Thanks, I am aware of patriarchy and the way it harms men. I don’t take the issue with men going against it, and it should absolutely be dismantled as it screws pretty much everyone, women and men.
What I do take issue with is that many just adopted the feminist approach and expect women to fix it for everyone, despite the fact feminism is and always has been about women, and what it does for men is rather collateral. Men are commonly not seen by feminists as someone whose voice matters much inside the movement, and if men don’t have much representation in it, we can’t expect it to be fair to us.
As per intersectionality, I’ve always found its ties with feminism concerning, much for the same reasons. Intersectional feminists are concerned with the issues of Black women, for example, but are Black men proportionally covered? We should accept that a white disabled man and a black able woman are both disadvantaged, and do our best to help everyone who is disadvantaged by any means. Intersectionality shouldn’t focus on women, or Black people, or disabled, or poor, or someone with mental issues, or anyone is particular; it should be about recognizing everything that drags people down and figuring out what can be done to shorten the divide.
I do think there can be more done to help Men within feminist spheres. I think one of the hard parts from a woman’s perspective is “Not all Men” men taking over debates in female circles and “Man-o-sphere” bros taking over any man and man discussion. Its good to have communities to discuss these things
I think focusing on feminism as the sole antisexist movement is inherently extremely imbalanced, as feminism was not made with men in mind to begin with, and the best you can hope for is being a secondary supporter in what’s written by the women for the women.
There was a good wave around a decade ago of feminists and masculists uniting to combat all forms of antisexism, in all directions. Men got more educated in womens’ issues, women got more educated in mens’, and people were genuinely attempting to resolve the complex issues that form on both sides while supporting each other.
But then loud and proud feminism (as opposed to reasonable and equality-oriented one) came back again to destroy it. Whether it’s more contentious and thereby boosted by the algorithms of social media on which most of us feeds, or there was some genuine shift that initiated it, or both - but peace has yet again lost its place to a dictate, and the dictate caused a reaction - so now instead of feminists and masculists working together we have feminists trying to impose their view on men (of which I suspect this place as well), and radicalized young men saying “fuck it, we’re not heard and we’ll make ourselves heard”, which roughly translates into “we ignore what harms patriarchy does us and are set for revenge through it, not realizing we’re just diving deeper into the mud pile”.
One of the main points of discipline of /r/menslib back on reddit and now here is to avoid, at all costs, saying “all feminists”, as more MRAy places are prone to do, which in turn do tend to have a discipline regarding “all women”, that’d be incel and Tate bro talk. Maybe such an approach could be mirrored and cause something beautiful. Like a disarmament treaty of sorts.
