I agree that it’s not quite the same, and I’m finding it real interesting to ponder how that happens.
This comic and this comment section have been pretty thought provoking. (Heads up, this is overly abstract speculation from here): For example, here’s a mathsy diagram
This is a commutative diagram, and I’m not at the level of being able to explain it properly, but part of it is the idea of equivalence, the fact that there’s two routes from A to D that are equivalent.
I’m thinking about this sort of analogous to what we’re seeing in the comic and these comments. Like, the base experiences we’re talking about (being spoken over when you’re trying to share your experiences, for example) are fundamentally shared experiences, but the manner of experiencing them is different, because it’s coloured by our own positionality (of which gender is a big part of). I think sometimes though, it’s like discussions don’t work because we get separated — some of us at B, and some at C. Like, it does matter that our experiences are different, but also, there’s a sense in which it doesn’t, because we need to head to the same place anyway.
I don’t know what converging on D would be in this analogy. Solidarity perhaps? Which would, I suppose, involve recognising that the route you’re on is different to the route other people are on, and that it’s possible to be heading to the same place. I’m not sure, this is quite abstract, but you said the word “meta” and that seemed to catalyse this thought, so here’s this comment. You’re welcome/my apologies
The comic is about how when people speak online online about women’s issues, dudes keep trying to make it about dudes.
This is a legitimate complaint in the situations where the topic is uniquely a women’s issue, and people are trying to redirect the conversation to something that really isn’t the same thing and is a separate issue so talking about that means you aren’t talking about the first thing anymore. But the meta issue of someone trying to talk about one group’s problems and getting hit by whataboutism, seems arguably more universal and might not be specifically a women’s issue, so saying something along the lines of “yeah this happens to us too it sucks”, could be supportive and not about shutting up discussion of the original topic.
This isn’t a universal complaint about the frustration of whataboutism.
This is a specific complaint about how any time women try to talk about women’s issues in a forum that may contain men, those men engage in disingenuous whataboutism.
The men replying are almost never showing support, they’re minimizing the issue, or they’re trying to co-opt the thread.
It doesn’t need to be a uniquely woman’s issue for it to be a predominantly women’s issue.
And it doesn’t need to be a predominantly woman’s issue for women to want to talk about it from a woman’s perspective without men making it about them.
The men replying are almost never showing support, they’re minimizing the issue, or they’re trying to co-opt the thread.
To me, the comment in question didn’t seem to be doing that. The point I’m trying to make is to object to the idea that it is categorically doing that, given the context. It seems like a divisive way of deciding what is bad behavior, to condemn any statement made in response to discussion about problems faced by one group that is not specifically about the struggles of that group, regardless of anything else about the statement.
This is a specific complaint about how any time women try to talk about women’s issues in a forum that may contain men, those men engage in disingenuous whataboutism.
If you would rather expand on how that goes or the ways in which this is predominantly a women’s issue, feel free to take this opportunity instead of responding to what else I’m saying.
Even now, you’re trying to derail the conversation, which is about how women have to deal with this bullshit all the time online, and make it about a topic you care about.
You don’t need to participate, if this isn’t the subject that you want to talk about.
which is about how women have to deal with this bullshit all the time online
The point has been made. If you have more to say about it, go ahead.
You don’t need to participate, if this isn’t the subject that you want to talk about.
The unspoken thing I guess being that I shouldn’t participate if that isn’t something I have anything to say about. It sounds like something you want is for discussions that can be considered to be about women’s issues to be narrowly framed as such, and think there’s something wrong with engaging with the discussion in a way that doesn’t do this. I think this is much less reasonable than anything the comic itself is saying. There is a big difference between talking about the same issue but in a broader way, and remarking something overtly irrelevant and hostile like “what about circumcision”. That isn’t to say that spaces exclusively for narrowly framed discussion about women’s issues shouldn’t exist, but I don’t see a reason this comment thread has to be one, or why not considering it to be one should be regarded as offensive.
My point is that it is a universal issue, all while many people are trying very hard to represent it as women-specific.
When male voices are shushed both under their posts and under those focused on women, they don’t have much of a platform to speak out. And they need it, too.
If all sides have an opportunity to say things without being interrupted, there is no point in chiming in and saying the other side has it worse.
As much as you may be right that both men and women are experiencing this, the post was talking about how women experience it. And when women speak out about it, it’s apparently hard to talk about just that and instead the male experience has to be discussed as well.
Again, I really don’t think you intended anything bad here. But as you said:
If all sides have an opportunity to say things without being interrupted, there is no point in chiming in and saying the other side has it worse.
Women try to talk about it (e.g. via this topic), but you interrupted by chiming in how men are also affected. That might well be true, but it’s also the kind of interruption that can be frustrating because, and I say this as a man, the experience women have is probably different (on average) from the experience men have.
You’re not one of the voices in the comic shouting “misandrist” or anything, but it is a kind of “and what about the men?” type of statement. And I don’t think you’re trying to be dismissive here at all and I do believe your intentions are good, but the result here is that what women want to talk about is once again not talked about, which is what the comic is about.
Your well-intentioned statement I think perhaps unbeknownst to you is steering the discussion away from the intended topic. And it’s exactly that problem that this comic addresses.
I see where you’re coming from, and I agree for the most part (and I also don’t agree with people taking pitchforks on you), but the direction I take to “steer it away” is to look at it as something universal, which is simply more helpful to understand why it happens, not to tie attention to men’s issues specifically.
I believe we’ve come at the point where women and men issues are so intertwined, so much permeating each other that it’s no longer helpful to see them as separate issues to begin with. Sure, we have different experiences, but those very experiences come from the interaction of problems on both sides, and looking at them from one side is essentially screaming into the void and hoping it helps - and when it predictably doesn’t, this leads to people vilifying each other instead of exploring the reasons behind it.
Everyone has to familiarize themselves with the issues other sides face, and come from the side of compassion if they want to be part of an actual solution. That includes men, women and enbies, too.
the direction I take to “steer it away” is to look at it as something universal, which is simply more helpful to understand why it happens, not to tie attention to men’s issues specifically.
I understand your intentions, but it doesn’t have the intended effect. By doing this you are making the assumption that the way women experience these issues is (close to) the same as the way men experience it. But you can’t really assume that, and often people disagree.
When women want to talk about problems they face, it’s important to hear them out and address their issue, instead of what amounts to ‘deflecting’ to a “grander” issue. At its core it’s a whataboutism that derails the conversation, and that’s not what you intended.
So my genuine advice is: don’t. Address these problems one by one. The solutions can often be different.
You have to assume that
I believe we’ve come at the point where women and men issues are so intertwined, so much permeating each other that it’s no longer helpful to see them as separate issues to begin with.
may well not be correct, and it can feel incredibly invalidating to people by assuming that this is the case.
I tried to make it clear that women have a drastically different social experience. It is true, and it would be weird to debate it.
But we have to separate venting from finding solutions. My very point is that we often cannot practically address women’s issues without addressing men’s ones, and vice versa. Going one by one, you will quickly hit the wall, as men (or women, if we talk about men’s issues) just won’t be able to do what they’re asked for. And instead of accepting that and working together, people tend to assume that the reason the other side doesn’t change is because they act in bad faith. This is inherently imbalanced and unworkable.
I see, but the point of the comic is that women don’t seem to agree with you and find that way of thinking about it fairly exasperating at times. In many cases there hasn’t been a serious attempt to address the issues raised, so claiming that you can’t address them without also addressing men’s issues would be perhaps a bit premature.
I see where you’re coming from, and not gonna debate it further.
Still, to me it looks this division is growing, and hostility is barely ever a good answer. There seemed to be more unity and more decisiveness to approach things together just a few years prior, and I’m not sure what ended it.
For me, while I get where the post is coming from, a lot of the narrative seems to revolve around the dynamic of:
“We need to have an open dialog about XYZ. Let’s have a conversation.”
“Okay, then here’s ABC for context, as a comparison to XYZ.”
“Actually I’m here to talk about XYZ, not ABC. And you’re the problem for not strictly limiting this open conversation to the specific scope I want to consider.”
Like… you can either ask for open discussion or you can say, “Everybody shut up and listen to what I have to say, and unless you’re opening your mouth to completely agree with me in every way, don’t bother because I’m not here for anything other than letting you all know what I think.”
I’m not saying that the points are wrong or bad, just that it’s a bad look to start out with talking about an interest in having a dialogue, then as soon as there’s any expansion of the scope of discussion, suddenly being unhappy that there’s thoughts different from where it started out, and playing the victim or worse, blaming whoever took the invitation for an open dialogue at face value and engaged in good faith.
Like… you can either ask for open discussion or you can say, “Everybody shut up and listen to what I have to say, and unless you’re opening your mouth to completely agree with me in every way
I feel like that’s a pretty gross misrepresentation of the issue.
The people in the comic (and in the comments here) are often trying to minimize the issue on which she is speaking, or co-opt the conversation for their own issues (typically forcing her and the original issue to the sidelines). They’re not adding context or having a discussion in good faith.
I don’t think the Comic is specifically about women.
I think this is about the overarching problem of whataboutism and its consequences on society and societal discourse.
In which case the OP would be on-topic and you would be the one derailing.
I am not saying that either of you is trying to derail but rather just showing that different interpretations (a more literal interpretation on your side and a more symbolic on ours) can lead to different discussions.
Funnily enough you’re in the comic. Not that I think you intended that.
The comic is about the meta issue so it’s not quite the same imo
I agree that it’s not quite the same, and I’m finding it real interesting to ponder how that happens.
This comic and this comment section have been pretty thought provoking. (Heads up, this is overly abstract speculation from here): For example, here’s a mathsy diagram
This is a commutative diagram, and I’m not at the level of being able to explain it properly, but part of it is the idea of equivalence, the fact that there’s two routes from A to D that are equivalent.
I’m thinking about this sort of analogous to what we’re seeing in the comic and these comments. Like, the base experiences we’re talking about (being spoken over when you’re trying to share your experiences, for example) are fundamentally shared experiences, but the manner of experiencing them is different, because it’s coloured by our own positionality (of which gender is a big part of). I think sometimes though, it’s like discussions don’t work because we get separated — some of us at B, and some at C. Like, it does matter that our experiences are different, but also, there’s a sense in which it doesn’t, because we need to head to the same place anyway.
I don’t know what converging on D would be in this analogy. Solidarity perhaps? Which would, I suppose, involve recognising that the route you’re on is different to the route other people are on, and that it’s possible to be heading to the same place. I’m not sure, this is quite abstract, but you said the word “meta” and that seemed to catalyse this thought, so here’s this comment. You’re welcome/my apologies
Oh hell yeah, Category Theory! LET’S GOOOOO!
The comic is about how when people speak online online about women’s issues, dudes keep trying to make it about dudes.
The comic itself is someone talking online about women’s issues, and the comments are all men trying to make it about them.
It’s remarkably similar.
This is a legitimate complaint in the situations where the topic is uniquely a women’s issue, and people are trying to redirect the conversation to something that really isn’t the same thing and is a separate issue so talking about that means you aren’t talking about the first thing anymore. But the meta issue of someone trying to talk about one group’s problems and getting hit by whataboutism, seems arguably more universal and might not be specifically a women’s issue, so saying something along the lines of “yeah this happens to us too it sucks”, could be supportive and not about shutting up discussion of the original topic.
This isn’t a universal complaint about the frustration of whataboutism.
This is a specific complaint about how any time women try to talk about women’s issues in a forum that may contain men, those men engage in disingenuous whataboutism.
The men replying are almost never showing support, they’re minimizing the issue, or they’re trying to co-opt the thread.
It doesn’t need to be a uniquely woman’s issue for it to be a predominantly women’s issue.
And it doesn’t need to be a predominantly woman’s issue for women to want to talk about it from a woman’s perspective without men making it about them.
To me, the comment in question didn’t seem to be doing that. The point I’m trying to make is to object to the idea that it is categorically doing that, given the context. It seems like a divisive way of deciding what is bad behavior, to condemn any statement made in response to discussion about problems faced by one group that is not specifically about the struggles of that group, regardless of anything else about the statement.
If you would rather expand on how that goes or the ways in which this is predominantly a women’s issue, feel free to take this opportunity instead of responding to what else I’m saying.
Even now, you’re trying to derail the conversation, which is about how women have to deal with this bullshit all the time online, and make it about a topic you care about.
You don’t need to participate, if this isn’t the subject that you want to talk about.
The point has been made. If you have more to say about it, go ahead.
The unspoken thing I guess being that I shouldn’t participate if that isn’t something I have anything to say about. It sounds like something you want is for discussions that can be considered to be about women’s issues to be narrowly framed as such, and think there’s something wrong with engaging with the discussion in a way that doesn’t do this. I think this is much less reasonable than anything the comic itself is saying. There is a big difference between talking about the same issue but in a broader way, and remarking something overtly irrelevant and hostile like “what about circumcision”. That isn’t to say that spaces exclusively for narrowly framed discussion about women’s issues shouldn’t exist, but I don’t see a reason this comment thread has to be one, or why not considering it to be one should be regarded as offensive.
You just can’t help yourself
My point is that it is a universal issue, all while many people are trying very hard to represent it as women-specific.
When male voices are shushed both under their posts and under those focused on women, they don’t have much of a platform to speak out. And they need it, too.
If all sides have an opportunity to say things without being interrupted, there is no point in chiming in and saying the other side has it worse.
As much as you may be right that both men and women are experiencing this, the post was talking about how women experience it. And when women speak out about it, it’s apparently hard to talk about just that and instead the male experience has to be discussed as well.
Again, I really don’t think you intended anything bad here. But as you said:
Women try to talk about it (e.g. via this topic), but you interrupted by chiming in how men are also affected. That might well be true, but it’s also the kind of interruption that can be frustrating because, and I say this as a man, the experience women have is probably different (on average) from the experience men have.
You’re not one of the voices in the comic shouting “misandrist” or anything, but it is a kind of “and what about the men?” type of statement. And I don’t think you’re trying to be dismissive here at all and I do believe your intentions are good, but the result here is that what women want to talk about is once again not talked about, which is what the comic is about.
Your well-intentioned statement I think perhaps unbeknownst to you is steering the discussion away from the intended topic. And it’s exactly that problem that this comic addresses.
I see where you’re coming from, and I agree for the most part (and I also don’t agree with people taking pitchforks on you), but the direction I take to “steer it away” is to look at it as something universal, which is simply more helpful to understand why it happens, not to tie attention to men’s issues specifically.
I believe we’ve come at the point where women and men issues are so intertwined, so much permeating each other that it’s no longer helpful to see them as separate issues to begin with. Sure, we have different experiences, but those very experiences come from the interaction of problems on both sides, and looking at them from one side is essentially screaming into the void and hoping it helps - and when it predictably doesn’t, this leads to people vilifying each other instead of exploring the reasons behind it.
Everyone has to familiarize themselves with the issues other sides face, and come from the side of compassion if they want to be part of an actual solution. That includes men, women and enbies, too.
I understand your intentions, but it doesn’t have the intended effect. By doing this you are making the assumption that the way women experience these issues is (close to) the same as the way men experience it. But you can’t really assume that, and often people disagree.
When women want to talk about problems they face, it’s important to hear them out and address their issue, instead of what amounts to ‘deflecting’ to a “grander” issue. At its core it’s a whataboutism that derails the conversation, and that’s not what you intended.
So my genuine advice is: don’t. Address these problems one by one. The solutions can often be different.
You have to assume that
may well not be correct, and it can feel incredibly invalidating to people by assuming that this is the case.
I tried to make it clear that women have a drastically different social experience. It is true, and it would be weird to debate it.
But we have to separate venting from finding solutions. My very point is that we often cannot practically address women’s issues without addressing men’s ones, and vice versa. Going one by one, you will quickly hit the wall, as men (or women, if we talk about men’s issues) just won’t be able to do what they’re asked for. And instead of accepting that and working together, people tend to assume that the reason the other side doesn’t change is because they act in bad faith. This is inherently imbalanced and unworkable.
I see, but the point of the comic is that women don’t seem to agree with you and find that way of thinking about it fairly exasperating at times. In many cases there hasn’t been a serious attempt to address the issues raised, so claiming that you can’t address them without also addressing men’s issues would be perhaps a bit premature.
I see where you’re coming from, and not gonna debate it further.
Still, to me it looks this division is growing, and hostility is barely ever a good answer. There seemed to be more unity and more decisiveness to approach things together just a few years prior, and I’m not sure what ended it.
Comic: “I’m here to talk about women.” Heckling ensues
First Comment: “This is exactly what happens to men.” Wall of Upvotes
Proof that you can pull the users out of the Reddit but you can’t pull the Reddit out of the users.
For me, while I get where the post is coming from, a lot of the narrative seems to revolve around the dynamic of:
“We need to have an open dialog about XYZ. Let’s have a conversation.”
“Okay, then here’s ABC for context, as a comparison to XYZ.”
“Actually I’m here to talk about XYZ, not ABC. And you’re the problem for not strictly limiting this open conversation to the specific scope I want to consider.”
Like… you can either ask for open discussion or you can say, “Everybody shut up and listen to what I have to say, and unless you’re opening your mouth to completely agree with me in every way, don’t bother because I’m not here for anything other than letting you all know what I think.”
I’m not saying that the points are wrong or bad, just that it’s a bad look to start out with talking about an interest in having a dialogue, then as soon as there’s any expansion of the scope of discussion, suddenly being unhappy that there’s thoughts different from where it started out, and playing the victim or worse, blaming whoever took the invitation for an open dialogue at face value and engaged in good faith.
There’s a big middle area you’re ignoring.
I feel like that’s a pretty gross misrepresentation of the issue.
The people in the comic (and in the comments here) are often trying to minimize the issue on which she is speaking, or co-opt the conversation for their own issues (typically forcing her and the original issue to the sidelines). They’re not adding context or having a discussion in good faith.
I’d actually disagree with you.
I don’t think the Comic is specifically about women.
I think this is about the overarching problem of whataboutism and its consequences on society and societal discourse.
In which case the OP would be on-topic and you would be the one derailing.
I am not saying that either of you is trying to derail but rather just showing that different interpretations (a more literal interpretation on your side and a more symbolic on ours) can lead to different discussions.
You’re right, and we all know who downvoted you