3...2....1 until someone tells us that that's what Feminism is all about.

My current inclination is that, although this site is valuable in so many other ways, there are some gender-related issues that cannot usefully be discussed here. The signal-to-noise ratio is just too low.

This saddens me.

post (and the two reactions to it) are all about wanting to spar with women. No woman has, as many do, jumped in this thread to make it about womens issues. In GD, men rarely post about their issues. Even in this forum, those threads die quickly.
Why do you think that is?

That didn't go down too well, did it? As I recall, Sarah I (forget her full name) decided he was trying to get one over on feminists somehow.

threads in the Men's group that sank pretty fast. It's a shame. But complaining women don;t want to hear about men's issues in a thread about women's issues is just silly.

She basically came out and accused him of using his personal experience of male suicide (he has had several close friends and relatives end their lives, all male) as a way of gaming the site. Not even "That's horrible, I hope you were okay". It was yucky.

And yeah, I think there's a lot of misunderstanding on this site, a lot of the time feminists post threads that appear to rest on the assumption that there's something uniquely immoral about a phenomenon happening to women that isn't unique to women at all wholesale, but has a particular twist that only affects women. There's clearly nothing wrong with selecting one gender's experience of such phenomena but some take the intent of the isolation of female experience from the wider discussion of the phenomenon as a subtle form of sexism.

Violence against women might be a typical example, there's clearly a prosaic understanding of the necessity for a discussion about it in that women, usually being physically smaller than men, face in violence a danger of a completely different kind than men in a similar situation. But if you assume that genders are supposed to be "perceived" as equal and look at the stats the story is much more that men are the victims of violence, i.e. the wider phenomenon of violence as a whole, because there are far more male victims of violence. So you can easily imagine someone making the mistake of assuming that women talking about violence against women is a subtle way of devaluing male victimhood rather than addressing the inherent assymmetries underlying violence against differing genders.

Violence against men isn't an emotionally charged topic. Everyone just accepts it. Whenever a man's assaulted it's just an assault. If a women's assaulted it's seen as much more unnacceptable and unfair... but that's because it is! A women is, in ordinary terms of capacity for self-defense, far more likely to come off second best if assaulted by a man than the other way round (currently accepted social norms of "not hitting women" and the possible consequences for a man in not retaliating as the victim of domestic assault laid aside, for now...). But what that often results in, via the ever-present, magical, preconscious nonsense of "men and women are the opposites of each other" is a backhanded perception that violence against men is kind of just normal by comparison. And, you know... that's sexism.

"complaining women don't want to hear about men's issues in a thread about women's issues is just silly" - that's not an unfair observation but I think sometimes things come up in women's issues that intersect with men's issues. We can't really establish which and when and how and what, I think we have to sort of muddle through each issue on it's own.

Sorry, I used your post as a springboard...

normalized in our society. I think women have made considerable gains in changing perceptions about it in the last century, before which they were considered as mere property. I only wish men would advocate harder for social change for their own sake- very often those violent against women also go after kids of both sexes, and some grown men also -continuing the cycle of abuse. We seem to celebrate violence in this culture way too often.

and serious discussion about many gender-based issues. Few terminology-based gotchas, less hostility, more open speculation. I survey GD for a few nuggets, but it's Meta-city, a kind of Roman Circus where some interests want to play king or queen-of-the-hill. Good for a pun or two, a sliver of info, occasionally some good writing. But increasingly it has moved from non-productive to counter-productive.

Just asking, thank you kindly.

But he's made it clear how he feels about this group and the members a zillion times, and while I don't think he'd post here if unblocked, I don't see the point.

Do you think there is an occulted male experience that needs discussing?

I think one of the problems this group faces is that most other sub-groups of DU are seen as places for the oppressed to talk to each other in an online environment that they do not feel oppressed by. If we're treating the Men's group as a similar forum we need to be clear about it.

I guess my main point is, we men face issues separate and distinct from those faced by women. Yes, we are all human, but we have special issues. We can deal with those and not be anti-female or anti-feminist. We men are NOT oppressed, at all, imho, especially white men.

Was I more clear ? Yes I am being sincere and not snarky.

I ask mainly because I very much DO regard men as having an occulted experience that isn't publically acceptable. But then, I'm gay. I'm familiar with men not feeling able to say what they think or how they feel. I also think there's an array of templates to which men are allegedly supposed to aspire that have almost nothing to do with how being male actually is, starting with their sexuality, discussion of almost all of which seems to result in squeals of horror or

I don't think your original point about war in your OP stands without that observation. I don't really see what else you would call men being used as cannon fodder for rich people if not oppression.

"YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU" is aimed at men. It's a universal and grotesque distortion of male emotional processes.

Says I.

I should qualify that. There's a necessity for self-sacrifice in times of invasion and when the security of the nation is at stake, but this capacity for male self-sacrifice is ripe for exploitation.

Recently there was an article about the 33 year old aid doctor with 3 and 5 year old children who refused the ebola serum so that it could be given to a 59 year old female missionary who volunteered at the clinic.

This was widely seen as "heroic" and meritorious. It is tacitly understood that she was under no similar moral obligation to do the same. Her wellbeing is more important than his; there are no other relevant extenuating circumstances.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/12596919