lookatthisfuckingoppressor:

obliviouslunarium:

lookatthisfuckingoppressor:

Yo, MRAs.

If you want to end selective service, there are countless anti-war and anarchist organizations that have been working on that.

If you are upset about dangerous work conditions, look into the labor movement.

If you are upset about circumcision, support the medical professionals looking to end the practice.

If you’re upset about men’s prison sentences, join a group critical of prisons, especially private prisons. Hell, work to shut down the prison industrial complex.

If you’re upset about men being raped, support an organization that teaches consent or one of the many groups that assist survivors.

Your movement isn’t just problematic, it’s superfluous. You’re just cherry-picking issues other movements already address and then only coming up with solutions for them that at best help only men, or at worst, only harm women.

p.s. I’m seriously tired of people arguing that the solution to men doing more dangerous work is for women to get into those fields, when really, as few people as possible should put their lives at risk to earn a living.

What’s wrong with working on all of those at once (cough, masculinism) instead of joining a billion different movements?

Feminists do it, and they also have other movements. What’s wrong with being able to choose a big group instead of subdivisions?

Feminism exists because women have been denied access to institutional power. This is also why people of color, the working class, LBGTQAI+ folks, the disabled, etc have created social movements. Social movements exist to provide a voice to those who have been denied one both explicitly and more subtly. Men, on the other hand, dominate nearly every political, social and economic sphere. Men are also more likely to be heard in interpersonal interactions and in movements that contain men, their voices tend to be respected and amplified over those of women. It’s only due to serious issues of entitlement and privilege that men feel that they, as a group, need to be heard even more over women.

Let’s also look at how men have chosen to use their institutional power. If there aren’t discussions or media celebrating fathers or encouraging men to be more open about their feelings and issues: it’s because men have decided to not to prioritize those discussions. Men have prioritized preserving their dominance and the gender roles that afford them influence over the well-being of women and non-binary people and in some cases even over the well-being of men they wield other forms of power over (men of color, gay men, trans men, etc).

The men’s rights movement highlights this wonderfully. Their stated intention is to do things like support male survivors of sexual assault, to criticize and transform the more dangerous aspects of masculinity, and to encourage and facilitate men being more involved in their children’s lives. In practice, their “activism” accomplishes the opposite in all three cases. They invest tons of energy trying to discredit and harass rape survivors, opposing those attempting to make consent a key part of our cultural discourse about sex, and making it harder for rape survivors to find justice. They are hostile to any discussions about problematic aspects of masculinity, ranting about the “demonization of men” or the (and yes, I’ve actually heard this) “feminization of men”. They seem far more dedicated to preserving what they believe is the right of men to refuse to support their children than to making it easier for men to be a part of their children’s lives.