I don’t know how else to describe it, but all my male friends and family are very unemotional. Not in the sense that they don’t feel anything, but that they are a lot better at handling them and I feel like I’m not. I’ve tried meditation, therapy, healthy eating and a better sleep schedule but nothing works. I still anger and get upset at the smallest things and I feel like I’m less masculine than my friends. Im even known as the super emotional guy in the group and they often tease me about it, which makes things worse. My family constantly talk down to me as I don’t work out much and am very thin and short while my younger bros are jacked and tall. I don’t know what to do and really needed to get this off my chest. Thank you.
This IS progress. Much better than the previous but simpler definition that went like “Feminism is a movement that fights for gender equality for women”. Which is a bit of a oxymoron if you ask me.
The next step is to recognize that cultural norms that harms people on the basis of gendered expectations isn’t uniquely or even primarily caused by an elite few, but is a systemic wide cultural problem for which both men and women are responsible. Using “patriarchy” as the term to refer to this problem is a best misleading, causes unnecessary division and leads to a certain myopia when looking at how to address the problem.
The step after that is that it is obviously absurd to name a gender equality movement after only one of the genders. Again this alienates certain groups of people and prevents them from contributing to the conversation on an equal footing.
But in practice, that’s not what’s going to happen. There’s not going to be a flipped switch and everyone agrees to stop using the word patriarchy to refer to the ills of society or to rename feminism to something else. Instead, little by little, the more sensible people recognize these issues and individually choose to no longer use the patriarchy and feminist terminologies. Until the only the only people left still willing to call themselves feminists will be the most radical of misandrists.
What other words are there to switch to? It is hard to argue that we should use different terms if those don’t exist yet.
This might give you a case of déjà-vue, but “harmful gender expectations” is a pretty good alternative. It doesn’t cover all the reasons why someone might want to use the term patriarchy, but it covers a large portion of them, in particular it does cover the use of it in this thread that set off all this discussion.
And I think using clearer more precise terms depending on circumstances would be greatly beneficial. The terms patriarchy seems easily misunderstood and misused and I’ve seen many people go so far as to believe that the term is intentionally misused or intentionally misunderstood.
On a somewhat related topic, what do you think of male privilege. Are men a privileged class?
There was a guy in this thread that talked about how acknowledging his male privilege literally saved his life (I’m exaggerating). But he also had the misfortune of using the word “Toxic” followed by the word “Masculinity” without any irony and therefore suffered the wrath of our merciless mod.
I spent 30 minutes preparing a reply before I realized there was nothing left to reply to, I ended up sending it to him in a dm. But you seem to have a bit more advanced understanding of these topics so I’m curious what you think of this one.
Patriarchy just means “society”, but sneaks in blaming men for any problems caused by it
Egalitarian is a word that means equality between all peoples, and that existed before feminism as a word, to give you an idea of how far back their sexist bias goes
“Toxic Masculinity” really is a victim blaming way to say “gender expectations placed on men by society, which are harmful to others but maybe sometimes we’ll admit are harmful to the man subject to the abuse, but who gives a fuck about that guy he hasn’t solved his own problems and instead made them known to others, how can we make him shut up?”
And for that last one we actually prefer the terminology feminism used before they realized it applied to men as well: “sexist gender roles and expectations”