The overwhelming majority of men have failed to protect women from the bad men. Good men don’t just not abuse women. Good men actively protect women from abuse.
Men have more physical power and more political power in the patriarchy. And with great power, comes great responsibility. Spider-Man uses his power to protect women from abuse. Every man should be like Spider-Man.
So are we supposed to like psychically detect instances of roofieing and Instant Transmission into the middle of shady bars to punch out evil men or what?
I recommend being an amplifier. Talk to the women in your life about what they need, and use your big loud socially privileged man voice to repeat it for them. You can be a political campaigner for women’s rights by amplifying women’s voices.
Do you have suggestions for how we can go about doing this? If I see a man being an asshole I’ll say something but it’s pretty rare that any of the abusive shit women in my life have gone through has happened when anyone else was there to do anything about it. Usually their abusers wait til they’re alone. I’m not trying to argue with you, I’m legitimately looking for ideas.
You could offer to go out with your woman friends and family members to keep them safe. Cover their drinks while they pee, etc. Protecting others starts with talking to them about what they need.
Another thing you can do is be an amplifier. Listen to their problems, and then repeat what they say to other men.
Spider-man is a vigilante who constantly fucks up and makes the system worse. He is also, and I cannot stress this enough, a work of fiction. Relying on the individual wills of physically and politically powerful men, even well-intentioned ones, is how we get to authoritarianism and fascism. The answer is not in individuals, but in systems.
In reality, the closst thing we have to Spiderman IRL is the NYPD, and we’ve already seen how ACAB.
The men with the most physical and political power are the ones abusing that power. The problem is the concentration of power, not men.
What happens when the “bad” men have more physical and political power than the “good” ones do in a system that allows those individuals to exercise that power unilaterally?
“Men” as a “political community” is entirely a fabrication. Reality does not conform to the social constructs you are trying to impose upon it. This may come as a shock to you, but most men do not actually know each other.
In the last US presidential election, 45% of women voted for Trump even after all of the misogynist shit he’s done, and 45% of men literally voted for a woman to be president (not including non-voters of course). A slight statistical trend, but certainly not enough to be able to predict who an individual woukd vote for based on gender alone.
Gender is a spectrum (or more correctly, a collection of a lot of traits, most of which are their own individual spectrums). That is not something I can selectively believe is true whenever I want to support my trans/nonbinary/gender fluid friends ans just conveniently ignore whenever it makes me feel good.
Racists absolutely love to cite statistics about violent crime in predominantly black communities. Do we say “good black people need to do a better job of holding the bad ones accountable?” Absolutely not, because that’s prejudiced ans ridiculous.
If one trans woman sexually assaults a cis woman in a public restroom and JK Rowling starts howling about it… What do we do? Do we demonize all trans women, or even all trans people entirely? Do we start doing genital checks in toilets? Do we start to become afraid of trans people as a “political community”? What if it were more than one case? How many cases does it take for it to become a problem? The answer is: the question itself is fundamentally transphobic and invalid.
I think most progressives get it: its unreasonable to generalize individuals by their identies and pre-judge based on things they cannot control. However, there always seem to be some people who have a problem with that and want to hate others as a sort of “revenge”. Right now it’s in fashion to hate on men. In the past it’s been white people, which I find particularly funny because “whiteness” itself is an incredibly recent concept and many “white” people in the US today would not have even been considered “white” 100 years ago. I’ve heard the occasional hate against straight and cis people.
Age is another one I see. People love to hate on Boomers, but most of the evil people destroying the world aren’t Boomers. Trump, Biden, Obama, both Clintons, Bernie, McConnell, Peloso, Graham… All Silent Generation. JD Vance is a millennial. Elon Musk is Gen X (though it’s even less relevant outside the US). Plenty of boomers are cool as fuck and have spent their lives fighting oppression to make the world a better place, while plenty of people from every “generation” have been shitty. The simple fact is that such generalizations are meaningless.
Not the mainstream one. He doesn’t hold any clout amongst most of us as a gay man. We don’t listen to him; he’s no gayfluencer. But Andrew Tate holds clout as a manfluencer.
The overwhelming majority of men have failed to protect women from the bad men. Good men don’t just not abuse women. Good men actively protect women from abuse.
Men have more physical power and more political power in the patriarchy. And with great power, comes great responsibility. Spider-Man uses his power to protect women from abuse. Every man should be like Spider-Man.
So are we supposed to like psychically detect instances of roofieing and Instant Transmission into the middle of shady bars to punch out evil men or what?
I recommend being an amplifier. Talk to the women in your life about what they need, and use your big loud socially privileged man voice to repeat it for them. You can be a political campaigner for women’s rights by amplifying women’s voices.
Thanks for the advice
Do you have suggestions for how we can go about doing this? If I see a man being an asshole I’ll say something but it’s pretty rare that any of the abusive shit women in my life have gone through has happened when anyone else was there to do anything about it. Usually their abusers wait til they’re alone. I’m not trying to argue with you, I’m legitimately looking for ideas.
Call out the men in your life who act shitty.
You could offer to go out with your woman friends and family members to keep them safe. Cover their drinks while they pee, etc. Protecting others starts with talking to them about what they need.
Another thing you can do is be an amplifier. Listen to their problems, and then repeat what they say to other men.
Spider-man is a vigilante who constantly fucks up and makes the system worse. He is also, and I cannot stress this enough, a work of fiction. Relying on the individual wills of physically and politically powerful men, even well-intentioned ones, is how we get to authoritarianism and fascism. The answer is not in individuals, but in systems.
In reality, the closst thing we have to Spiderman IRL is the NYPD, and we’ve already seen how ACAB.
The men with the most physical and political power are the ones abusing that power. The problem is the concentration of power, not men.
What happens when the “bad” men have more physical and political power than the “good” ones do in a system that allows those individuals to exercise that power unilaterally?
This dumbass literally used a fictional character as an example of ideal man lmao
So you’re saying bad men hold all the social power in the man community, and good men are a political minority, if not a numerical minority?
I agree. And that’s why people are scared of men as a political community.
“Men” as a “political community” is entirely a fabrication. Reality does not conform to the social constructs you are trying to impose upon it. This may come as a shock to you, but most men do not actually know each other.
In the last US presidential election, 45% of women voted for Trump even after all of the misogynist shit he’s done, and 45% of men literally voted for a woman to be president (not including non-voters of course). A slight statistical trend, but certainly not enough to be able to predict who an individual woukd vote for based on gender alone.
Gender is a spectrum (or more correctly, a collection of a lot of traits, most of which are their own individual spectrums). That is not something I can selectively believe is true whenever I want to support my trans/nonbinary/gender fluid friends ans just conveniently ignore whenever it makes me feel good.
Racists absolutely love to cite statistics about violent crime in predominantly black communities. Do we say “good black people need to do a better job of holding the bad ones accountable?” Absolutely not, because that’s prejudiced ans ridiculous.
If one trans woman sexually assaults a cis woman in a public restroom and JK Rowling starts howling about it… What do we do? Do we demonize all trans women, or even all trans people entirely? Do we start doing genital checks in toilets? Do we start to become afraid of trans people as a “political community”? What if it were more than one case? How many cases does it take for it to become a problem? The answer is: the question itself is fundamentally transphobic and invalid.
I think most progressives get it: its unreasonable to generalize individuals by their identies and pre-judge based on things they cannot control. However, there always seem to be some people who have a problem with that and want to hate others as a sort of “revenge”. Right now it’s in fashion to hate on men. In the past it’s been white people, which I find particularly funny because “whiteness” itself is an incredibly recent concept and many “white” people in the US today would not have even been considered “white” 100 years ago. I’ve heard the occasional hate against straight and cis people.
Age is another one I see. People love to hate on Boomers, but most of the evil people destroying the world aren’t Boomers. Trump, Biden, Obama, both Clintons, Bernie, McConnell, Peloso, Graham… All Silent Generation. JD Vance is a millennial. Elon Musk is Gen X (though it’s even less relevant outside the US). Plenty of boomers are cool as fuck and have spent their lives fighting oppression to make the world a better place, while plenty of people from every “generation” have been shitty. The simple fact is that such generalizations are meaningless.
If there’s an LGBTQ+ community, there’s a man community.
It depends, would you consider Sam Altman part of the LGBTQ+ community?
Not the mainstream one. He doesn’t hold any clout amongst most of us as a gay man. We don’t listen to him; he’s no gayfluencer. But Andrew Tate holds clout as a manfluencer.