. Men have less to lose from risky sex so have less motivation to pay for means to avoid pregnancy.

Which, again, disadvantages women. You can rationalize the existence of these disadvantages all you want, but it doesn't make them go away.

Kyuubi4269 posted...
however when you are talking about society and social issues, there are none. It's not the job of society to create equity.

If society doesn't create equity, however, then society has created advantages/disadvantages. There's no neutral outcome here: whatever society does will have an impact on equity, for better or worse, and can therefore be blamed for it.

Kyuubi4269 posted...
That is a rather important point. I see a lot of women claiming precisely the inverse, and quite successfully, citing male privilege. He's doing exactly what many have done before him but inversed.

The key difference being that women statistically making less money than men is a fact, so citing some of the factors associated with that reality as contributing to financial hardship is justifiable. Inversely, men do not statistically make less money than women, so attempting to blame financial hardship on that non-reality would make about as much sense as blaming your flooding basement on water being dry.