realising my previous response has exactly no persuasive power unless you’re already in agreement with me on a bunch of other things and I don’t want to just be jerking off on other people’s posts so here comes Response 2: Electric Boogaloo
The basic idea I completely failed to address in my response goes like this: Any negative attitude towards men has exactly the same weight and effect as negative attitudes against other oppressive groups, i.e not enough to actually cause hurt unless you’re commited to being a little bitch about it.
This is inaccurate in three ways.
First is the sheer volume of anti-male sentiment. There’s a whole lot more anger and disgust expressed at men than there is at white people, abled people, neurotypical people etc. Cishets come close but most of the time that turns out to just mean “queer person I don’t like” so that’s a whole thing on its own. Even if it’s just venting of jokes, the sheer volume of it can get overwhelming.
Second is the form it takes. When people complain about, say, neurotypical people, it generally takes the form of direct reactionss to oppression. They’ll complain about neurotypicals being shitty to them, about societal expectations, or turn a stereotype around by applying it to the dominant class. The jokes about men are kind of just... hate? A lot of it is just “men are ugly”, “men are dumb”, “men can’t take care of themselves”, “men are rude and violent and destructive”. There’s no taking apart of dominant narratives, really. Society already agrees with most of that. “Men are strong and women are pretty” is like the motto of tradwives. Men being dumb and bad at household tasks got old ten Family Guy seasons ago. We’ve heard it all. It’s not deconstructingth patriarchy or helping break down barriers between genders, if anything it’s reinforcing it.
Third is male identity itself, and how it functions. “White” and “neurotypical” and so on are mostly defined by the lack of marginalisation. You’re white if you’re not any other race and you’re neurotypical if you lack neurodivergence. And it’s kinda hard to get your feelings hurt over something like that. But for marginalised men? Being a man isn’t just absence, and it interacts with the rest of their identities. Gay men are treated as lesser men for their sexuality. They are seen as predatory, because man equals horny and horny plus unacceptable attraction target equals sex freak. Trans men have to fight to be acknowledged as men, and battle guilt for abandoning womanhood the whole way. For black men, the wholesome ideals of white masculinity are twisted to paint them as dangerous and violent, a threat to the weak and pretty white women that belong by rights to white men.
Being a man is important to people. So when it’s insulted, that hurts. And when you’ve had to fight to be seen as a man in the first place, it hurts even more. It’s a double-edged sword of being shoved out of manhood in wider society to then have that same manhood attacked in progressive communities. Anger towards the oppressor is natural, but it can be expressed in more constructive ways than this.
