It’s so charming how women say “I am afraid” and the first thing men do is say “you’re delusional.”
Discounting women’s feelings is one of the reasons we are afraid. We have to daily interact with people who treat us as less than fully human, even when they aren’t raping us. Your daily behavior makes you more unpredictable than a bear.
At least with a bear, you know where you stand. And you won’t be actively hunted.
I’m not addressing the fear itself. I address the culture of fear, the fearmongering, and an attempt to overgeneralize.
This goes further than a mutual exchange of fears and goes into the territory of a cultural phenomenon, a hostile one.
The fear is real, and I understand how it feels due to getting a childhood trauma myself. I’ve been there.
But we should focus on the actual solutions to the very issues you’re afraid of, not on getting hostile to each other.
My daily behavior around women (and men, too) builds on mutual trust and respect, I admire and deeply respect many women in my life, and I never treat anyone as someone “less than a human”. Same is true for most males, for all I know.
It is dangerous and counterproductive to just assume all males have bad intentions. We don’t.
As a (gay) dude, here’s the piece of the math that’s missing: expected outcome. If a woman (generally, there are exceptions) decides they want to harm a man, that involves planning, a taser, drugs, etc. It can be done, but it’s gonna take effort to not end up on the wrong side of this felony. If a man wants to harm a woman, that often simply involves a dark alley and a drop of patience. Note: this is not to say there aren’t women than can’t harm men in the same manner, simply that they are less common than the opposite case.
So yeah, being cognizant of one’s vulnerabilities is not a bad thing, and when your biological sex predisposes you to certain vulnerabilities (size, musculature, presence of testicles), it isn’t wrong to acknowledge and mitigate them. And when people tell you that they take certain steps to prevent being taken advantage of, it shows a distinct lack of empathy to not realize that maybe they have a point.
I see where you’re going with that, and I agree to some extent. It might be scary to be surrounded by people who can force you into anything without all that much effort, that can just stronghand you.
I always wondered how average women navigate intimate relationships with men in that regard. Must involve a lot of trust.
But at the same time, there are more dimensions to abuse than pure physical assault. Psychological violence is a thing, domestic violence is very real and allows for all sorts of preparations, etc. It is possible to trap a male into a cycle of horror of psychological and physical abuse, it’s just less likely to successfully assault random man on the street.
And most of violence is done by males too through these channels, not just attacking a woman in the forest.
As per steps and fears, I just fail to see how propagating fear helps to combat the issue. We should address abuse, its reasons, make the cultural shift that would help prevent it, not compare males to bears and be done with it.
Bringing up psychological/domestic violence is a red herring, we’re talking about dealing with strangers for the moment. Lessons here can be applied there, but don’t get off the plot.
People’s fears need to be heard. You talk about communication, but you aren’t listening. You’re dismissing women’s real fears about being raped (1 in 6) because your feelings are hurt that they would rather take their chances with a dangerous wild animal than a random man. So now, you’re subverting a very good conversation to assuage your own ego that feels like it’s being attacked (should probably look into that closer…) instead of listening to them and hearing that they are scared. It’s not “might be scary”. It’s “any day, for no reason, I may be raped”.
When you dismiss them because you don’t like the language, it only makes the language more extreme because they aren’t being listened to. Shut the fuck up and listen. When there’s actually a conversation happening, we can get where we all want to go. But that start with putting your feelings aside and listening. Because between “my feelings are hurt you compared me to a wild animal” and “society at large won’t address how widespread rape is”, gotta say that the hurt fee-fees come in a distant second.
We can have a conversation about being polite to each other when politeness doesn’t get people raped.
This was never supposed to be a red herring - rather an expansion of the topic of violence and abuse. But we can always return to a more narrow discussion.
I listen a lot to those fears. This is far from the only thread in the Universe where it is being discussed, and I never hijack serious topics on the matter, or, God forbid, someone telling their story. In there, I’m a compassionate listener. Right now, we’re discussing it under a meme, which sets a different standard.
The reason I’m bringing this up is not just because I feel hurt by such attitude and I’m not alone in this (although this needs to be addressed as well, because to some people it actually causes a lot of mental damage; just shouldn’t be number 1 priority), but rather because, as I see it, such attitudes end up exacerbating the issue of male abusers.
As you just said, not being listened to makes people radicalized. And yet, when I bring the very shushed topic up from the swamp of stigma and neglect, I’m immediately told to “shut the fuck up” by the very person that teaches me to listen.
Alienation and gender stereotypes, the constant depiction of males as animals go a long way into forming mindsets that end up being hostile to women. And when acts of such hostility inevitably happen, the solution on everyone’s lips is “let’s double down on that strategy, it sure should work”.
Society cannot adequately address the very issues you bring up without there being a conversation. And shushing any voices that disagree with the methods you suggest isn’t called “conversation”. The solution is multifaceted and cannot be solved by yelling at each other. Unfortunately, the modern culture has formed a common expectation that there is plenty of trolls and malicious actors that are waiting to hijack the conversation, muddy the waters, and keep doing their bad things, which divided people and made a lot of conversations impossible as everyone seems to expect that from their opponent. Here, I must assure you, I am very genuine in my take.
Now, I’m not saying mutual understanding will lead us to the world of ponies and rainbows, but it sure as hell will help better prevent terrible outcomes. We need communication, and what I’m trying to establish is exactly that - because where else? It’s not that there’s plenty of avenues.
This is a well reasoned argument. I apologize for being over inflammatory and ill effective at making my point.
You’re right, a conversation can’t happen with people being shushed. The issue is that when these red herrings come flying out, it has the same effect. When we expand the topic, the core thread gets lost in the noise and the people that are harmed notice that everyone has run off with their herring and we’ve lost the plot again. And then extreme language pops out (such as my telling you to shut up and listen) because the important part was drowned out by perfectly valid and tangential things.
Yeah, it sucks that men are compared to animals (because women never have been, but I digress). But I personally think that we can suffer an unfavorable comparison while we deal with a much larger issue. We can recognize that people do see us that way and that, instead of getting hurt over it, we can listen to them, see what they are saying, and demand better from ourselves and other men so that the bad comparison goes away naturally instead of trying to force it down. Telling women that your feelings are hurt by their words tells them that you stopped listening to them.
And yeah, I recognize that there’s a thread of “suck it up” in here that also isn’t good and should be addressed as a society. But I think it can wait till after we’ve dealt with the rape.
It’s alright - I’m happy we’re on the same page again :)
If I understand your concept right, it goes as following: by fighting alongside women, we can not only help them tackle the issues they face, but also change their perception of men, winning feminists’ loyalty in the fight for equality, all while aiding to make a cultural shift that makes the problem go away. And then we can have a dialogue.
I don’t expect this to work so perfectly, however. My expectation is that abusive behavior will not get away until we improve communication, including communication with those who are at highest risk of offending; it is a vital part of fighting the very issue. We should understand the drivers of such behavior, refer to firsthand exprience, let people be heard instead of radicalized, and see what we can do to help them avoid falling for traps that lead them to abuse.
In a general picture, of course, we can and should remain attentive to the issues raised by women, but we should also promote the culture of mutual attention, as many problems around gender can only be solved on both sides. Feminists can benefit greatly from better understanding of the male side of the story, and masculists should listen closely to women as well. By interacting with the other side, we can better understand the core issues that lay the foundation of what’s happening.
Unfortunately, many people in the feminist movement do not see such communication as something necessary, and some even claim it’s harmful, either as a distraction or as an active intervention of men to hijack the conversation (in fairness, such attempts are also made, so we need to derive the honest positions and uncover lies and traps). Some masculists (and I mean actual masculists, not traditionalists) answer to that with return hostility, claiming that women rarely reciprocate by listening to men, even though in reality I’ve seen many women actually being sympathetic to the masculism movement. Both, I think, fail to acknowledge they play a tug of war instead of acting together on the issue that’s much more two-sided than they anticipate.
Behind every person we see as evil, bad, abusive, is a complicated story of misunderstanding, trauma, toxic upbringing. No one’s evil for the sake of it, everyone thinks they’re righteous. It’s the idea of good, the understanding of the intricacies of the world around that differs. And we can’t address this by blanket and deaf measures.
Bad actors capitalizing on real things is also a red herring. 1 in 6 women get raped and you’re gonna let a few people who use social engineering in awful ways excuse that?
You know what a man has to do to get his way in public? Wait till there aren’t many people around, cover her mouth and move her out of public.
You know what he has to do in private? Same thing with fewer steps.
None of these things are good, but we’re only talking about one of them at the moment. So again, no one is saying there aren’t other evils, but you’re prioritizing your own feelings over their real rapes by diverting this conversation.
but you’re prioritizing your own feelings over their real rapes by diverting this conversation
There’s a reason why multiple replies can be given to the same comment on this platform. It’s because this way, unlike talking, we can actually have multiple threads of conversations at the same time.
I am not diverting any conversation, just creating another one.
1 in 6 women get raped and you’re gonna let a few people who use social engineering in awful ways excuse that
You are attempting to create a feelings based response using this sentence.
You know what I have to do, before any of the other things mentioned, to take advantage of any such opportunity? ::
Be alert to notice such an opportunity
Somehow convince myself that the outcome of each and every step is desirable
A person who would willingly rape someone, won’t have the 2nd barrier. Similarly, a person who would willingly use the social power given to women (specifically to prevent rape), won’t have the same, 2nd barrier.
Those who would, won’t find find themselves doing so even given the easiest of opportunities.
The above post and the server it is on, is much more open ended and doesn’t mandate a certain specific type of violence. You seem to be having a problem with anyone responding to you with any other dimension of, what is essentially, a bandit - victim interaction.
Also, how many of those “1 in 6 women” managed to get away with lying?
I’m not claiming rape to not be a problem (as you might want to state), but statistics are not going to help win against it either. Specially considering how hard it is to determine the truth of it.
I’m focusing on a specific thing because the thought experiment that brought this whole thing up was about that specific thing. Creating a new conversation is diverting the larger conversation because you’re ignoring the things you don’t like (in before you accuse me of the same).
You are attempting to create a feelings based response using this sentence.
No, I’m implying that the real rapes of 1 in 6 women are more important than the impossible to quantify number of bad actors manipulating people for nefarious ends. Which also goes to your ‘women are lying’ point.
Also, how many of those “1 in 6 women” managed to get away with lying?
I’m not claiming rape to not be a problem (as you might want to state)
You are implicitly doing so by saying this in the first place. The issue of bad actors of all kinds (both liars and rapists) need addressed, but the conversation that the thought experiment has dredged up is focused on one of them. We can talk about those other things when they are a widespread societal problem that a significant proportion of the population decides to ignore because they don’t like the way the ignored are discussing it.
I’m not leading anything. I’m saying that addressing rape is more important than people’s feelings being hurt.
I’m also saying bad actors are the minority case of take and are traditionally brought up as a red getting.
Finally, I wasn’t creating feelings, I was pretty obviously pointing out that one thing is more important than the other to the extent that it should be obvious. If it is not, I’ll be happy to explain because I often don’t get things that are obvious to others and can relate.
If you feel like you are being attacked by rape victims saying they don’t trust men, you should probably look into why.
No one assumes all men have bad intentions. Dramatic, much?
Why is it so hard for men to understand that being cautious around all men is not the same thing as thinking all men are dangerous? It’s not that subtle of a difference.
There really is quite some amount of women that assumes exactly that, and what troubles me is that their amount appears to be growing, cementing a large cultural divide and growing hostility. Which, in turn, doesn’t make men safer either.
I understand the caution, though, even though it saddens me as it means perfectly reasonable men often have harder time communicating with women on the same level other women do.
Communication is key, and this key is more often than before thrown away.
Why is it so hard to understand that being cautious is the very opposite of “I’d pick a bear”? You have to assume all men, or rather a very large percentage (more than a chance of a wild grizzly mauling you) have bad intentions and are willing to act on them, but they only need an opportunity (i.e. be in a dark forest). The choice outlined here seems to be “would you face a murderer and a rapist or a wild animal” instead of “a man you don’t know or a wild animal”. That’s the problem “men” see with this hypothetical - there is a difference between validating feelings and outright misandry.
It’s so charming how women say “I am afraid” and the first thing men do is say “you’re delusional.”
Discounting women’s feelings is one of the reasons we are afraid. We have to daily interact with people who treat us as less than fully human, even when they aren’t raping us. Your daily behavior makes you more unpredictable than a bear.
At least with a bear, you know where you stand. And you won’t be actively hunted.
You need to step away from the Internet and stop indulging your victim hood fetish
I’m not addressing the fear itself. I address the culture of fear, the fearmongering, and an attempt to overgeneralize.
This goes further than a mutual exchange of fears and goes into the territory of a cultural phenomenon, a hostile one.
The fear is real, and I understand how it feels due to getting a childhood trauma myself. I’ve been there.
But we should focus on the actual solutions to the very issues you’re afraid of, not on getting hostile to each other.
My daily behavior around women (and men, too) builds on mutual trust and respect, I admire and deeply respect many women in my life, and I never treat anyone as someone “less than a human”. Same is true for most males, for all I know.
It is dangerous and counterproductive to just assume all males have bad intentions. We don’t.
As a (gay) dude, here’s the piece of the math that’s missing: expected outcome. If a woman (generally, there are exceptions) decides they want to harm a man, that involves planning, a taser, drugs, etc. It can be done, but it’s gonna take effort to not end up on the wrong side of this felony. If a man wants to harm a woman, that often simply involves a dark alley and a drop of patience. Note: this is not to say there aren’t women than can’t harm men in the same manner, simply that they are less common than the opposite case.
So yeah, being cognizant of one’s vulnerabilities is not a bad thing, and when your biological sex predisposes you to certain vulnerabilities (size, musculature, presence of testicles), it isn’t wrong to acknowledge and mitigate them. And when people tell you that they take certain steps to prevent being taken advantage of, it shows a distinct lack of empathy to not realize that maybe they have a point.
I see where you’re going with that, and I agree to some extent. It might be scary to be surrounded by people who can force you into anything without all that much effort, that can just stronghand you.
I always wondered how average women navigate intimate relationships with men in that regard. Must involve a lot of trust.
But at the same time, there are more dimensions to abuse than pure physical assault. Psychological violence is a thing, domestic violence is very real and allows for all sorts of preparations, etc. It is possible to trap a male into a cycle of horror of psychological and physical abuse, it’s just less likely to successfully assault random man on the street.
And most of violence is done by males too through these channels, not just attacking a woman in the forest.
As per steps and fears, I just fail to see how propagating fear helps to combat the issue. We should address abuse, its reasons, make the cultural shift that would help prevent it, not compare males to bears and be done with it.
Bringing up psychological/domestic violence is a red herring, we’re talking about dealing with strangers for the moment. Lessons here can be applied there, but don’t get off the plot.
People’s fears need to be heard. You talk about communication, but you aren’t listening. You’re dismissing women’s real fears about being raped (1 in 6) because your feelings are hurt that they would rather take their chances with a dangerous wild animal than a random man. So now, you’re subverting a very good conversation to assuage your own ego that feels like it’s being attacked (should probably look into that closer…) instead of listening to them and hearing that they are scared. It’s not “might be scary”. It’s “any day, for no reason, I may be raped”.
When you dismiss them because you don’t like the language, it only makes the language more extreme because they aren’t being listened to. Shut the fuck up and listen. When there’s actually a conversation happening, we can get where we all want to go. But that start with putting your feelings aside and listening. Because between “my feelings are hurt you compared me to a wild animal” and “society at large won’t address how widespread rape is”, gotta say that the hurt fee-fees come in a distant second.
We can have a conversation about being polite to each other when politeness doesn’t get people raped.
This was never supposed to be a red herring - rather an expansion of the topic of violence and abuse. But we can always return to a more narrow discussion.
I listen a lot to those fears. This is far from the only thread in the Universe where it is being discussed, and I never hijack serious topics on the matter, or, God forbid, someone telling their story. In there, I’m a compassionate listener. Right now, we’re discussing it under a meme, which sets a different standard.
The reason I’m bringing this up is not just because I feel hurt by such attitude and I’m not alone in this (although this needs to be addressed as well, because to some people it actually causes a lot of mental damage; just shouldn’t be number 1 priority), but rather because, as I see it, such attitudes end up exacerbating the issue of male abusers.
As you just said, not being listened to makes people radicalized. And yet, when I bring the very shushed topic up from the swamp of stigma and neglect, I’m immediately told to “shut the fuck up” by the very person that teaches me to listen.
Alienation and gender stereotypes, the constant depiction of males as animals go a long way into forming mindsets that end up being hostile to women. And when acts of such hostility inevitably happen, the solution on everyone’s lips is “let’s double down on that strategy, it sure should work”.
Society cannot adequately address the very issues you bring up without there being a conversation. And shushing any voices that disagree with the methods you suggest isn’t called “conversation”. The solution is multifaceted and cannot be solved by yelling at each other. Unfortunately, the modern culture has formed a common expectation that there is plenty of trolls and malicious actors that are waiting to hijack the conversation, muddy the waters, and keep doing their bad things, which divided people and made a lot of conversations impossible as everyone seems to expect that from their opponent. Here, I must assure you, I am very genuine in my take.
Now, I’m not saying mutual understanding will lead us to the world of ponies and rainbows, but it sure as hell will help better prevent terrible outcomes. We need communication, and what I’m trying to establish is exactly that - because where else? It’s not that there’s plenty of avenues.
This is a well reasoned argument. I apologize for being over inflammatory and ill effective at making my point.
You’re right, a conversation can’t happen with people being shushed. The issue is that when these red herrings come flying out, it has the same effect. When we expand the topic, the core thread gets lost in the noise and the people that are harmed notice that everyone has run off with their herring and we’ve lost the plot again. And then extreme language pops out (such as my telling you to shut up and listen) because the important part was drowned out by perfectly valid and tangential things.
Yeah, it sucks that men are compared to animals (because women never have been, but I digress). But I personally think that we can suffer an unfavorable comparison while we deal with a much larger issue. We can recognize that people do see us that way and that, instead of getting hurt over it, we can listen to them, see what they are saying, and demand better from ourselves and other men so that the bad comparison goes away naturally instead of trying to force it down. Telling women that your feelings are hurt by their words tells them that you stopped listening to them.
And yeah, I recognize that there’s a thread of “suck it up” in here that also isn’t good and should be addressed as a society. But I think it can wait till after we’ve dealt with the rape.
It’s alright - I’m happy we’re on the same page again :)
If I understand your concept right, it goes as following: by fighting alongside women, we can not only help them tackle the issues they face, but also change their perception of men, winning feminists’ loyalty in the fight for equality, all while aiding to make a cultural shift that makes the problem go away. And then we can have a dialogue.
I don’t expect this to work so perfectly, however. My expectation is that abusive behavior will not get away until we improve communication, including communication with those who are at highest risk of offending; it is a vital part of fighting the very issue. We should understand the drivers of such behavior, refer to firsthand exprience, let people be heard instead of radicalized, and see what we can do to help them avoid falling for traps that lead them to abuse.
In a general picture, of course, we can and should remain attentive to the issues raised by women, but we should also promote the culture of mutual attention, as many problems around gender can only be solved on both sides. Feminists can benefit greatly from better understanding of the male side of the story, and masculists should listen closely to women as well. By interacting with the other side, we can better understand the core issues that lay the foundation of what’s happening.
Unfortunately, many people in the feminist movement do not see such communication as something necessary, and some even claim it’s harmful, either as a distraction or as an active intervention of men to hijack the conversation (in fairness, such attempts are also made, so we need to derive the honest positions and uncover lies and traps). Some masculists (and I mean actual masculists, not traditionalists) answer to that with return hostility, claiming that women rarely reciprocate by listening to men, even though in reality I’ve seen many women actually being sympathetic to the masculism movement. Both, I think, fail to acknowledge they play a tug of war instead of acting together on the issue that’s much more two-sided than they anticipate.
Behind every person we see as evil, bad, abusive, is a complicated story of misunderstanding, trauma, toxic upbringing. No one’s evil for the sake of it, everyone thinks they’re righteous. It’s the idea of good, the understanding of the intricacies of the world around that differs. And we can’t address this by blanket and deaf measures.
You’re forgetting something.
All a woman needs to do, is:
And there’s a good chance an angry mob will beat up the guy before even thinking to ask.
Even better if she wants to snatch something and run.
Bad actors capitalizing on real things is also a red herring. 1 in 6 women get raped and you’re gonna let a few people who use social engineering in awful ways excuse that?
You know what a man has to do to get his way in public? Wait till there aren’t many people around, cover her mouth and move her out of public.
You know what he has to do in private? Same thing with fewer steps.
None of these things are good, but we’re only talking about one of them at the moment. So again, no one is saying there aren’t other evils, but you’re prioritizing your own feelings over their real rapes by diverting this conversation.
There’s a reason why multiple replies can be given to the same comment on this platform. It’s because this way, unlike talking, we can actually have multiple threads of conversations at the same time. I am not diverting any conversation, just creating another one.
You are attempting to create a feelings based response using this sentence.
You know what I have to do, before any of the other things mentioned, to take advantage of any such opportunity? ::
A person who would willingly rape someone, won’t have the 2nd barrier. Similarly, a person who would willingly use the social power given to women (specifically to prevent rape), won’t have the same, 2nd barrier.
Those who would, won’t find find themselves doing so even given the easiest of opportunities.
The above post and the server it is on, is much more open ended and doesn’t mandate a certain specific type of violence. You seem to be having a problem with anyone responding to you with any other dimension of, what is essentially, a bandit - victim interaction.
Also, how many of those “1 in 6 women” managed to get away with lying?
I’m not claiming rape to not be a problem (as you might want to state), but statistics are not going to help win against it either. Specially considering how hard it is to determine the truth of it.
Anti Commercial-AI license
I’m focusing on a specific thing because the thought experiment that brought this whole thing up was about that specific thing. Creating a new conversation is diverting the larger conversation because you’re ignoring the things you don’t like (in before you accuse me of the same).
No, I’m implying that the real rapes of 1 in 6 women are more important than the impossible to quantify number of bad actors manipulating people for nefarious ends. Which also goes to your ‘women are lying’ point.
You are implicitly doing so by saying this in the first place. The issue of bad actors of all kinds (both liars and rapists) need addressed, but the conversation that the thought experiment has dredged up is focused on one of them. We can talk about those other things when they are a widespread societal problem that a significant proportion of the population decides to ignore because they don’t like the way the ignored are discussing it.
You are attempting to create a feelings based response using this phrase. Is that clear enough.
I’m not going to be a broken record here just to explain myself to someone who might try leading this conversation into accusing me of rape.
I’m not leading anything. I’m saying that addressing rape is more important than people’s feelings being hurt.
I’m also saying bad actors are the minority case of take and are traditionally brought up as a red getting.
Finally, I wasn’t creating feelings, I was pretty obviously pointing out that one thing is more important than the other to the extent that it should be obvious. If it is not, I’ll be happy to explain because I often don’t get things that are obvious to others and can relate.
If you feel like you are being attacked by rape victims saying they don’t trust men, you should probably look into why.
No one assumes all men have bad intentions. Dramatic, much?
Why is it so hard for men to understand that being cautious around all men is not the same thing as thinking all men are dangerous? It’s not that subtle of a difference.
There really is quite some amount of women that assumes exactly that, and what troubles me is that their amount appears to be growing, cementing a large cultural divide and growing hostility. Which, in turn, doesn’t make men safer either.
I understand the caution, though, even though it saddens me as it means perfectly reasonable men often have harder time communicating with women on the same level other women do.
Communication is key, and this key is more often than before thrown away.
Because men are stupid pieces of shit who don’t care about how or what women feel. The dude you’re replying to is a perfect example.
Why is it so hard to understand that being cautious is the very opposite of “I’d pick a bear”? You have to assume all men, or rather a very large percentage (more than a chance of a wild grizzly mauling you) have bad intentions and are willing to act on them, but they only need an opportunity (i.e. be in a dark forest). The choice outlined here seems to be “would you face a murderer and a rapist or a wild animal” instead of “a man you don’t know or a wild animal”. That’s the problem “men” see with this hypothetical - there is a difference between validating feelings and outright misandry.