Sometimes I need to see the twitter feeds of people like this, as a reminder of exactly what women mean when they talk about men being scum.
Sometimes it hurts to be generalized into a category I don’t feel I belong to and it’s tempting to push back, but knowing that people are out there spending what appears to be all of their free time being horrible online and harassing women is a good reminder that women are pretty justified in having a low opinion of men in general.
Now I can go back to pretending twitter doesn’t exist for a while again.
The easiest way to see if it’s OK is to swap out “men” with any other protected characteristic. If, having done that it suddenly becomes problematic, it was always so and they should’ve known better.
I think youre right not to engage them though. For all their talk of equality, anyone who talks like that just wants to be at the top of a new hierarchy. Remove or subjugate the men and most women (who haven’t decolonisated their minds) will just replicate the same power structures, adopting the position of patriarch without a hint of self awareness. The way forward is to help other men see the pain caused to them by the patriarchy, as its only then that we can see the pain we cause through the patriarchy, due to the rituals of disregard and empathy killing we go through as boys.
I’ll finish by saying the same thing I said to my dad, shortly after he lost his job" "yes dad, of course I’ve heard of the phrase ‘sometimes you have to fight fire with fire.’ However, you can’t always do that, especially when you’re meant to be firefighter, you doughnut.
You should reference my other comment in this thread. You’re correct that statements like “all men are trash” are unjustly prejudiced, but you’re making a false equivalence.
My point is that is that both are wrong, not that they are or are not both equally wrong. So, would you mind explaining where the equivalence is please?
I mean, I know its more of a case that some people don’t like that both of those things are wrong to do but I’m gonna need a little more than that and a misunderstanding of an informal fallacy, sorry.
In your comment, whether intended or not. It’s not a long comment. By “whatabouting” the idea of replacing men with any marginalized group, you are making a false equivalence via equivocation. By leaving out the crucial aspect of power imbalance, you minimize its role by implication. See: all lives matter in response to BLM.
Again, you don’t understand what a false equivalence fallacy is. So, you should really stop attempting to use it because doing so is make you look like a fool.
Whatabouting and false equivalences aren’t the same thing. I feel like I’m witnessing the death of irony here.
No, something wrong is still wrong, even if you feel bad about historical injustices. The power imbalance does not change this and also ignores every other intersection a white person could have.
You even drew a false equivalence the BLM which is the only actual false equivalence on this chain.
See the wiki pages of the fallacies you clearly don’t understand.
God damn bougouise feminists.
God forbid a rhetorical argument fall into multiple categories. I never said whataboutism and false equivalences are the same thing. You happened to do both. Equivocation has nothing to do with setting two things as equal, it’s the use of ambiguous language to avoid the bigger picture of an issue or to avoid committing to a stance. It is another form of logical fallacy. Via equivocation (omission and vague language) you omitted key facts (social power imbalance) that makes bringing up a connected, but not equivalent, issue (replacing men are trash with any other group, which is a form of whataboutism) a false equivalence.
You can say I don’t know what I’m talking about. That doesn’t make it true. Your equivocation of your whataboutism argument led to forming a false equivalence.
All lives matter in response to BLM is both whataboutism and a false equivalence. Just because someone didn’t say “what about” or "these things are equal doesn’t make those facts untrue. There is an implied “what about all those other lives, don’t they matter?” which in itself implies that the societal inequalities BLM rose in response to are equal to the pressures felt but the rest of “all lives.”
God damn bougouise feminists.
Lol
So just because shitty men exist, we’re supposed to say “welp generalizing us is fair because technically men like this exist”?
I have found pushing back is useless. People are just waiting for you to be a horrible “fragile man” instead of just realizing that being accurate in who you blame for being shitty matters. So yeah I wouldn’t really conclude that if you see one example of someone being disgusting then you have to allow yourself to be falsely aligned with them.
You can just know the shitty generalizers are bigoted, and hope it’s a phase for them. I certainly have never seen any value in either supporting that generalization or fighting against it.
People on the Internet love thinking they’re better than you and that you’re scum. The only way I know to deal with it is just by accepting it
This definitely misses the power imbalance of punching down vs up. If someone genuinely believes all men are “scum,” yeah, that’s prejudiced. However, there is a big difference between a group that has less power in society pushing up against the class that has more power or oppresses them and the reverse. The idea that “y group is (insert pejorative)” and “x group is (insert pejorative)” are equally bigoted statements assumes that x and y groups are equal in social power. Statements like “men are trash” or equivalent don’t necessarily represent an individual’s true opinion of all men, but a general pushing back against a group with more power, many individuals of which attempt to exercise their perceived privilege over women.
Women that say “all men are trash” or similar might not be thinking with this level of introspection and subtlety, but it’s a subconscious reaction to their position as a group with less power. They rarely hold that on a personal level against every individual man, unless they’ve been deeply hurt. I have experienced things that make it harder for me to trust men. My friends have experienced things that make it harder to trust men. I do not think every man is evil. When you see the damage around you on societal levels, see the people calling for your rights to be taken away, see how they treat you like an object or property because of who you are, and you see it in the lives of many many people like you, it creates a resentment of the group that is responsible.
I am not suggesting that there are no women that take advantage of men. I am not suggesting that men cannot be abused. I am not suggesting that it’s okay to make men feel responsible for the actions of people that share only a gender with them, nothing else. However, I am explaining why women might feel hurt or disempowered enough to push back against men in general, and why “men are trash” and “women are trash” (though far more often, the phrase when targeted at women takes a sexual connotation: whores, etc) are not equivalent statements. Both the women that have been hurt and the men that feel hurt by the byproduct of their resentment are victims of the patriarchy. Until everyone, regardless of gender, holds the same societal power, there will always be people of all groups being hurt by the imbalance.
TLDR: Don’t resent the women who are a product of their environment saying “men are trash,” resent the patriarchy that hurts men and women alike.
Ah, the kid brother defence. “But big brother did it, I had the right to!”
Still wrong! Someone else being shitty and prejudiced does not in any way, shape or form excuse your prejudice. I’m sorry you’ve had to face prejudice, but this way you are paying it forward.
I have never said or meant “men are trash.” I don’t know who gave you that idea. I explicitly didn’t excuse the behavior, I stated it was wrong and unjust, yet explained the societal nuance and why it isn’t okay to equate “men are trash” and “women are trash.” I’m paying nothing forward.
Honestly if you have to write paragraphs to defend something that is intuitively ignorant and bigoted to do, you’ve lost the argument by default
I think she “had to” write that much because she knew the thickness of the skull she was trying to penetrate. And your counter-“argument” only proves that point.
P.S. Just because you think something is intuitive to you doesn’t mean it’s correct. It just shows you’re part of the system that needs replacing.
We all know that grouping people together is shitty. I don’t have to make any argument
This is reductive. I do not disagree with the fact that generalizing diverse groups is wrong, and I made that fact clear in my comment. You either didn’t read my comment, didn’t understand it, or are maliciously choosing to misrepresent it.
I didn’t read it. Because it was defending the indefensible.
And if you took the time to read my messages, you’d recognize that I agree that saying “all men are trash” is an unjustly prejudiced statement. What you aren’t realizing is the societal pressures and power imbalances which you’ve conveniently ignored in your argument. You’re taking the same rhetorical role as the “all lives matter” people in response to BLM. I’m not arguing with you. I’m explaining to you. It’s your choice to learn or to stick your head in the sand, and it makes no difference to me.
See I made the mistake of reading this one and it’s emblematic of exactly what I was getting at:
- Extrapolates things I didn’t say
- Seems to imply a random stranger on the Internet knows more about me than I do
- Self righteous and egotistical
- Claims I’m ignoring things which are entirely beside my point
- Dodges the point which was simply that something which is objectively shitty is shitty
- Continues defending shitty behavior while denying doing so
- Compares me to disgusting assholes I hate and have nothing in common with
“Extrapolating things I didn’t say” is called inference, and you can claim something is beside your point but it doesn’t change the fact that your omission commits a logical fallacy. I do not defend shitty behavior, I demonstrate nuance, and yet I constantly see this response online to it. A nuanced position that contrasts your own does not necessarily agree with your opponent, and the ad hominem is just immature.
Committing the same logical fallacy as a “all lives matter” person does not mean I believe you to be the moral equivalent of one, regardless of my disagreement.
Pointing out something objectively shitty as shitty is not in debate. Doing so in omission of other key facts is the problem. Let me provide an example conversation, featuring person A and B, who are both going to be parents soon:
A: “I hope I have a girl!”
B: “I’d support whoever my child is!”
A: “I’d support my child even if they were born very sick!”
Both A and B are using a poor form of argument, which I don’t have a better name for than whataboutism, but is very adjacent to it. By saying “I’d support whoever my child is,” B is implying that A would not. By saying “I’d support them if they were sick,” A does the same. This is the same thing you’re doing when you say:
Dodges the point which was simply that something which is objectively shitty is shitty
You use this same rhetoric throughout your arguments, as do other commenters agreeing with you. I agree that thing is shitty because it was shitty. This is more equivocation. The point is not simply that “thing is shitty because of self evidence,” it’s that by saying this you form a false equivalence and minimize women’s experiences.
If you read nothing else, read this: My argument has nothing to do with whether or not pejorative generalizations are wrong, or to do with defending women who make such arguments. I agree with you on both of these points! My entire argument is that your response of “what if you did this to another group” while omitting the power imbalance that is intrinsic to this issue equates both groups, and therefore dismisses the existence of the power imbalance entirely.
You cannot reply to trans people saying “cis people are trash” with “what if you said that about trans people,” to black people saying “white people are trash” with “what if you said that about black people,” or the above example, or any other similar situation, without also including the nuance that a power imbalance does exist. To do so is to minimize their experience in a defensive position of privilege.
I do not want to be at ideological odds with you. I do not think “men are trash” is an okay thing to say. However, I understand that there is nuance here, and that hurt women are not the target of my ire; the unjust system that hurt them is.
I beg you, read this comment in full. You’ve painted me in your mind as a self righteous egotist, which couldn’t be further from the truth. I won’t continue a back and forth, but I do at least want you to understand that I’m just another person with a set of lived experiences, not a feminist demon from hell here to kick little boys. Men and women are both victims of the patriarchy. Have a good day.
