I just stepped down as moderator from all five of the subreddits I used to moderate over on Reddit. I just can’t ethically justify continued activity on Reddit, and especially free volunteer labour for an openly greedy company that is engaged in scummy behaviour, forcing mods to open protesting communities or be demoted.
So my online activism for boys and men is now focused here and on Mastodon. And I am welcoming everyone coming over from Reddit, especially from LeftWingMaleAdvocates, the sub I put in the majority of my time and effort as a mod.
Let’s build something good here, as we did previously on Reddit. It appears we have a wider reach here, so let’s debate in good faith and with civil manners.
Here, in this magazine (i.e. community or subreddit in Kbin-speak) we wish to discuss and spread awareness of various issues that disproportionately affect males.
We believe men are not being well-served by either side of the mainstream political spectrum. We oppose the right wing’s exploitation of men’s issues as a wedge to recruit men to inegalitarian traditional values. But we also oppose feminist attempts to deny male issues, or shoehorn them into a biased ideology that blames “male privilege” and guilt-trips men.
We have no objection to the genuinely egalitarian aspects of feminism, but we will criticize feminist ideology wherever it is inegalitarian and/or untruthful, especially now that it holds institutional power. Too often feminism has promoted a one-sided “equality”, dismantling male advantages while exploiting, reinforcing, preserving, and downplaying female advantages - particularly in cases involving alleged abuse.
In practice this means that most of us are politically homeless. The natural home for male advocacy should be the left wing, which professes to be explicitly egalitarian. But in modern practice, men’s issues are habitually ignored, denied, or even opposed.
We seek to address male issues without falling into the traps of an impossible return to the past or a disastrous sexism. Men and women have equal value, and we need to work together for a better future.
The fediverse is the future
This place on Kbin already seems to have more activity than the old r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates did. That place is basically dead now. It’s a shame it fractured the community, but at least this place won’t be upended in the future by a greedy and clueless corporation.
hopefully this community can collect many of the castaways of the reddit ones
tbh, male centric subs were targets for admin actions far too frequently, and moving away from a corp like that can only help a community like this.
Agreed. Worst case scenario if we were kicked off of here (which I don’t think will happen. we’re not a hate sub), we could migrate to a dedicated instance hosted by one of our own members. But I don’t think that will ever be necessary.
Can’t tell you how many admin responses i’ve gotten that said “Hate or bigotry towards men is not covered by our anti-discrimination or hate speech policies. Please read our policies before submitting a report about hate speech.”
You seem to have an extremely specific take on men’s issues, insisting you’re not one of those men’s rights guys but nonetheless taking a dim view of feminism except when you deem it sufficiently egalitarian and uncritical, I dunno about grabbing the whole concept/namespace of “men” and dedicating it to that. But ya did it, so good luck with it.
What exactly should we have done then? I only claim to speak for myself; in an ideal world I would love to work with feminists, but we’re having conversations here that are not permitted in feminist spaces, so we need our own space for that. I hope you’ll be open minded and do a little reading here to see what we’re about.
Any space that caters to feminists or feminist thinking is in no way a safe place for men, we should make that clear
insisting you’re not one of those men’s rights guys
MRAs seek gender equality before the law and full human rights for men, MRAs are a branch of egalitarianism. If you think there’s something wrong with that, that’s your problem.
How do you / did your community feel about the MensLib community?
They hosted an AMA with a guy who minimizes/denies that men can be victims of women aggressors. They tried to walk back some of the stuff he said, but didn’t outright apologize. They censor/minimize/deny a lot of other men’s issues. They are counterfeit, perhaps even a calculated disinformation campaign to co-opt the men’s movement.
Feminism is obviously NOT organized enough to do anything like that, which tells me you’re too paranoid to be worth listening to. Take a chill pill dude, not everything is a conspiracy.
We don’t do personal attacks here. Comment removed.
And here I thought you were against the whole “never say anything negative about any member of our community, no matter how wrong they are” moderation stance that most feminist communities use.
If you don’t nip the “it’s a conspiracy” types in the bud, you become the nazi bar. Because there’s a very thin line between “it’s a conspiracy”, “this is all their fault”, and “we should do something about those people”.
Calling another community “counterfeit” and a “calculated disinformation campaign” is dangerous, inflammatory language. If the mods or the community don’t call it out, it encourages worse things to be said.
Not to mention it’s clearly not even close to the realm of reality. It’s not a rational statement at all. Pointing that out is not a personal attack.
Anyway, I’m not signing up to fight a losing battle against incel types taking over this space, so if this is how it’s gonna be, I’m out.
We don’t accept calling members of this community “too paranoid to be worth listening to”. That is a personal attack. And we don’t call them incels either. This is a place for civil discussion. Not for calling each other names. Our sidebar specifically states: “Attack the argument, not the person.”
Just curious, is it possible to see Kbin comments/posts that were deleted by a user or moderator like Removeddit for Reddit (supposing they haven’t been archived to the wayback machine)?
I am browsing a federated Lemmy instance and to me all the comments are still visible.
I’m not sure how you got that from my comment that I was talking about feminism as a whole. You asked what we think about r/MensLib and that’s what I answered.
However, I did address feminism as a whole in the post I just made in this magazine.
I appreciate that they try to highlight some male issues. But they subjugate them to feminist ideology, which I think is the wrong approach. They control the conversation very tightly and do not allow general criticism of feminism (especially the widespread misandry), nor specific topics such as legal paternal surrender. For that reason I consider the MensLib sub “controlled opposition”. Even tho many members may have the heart in the right place, there is a high degree of self-censorship going on. Or you find yourself, as I did, quietly shadowbanned.
Thank you for sharing your viewpoints (side note, this is my first time really reading reddit in a while and it’s crazy how many accounts have been overwritten or [deleted]). I was active in the early redpill community, years ago, and watched in horror as it got taken over by right-wing protofascists. So I’m a little gun shy when it comes to men’s spaces. I think, getting meta for a moment, there’s something to be said for policing your own community a little over-zealously to keep out the misogynists…but then again, there’s also something to be said for being honest in your beliefs, even if that means alienating an ally (like feminists).
I’ve subscribed and I’ll keep a close eye on this community. You’ve got a difficult job; there’s a lot of angry, misogynistic men and angry, misandrist tumblristas in the fediverse who would love to take over the discussion.
Hey brother
I’m in a similar boat as you, and watched TRP go from “this is info men need to know, and soon” to religious conservative grifters, and similarly upset about it
And then watching menslib and others get setup so men could talk in “approved” ways
But all of that makes it even more important to me not to abandon other labels to grifters. It just makes it easier for them to dissipate any momentum we might accrue for social change.
If the moderation is bad, it’s a lost cause. The mod here removed a couple of comments I had calling out blatant misogyny, while leaving the misogyny. This space is doomed. I’m not wasting any more effort on it.
I have removed comments for personal attacks, as per our rules.
Where is the misogyny? I mean, it is possible I may have missed it, as I am human and fallible. But make sure to differentiate feminism from women. Feminism is an ideology, not a gender. Attacks on women as a gender will not be tolerated.
So, if you want to call out bad behavior here, call out the specific statements (“That statement is misogynistic” or “Saying that is bigotry”). Do not use personal attacks (“You’re a misogynist” or basically any form of “you are X”) as they will be removed.
Like I said, I’m not wasting more effort on it. I do still think you have good intentions and I still wish you luck.
That’s your good right, of course. But I’ll take that as “it was moderated correctly, and there is no actual misogyny that I can point out”.
Hopefully it will be like the subreddits he moderated. They turned out quite nicely. Unapologetically advocating for men from an egalitarian perspective while also being unapologetic about defending against the misandrist detractors, a large number of whom call themselves feminists and leverage feminist ideology.
Re: your stance of feminism and its role in the betterment of the lives of men.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that the primary problem at the core of most issues facing men today is the narrow, unrealistic, and frankly unhealthy image of masculinity that our society expects us to strive for. And I have to imagine that the (or at least a) goal of any sensible male advocacy group would be to push back against the notion that a man who doesn’t meet this single societal ideal of manliness has failed to be a man.
However, I also don’t think it can be dismissed as coincidence that so many of the words used to belittle men and boys who behave in ways they’re not “supposed” to imply femininity.
“Don’t be such a pussy.”
“That guy’s a little bitch.”
“Haha, he cried like a girl!”
Would you not agree that one of the most powerful ways to go about robbing these types of sentiments of their power over young boys is to help feminists destigmatise simply being a girl or a woman? Most issues facing men aren’t because women are being given advantages, but because men face the disadvantage of not being allowed to adopt roles or attitudes deemed beneath us — just as women are not allowed to adopt roles and attitudes deemed beyond their place.
I firmly believe that feminism, if truly successful, will allow men the freedom to be who and what they want to be because “masculine”/“feminine” will no longer equate to “good”/“bad” or “strong”/“weak”.
How could feminism in any way give men “the freedom to be who and what they want” when they portray men as the problem? Feminism is toxic to healthy masculinity and healthy gender relations.
Friend, I think you’re already falling into the “us vs them” mentality. We should be able to separate the loud, misandrist, “men are the problem, women are the solution”, feminists from the “we’re equal before the law, but I still perceive inequality and something should be done about it”, passive feminists.
That is what is done to MRAs who were just saying “men have issues too, here are some” and being labeled as misogynist, radical, dangerous, and incel (which also shouldn’t be an insult, much less one exclusive to men).Each community has their loud, obnoxious members, but they shouldn’t be representative of that community unless the community is mostly loud and obnoxious itself.
As such, I’d like to challenge your view that feminism is the problem and propose that it has much more to do with tradition and religion. Men and women alike face irreconcilable gender roles, prejudice, and traditional and societal obligations, that lead to their oppression:
- men should work, women should clean
- men and women should make children
- men should not show emotions, women are too emotional
- men should protect women, women are the damsels
- a man should sleep with a woman, a woman should sleep with a man
The issue is much deeper than simple “women say men are the problem, which is the problem”. Tribalism, identity-politics, and myopic, single-viewed, unidirectional thinking is toxic.
We do not say that women are the problem. But we also disagree that men are the problem.
We need to address traditional gender norms in an egalitarian way. We support freeing women from them. But we must not forget about freeing men also.
That means we can’t accept misandry from any movement that claims to fight for gender equality. And that unfortunately leads us into conflict with feminist ideology and feminist praxis.
I think you are conflating men as a group with men as individuals. I think Russia is terrible, but I’ve met many lovely Russian people.
While I can’t speak for feminists, I think when they say “men are the problem” that’s shorthand for a system that generally pays men more, expects them to take on less domestic responsibilities, allows them to vote away women’s rights, and all of the other longstanding injustices.
In Western countries like most of the European ones, men and women receive equal pay for equal jobs.
Families already share responsibilities equally (fair, not everywhere; I can speak for the north of Italy), and women feel free not to engage with boyfriends who are not up to that.
Finally, in the US it’s mostly women who are voting against women’s childbirth rights.
I haven’t spent much time in the north of Italy but we have some suppliers there and every single one of the engineers at the one I worked with was male. I don’t doubt they have equal pay for the same job, but I don’t believe for a minute that the average women in northern italy makes the same as an average man.
As for voting, there was only one woman on the supreme court that voted to overturn roe vs wade. The rest of the votes came from men
Nobody is stopping them from going for higher paying jobs or working more hours. But it’s not expected of women like it’s expected of men.
Right but one thing I really admired about that italian company was that they’d bring on engineers as apprentices right out of high school and train them on software or machining. I think that’d really admirable, and it’s great that people can work their way into high paid positions.
But i still fail to see why an engineer with a high school education should be paid more than a nurse or teacher with some college education. Is the former really that much of harder job, or that much less in demand?
This is a class problem, not gender. Join us.
The difference between feminism (or even feminists) and men is that the former is a movement or a chosen label, while the latter is not something one can choose to be. So when you generalize the latter (“men are pigs”, “men are responsible for the world’s problems”, or even “Kill All Men”), it really comes across as outright hateful. At least more so than criticizing a movement (feminism) or generalizing feminists (although I don’t believe in doing that too). Seriously, if you were to replace “men” with “blacks”, or even “women” in feminist drivel, you’d be (rightfully) called out for spreading hate. For how much feminism pushes inclusivity and careful, considerate use in language (think: using ‘police officer’ instead of ‘policeman’), when it comes to men, they just give fuck all.
And for the ‘wage gap’, it should really be renamed the ‘earnings gap’ as for the same amount and type of work, men and women are generally paid the same. The main reason there’s a gap is that men generally work more and in higher paying fields. Now why they choose to do so is certainly worth discussion, but to frame it as men being paid more with the insinuation that they both do the same amount of work, is disingenuous.
Men taking on less domestic responsibilities is part of gender roles, no? In exchange they are expected to earn more by working more. Not to mention when you say domestic responsibilities, I doubt you include male dominated tasks like mowing the lawn, or fixing the car. Again, framing it as one-sided privilege (‘men have the privilege of doing less house work”) is disingenuous. I don’t think housekeeping or child-rearing, which is female-dominated, is a walk in the park either, for reference.
If you believe the system allows specifically men to vote away women’s rights (abortions I believe?), and that men shouldn’t have a say in that. Do you also believe women shouldn’t have a say in voting on issues like Selective Service or even conscription, in some countries, that primarily or uniquely affect men? Furthermore, in many countries, women are outright born with the right to vote, whereas men have to sign up for Selective Service or Conscription (what happened to ‘My Body, My Choice’?)
E: grammar
I think you are conflating men as a group with men as individuals.
I don’t, but most feminists do.
I think when they say “men are the problem” that’s shorthand for a system
Then they should blame society, not men as a group. Most men don’t have any more influence on the system than most women do.
And what do you think constant negative messaging about men as a group being the problem does to the minds of boys growing up? Are you surprised many of them go down the alt-right radicalization pipeline?
a system that generally pays men more
I don’t know where this is true, but certainly not in Western countries, where such discrimination by gender is illegal.
expects them to take on less domestic responsibilities
More a question of expecting men to take on different domestic responsibilities, on top of expecting men to be the primary providers.
allows them to vote away women’s rights
Instead, men overwhelmingly voted for granting women equal rights.
and all of the other longstanding injustices
You mean injustices such as conscription, age of retirement, homelessness, etc?
I don’t, but most feminists do.
Most of the feminists I know are straight and either married or partnered - they clearly don’t hate all men. Some maybe do, but I don’t think it’s the majority.
I don’t know where this is true, but certainly not in Western countries, where such discrimination by gender is illegal.
I’m in the US and it’s absolutely endemic. Women still make significantly less than men on average and gender discrimination is baked right into jobs. My city starts teachers at $56k and police officers at $70k - one of those jobs requires a GED and the other requires a Bachelors degree. Even with a Master’s teachers can make as little as $61k - and that’s entirely because it’s traditionally a “women’s job”. Can you name any male dominated field where most workers have a master’s degree and make that little?
Europe’s maybe a little better, but there’s still no country where women outearn men - if there really was equality there you’d expect to see that look more like a bell curve.
I’m also from the US and you’re full of shit
Women in the 18-30 age bracket are out-earning their equivalent male counterparts by a significant margin at this point, across most fields
Exactly. Of course men in their 50s-70s will outearn women because that’s how things were in the past. The future is clearly shown by how much money 20 year olds are making. The only reason young women are making less is because they choose to stop working and have a kid (And yes, men are pressured to have kids too).
but men are pressured to work even harder to support that kid
Male workers having children then becomes an economic benefit, as the man has to work harder
Female workers having children is an economic loss, as the worker stops working entirely.
From an financial point of view, anyways
Another reason why i’m all pro WFH policies. It gets men back in constant contact with their children and makes all the excuses a woman might make to not have to work anymore really weak.
The government of Russia ≠ the people of Russia. Men are just a gender. There is no government of men. When you say “men are the problem”, you are talking about individual men and men as a whole.
Society also expects men to earn more and ties their value to how much wealth they have. Women play a part in this too just as men do. It also expects men to take on more responsibilities outside of the house.
There are as many injustices against men as there are against women. What happened with Roe v. Wade being overturned is terrible, but when it happened people actually cared for women’s wellbeing. Including myself.
Where is the outrage over any of the injustices that men face (the draft, male genital mutilation, exclusion from homeless/DV shelters, family court, etc.)? There is none, because when women are victims of injustice people care; conversely when men are victims no one cares.
At worst, feminist literature will try to ignore male victims to make DV seem like a gendered crime, taking away services from men, and make out so-called male victims as abusers in disguise (like the book “Why Does He Do That?”).
The government of Russia ≠ the people of Russia. Men are just a gender. There is no government of men. When you say “men are the problem”, you are talking about individual men and men as a whole.
Obviously you are technically correct, but I still think many feminists use “men” as a shorthand for the broader male-dominated system. If I say “I love the way women smell” I really don’t need to clarify that I probably don’t mean all women in all situations, it’s kinda obvious.
Where is the outrage over any of the injustices that men face
That’s a logical fallacy. There probably should be more outrage about those things, but that doesn’t change the initial situation.
Obviously you are technically correct, but I still think many feminists use “men” as a shorthand for the broader male-dominated system.
And that shows their bigotry, which we are calling out.
Where is the outrage over any of the injustices that men face
That’s a logical fallacy.
No, it’s not. Calling it a logical fallacy is bigotry. Outrage over any of the injustices that men face is a human rights issue.
alright, i guess. i don’t entirely disagree, though I did feel like I was reading a MGTOW post with some words swapped out.
Your phrase; “The natural home for male advocacy” [is x on the political spectrum] is a strange phrase, and familiar, and formulaic.
Try humanism, and love
I bet you wouldn’t feel the same about a “home for female advocacy”. Men need safe spaces too.
Note: including safe from right-wing exploitation.
do you feel the “home for female advocacy” belongs somewhere on a political spectrum?
Yeah, I think the left wing generally espouses tolerance and equality, so anyone saying “hey, this group is being marginalized, we should fix that” should naturally find a home in the left wing. The right wing is more about rigid hierarchy and “this is the way the world is ordered, don’t challenge it”.
It is definitely not a MGTOW post. I explicitly say: “Men and women have equal value, and we need to work together for a better future.”
