A growing network of online communities known collectively as the “manosphere” is emerging as a serious threat to gender equality, as toxic digital spaces increasingly influence real-world attitudes, behaviours, and policies, the UN agency dedicated to ending gender discrimination has warned.
I feel like a Cassandra since I was warning about this for years now.
The gender equality narrative got too focused on excluding men specifically, instead of including the less represented gender in each profession. Somehow the idea was that men are privileged in the system and women oppressed, while the truth is that both men and women are oppressed.
Divide and conquer was a small step away from that point.
Same, I’ve been saying it for a decade that the current anti-men direction can only mean that young men will push against that and not in a nice way.
Well, guess who was right? Feminism has come all the way from something great and noble towards utter shit.
I think there is nuance here. My understanding is that there is a very small but loud percentage of women that want to exclude men. When DEI (inclusion of less represented individuals) is encouraged, it’s often cut down by “only the most qualified should be hired”, detracting from the core topic which is bias. Most of the discourse around privilege was to help understand that men aren’t actively oppressive, but many are blind to the ways in which they contribute to the oppressive issues due to cultural programming. In parallel to what we’re seeing with protests - inaction is not helpful. Those that are privileged are more likely to be able to change the minds of those that are actively oppressive. TL;DR privilege is just the ability to apply peer pressure.
As a man, I’ve never been made to feel excluded by gender equality in any way whatsoever.
Every once in a while my uni has some interesting events (at least based on the description), public announcement sent to everyone, and the last sentence has almost always been some form of “women only”. There is usually no gender neutral equivalents to these events and they’re done in the name of gener equality. So I very much feel excluded by gender equality.
Oh no, a place you couldn’t go as a man?!?!? How could you ever survive?!?
You’re part of the problem
Same here. However, I suspect you and I are not zero-sum thinkers, and can conceive of a future in which both men and women can apply themselves to their full potential.
But it seems like a key part of the counter-movement to gender equality is based on the notion that every time a woman gets a job, they are taking it away from a more qualified man. It seems to be built on a mountain of insecurity more than anything else.
That may be, but you are not all men ? So some have.
There have been several cases here in Australia where men have been denied access becase they are men and taken it to court… and lost, I suspect that’s sort of what the person posting is referring to. Theres a carve out in the law to allow womens only spaces.
Now, whether you agree with the ruling of the courts or not, is to some extent ilrrelevant to the discussion (the courts are notionally after all just following the law) because gender equality then isn’t about what’s on the tin and that’s when you get push back.
I like how you were down voted for it. Hell there’s a free online course in my country right know that is not open for everyone, it says in the description that anyone can apply for a chance but only women will be allowed to participate.
I mean it’s specifically a girl’s coding class, I suppose there’s also open classes. Segregated resources are not the same as one side lacking resources.
The trouble with that kind of stuff is usually that the gendered version is some half-assed feel-good BS. There’s not a single martial artist, gender doesn’t matter, who respects “women’s self defence” courses because the stuff they teach there is, at best, useless. More often it’s actively dangerous placebo and reading the instructions for your pepper spray will be much, much more helpful.
When businesses commit to having a certain percent of employees/managers/board members/etc be women, that means it’s at the exclusion of men. Maybe you’re not in the category of men who miss out on jobs and promotions simply because they need to hire a woman instead of a more deserving man, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
You can’t commit to “diversity” without taking away opportunities for progressives natural enemy, the straight white males.
So if a company traditionally had 10 men employees and now has committed to having gender equality, you see this as 5 jobs where men are no longer considered, rather than it historically being 10 jobs where women weren’t considered?
But that’s not true.
Hire the best person for the job. Period. If the best 10 people for the job - ie the most qualified, the most experience, interviewed the best, the best culture fit, etc - are all men then that should be fine. Hiring less qualified, worse people simply because they’re women or a minority is ridiculous, and it means that more deserving people are missing out.
There are absolutely jobs where hiring the most qualified person for the job is critical. There are a lot of jobs where the threshold for good enough is far below that, and most companies are at least as concerned at getting the cheapest labor that can fulfill the position as they are at getting the best person (at that lower rate). Adding additional constraints like diversity isn’t going to affect those jobs any more than the company’s desire to save a buck.
Honestly I think examples like this are counterproductive, the average man will never be considered for one of these positions, nor will the average woman. It is useless to get angry at such a situation as it only serves to engage people in the “gender war” which only serves to distract you from the real issues which are almost completely class issues. Instead of getting angry that some woman “took away” the job of some man who was “more deserving”, you should get angry that that person is most likely getting paid a hundred times more than you and will cut your job in an attempt to make the company appear more profitable.
It’s not only executive/board level jobs that have “diversity quotas” now.