ObjectivityIncarnate

Take for example “toxic masculinity”. Literally taken, that word means that masculinity is toxic.

Well, no. Taking “rotten apples” literally doesn’t mean apples are inherently rotten, it’s just a descriptor.

What I have more of a problem with is that the exact same thing exists within stereotypes of femininity, but “toxic femininity” never gained any steam as a concept/term at all. That does more to imply ‘it’s all the males’ fault’, I think.

I’m reminded of someone once mocking the notion of a fanny pack being marketed to men with a camo pattern, calling it an example of “fragile masculinity” that was inherently misogynistic. I asked them if a tool set with pink handles being marketed to women was an example of “fragile femininity”, and response I got was no, that that was also misogynistic, somehow.

Also, “manspreading” is supposedly a misogynistic, aggressive act by men denying women space in public settings, and yet, (primarily) women taking up entire extra seats by putting their purses/bags on them never ‘went viral’ in the same way, again no colloquialism for it, despite being an act that’s significantly more common, and deprives others of more space than a guy whose knees are spread out.

Ideologues won’t see the obvious flaws in their logic no matter how blatant you make them.

Black Lives Also Matter would have been much better

Better, but still not optimal, since the whole thing is about police brutality, and that slogan says nothing about that. Even with the “also”, in general it comes off as an accusation of racism toward whoever you say it to (especially since it was said mostly to other ‘random’ citizens, not cops).

If I walked up to a random person and said “hey, women’s lives matter”, I should expect to get one or more of these responses:

• Uh, duh? Who said otherwise?
• Why are you saying that to me? Do you think I don’t think they do?

Because those are the implications that kind of phrase carries.

When BLM was a brand-new thing, it was a normal, and very understandable, reaction, for someone who’s hearing it for the first time to say/think something along the lines of:

• Who said they don’t matter? I know I didn’t, why are you saying “black lives matter” to me, as if you’re implying that I don’t believe they do?
• Why specify “black”, aren’t you implying others don’t, then?

It was also badly-named for another reason: the whole foundation of it was in response to police unlawfully killing black citizens. “Black Lives Matter” in no way speaks to anything involving police action. The phrase naturally comes off as an aggressive accusation of deep racism (to the point of believing a certain person’s life is literally worthless, which is a step beyond the inferiority actual racists usually ascribe to their ‘target’) when said to someone.

Or “mansplaining”. Woman can and do exhibit that behavior too. Just try being a young father and bring your toddler to a circle of older women. The correct word would be “overexplaining”, and suddenly it clearly describes the problem without unnecessarily tieing it to a gender.

“Overexplaining” already has an established unrelated definition, though. I’ve ‘coined’ “splaining” as slang for the behavior, which is not only perpetrated by both sexes, but is also perpetrated for reasons other than sex. It’s kind of a subcategory of condescension, I’d say.

When someone assumes another is ignorant on a subject, because of any characteristic that does not actually have a relationship with knowledge of that subject, and as a result, condescendingly explains something to them, that’s ‘splaining’. Also of note is that EVEN IF the ‘receipient’ actually happens to be ignorant of that subject, and of the information being given to them, it’s STILL ‘splaining’. What defines it is the combination of the unfair assumption, and the action taken based on said assumption. Assuming you know more about X than someone because they’re younger than you, is a non-sex example of the exact same behavior.

Things are still very bad for women and that is not even getting into partner abuse

Did you know that in nonreciprocally violent heterosexual relationships (i.e. only one of the two partners is violent), women are the perpetrators over 70% of the time? Yet, domestic violence is most often treated like a thing with only male perpetrators and female victims.

or topics like rape.

The narrative is such that the public consciousness is so skewed that you’re not aware that women rape men as much as men rape women, are you? Successful feminist lobbying (primarily attributed to Mary Koss) to call the rape of a man by a woman something other than “rape” so that female rapists can ‘fly under the radar’ on “rape statistics” is the primary reason this is so uncommonly known.

If you think underreporting and a lack of justice is bad for female victims of male rapists, your head will explode if you objectively look at the respective rates for male victims of female rapists.

It’s bad for both sexes, but it is literally objectively worse for males. Your ignorance of this subject just proves how wide the empathy gap really is.

The Innocence Project is all about getting wrongfully convicted people out of prison. Check out the linked list, filter it for “sex crimes” if you like, look at the years and decades of wrongfully-served prison time, then see if you can find any women.

There are no cases of a man molesting a girl and then successfully gaining both legal custody of the child, and legally-awarded child support - from the child he molested. But reverse the genders, and precisely that has happened.

This constant trivialization/erasure of male suffering just makes it clear how little people like you actually care about equality. Anyone truly seeking equality would be equally outraged about injustices suffered by both sexes.

I’m reminded of how outraged feminists were about the inequality when men possessed a significant majority of college degrees^[1], but in the present day, after the myriad of programs/grants/scholarships exclusive to women got it to the point where women are now significantly more than half of college graduates, and men are in the minority, suddenly feminists aren’t concerned with that inequality anymore.

One of the many reasons the claims that feminism was for everyone and that there was no need for male-focused advocacy (and that, in fact, such advocacy was inherently misogynistic) because feminists ‘had it covered’, always rang hollow.

One more quick example, an anecdote from my own personal life: a feminist friend was complaining about required reading materials for high school classes not being 50/50 re the sex of the author, but being majority male authors, which was disadvantaging the girls. When I pointed out that girls already are objectively significantly ‘ahead’ of boys in those subjects, so why was she pushing for the gap to grow even wider, her only response was to get angry.

An actual egalitarian would care about a significant imbalance in either direction that’s caused by bigotry/prejudice, regardless of who’s got the short end of the stick.

In any case, I think it would just be a nicer thing if we were nicer to all people that are disadvantaged, or just people in general. Tearing others down doesn’t lift you up.

Yes, this is actual egalitarian thinking. Special interests who don’t care about inequalities that benefit ‘their group’, or stop caring when an inequality that affected ‘their group’ now favors ‘their group’, are not forces for equality/fairness.

The IEA estimated that it would take around 45 hours of Netflix streaming to generate the carbon emissions of driving 4 miles.

Just a little 90x error, lol

👆 Found the gooner.

Actually, all they had to do was make the man in panel 1 and the man in panel 3 not the same man, to not have been shitty in the way I pointed out.

It’s very simple.

The thing is, I don’t blame women for valid self protective instincts.

I don’t think labeling men hypocrites counts as a “self protective” act.

I feel like you and many others feel like my issue is simply that panel 3 is there at all, and that I’m indignant about the notion of men reacting poorly to rejection. But that’s not my issue at all. I explain below.

Ghosting is antisocial bullshit, but it’s the easiest solution available to a potential for real, serious harm, especially when you are only one of some dozen guys one woman might be dealing with on the subject.

You’re misinterpreting the core of my distaste with the comic.

All the comic had to do to not be shitty in the way I’m criticizing it for, is have the men in panels 1 and 3 not be the same person. That’s all. Then I could at least understand a message like what you describe: ‘this is a shitty thing to do in a vacuum, but I feel like I have to do it, to not risk an unpleasant reaction’. But by nonsensically making it the same guy, when it’s basically never the same guy doing both things (do you really think men who have those kinds of outbursts when they’re rejected, are the ones wishing women would reject them overtly? Think about it), the author is shitting on decent guys who have a reasonable desire to not be ghosted, which is not mutually exclusive with understanding why women do it.

Does that make sense?

“Not all men, also women are bad”.

So we’re just lying now?

The ‘point’ they got across is that the author believes that men who express the desire for women to be more direct with them (presumably instead of ghosting them), are all hypocrites that react poorly to directness. At the very least, they unambiguously state that assuming that to be the case is the correct thing to do.

There’s no ambiguity about that. That is the message, and it’s inaccurate and sexist.

Are both ‘parts’ within the DMs with that person, or is ‘1’ in a regular post/comment, and then ‘3’ is in the DMs?

If the latter, I don’t think I can realistically verify at all if they’ve posted any significant amount, but with the former, I probably could.

Ah you’ve edited your comment

Sorry, I’m quick to revise if I think I could have written something better, or found supporting information, etc. I don’t think the content has really materially changed, though.

You can just go and look to confirm this, DMs aren’t private on lemmy.

I don’t know how to do this, nor am I really inclined to dig through someone’s stuff like that (and even if I did, I’d expect only the ‘panel 3’ part to be in the DMs, not the ‘panel 1’ part too). Can you link to one example of the same person doing both (panel 1 and panel 3) things? I’m genuinely interested to see.

Did you just link to yourself?

Yes, why write the same comment twice?

Thought that argument was so good you came over here to point at it, let me know?

It’s not an “argument”, anymore than “apples are fruits” is an “argument”. It’s stating a simple fact. It’s fallacious to conflate panels 1 and 3, and imply (via the 4th panel having the woman say she was correct to expect both characteristics in the same man) that the men who express the sentiment in panel 1 are the same ones who should be expected to react immaturely to honest/direct rejection.

If you write a comic where a person sees someone else do two things one after the other, and then expresses that they correctly expected them to do the second thing after seeing them do the first, that is a very obvious endorsement of assuming that people who do the first thing also do the second thing.

If it was a black guy who said he liked sports in panel 1, then she asked in panel 2 what sport was his favorite, and then he said basketball in panel 3, and panel 4 was identical (“Yup, that’s about what I expected!”), would you really think it was some crazy outlandish interpretation to read that as ‘the artist is saying that it’s correct to assume that black guys who like sports favor basketball’?

this isn’t an argument, nor a statement. For all we know, it’s an anecdote. Perhaps, even a dream.

You’re just being deliberately obtuse now.

If you think that the appropriate answer to “women feel scared to reject men because of common toxic behavior” is “but its not all men”…

Wow, I’ve rarely seen such a robust straw man built in such a short amount of time!

Despite the impressive construction, it is a construction. I didn’t say that.

No point in reading the rest of your comment, since it all follows from the ridiculous premise quoted above.

It’s like saying you’re confident there isn’t anyone who both advocates for polyamory and also insults people for being in a romantic relationship with more than one person at the same time.

Is it absolutely impossible that such a person exists? No, but it’s obviously going to be extremely rare, at best, because it makes zero sense for both characteristics to exist inside the same person. Therefore, I feel confident in saying ‘this is not a thing’, generally speaking.

To have the same person espouse the sentiment in panel 1, AND react badly to a rejection like in panel 3? The same guy?

No, that is absolutely not a common thing; even calling it “uncommon” is a massive understatement, I think. I’ve spoken to many women about that sort of thing (and shared stories of my own), and none who’ve ever shared screenshots with me of, or talked about, the ‘aggressive rejections’ they’ve experienced, has ever had it coming from a guy who also has voiced encouragement toward women directly/honestly turning men down. And I’ve spent entire afternoons having fun with a woman buddy who was going through her conversations on a dating app with me and showing me ‘highlights’ for us to laugh at together.

It’s never the same guy doing both things. Seriously, come on now.

I literally made NO REFERENCE to people with social anxiety whatsoever.

Yes, I am aware that you painted “incel” with only the stereotypical brush strokes.

Everyone who mentions incels in the internet is talking about the ones we see in the fucking internet.

Not everyone. This is the same as someone denigrating “feminists” by talking about all of the stereotypical man-hating behavior, and then when someone replies “hey, there are plenty of feminists who don’t act like that, most even, you shouldn’t generalize”, that person responds saying “everyone who mentions feminists on the internet is only talking about the stereotypical ones”.

‘I just meant the bad ones’ is not justification for generalizing, period.

I’d put a significant wager on this specific thing (meaning, the events of panels 1-3, all with the same singular man) never having happened to this person.