Be Excellent To Each Other

What a shame you've ruined the sentiment of this post by making a broad generalisation which, in my observations of the MRA, has absolutely no merit of any kind. In all discussions I've seen by MRAs, any comments which revert to anything cheap along the lines of 'well what do you expect from a woman' are downvoted, criticised, and stamped down upon as unproductive - without exception. Anything blatantly misogynistic is outright removed and the users banned. It has no place in that discussion.

MRAs are to men what Feminists are to women. If you think the latter has merit, so does the former. The fact you can dig up one or two extremists and try to paint that as the entire movement is about as legitimate as finding the most misandric radical feminist and trying to paint that up as feminism embodied.

What a shame that your pretensions of openness are nevertheless marred by your own prejudices.

On topic, I'm not depressed but I've got a troubling literal ball-ache that I'm going to see my doctor about. I'm pretty excited to get my nads out to a random stranger, but I'm also aware that this discomfort or embarrassment is normally what puts men off getting checked so I'll be doing that to make sure it's not the C, or any other troubling thing.

"Hey, let me counter a generalisation with another one!" -_-

Not to derail but feminists themselves have trouble deciding on what feminism actually means to the people who identify to that label. Suffice to say it means a variety of very different things and is a terrible definition generally.

If you're interested in a very relevant film that's just been kickstarted, look at this:



A feminist who explores the Men's Rights movement and finds her own perceptions being challenged along the way, along with countering many of the stereotypes parroted by myp in his opening post. I'll be very interested to watch it when it comes out as I'm sure it'll be very illuminating regardless of what you currently think about it.

Thanks for not consulting me before taking my comments out of the thread they were intended for, which also removed the relevant part of my post meant for that thread.

Even if many of today's feminists are just mental, "man's rights activism" sounds as stupid as "white people's rights activism".

We should *actually* probably talk about MRAs, for those who aren't au fait with the term. They are almost 100% straight, angry, white men. They don't care about real men's issues at all, gay men, or men of colour, or trans men, etc etc.

The Red Pill movie discussed above has pretty much been entirely funded by A Voice for Men, a prominent MRA site. So any notion that it will be impartial at all is palpably laughable. The Kickstarter was failing until site owner Paul Elam started rallying around asking MRAs to fund it. http://www.vocativ.com/news/245222/mens ... -red-pill/

MRAs believe that marital rape should be legal:

http://www.avoiceformen.com/mens-rights ... -in-india/

Despite taking a lot of money from donations, none of it is accountable, and none of the money actually seems to have been spent on anything that will help men at all (men-only DV shelters, helping victims of abuse etc). They are strangely silent when it comes to actually helping men. Paul Elam has even admitted that MRAs exist simply to shout at and abuse feminists. http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2015/03/1 ... -declares/

Here is a video showing the face of the Men's Rights Movement.

Lovely, aren't they?

They contain such luminaries as 'Roosh V', who proposes stopping rape by making it legal on private property. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/ro ... al-5193802

The very sad thing about all this is that the whole 'Men's Human Rights' movement obfuscates and undermines genuine activists trying to campaign for men's issues such as suicide rates, domestic abuse, custody cases, etc.

Saying that feminism and MRAs are two sides of the same coin is at best misguided and at worst dangerous. The former looks to empower women and help them realise they don't need to fit inside the boxes that society deems them and that they are equal to men. MRAs exist only as a reaction to that - literally old men shouting at clouds because the world has moved on without them.

All very true myp, but what gets utterly fucking tedious is the dismissal of any countervailing voice in gender discussion as being an MRA. See for instance any CiF comment thread under a Jess Valenti column where peopeel will quite rightly point out a lot of the bollocks and innaccuracies in her writing (which is a real shame, as she has some good points under the terribnle writing, misuse of statistics and blatant cobblers). It's as bad as the SJW dismissal.

The problem is that gender discussions seem to have become utterly poisoned, both from the feminist perspective (or at least the 4th wave, middle class white woman version on the Guaridain) and from the male side (e.g. MRAs, who, as you point out, don't give a toss about genuine male issues and are just there to give voice to weird inadequates). The extremes on both sides mean that everyone on ether side gets tarred with the same, or a similar, brush.

Literally the first thing he said.

Eh? I'm not sure how that is related to what I've said. Sorry, I'm possibly being dim.

EBG's position there seems a little weird - actual self-identified MRAs are 100% nutters, as myp has suggested and as I 100% agree. EBG seems to think there are cuddly ones that actually do actual proper men's rights activism. There aren't.

What I was getting at is the dismissal of reasonable counterpoints as being MRAs, mansplaining etc. It's much like anyone vaguely right wing being declared a Tory HQ troll.

I don't disagree with you there. Liberal (ie white) feminism is pretty toxic. They are anti-sex work and do not recognise trans people either (see Germaine Greer as an example).

I'm all about intersectional feminism which is much more inclusive. I've seen some wonderful articles about issues men face and how we can try to solve them from prominent feminists today. It is a sort of sad irony that feminists do more for real men's issues than MRAs ever will.

This false dichomoty of an imagined battle between feminists and MRAs is laugable though. You don't need to identify as a feminist to realise that MRAs are basically snake oil-sellers for the 21st century. Even those who don't use the F word would want true equality for all - if they're a person with a basic level of human decency, at least. A lot of arguments MRAs have are against feminists they've made up in their heads, rather than the actual topics of discussion. It's baffling and frustrating.

I had no idea Germaine Greer was a trans person.

</obvious>

*crowd boos*

Myp, I completely agree with everything you've said there, again.

I feel like I'm in some sort of alternate universe.

Don't men already have access to basically every rights afforded to women, and then a bunch more on top of that?

I know I've never been meaningfully discriminated against for being a man. In fact I have something approaching a full deck of privileges that have given me a great deal of benefits over other people throughout my life. No doubt many I didn't even notice.

Sometimes I want to have sex with a woman but she doesn't want to have sex with me. This is just a disappointment rather than an infringement of my rights in any way.

It's completely ridiculous to compare feminism to MRA really. Feminism is essentially an academic discourse, or at least an umbrella term for a diverse range of discourses and philosophy related to inequality in gender relations. While MRA is, what, some post-New Right reactionary movement that has popped up on the Internet recently?

Well no, Lewie, and many women have suffered no ill either. But women can face many many forms of discrimination, and boys now are less likely to do well at school (reversing the previous situation), men are out earned by women up to their mid 30s according to ONS figures, men are more likely to commit suicide, be homeless, be victims of violence etc. everyone can end up having it a bit shit, really. Generalising from one example isn't helpful.

The mistake is in ever casting it as a men vs women situation. Class and capitalism are the biggest issues. Many of the issues affecting women (such as picking up a career after having children) are issues that affect men (fuck me I want my employer to be ok with me taking time out or working from to look after the kids when they're ill without it being a big screaming deal) and a holistic solution is the way forward. I don't get why more men don't see this.

The MRAs don't care about this and it seems that some of the louder media feminists are so focused on either generalised and petty man bashing (see the man spreading nonsense for example, or anything written by Julie bindel these days) or very specific middle class white wealthy woman issues (and this helps drive the misperception of feminism and the "feminazi" bollocks). Perhaps I read the Guardian too much. But this is what causes the impression there is an us v them thing going on.

Very weird isn't it? I'm glad we got there in the end.

You're overselling that significantly.

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/a ... tudy-finds

"Figures compiled by the Press Association have shown that between the ages of 22 and 29, a woman will typically earn £1,111 more per annum than her male counterparts. ... While younger women in their 20s came out top in the earning stakes, the story was vastly different for workers in their 30s. A man turning 30 in 2006 would have brought in on average £8,775 more than a woman of the same age."

So it's under 30, not "mid 30s", and it's only very slightly more, and it's vastly counterbalanced by a huge shift towards male salaries in the post-30 age groups.

You're right, yes, Doc, I misremembered the upper end of that. And no, it's not the end if the world. But it's still a difference, and of course the change from 30s onwards is due to career breaks for children rather than inherent direct sexism in the system. It could be evened out with more progressive approaches to shared parental leave, but then an element of this would remain due to personal choice.

It's possibly logical to extrapolate that if women didn't take career breaks to have kids the differential would remain. Perhaps women just work harder than men (they certainly form a higher percentage of graduates, which is arguably a differential that needs fixing)

[citation needed]

That's nowhere near true in tech, the area I am most familiar with. You can control for career breaks, for pipeline, for every confounding factor you can think of and women still come out far disadvantaged. And the first ever computer programmer was a woman, and the field had a gender bias towards women until a few decades ago.

Lord Bryon's daughter. Her mother said she could do anything as long as she wasn't a poet.

Didn't she invent the micron, too?

Hmm, no. What am I thinking of?

[citation needed] there too then! Does that really control for everything?

There are laws against paying different amounts to people on the basis of gender - if we know about employers doing this, there's a potential rash of lawsuits there.

I'm not saying it's not true, I just find it hard to believe that there is direct bias in terms of paying women of the same experience less money for the same job. At least in this country.

While other factors may come in, I think it's hard to argue that career breaks don't play a very large part of the gap in pay after 30.

In law it's certainly the case that the majority of new entrants and associates are women, but I'd need to go looking for the data for that to citation for you, and I want to play battlefront.

Man, we should pass a law against murder, so no-one ever got murdered again.

Oh come on, that's a daft analogy. "That man stiffed me on a drug deal/shagged my wife/I'm a psychopath so I'm going to pay someone less money".

Sure, because it's relatively easy to catch murderers. Whereas for a woman to discover a man is getting more pay for the same job, and then to prove to a legal standard their jobs are the same and their performance is the same, is nigh on impossible.

This is hopelessly redunctionist. The problems are unconscious bias, not anything as baldly stated as you suggest. This video (which covers our mandatory diversity training at Google) is excellent, although it's also rather long.

Oh, you sound pleased with yourself with that one. I'm not sure why you need to be quite so antagonistic, but there we are.

Anyway, I'm not convinced that's entirely true. I know we do look into this sort of thing where I work, and there are rules around it. It's built into the system as we have a legal team and audit/risk team and HR team that ensures compliance with the law, same way as we ensure compliance with e.g. product safety requirements. As a parallel, it'd be cheaper to make less safe products but we're not going to.

The reason your analogy is daft is because the drivers behind murder and paying someone less for the same job are very different and incomparable. What would motivate an employer to discriminate in this way? Particularly when in any halfway large company there will be specific rules in place to prevent it. If you're going to deliberately pay women less, you'd do the same to the men, and reduce your payroll costs.

Perhaps I'm just failing to empathise with the necessary mentality that would lead to it, but I really can't see how it would happen in practice these days.

I'm also quite pleased with the government making people publish (at least aggregated) information around this soon.

Just seen your intervening post - that's very much another reason why your analogy was not really apposite, of course. As I was getting at (in a different context) with the bit you quoted.

However, you raise a fair point in relation to unconscious bias that I admit I hadn't considered.

I'm not saying that there definitely aren't cases of women getting paid less because they're women, but do you really think that that is the cause of the bulk of the (pretty large) pay gap post 30, rather than the slightly more obvious "not at work for several years"?

Why would men suddenly start being biased (whether consciously or otherwise) against women when they hit their 30s? Surely it would start earlier than this, which would mean there wouldn't be a pay gap in favour of women in their 20s?

I'm not saying there isn't an issue with a pay gap 30s onwards, I'm just suggesting a bulk of the cause lies other than with direct "I'm going to pay less because she's a woman" sexism. And the solutions are therefore different.

This is a horrible thread title for this discussion...

Anyway, re: the ONS stats, now I'm not posting from my phone during a school governors' meeting :

Between the ages of 22 and 29 women earn 1.1% more than men of the same age, and between 30 and 39 women earn 0.2% more than men in the same age group (per hour).

ONS figures (Fig 9, page 12):
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_385428.pdf

"In fact, the gap is negative for the 22-29 and 30-39 age groups, meaning that women earn on average more than men.Thereafter, there is a relatively large positive gap. This is likely to be connected with the fact that many women have children and take time out of the labour market."

The Guardian link you posted (a) related to 2006 for the the man turning 30 point and (b) appeared to relate to overall earnings - I'm not sure if that factored in part time working (which will be more prevalent for women who've had children). I'm also not sure you can meaningfully compare average income across people when they're working different hours (some of which will be through choice, some won't), which is what that seemed to do (although I readily admit the Guardian summary is not exactly comprehensive).

I'm absolutely not trying to get into a "one side has it worse than the other" argument (and the ONS stats show that overall there is a 10% pay gap in favour of men, which is terrible, and it seems it can to a large extent be explained by women taking time out of the labour market which forces certain choices on women and this is an issue that really needs to be fixed, which was my entire point), it's just that you started the stat waving and [citation needed] and I'm compelled to argue:)

However, if it shows one thing it shows that its easy to see how disagreements occur with stats like these - it's very hard to count everything and to factor everything in.

All that aside, why the chuffing hell are 16-17 year old boys getting paid so much more than girls? I really can't figure that one out.

Also - it's clear that the public sector is much better on the pay gap for some reason, which is fascinating.

Looking at that picture I don't know how anyone can take that bunch seriously. They look like they all get together in a cabin in the woods at weekends and shoot stuff and drink moonshine

One place where men's rights is very lacking is rights and custody in divorce. One of my friends spent the best part of 700K fighting his untrustworthy wife over allegations of child beating and rape.

She had everything from legal aid and the social services where "mums always right" the whole way through.

Everything she accused him off was utter shite, didn't stop the legal aid barristers filling their boots though.

In the end he has full custody of his kids, she gets 2 hours twice a week that has to be supervised as the judge ruled her untrustworthy to be on her own with him. Legal Aid also gave her a bill for a 100K as they finally realised she was wasting time and money.

My mate as done ok and had money to fight it, but he told me when first started the first thing he got through the post was a freeze on him selling or raising any money on his house. For most guys this would be the only place they could fund a custody battle from so its no wonder you get fathers for justice protesting.

I don't understand the particular issue here...? An allegation was made, it was investigated, and then he won the case and got custody of his kids....? So you know it was all lies, why would social services believe either of them straight away? And if there's any doubt, surely it's better to remove the children from potential harm?

Anyone can make false accusations, be crazy and vindictive, not just ex-wives. Justice prevailed.

Most families are set up to be biased in favour of the mother/child relationship. If that situation is considered normal and in the best interests of the child during the marriage, why would the courts change it just because you get divorced...?

Even in happy, normal marriages where both parents work, the mother is the primary care-giver. She makes the meals, she makes and attends appointments, she takes time off when the child is sick, she stops work for the first year or so, she does most of the chores. I know that is not always the situation but it also not always the situation that the mother gets primary custody.

Fathers 4 Justice are MRAs. They do nothing to help their custody battles and just hang off buildings in Batman suits and whinge.

The issue is in a patriarchal society women are seen as the main caregivers while men are the breadwinners, so the courts will heavily favour the mother in most circumstances, even if the father is a much better parent. By striving for equality we can break these gender norms for both men and women - it will help us all!

Justice had no change of prevailing at all if my mate hadn't got £700,000 to pay for it!

Its not justice when the women gets almost limitless legal aid and the man( who is supposed to be innocent until proven guilty ) gets no help at all.

Your friend's case is incredibly rare. While this infographic isn't 100% accurate, it's a decent enough representation (in fact it probably overstates the number of false rape accusations).

He was accused of this after the first set of accusations had started to fall apart (he was accused of beating her and his kids) he was awarded supervised access when it started to become clear they wasn't any truth in any of it.

As the process went on and more of the accusations' were seen as false he asked the court to relax the supervision as he had to have his mother and sister there each time and it was becoming a strain for them

This was granted and then she came out with the rape accusation the next day.

You would have thought that given the false allegations which were disproven in part by endless journals she kept around the house showing that she had mental issues that he would have been given some doubt.

Instead he went back to square one.

You are right is a rare case given the ruling that sees his wife get heavily supervised access 2 hours twice a week.

Very sad for the kids and I still don't know why he didn't see the issues with his wife before it came to this. I new her very well and she was always very nice to spend time with.

I'm sorry, I may be misunderstanding, but are you suggesting her rape allegation shouldn't have been believed from the beginning because she had mental health issues?

I think he is suggesting that the woman shouldn't have been given any more special treatment over the man. Or at least I hope that is what he is saying.

No not at all, but given that they weren't in the first set of allegations and those were proven to be rubbish , you would have thought some questions would have been asked.

The Police were later found to be coaching her and the kids to try and add weight to the rape allegations, in fact his wife said this in open court in front of a judge and that's how it was found to be false.

The judge also had to get a senior police officer up in front of her and tell him to formally remove the charges and bail months after they were found to be false.

The whole process was biased against him as a man (not saying he should have got special treatment over any of the allegations) The Social Services told him that Mum was always right and that's how they were going to work the case. This stance came about as previously they have been so sloppy with a number of domestic cases (doing the opposite) and a number of these has seen the women murdered.

Of course I'm for anything that could save peoples lives, but there was no middle ground just 2 extremes, even long after the judge had ruled on everything the Social Services was trying to get things overturned, they were told to back off by the judge with a threat that she would rule to a degree that would set precedent for legal action against them.

Phew


There's lots of reasons why someone might delay revealing that they been raped, though, and timeliness shouldn't impact upon how seriously a complaint is taken.

Obviously there's a load of other issues in this case, but if this woman had actually been raped and the police hadn't taken it seriously that in itself would be an issue. Such a shame (for the kids) that it was wrapped in the complexities of a custody battle etc.

In the unlikely event you're open to learning about the true value of the Men's Rights movement, you can just watch this video without even knowing what it's replying to. Assume it's replying to everything said by the feminist tumblrina who's posted the most intellectually-dishonest bullshit on this thread that I've ever seen, and did so only when he knew I wasn't around to immediately counter it. A very tedious cookie-cutter SJW type that merits no individual response.

There are many other such videos, should you ever choose to truly educate yourselves.

Welcome back, Gnomes!

Not mad actually just laughing

That video is 40 goddamn minutes long, I ain't watching that. Plus she's uggo.

Can we get a tl;dr on the video?

It's all the woman's fault.

Story of my life

Do you think any of us are stupid enough to waste our time watching that?

If I had a pound for everytime some angry white man told me to watch someone I've never heard of shout about teh evul femimmsts for an hour on YouTube I'd be a very rich man indeed.

Mr preferred choice of bread.