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Can’t we just say being a Men’s Rights Activist is premised on “The radical notion that men are people” And that they just want equality between the sexes. I think the temptation is to just call them woman haters or something and suggest they don’t mean it when they say it. It seems like a parallel situation but I think few people would say MRA = Feminist.

Obviously, there is something more going on. Feminists seem to want to advocate for women and most think women have the worse end of the deal. MRAs want to advocate for men and (probably?) most think men have the worse end of the deal. Perhaps some form of both groups are necessarily.

A gender related issue I care about is genital cutting. I’m not particularly able to influence the people who cut women’s genitals with my English language blog, but plenty of feminists could oppose this practice outspokenly but I haven’t really seen it. Maybe they aren’t obligated too but it seems reasonable that someone advocating for men and pointing out the hypocrisy on some level is worthwhile.

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I just started reading The Handmaid's Tale, and the world it depicts isn't utopian even for the people at the top. There are still rebels belonging to other religious sects, and the narrator shopping for one of the most elite Commanders has difficulty acquiring fruit (the railways are often sabotaged), and he can't eat meat more than one day a week. Most men have lousy odds of acquiring a wife, since so many women are allocated to the elite, and the supply of fertile women crashing is a big part of the premise.

More plausible would be the idea that someone would want to turn back the clock to an existing past, since people actually did live through that and it was neither utopian nor dystopian but normal to the people that lived through it. In the Brexit referendum, for example, there was a big voting divide by age: those young enough that they were born after the Common Market voted to Remain, while those old enough to remember an independent UK voted to get it back.

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>Can you honestly name any viewpoint untainted by at least a few fanatics dreaming of fire and blood?

Maybe Jainism

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The whole "take us back to the 19th century" is really a silly idea. Are we to believe that it would have been possible to survive as a species in the 19th century with current ideas of gender roles? Certainly there were inequities and regrettable treatment of women in that age, but a large driver of the gender roles at that time was surely driven by what enabled them the best chance of making it to adulthood. Clearly raising children, preparing food, and maintaining a home was a full time job for someone. Acquiring food often required physical strength. The division of labor made absolute sense from a comparative advantage point of view. This does not excuse any abuse of women, preventing them from an education, or other human rights, however those folks were muddling through life, trying to figure out what works, just as all humans at all times. No, (almost) no one wants to take us back to the 19th century, but it's not as though those folks had a choice between how they lived then and how we live currently.

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Why can't we just get the consensus to use a neutral word (like egalitarian)? It's absurd that it's peddled that "feminism is actually about equal rights", when the word refers to women exclusively.

I kinda believed it for a while, that feminists actually believe that at least. But I'm from Poland. Recently there was a situation where someone was "asked" to go to mandatory military training for 30 days (and after that, mandatorily pledge to be a soldier).

Also, in a survey, it turned out that 49% of women are for mandatory draft. 47% against. For men, it's 39% vs 58%. https://twitter.com/IBRiS_PL/status/1495785047965765642

It's pretty fucked up IMO.

Anyway, I wrote about it at length in the comments here: https://www.themotte.org/post/229/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/42021?context=8#context

Here's an exchange on Twitter, with female left-wing politician (@AM_Zukowska) (literally everyone voted for possibility of these military exercises, apart from 8 people IIRC who abstained from vote)

@KorolukM: I pay mandatory taxes and expect the government to ensure my defense from that, not treat me like potential cannon meat. If it's not enough, I can pay more.

If you like the state shitting into your face, then by all means, no kink shaming. But don't throw that shit at others.

@AM_Zukowska: That is, how exactly, with whom is it to provide defense? Someone has to serve in the army and in case of war the state has to have trained conscripts. Sorry. Ideally, wars would not exist. But there have been wars since the dawn of mankind.

@nalu__xx: For you to write such a thing.... Well, I won't say that I'm not disappointed

@AM_Zukowska: I wrote that, because I feel responsible for the country.

@MoistureBusters: And is Private Anna-Maria going for training too?

@AM_Zukowska: I do not have a military qualification. I think that, unfortunately, with an eye defect of -7 diopters and retinal detachment I would not get one.

@Vimis23: So then what do you think, compulsory service for men and women? What do you say to that? Everyone for conscription. Equality is equality.

@AM_Zukowska: There has been no compulsory conscription for anyone since 2009. Military service is voluntary. There are, however, military exercises for those with a Category A military qualification. Since 2014, they are no longer only for reserve soldiers, because since 2009 we have less and less reserve.

Also, fragment of a translation of a feminist article about why women SHOULDN'T be treated equally:

> "Where are the feminist organizations when men get drafted into the army?" the graduates of the University of Peasant Reason ask. Let me now explain.

("Peasant's reason" is an idiom roughly equivalent to "common sense")

> If I were to use the same rhetoric as the University of Peasant Reason, which demands compulsory conscription and military service for women as well, and preferably for feminists ("after all, you're all about equality, aren't you?"), I would have to write that you, dear men, have wound the whip on yourselves.

> The patriarchy you have established generates conflicts that are later resolved violently and forces you to be cannon fodder, in certain circles called reservists. You are the ones who have decided that gender determines who is fit to fight and who is not. I don't know about that, but I do know that in your battles - those fought in or out of uniform - women also die.

> The argument "women, now you have what you wanted, now go to war" is in fact a misunderstanding of the flagship assumptions of the drive towards emancipation.

> No - the fact that a woman becomes a soldier, even a General, is not a celebration for feminism. Just as it is not, for example, when women head greedy corporations or referee soccer matches at the World Cup, which violates human rights, exploits, promotes homophobia and sexism.

> While the establishment of quotas in the army may appear to be an equalitarian demand, and indeed rubs the nose in the face of gender stereotypes that assume women are physically weaker than men and unfit for military service, it actually represents an extremely neoliberal and ignorant approach to gender justice that ignores opposition to oppression.

(...)

> The army is a generator and reproducer of the violence of oppression against which all social emancipation movements headed by feminism are fighting. Therefore, the half-witted expectation that women should join it willingly, with a smile on their lips and male anointment, is nonsense.

> While we demand recognition and equal rights, we don't want an equal share of the harms produced by patriarchy. We want those harms to be none - or at least less.

> University of Peasant Reason goes on to say, "since we, men, have to go into the army and die, you women must too." (...) it forgets that war means the death of civilians, that it uses a particularly cruel tool - rape. And it so happens that the latter largely involves women, who would often rather die than experience it.

> Shreshtha Das reminds us that "the military and the hypermasculinity it promotes also harms women who do not live in areas controlled by the military." In doing so, she cites a 2004 study by Catherine Lutz, clearly showing that rates of domestic violence are three to five times higher among military couples than among civilians, because "the military as an institution that promotes the idea of heterosexual male supremacy glorifies power and control or discipline, and suggests that violence is often a necessary means to achieve its own ends."

> You read that right. The year is 2023, Poland. The country is in a panic over military mobilization, triggered by media reports of an increase in the number of reservists in the state army. And Polish male hussars are howling on the Internet: "what about women?".

> I'll just reiterate: the main problem of those who insist on the forced conscription of women into the army is that they misunderstand feminism. The coercion to become cannon fodder, on the other hand, is a patriarchal assumption that strikes at any gender.

> Your fear of military service, your disagreement with the state deciding for you without you, however, is not the fault of feminists. It is the fault of the oppression of the patriarchy and men in power in Poland. If you choose to oppose them, we will go with you. But don't expect us to be happy that you wish for us as badly as you wish for yourselves.

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"Since the share of the population that openly devalues men is much larger than the share that openly devalues women..."

This is a bold claim. I understand that measuring the number of people who "openly devalue" a group can be tricky due to edge cases, but are there statistics or data that you are relying on here? I am honestly unsure if this statement holds up when applied to the US population in general.

(I can believe it holds up when applied to the Twitter population, but I don't think Twitter is a representative sample of the whole US, or the world.)

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Aaronson seems to think that the best thumbnail description of the rise of Nazism is something like: "a desire to oppress the weaker group was always bubbling under the surface, and as soon as counterforces became insufficiently diligent, it naturally emerged." I think that's a view of history wrong enough to be called delusional.

A good thumbnail would be: 'German non-elites were actually, thoroughly beaten down by powerful internal and external forces, and they clung desperately to a group that promised to end their feeling of powerlessness, including accepting its choices of scapegoat." Which is to say, it was not weakness, but rather great strength of international political and economic forces (and how that strength was misapplied) that was most responsible for Italian Fascism and Nazism.

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I don't get this argument with "150 years ago." Does Bryan say that if feminism would mean you don't want women to be oppressed like 150 years ago, it would make sense? But he very cearly stated that he believes women were freer in the 19th century than they are today:

https://www.econlib.org/archives/2010/04/women_liberty_a.html

So even if feminism would mean that you don't want women to be oppressed like 150 years ago, he would still be against feminism, as he doesn't think women were oppressed back then. Bryan seems to believe that women were never oppressed (at least in the West). So he would have been against feminism even 150 years ago, right?

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"I am not a feminist" means that you are not a feminist in 2022 in the United States. I suspect that, like me, many of your readers are interested in a wider field of information: for what times and places *are* you a feminist? As we look around the world and back into history (and pre-history), we find many different social arrangements, differentially affecting the sexes. When and where do we find men favored over women, and when and where do we find the reverse (and when and where is there balanced treatment of the sexes)? You may rightly complain about the extremely wide scope of the question, but what are your impressions?

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The S.C.U.M. link is broken because it has an extra slash at the end. Manually removing the slash works.

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I'm glad that Bryan is friends with a better class of people, people who don't make their reputations by feeding (many) men's (fake / absurd) sense of victimhood, who have the arrogance to make proclamations about how women (et al) are treated by society.

https://www.mattball.org/search?q=caplan

But thanks for at least publishing Scott's sane take.

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