eg “not all men” weirdos
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Edit: to further clarify the example above since it set off some brainworms, this can be seen when people respond to discussions about patriarchy and the way it shapes toxic masculinity with defensive “not all men” statements.
When we discuss systems, we are aware that not everyone who has privilege within them internalizes it the same way.
Men are not somehow evil. Masculinity is not somehow evil. Feminism is about liberation of everyone from patriarchy. The issue is that you can wind up needing to “protect” or cater to very fragile expectations of individuals and that can sometimes wind up recentering discussion on purely men and their feelings about patriarchy.
That is an important aspect of the discussion, but it cannot be the only one. Given that one of the patriarchal behaviors that many men are taught is to talk over anyone who is not a man, space must be intentionally created for others.
Anyway, this would be better covered in a dedicated effort post on feminism and positive masculinity.
This is however a meme featuring Josie and the pussy cats with a comments section that proves the meme is accurate lol
Now that my main point is snarked out at you, yeah of course. Gender essentialism is deeply destructive and completely untethered from reality.
I'm not saying 'all or almost all,' I'm saying 'way, way too many for reasons that are deeply rooted in our concepts of what constitutes a man.' I'm sorry you've got guilt tied up in that - it's probably undeserved in the first place. But unless you mean gender essentialists like TERFs making sweeping statements about 'male nature' or other kook shit, I haven't even once encountered anyone talking about men who, upon my asking, didn't explain some variation on 'we're talking about the concept of manhood that men are taught to emulate, as well as the social structures propping that concept up.'
And I did ask a few different people. It pained me as a kid to see those statements, because I knew I wasn't like that, but the only people who ever clarified that they really did mean categorically all men were gender essentialists. So eventually, I just adjusted my understanding of 'men' as an unqualified group in accordance with how sane, non-gender-essentialist people were using it.
To me it mirrors the reactionary narrative of 'Black rights activists want you to feel guilty for being white.' The activists don't say that - their opponents do. The activists can and will explain systemic oppression until the sun burns out, but it will always be misrepresented in public discourse as 'white bad' because reactionaries eat it up, refuting it is longer and more boring to observe, and unfamiliar white audiences will enter the conversation in a defensive posture.
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What? No you can't. That's been the whole point here - that 'not all men' is a reaction to 'men' more often than to 'all men'. You don't get to define other people's ideas for them by adding an incorrectly-inferred 'all' even if you do feel reflexively defensive about it.
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Oh, lol no worries then.
In that case, my reply would be that this kind of messaging has limited use depending on context. This thread is the only occasion I've ever had to say the phrase 'men are predators' and it isn't a wording I'd usually go for. The times I've seen it brought up, though, have generally been decontextualized comments out of larger discussions surrounding toxic masculinity.
I grew up with an endless stream of, "Here's what the feminists/gays/etc think of you," media, so I very much default to asking the feminists/queer folks/etc to elaborate when they say something that doesn't sit right with me. Though, back when I was concerned enough about the phrase to ask people what they meant by it, TERFs hadn't really congealed into the grotesque mass we know and loathe today. At that time, the argument I usually saw was between 'our traditional gender roles are toxic' and 'our traditional gender roles are not toxic.'
Now there's usually some terf looking to assert that trans women are predators in disguise. I can't imagine that discussions of toxic masculinity go quite the same way they did back when I was reading more of them.
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I'd pretty much agree with all of that, particularly if you count small communities as semi-private. My experience with it had generally been outrage-mill (often Fox News specifically) pieces where some so-called reporter had trawled small, publicly-accessible communities to grab screencaps out of larger discussions.
Meanwhile, the only left-ish organization I've had access to is a branch of the DSA that, shortly after I joined, purged all members who had been critical of the Steering Committee's anti-voting decisions. Being one of those people, this nipped my interaction with them in the bud. I don't meet many people left of John McCain, so I assume you're right about identity shitfights in progressive groups