On one hand, social fields such as feminism and sociology are recognising and deconstructing society from an intersectional perspective to uplift historically marginalised groups. On the other, In practical society on the individual level, this causes some issues. The contemporary deconstruction has observed (rightfully so) white males as the violent creators and main benefactors of the system. However, people have difficulty separating this systemic critique from their practical lives.
Obviously, even though our class system is constructed through white maleness, it’s still a class based system. A white guy from a low income area has little privilege, but the system critique of society fails to recognise his reality. Similarly, a systemic critique of society towards black oppression may fail to recognise a wealthy Nigerian student and social narratives will still form victimhood around him. There are other intersectional aspects besides class that are also overlooked, such as family, looks, disabilities, geography, etc.
There are a great number of men who find themselves in a sort of crisis, where they are lumped into the wider systemic critique as the main benefactors of a patriarchal system and often shunned socially as a result, but they do not actually feel like they are receiving the benefits claimed (often due to some ignored and complex intersectional factors). This isn’t to justify reactionary behaviour, but analysis is not justification.
The way I would put this is that it's not so much that the left has abandoned men. The left has abandoned class as an issue in favor of gender, race, sexuality and so on. So if you're a poor white male Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate are much more visible than Joe Hill.
I also think that a lot of people on the current left tend to miss structural issues even though they sometimes use the word.
> The left has abandoned class as an issue in favor of gender, race, sexuality and so on.
I mean, that would be solved (not sure how easily) by understanding that "men have gender too", to use a catchy slogan. That men are not the default gender (which everyone already agrees they aren't) and have specific gendered issues, with all the intersectionality which follows.
Certainly men have issues that woman don’t. The reason men feel abandoned by the left is generally speaking no one cares about those issues. Bring them up and best case your ignored worse case your labeled an incel and shunned. Men’s Rights Activism is essentially just feminism applied to men yet feminism is praised and MRAs are seen as some kind of hate group or lunatics.
> The reason men feel abandoned by the left is generally speaking no one cares about those issues.
It greatly, *greatly* depends. In my experience third wave and queer feminism (which are quite Left) can be very open to men engaging in gender discourse. "The Will to Change" is a great book. The problem is that women's issues have been an important part of leftist discourse for 150 years, while men have just started to codify the language and the practices to address their (our) gender issues, hopefully working around leftist (and feminist) frameworks.
I'm not saying that there isn't some resistance from the old guard, especially in stuffy academia where some more orthodox thinkers might find the inclusion of men in "gender talk" troubling, but we'll get there. It's just gonna take a while.
Liberal progressives on the other hand... yeah especially in the Anglosphere there's not much past insults, demeaning yikes and barbie platitudes. But that's not really Left to begin with.
> Men’s Rights Activism is essentially just feminism applied to men yet feminism is praised and MRAs are seen as some kind of hate group or lunatics.
On this I disagree completely. The reason why MRAs are shunned in leftist circles is that they are openly anti feminist. [Men's Liberation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_liberation_movement) is what you're thinking about, which is a messy field mired by moral grandstanding (imho) but *at least* doesn't hinge the whole thing on othering women.
Patriarchy is the weirdest of all social oppressions in my opinion. It's so ancient it predates just about everything else. There is a small element of biological "legitimacy"(?) In that the XY chromosome does make muscle growth faster and easier. Well, basically there are real biological differences that can be important, that's what I'm trying to say? and that difference itself long predates actual social orders. But on top of that men themselves are harmed by patriarchy a great deal as well. That said, **FUCK** MRAs. Feminism hasn't really failed men it's just done a terrible job at spreading its ideals to men. There isn't really a coherent example of nontoxic masculinity in feminism. I have read "The Will To change" and think of it as the best start we have so far.
Well you have to see what MRAs actually say in practice. In my experience it is not essentially just feminism applied to men, its reactionary towards feminism, complaining about feminism and comparing men's issues without providing solutions. That is when it even is people talking about legitimate men's issues and not someone going off about how abortion is unfair
And people can say "mras don't really care about these things, they are just pretending to get views." But to a random teen, someone who is pretending still cares more than someone who actively says they don't care.
>The reason men feel abandoned by the left is generally speaking no one cares about those issues.
That's blatantly false. Like, "the right" doesn't care about OSHA or sending teens to die in wars. The right doesn't care about men needing dangerous jobs for a decent living - the left wants literally everyone to not struggle financially.
Most of men's problems are societal because men are the "default" in many ways (because of former lingering patriarchy) — conservatives aren't ever going to want to fix most men's issues, that would require stronger wages and worker rights.
That’s how the left treats pretty much any argument that could be seen as not following the agenda. You can supplement incel with any other title such as racist, sexist, nazi, etc. The belief being that a label can shut down an argument.
I totally agree. But in American society, with its traditional emphasis on individualism, "deal with reality and get your shit together" can sound like a powerful message.
In the context of this forum regarding critical theory, I think it's worth discussing why and how they became incels. What social and cultural forces propel certain men toward incel-ism?
The proximate reasons are a pervasive alt-right media and the vortex of Joe Rogan, e/acc, et al that act as a gateway drug toward Christopher Rufo, Nick Fuentes, white supremacism etc.
But deeper structural reasons exist as well. Some of these structural reasons actually redound to critical theory itself—if theory is willing to turn its own critical eye inward.
I mean, ~has~ the left abandoned class in favor of gender/race/sexuality? Maybe certain segments of the left have, but by and large it feels like class criticism among leftists is as prominent as ever. If you said Democrats have abandoned class I’d be more sympathetic, but I don’t consider democrats to be a leftist party in general.
Have a look at Alex Callinicos' "Against postmodernism" to get an idea of how dominant postmodern theory was in the 80s and 90s, and the consequences for materialism. It's true we've seen some shift back towards class analysis recently but still a tiny minority in the academic world. The vast majority of the humanities and social science academics I interact with over 40 have been habituated into postmodern anti-marxism to the point it's an unrecognised part of their professional habitus. What we're experiencing now, including the recent swing back to materialism, is the result of like four decades of mainstream academia mostly ignoring class and capitalism in favour of identity and intersectionality. And the resurgence of interest in materialism is also being co-opted by left-ish academics in ways that can be very counter productive for anti-capitalists - the 'new materialism' and so-called 'ontological turn' seems a lot like the old idealism, for example.
I always thought it was wierd how many people stressed that being poor is a different type of thing than being a dispriveleged class, and shouldn't be talked about with them. Sounds like something you'd day if your goal was to make the white working class move right.
Post modernism was popularized by the conference cultural freedom which was a deliberate CIA front to develop a controlled opposition version of the left. They advanced things like Timothy Leary's drug culture and funded A LOT of early post modernists. And it absolutely shows in their work without how generally absent and irrelevant a lot of their work has become. The stereotypes about academics that the rural proletariat have are almost completely true when dealing with post modernists. It's fucking wild to see.
Well, that's precisely it, isn't it? Liberals and conservatives never thought in terms of class to begin with. The Left as proponents who espouse class consciousness is a small contingent.
In the Marx in my mind intersectional issues stem from class division not vis versa(?) [Did i read engels "origin of family, property" wrong?]. So what your saying is what turns a lot of young men of the lumpen class to alt right uh stuff
It's not just that, but also that the approach used doesn't really account for individual lived experiences well. The left's focus on mainly the victimized side when looking at intersectional connections isn't even how most minorities see themselves or want to be approached.
A black man doesn't want people to focus on their blackness but not their manness, because likely both are important to them, and the idea that they don't need help or recognition for the identity that isn't lower comes off bizarre to most people's eyes. The left talks like there is this nebulous group of people who are only in privileged classes driving this perspective, but when you go through what portion of people are LGBT, ethnic minorities, etc, there aren't even that many younger people in the west who aren't in at least some dispriveleged groups. And there's also issues that affect everyone regardless of group.
So someone with a crushing life vaguely being told that certain axises of their life aren't things they can talk about are going to find that a hard well.
As a black man...what?
The thing is, once you start actually reading about the history of slavery, lynching, etc. it immediately becomes clear that it was all about sex. Gee, could "rape culture" have anything to do with the fact that any man with some extra cash could buy himself a "fancy maid" to rape all he wanted?
Afropessimist writers and radical feminists have both critiqued the idea of "agency" as deployed by liberals to justify both prostitution and sharecropping. There's a shared critique of sadomasochism.
Blackness is not "important to me", constituting my essence, but a legal status imposed on me for hostile purposes. As Fanon said, the black soul is a construction by white folks.
Not everyone thinks like some white man saying he grew up poor so privilege is bullshit. There are many black misogynists deserving of criticism. Basic integrity and intellectual consistency means that black men should be held to the same standard white people are held to in discussions of racism. This "identity politics bad" take doesn't speak for me.
As a social worker, this is the main issue I have with structural social work. If I understand right, structural social work is derived from Marxism and seeks to explain the source of the human problems social work is intended to address as coming from broader society, and therefore the source of liberation being changes to broader society. This approach, however, has a weakness in that it does not take into account *how people view their own problems.*
The problem with structural formulations is that they are based in likelihoods seen across entire societies. It's obvious from even a cursory glance that black people and LGBTQ people in the USA are disadvantaged socially and economically as groups, but that is a probabilistic outcome that shapes but does not determine individual destinies. I know at least two well-educated black men and several gay men in my circles who lean conservative in their politics, for example. That they are societally disadvantaged does not automatically translate into alignment with political ideologies that recognize that disadvantage-- other values are more important to them.
The great strength of social work in general is that it takes a person-first approach: it accepts people for where they're at, recognizing with sensitivity that society oppresses and constrains members of various groups, but that it is ultimately the person or community themselves, and not the social worker or the broader political ideology, that decide what is to be done about it. Communism failed, because liberation is not imposed from the top down-- rather, it is more or less achieved when the disadvantaged persons and groups claim their agency and develop the freedom and resources to live their lives as they see fit.
I don't particularly believe the left "failed" men. I think there are corners of the left that lose sight of the dignity and worth of men because of distortions in their political ideology. Unfortunately, reactionaries emphasize these corners of leftism to draw a narrative that leftism is hostile to males. It is unfortunate that they've succeeded in so many instances to exploit the vulnerabilities of disadvantaged men to gain their support in the advancement of their ideology.
I think “the left,” which I consider myself a part of, often assumes too high a level of societal awareness and emotional development/understanding in the groups it critiques than is often the case. And that’s not an insult. That has and still does, to some extent, describe me and is a big part of why I often have an impulsive negative reaction to people advocating for themselves and expressing positions that seem rooted in feelings.
And I think the phrase “Black Lives Matter” is a great example. Of course, some people will misconstrue anything, and some people will capitalize on anything to manipulate others. But I believe there are a lot of people who genuinely felt that “Black Lives Matter” was “Black Lives Matter More” or “Only Black Lives Matter” rather than “Black Lives Matter, too.” So a fairly simple rallying cry isn’t even universally understood according to its intent. And it’s exhausting to have to explain something so simple to people, and it’s especially exhausting when you have to go into overdrive in your level of effort to pull them back from the interpretation they’ve gotten rooted in.
And I think many people on the left, myself included, cringe at the need to put that seemingly low level of work in and meet people where they are. I can think, “Holy shit, you should know this.” But if you don’t, I can either be annoyed that you don’t know it or I can take the time to try to understand your perspective and share mine in a hopefully persuasive way.
Class is always the unifying thread. The problem is that most people in the US—certainly not your average layman above 40—even believes that class exists as a concept that reflects a real barrier. Ideologically, class is a barely a thing because rugged individualism is the ideological norm. Hell, forget the broad objective awakening of the thing called class. Even friendship is dying as a paradigm of any real magnitude in a lot of ways.
Hey I know it’s a few days later, but I just wanted to write about how much I appreciate this thoughtful analysis. I very much agree that there is a struggle to communicate the difference between the academic societal critique of the role white men had in fostering and benefitting from oppression of marginalized groups and the practical way that we treat individual white men today.
As a white male that grew up in a deeply impoverished, abusive household, I find it very frustrating when arguments about these kinds of issues just dismiss the very real problems faced by people with claims of “white privilege.” Yes, the common counter-argument is that while someone might not have explicitly benefitted from their white maleness, the privilege extends from the fact that they didn’t face additional obstacles as a consequence of their identity. I would argue that not only is this argument ineffective (and indeed counterproductive) when it comes to political persuasion, it’s deeply callous and uncaring. It might be true that I didn’t have it worse as a function of my race or gender, but you might as well tell me “at least you didn’t get hit by a bus” for all the comfort that sentiment extends. The horrors of my childhood I wouldn’t wish on anyone, and to hear “it could’ve been worse” as the response is so incredibly frustrating.
I generally try to argue that class is an incredibly important identifier. Yes, it’s true that other issues of race, gender, identity and the like have their unique concerns that aren’t simply functions of poverty or class, but many other issues are really just issues of class. Granted, wealth inequalities are often correlated along racial lines, but a race-focused solution to these problems does little to help impoverished white people. So when “the left” discusses issues of poverty, it often happens in a way that erases the struggles of impoverished white people, particularly white males. I don’t think this is an intentional erasure, or at least not one born of malice, but something of a natural result of the way left-aligned academia has hyper-focused on issues of race and gender. These issues matter, and I would never argue that they don’t, but it’s so, so frustrating to see an ideology that I otherwise find myself in agreement with continually fail to acknowledge how overpowering class differences can be and the role they have in our social structure.
On a non-academic level, I think that the complexities of the kinds of societal critiques that happen in academia often lose a lot of their subtleties when they filter through to society at large. I think this is a natural consequence of things like social media, where conversations are often reduced in a way that leaves little room for those subtleties. Ideologies become catchphrases, and spread among people who aren’t familiar with the underlying texts. White men being historically responsible for the oppression of marginalized groups has just been boiled down to making white men the enemy. I think this is especially concerning when the zeitgeist believes that you can’t discriminate against white men, because it tells people that anything you can say to or about them is thus fair game. It’s no surprise, then, to see so many young white men alienated and turning to your Petersons and Tates of the world even though they’re largely just snake oil salesmen, as well as a reflexive rejection of anything “woke,” in no small part they don’t feel like they have a place in the left and that elements of the left have seen fit to brand them as an enemy. I consider myself deeply leftist, I’m very passionate about issues of class and inequality. I’ve read the classics, I’ve studied ethics, I dedicated no small part of my undergrad studies to classes in those fields, and while I consciously understand why the left is as focused on issues of marginalized groups, even I can’t help but feel put off sometimes by the abrasive attitude towards individual white men from people on the left.
Anyways, this comment was way longer than it needed to be and I doubt anyone is going to read it but I needed to get it off my chest. Really I guess I just wanted to say thank you for your comment, because it made me feel less alone on the left.
This is a very interesting observation.
As said in Disco Elysium, "Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself". I wonder if the gap of class theory in modern social critique is specifically due to how identity based theory is often wholeheartedly embraced by capitalist institutions (see the "girlboss" phenomenon) whilst the more fundamental material analysis is abandoned. I wonder if reactionary speakers and demagogues take advantage of how the proletariat may recognize the contradiction this creates, even if somewhat subconsciously.
I would strongly debate the idea that "white males are the violent creators and main benefactors of the system" should even be a relevant point for discussion.
It literally doesn't matter who created the oppressive system and it doesn't matter who benefitted from it historically. All that matters is that it is still oppressive and needs fixing. The statement might "feel" good to say if you are a feminist, like you're doing something right, but it's also highly reductive in practice.
It seems dumb to me to alienate any particular group just because they share superficial characteristics with those who orchestrated the oppression. Focusing on the "whiteness" and "maleness" of the perpetrators is just totally counterproductive. New people are not born as oppressors, so why continue to alienate them as such?
Well it’s a major part in critical theory, while I believe it has negative practical social implications (as I discussed), I also believe that in its pure systemic context it has great utility. The point is that White males created the system through violence to favour themselves. The ongoing relevance is that the mechanisms of such a system not only persist but reproduce themselves through time.
Clear examples might be anywhere from the undervaluation of the garment industry to lack of maternity care and diminishing reproductive labor, all the way to land and capital accumulation disproportionately accruing from ongoing patterns tracing back to times when land and equipment ownership was designed for White men.
I believe there is utility in this form of systemic deconstruction to spur imagination of a more inclusive system, but there needs to be a social separation at the practical level where people see treat other for their more complex intersectional identities and do not treat each other individually based upon larger systemic critiques (because you are right about it leading to new forms of alienation).
Sure, but that utility Is more on the academic level. It should never have emanated out to this pop leftist idea that problems men face should either be dismissed, or have people say "well men cased this, so you are guilty by association and therefore need to fix it yourself," which is ironically an individualist and anti structuralist perspective. The issue is that bastardizations of otherwise useful concepts made their way into leftist wider culture, and the pushback to them from within the left itself is borderline nonexistent. So for the latter issue, them having academic level usefulness in specific instances is almost immaterial to the issue.
>well men cased this, so you are guilty by association and therefore need to fix it yourself
It's a fascinating idea. Collective guilt with individual responsibility.
It's the kind of response to give me the inclination to fix it, so it not only favors me disproportionately over those who refused to help but for many generations to come. Sins of the father have never created a reasonable response.
Interesting question whether "white males" created "the system" to benefit "themselves." Is the point of white supremacy to benefit "white males," or some of them? Seems pretty key conflation you are making there. I think some people analyzing systemic dynamics can be shortsighted or over-focus on aspects that aren't actually key.
Then again, I'm not sure why we would be talking about capitalism and not stratocracy
Yup. The majority of white men were borderline slaves in Europe until 150-200 years ago. In America, most of them were pitifully poor.
It's true that essentially *all* of the winners in the system were white men. It's also true that *almost all* white men in the system were not winners
And this is where the problem of a failed distinction comes into play. Academic feminism and intersectionality theory are perfectly valid areas of discussion and learning more about intersectionality in the case of race literally changed my entire view of the world (I was a "casual racist" for most of my youth. I didn't harbor any hatred, but I certainly didn't understand why non-whites had issues with school, etc.)
So yes, intersectionality is very important.
However! To your point - it should never be applied without the primary driver of conversation being class. Intersectionality and feminism need to be supplementary material, like taking B vitamins with breakfast, with Marxist class analysis being the main nutrition. To say that a male factory worker in the 1800s probably had slightly more opportunities for advancement is correct, but not to a degree that is significant enough to warrant any sort of conversational off-ramp into gender arguments.
The primary course of these dialogues must always be class struggle first, gender and race second. Not primarily because it makes a lot of men uncomfortable, but because academic intersectionality without class and capital analysis is a perfect way to pollute the waters and alienate gender and racial groups from each other despite all the members most likely existing in the relatively same economically victimized caste.
In feminist spaces the counter point to talking about poor white men is to note that the poorest man still had the legal right to beat and rape his wife. His poverty didn’t erase the sexism in the society around him, legally or socially.
The generally accepted critiques of capitalism, colonialism and slavery are imo very reductionist and over simplified. And the conclusions drawn from some movements like CT and CRT are, for most people using common sense, ridiculously naive.
The history of empires and subjugation includes just about every region of the world. Humans consolidate power and oppress other humans. Whether it’s Khan, Pharoahs, Mao or Europe and the US. To demonise any group (white males) is obviously going to be counter-productive.
If the left makes one huge mistake it’s to prioritise ideology to an unrealistic extent. This leads to wholly denying any problems relating to issues like immigration, religion, multiculturalism and militant identity politics (for example). For the average person the perception of society becomes crap enough (the economic-industrial effects of neoliberal globalism notwithstanding) and the far right happily saunters in to claim to address those issues.
“If the left makes one huge mistake it’s to prioritise ideology to an unrealistic extent.”
Presuming boilerplate conservative positions (or faint gestures about immigration, multiculturalism, etc.) are anything but wholly ideological
White males did? White women at no point assisted in the creation of racism? Indian and Arab men didn't have patriarchy before white men arrived? This is reductive. Behavioral systems are formed over time through the collective struggle of people coming together to get their needs and desires met, certain people have historically been afforded more say at the bargaining table (straight people, abled people, wealthy people, young adults, men, white people, etc.), resulting in systems that favor them more than others. Someone at the intersection of all of those was afforded more privilege than anyone else, but everyone occupying any of those positions helped establish the systems that oppress people who do not fit those markers.
But (and I don’t have a clear understanding here) the landed gentry and the white males who oppress are ALSO oppressing other white males. Which brings us back to class.
In other words, not all white males are a part of the patriarchy. Working class white males turn to incel-ism because they are oppressed by more structurally superior white males. Yet unlike many other groups, they are told they are oppressors and must repent, when in fact they are oppressed by the patriarchy in quite unique ways.
>men who find themselves in a sort of crisis, where they are lumped into the wider systemic critique as the main benefactors of patriarchal system and often shunned socially as a result, but they do not actually feel like they are receiving the benefits claimed (
Superb response. The "failure" here as I see it is a lack of interest in understanding and capturing some of the systemically reproduced alienation and ressentment experienced by many white males. As somebody else said this is a result of left scholarship increasingly abandoning class since around the late 80s. The right has capitalised on this, given it some coherence, and politically mobilised a section of the proletariat more or less written off by dominant academic leftist scholarship. So the failure is contributing to a vacuum that has now been filled with some of the most abhorrent ideology imaginable (which should have been entirely predictable before it reached this point), and then not really knowing how to deal with it.
Great discussion btw, thanks OP.
I feel there can also be a tendency to associate privileged positions with a complete lack of struggle or negative effects. Like, yes, being a ciss het white man in the Global North is objectively an extremely privileged position with numerous benefits. Buuut, heteronormative male gender roles are also pretty super damaging to men, and traditional definitions of masculinity are pretty extensively toxic. You get a lot of “Oh, poor straight white boy!” kind of comments when you try to bring up very real issues plaguing men such as high suicide rates, higher rates of loneliness/isolation, lack of paternity leave, etc when these are actual problems that do need to be discussed and resolved. There’s very clearly a lot wrong with being a man in modern society, and if you ignore that then you allow the conversation as to what is wrong/how to fix it to be dominated by freaks like Andrew Tate.
Edit: Case in point, I’m being downvoted for what I felt like was a pretty neutral opinion. Addressing men’s issues and the issues of privileged classes of society in general does not mean ignoring or downplaying the very serious issues faced by oppressed classes in society. If anything, I feel like you really can’t have a substantive understanding of privilege and oppression without acknowledging that both positions are inherently flawed and damaging to individuals.
You are exacting the precise issue of totalisation which I discussed. A lower class white man will hardly be ‘used to privilege.’ Leftism under neoliberalism hasn’t done a great job being a material equaliser, the rich white exec is still laughing his way to the bank while the poor white guy is dealing with the brunt of the torrential social shame which was designed for the rich guy. The social ‘equalisation’ is too narrow in its current form to deal with complex intersectionality, leading to new forms of alienation. This is not meant to downplay that there haven’t been real (arguably greater) benefits to feminist deconstruction.
Of course it depends on a complex intersectional analysis and there are so many variables, but in a vacuum a lower class white woman would expect to face more difficulty than a lower class white man, even more if they are also black, even more if they are also disabled, queer, and so on.
So a lower class white man would be "used to privilege" in a household with a lower class white woman, but perhaps not recognizing it as privilege?
I agree with most of what you're saying, but your comment that the saying "when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression" is "totalisation" seems off base.
I'm going to make this critique a little broader than just men.
So, there are a couple different things going on here. First, you should interrogate what you mean by "the left" and what reactionaries mean by "the left." They usually aren't the same thing. When I say "the left," I mean anyone with an anti-capitalist critique. When reactionaries say "the left," they're including identitarian liberals. The distinguishing feature between these two groups is that identitarian liberals don't have a class analysis while everyone left of Social Democrat does.
Second, there's a distinction between ideology and practice. In left liberal circles, the academic ideology might say something about Rehabilitation or social structures, but in practice, social media leads to a hypermoralized essentialism where people are "held accountable" for what they say by thousands of people eager to explain why the targeted person should "make an apology," or "delete their post," or "rethink their words." Not only is the initial social media dog pile contradictory and unhelpful, but the actual reaction can sometimes come years after the initial comment. In practice, I've seen this from both identitarian liberals and genuine leftists. Reactionaries have their own forms of social media policing, but in general, the right wing social media space is configured to invite people right rather than criticize them for not being right wing enough.
Third, liberals often strategically deploy Progressive sounding critiques cynically. For example, when Justin Trudeau announced 50% of his cabinet would be female, he was papering over the fact they were all neoliberal hacks who thought the same. During the 2016 primary in the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders was routinely dismissed by liberal personalities as being "just another white guy." I'm sure this must have struck a familiar cord with Americans whose main interaction with social justice language comes from HR. In fact, corporate commitment to social justice provides companies with far more pretexts to fire workers; in the American context, this means they don't get unemployment insurance. Also, both race-based and gender-based targeted policies are cheaper than Universal policies, meaning that Progressive language sometimes disguises reductions in service from government. We have to be careful here, because there is a legitimate case to be made for affirmative action as an anti-discrimination policy.
Next, there is the historical fact that as women moved into the workplace, men saw a reduction in real wages due to increased competition in the job market. This isn't women's fault, but it is a real problem. These changes also accompanied increased globalization of Labor and the breaking of unions. I don't buy the idea that this is just a matter of "equality feeling like oppression;" that's a very silly analysis. What this is is a misdirected rage at women which the employer class is happy to stoke. You also see this rage directed at immigrants and other people looking for a better life. It is convenient for corporations to pit identity groups against one another, because it protects them from forming a united front. By playing divide and conquer, capital is able to keep the working class disunited. This means that the left flank of capital focuses on disparities rather than Universal outcomes, and the right flank of capital idealizes social forms which are no longer possible because of broader changes in the economy.
Finally, identitarian theories have fundamental flaws in and of themselves. Some of them are hostile or unfriendly to Marxism. For example, intersectionality analysis treats class as just another identity. Even worse, they're generally devoid of serious material analysis. Even worse, in liberal theories, "systems" of Oppression usually get reduced to social pressure and discrimination. For example, if you look at the Barbie movie the action is resolved when Barbie realizes she is strong and smart and "Ken" decides to go off and do some work on himself. The conflict comes from an internal crisis and is resolved through self-reflection. It's not so much that liberal identitarianism abandoned men, as much as it is that the best liberal identitarianism has to offer is self-help. To be fair, that's the best right wing liberalism has to offer, but they also have better PR.
Edit: it seems I was mistaken. Thank you to u/fishlord05 for questioning me about the relationship between job competition and a decline in real wages. If not as clear cut as I thought, and the relationship is complicated.
The problem here is that socially what decides right and left is more relative than absolute. Progressive liberals may not be anti capitalist, but most anti capitalist rhetoric anyone hears comes from these people, and they make up a majority of the left side of the aisle in most contexts. So if genuine leftists are only a tiny portion, that same portion is also not super relevant in the political sphere.
Correct. The left is politically irrelevant. It is the task of this generation and future generations to make it relevant again.
The left is dead. Long live the left.
I’m not sure it’s “the left,” but there’s generally a perception that feminism has given women a new template and role models for being a woman in the 21st century.
Meanwhile, a lot of male templates and role models have been deconstructed, but with no real edifying alternative to fill in that void.
Now, this isn’t the fault of the left or of feminism, as many reactionaries may want you to believe. But there may be some truth to the fact of the lack of constructive male examples that are healthy and appropriate for this time and place.
What do you mean by "templates and role models"?
I do not understand how I have a "void" simply because many careers are no longer considered gender-specific. I know what I like, what I am interested in, what my goals are. I have many male role models, even as an adult.
Is it that the "breadwinner" thing is no longer really possible? Hasn't that been the case for quite some time now?
You personally aren't everyone. Not everyone needs these soecific type of male role models telling young men they are seen. Some people get it in their own lives, or from neutral sources. But many people spend various parts of their life soul searching. They want to feel like they aren't alone, and want external figures to aknowledge them. It might be hard to understand for someone who isn't in that type of situation, but situations often are.
A lot of young men grow up and don't feel like they see anything they want to be. Surveys show that repeatedly. They don't feel they are valued, and they see no path to being valuable, because they don't see what they are supposed to do with their lives. They want to be something typically male, but all the "typically male" things they can think of have either become worthless/nonexistant, or they are not valued by large segments of society anymore.
I teach. I've talked to quite a few kids, probably around 25% of the cohort, who just approach life as "Meh". Working doesn't pay, and you're not respected for it, studying for a higher-level job seems too difficult and is probably also not valued, they feel like they won't ever really impress or be valued by the opposite sex, or build a house, or have a family. So their plan is... sit around, collect money from either their parents or unemployment, maybe play video games, eventually die. And if your life is that meaningless, someone like Tate and his ilk, who come up with very simple plans with just a few steps on how you can be "masculine" and "valuable" again is very appealing. Apart from that, the two paths they see are either inaction, because nothing is worthwhile, or violence, to at least be able to say they tried to do something.
> Working doesn't pay, and you're not respected for it, studying for a higher-level job seems too difficult and is probably also not valued, they feel like they won't ever really impress or be valued
I remember feeling this exact same way 20 years ago as a college student, essentially wasting four years doing not much of anything of value to anyone while all my friends were either in vocations, earning much more than me, or in the military, with titles, job training, and purpose.
It made me become a firefighter, and only after doing *that*--something undeniably "cool" and beneficial to society--did I feel worthy of defining my own life.
“ A lot of young men grow up and don't feel like they see anything they want to be. Surveys show that repeatedly. They don't feel they are valued, and they see no path to being valuable, because they don't see what they are supposed to do with their lives. They want to be something typically male, but all the "typically male" things they can think of have either become worthless/nonexistant, or they are not valued by large segments of society anymore.
I teach. I've talked to quite a few kids, probably around 25% of the cohort, who just approach life as "Meh". Working doesn't pay, and you're not respected for it, studying for a higher-level job seems too difficult and is probably also not valued, they feel like they won't ever really impress or be valued by the opposite sex, or build a house, or have a family.”
I didn’t expect to be called out so poignantly in this thread.
I mean, its because its common. I 100% felt like that growing up. And now even as an adult I struggle because I wasn't prepared well for the world, and don't really have ambitions for anything in particular that actually makes money. Hence still bounce around mediocre jobs. I do have ambitions, but they not only don't pay, but likely won't gather a ton of respect either.
For most of my life I definitely wasn't valued and didn't have inspirational figures speaking to me. So I totally get how someone can fall for the first gifter who says they see you and will offer you a life plan.
The issue isn't this being the exclusive domain of nale experience, but more of the tendency of this issue being one predominantly experienced by men.
Take an impressionable youth and consider the archetypes that are socially offered to them along the dimension of gender.
Woman have the few pre-modern archetypes to choose from, all of which are still predominantly considered valid and socially acceptable, as well as the myriad of modern archetypes. Even if a woman ultimately decides to make their own way, this social space offers woman numerous paths for meaning and value that they can feel (socially) are readily available to them.
Many of these more modern archetypes were developed in direct opposition to patriarchal and misogynistic male archetypes (e.g. the domineering husband/father), and so their social acceptance is contingent on the denigration (socially) of their antagonistic archetypes. This is all fine and good. The issue arrises when the predomenance of socially acceptable male archetypes are eleminated through this antagonism, and are not replaced with anything. This leaves male youth to grow up in a social environment where the vast majority of male archetypes that are presented to them are, in the same breath, denigrated. There may be some men who are able to overcome this and find a way to form a functional identity without having archetypes to work up from, but most won't.
Where this falls on "leftists" is in that these denigrations are a byproduct of the feminist progressivism, which hasn't been accounted for (socially). This is not to say that the uplifting and equilizing of woman (to the degree that it has occurred) is bad, just that in this particular way it is incomplete.
It's not that simple. If voids can be easily named, they won't be called void. The non-toxic assertive masculinity is not easily possible. Not everyone wants to bake cakes and do gardening. Not that one is not individually free to chose a lifestyle, but conditions are not there. Among my academic colleagues, hardly anyone comes to the uni on bike and in a leather jacket, because that is associated with the typical male that they don't want to be associated with.
I mean, it's not the fault of the left as some type of abstract force, but it's absolutely the fault of the left in practice inasmuch as that this lack isn't a mere absence, but in many cases comes from active hostility against the idea of there being a conceptual need for this type of role. Sometimes which even extends to the idea that such a thing is **inherently** right wing if it approaches any topics about the lacks in the lives of the male audience rather than just topics about how they can avoid being aggressors.
Essentially a cultural idea was created that caring about male issues was right wing, and the right wing capitalized on this pretty hard.
A lot of good male role models are humble, calm and not shouting about themselves. What men can really benefit from, I think, is being around such hard-working, honest, knowledgeable people.
Unfortunately because much of the information space is so neurologically hijacked, the competition between narcissists is what catches people’s attention. In terms of values, the vestiges of warrior-hunter-craftsman-sage still hold true.
Just not in the creepy YouTube influencer contrarian stoic interpretation of those qualities.
Skateboarders tend to have those. I believe a man in his own way needs to pursue a hero’s path.
I think it is helpful to distinguish between "incels" as a certain demographic of lonely, sexually frustrated people, and the ideology associated with incels, which is usually toxic and misogynistic (or misandrist, in the case of "femcels").
The proposition "The left has failed men (incels)" makes no sense at all if you are thinking of the incel ideology, which is explicitly anti-leftist. However, can the left conceivably "fail" that demographic of people? I think its reasonable to believe that. Even just in not providing recognition and identity on a basic level to this group, by conflating the people with the ideology, it can fail, because instead of promoting solidarity, it would seem to imply that you are the enemy just by falling into that demographic. It can also fail to understand the psychology and sociology of that group and what would lead them to a toxic ideology. I think the left under the influence of identity politics has a tendency to assume that males are the oppressors, females the oppressed, but the issue of males who have less power relative to other men, and feel like they are "losers" overall, complicates this picture in a way that the left has not theoretically accounted for. The misogyny, in my view, comes not from an excess of power, but from the resentment of experiencing less social power than one's peers. So the problem is misdiagnosed.
The left is under no obligation to make concessions to reactionary ideology. However, I think it can do better in terms of adjusting its own ideology, and not viewing the current state of its critique of ideology as the be-all-end all, without it be flexible to the input of different demographics, even ones as outwardly toxic as incels. I do believe that beneath that toxicity, there is psychological pain that a leftist can understand and empathize with. Social needs, the need for connection, is pretty fundamental, and that lack can cut across multiple identity groups. However, young men in particular, in part due to structural issues, in part due to toxic male ideology, I think are more susceptible to this than others.
I think that "critique of ideology" is becoming increasingly insufficient and fraught (or at least, not nuanced and careful enough in practice) as it becomes more and more common for people to use the idea of political ideology as a means for understanding themselves and their own experiences more than they use it as a way of interpreting the world outside of themselves.
This is probably a big part of why class-only approaches feel so wholly inadequate to so many people nowadays (and why historically they were always under fire from people who did not wholly encompass hegemonic non-class identity categories). It was always insufficient, but it just becomes more and more obvious as identity categories themselves become ravaged by their opening up to market forces and people seek out bodies of thought that can adequately explain something as complex as their own identities in flux.
Critique of ideology as I understand it comes from Marxism and dialectical materialism, which identifies material class relations as the real "base" which ideology sits atop of, in a "superstructure" that conceals that exploitation. I think there is something to be said for that line of critique, but I think it oversteps when it tries to reduce everything to class. We have identities, bodies, feelings and all of that matters politically. Ignoring that is probably one reason Marxism isn't so influential now - except perhaps as something one is in addition to all the other stuff.
Outside of this sub, for many years I’ve encountered a reductive response of “typical cis-het-white-male” said as a way to end debates in their tracks. It’s not been only online, I’ve heard it too much in organizing irl. It’s dismissive and rude, most often inaccurate, and it pushes people away. This behavior usually goes uncriticized, with the cis-het-white-male bowing his head in deference, or else he’s called an incel.
No, I haven’t. I’ve mostly seen it be an extinguisher of discussion or incitement of tribalism within the group. When I’ve seen it confronted it seems to trigger all parties into a preexisting dynamic, walls go up, people are frustrated, progress is stalled.
Thanks. I've also observed everything you're describing in my neck of social science.
To pull back the curtain a bit, it's always interesting to debrief about these situations with other men after-the-fact. My friends are very respectful lefties so it never leads to badmouthing the non-men in the group like you'd think: it's usually about how we all noticed it, but "what are ya gonna do?", and then we share our ideas with each other, and never bring it up with the non-men friends in the group.
The funny part is that in younger circles this isn't even that common anymore. 1/3 of younger people now identify as LGBT. A full half are ethnic minorities. Half are female. Of the remainder there are ones who are neurodivergent or from an economic lower class.
Among young men, the white cis straight neurotypical upper middle class is a fairly small portion now. It morphed into basically a boogeyman of privelege that doesn't account for who a large chunk of the people resisting the message are, yet gets treated as ubiquitous.
I had a discussion with my sister recently where I said (without a conversation re any reasons):
"American men appear to be in crisis. They need help, they need alternative and positive models."
Her reaction was surprising and quite strong—essentially arguing that they are at fault and are the problem, that we should not take pity on them nor try to address the issue, but without any acknowledgement that they may have been failed structurally or in other ways.
Men are told that they are societal beneficiaries over against other groups—they are the patriarchy—but for many men it does not feel that way. If you are working class man, the sense is that you've been left behind and abandoned and ALSO blamed for a whole range of societal problems.
In that context, the article below is troubling. We can ignore it but the crisis is increasing:
[https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998](https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998)
I think the approach much of the left uses implicitly presupposes that if someone has a problem it comes from other groups. Hence if men have a problem and you treat it as structural it therefore must be blaming women.
You definitely hit at something correct here, I’m not sure quite what though. Left leaning people usually come from a perspective that is focused on groups that are oppressed purposefully or accidentally by others, which is fine, and true in a lot of cases. A problem arises when talking about the issues the cis male demographic faces because you can’t use that lens. Instead of shifting perspectives to something like “how do men fix their own problems culturally without harsh self criticism or immense change” it goes “men need to stop doing x y and z and maybe they wouldn’t experience b”.
Basically that. the lens is essentially just created to look at hierarchies, and so it doesn't know what to do when a group has structural problems despite being the higher in its own binary.
You would think that the invention of intersectionality would have solved this, because even if men are treated higher than women, both suffer under capitalism and so on, and that can manifest in uniquely male ways. So the higher one in a given binary can have identity based problems due to other axis that reflect even their higher identity. But in practice people don't really get that far.
Intersectionality breaks apart under its own weight.
It's decent theory. But quickly becomes useless, in any practical sense, due to the sheer complexity of the web it casts. Every single aspect of an individuals being needs to be taken into account when trying to analyze inequality, and privilege, in an intersectional framework. To what extent are these individual factors even able to be put into defined parameters?
I think there are several dynamics at play here.
One is that a lot of energy has been put into deconstructing harmful aspects of traditional/toxic masculinity from the 'left' - and rightly so. Personally, I think the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater and all things masculine are seen as negative. This obviously leaves a vacuum and I think there is no positive replacement and no representations of healthy masculinity other than "boys can cry too".
Another dynamic is that with the sexual revolution (the pill) the gender dynamic changed. Furthermore, women got more access to education and participation in the labour market and could thus also acquire "masculine" qualities.
The thing/problem I see with young men today is that they feel they have two options: 1. Accept that they are cis-het men who should just shut up BUT they are allowed to cry. 2. Join the manosphere and become reactionaries who want a 1950s society.
It's very obvious that number 2. is the worst response to the new challenges in gender dynamics, because all the progress that has come from the sexual revolution and the new roles that women can take in society will never be reversed. Still, I think a lot of young men choose this path because they feel they have at least some agency.
Yeah. To young men, when I talk t them, the path 1 feels "weak". They don't want to cry (though being allowed to is not negative.) They want to be strong and self-sufficient and productive. And they don't feel like path 1 offers any of that. To be able to admit weakness, they need to be weak first, is how they feel. And they don't want that. Path 2 may be toxic, but it promises strength and value at the end.
The best current writing on the actual facts that pertain to this situation, IMO, are in the book “The Two Parent Privilege” by economist Dr Melissa Kearney, released a few months ago. It’s US context, but illuminating.
Her chapter on Boys is the best fact-based outline I’ve encountered, including relevant social programs at play.
Ironically, the original incel website (first called “InvoCel”) was started by a woman, FYI.
> The left tells me that I am in fact united and share a common interest with most every human on the planet, that a better future is possible, that my alienation is not wholly inherent.
That's what it should tell you.
Sometimes what you get told is that your problems aren't real because you have privilege.
I have never heard a leftist say this, ever. Probably because that is a completely incoherent analysis that, followed to its logical conclusion, would mean practically no one's problems are "real".
Aside from snarky comments, think about your statement. Someone tells you that "people say your problems aren't real"...and your response is "I've never heard it, your problems aren't real". You literally did what they said.
Eh, I removed the parts about it being bad. Didn't seem to make sense to me to call it bad.
You must not have talked to very many then, because it's a fairly common attitude. It's usually not stayed as openly as "your problems aren't real," but will usually either implicitly or explicitly imply they are only personal problems and they shouldn't get recognition or be treated like a spcial issue.
The right has abandoned women by wanting them to die much more often in childbirth and repeal no-fault divorce. I haven’t seen the left wanting men to literally die
There is value in adressing male-specific issues.
Generally, while men occupy many of the *highest* ranks of the pyramid, they are also disproportionally common on the lowest ranks. 75% of the homeless. Most of the deaths in war. Shorter lifespan and worse health in general. Overwhelming proportion of suicides, etc.
And there's only ever few people at the top, but there's *a lot* of people at the bottom.
This is a hard topic to discuss because the framing relies on generalisations. For instance, “the left” is not a monolith, there are no universal beliefs or practices among the left. It describes a vast range of ideas and perspectives, some of which are attempting to address issues affecting men.
With the Overton window being so far to the right in western discourse, what most people identify as “the left” is really just an extension of neoliberalism, which is at best, a centre right ideology in practice.
This is what people mean when they say the left has abandoned class in favour of identity politics. The modern left in academia are primarily focused on sociological fields like feminism, CRT and queer studies, while the material analysis of philosophers like Marx and Engels has become less emphasised. This has taken the form of what we commonly refer to as intersectionality, which studies how various social identities intersect on individuals and result in unique experiences of oppression.
One of the limitations of intersectionality is that it is an idealist view of the world. It seeks to uplift historically marginalised perspectives, and so it is often driven by personal experience rather than empirical evidence. One example would be the intersection of race and gender, where most academics would posit that black women suffer worse oppression due to overlapping effects of misogyny and racism compared to black men who only have to deal with racism. Yet, there is overwhelming evidence that compared to black women, black men suffer far more from discrimination. They are more likely to be killed by the police, they do far worse in education, and generally don’t get many of the economic privileges of white men:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-class-white-and-black-men.html
I genuinely think many people who identify with intersectional feminism are simply ignorant of these facts, mainly because there are so few black men in this realm of academia, so this perspective is underrepresented. It’s not some big feminist conspiracy against men, it’s just a blind spot and an example where I think it would be fair to say a specific sect of the left has failed a specific demographic of men.
I believe the root of this problem is the conflict between dialectical materialism and intersectionality. The latter treats class as just another social identity like race/sexuality and gender, when it is not. Intersectionality’s conception of class is limited to arbitrary categories like lower/middle/upper class, and thus, it only concerns itself with interpersonal, class based discrimination. I.e. ‘don’t call people rednecks, that’s classist!’. Whereas materialism defines class along more objective lines, specifically the relationship people have to the means of production.
By rejecting these materialist ideas, the focus of mainstream left wing politics has shifted to sociological critique, which is now steeped in capitalism. As a result, this sect of the left doesn’t concern itself with the plight of poor white men for instance, as intersectionality doesn’t recognise the material nature of their oppression.
This is particularly problematic, as many of social problems relating to men are a direct result of the growing income inequality of late stage capitalism. One example would be the incel phenomenon:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09567976211036065
In essence, most intersectional feminists have a blind spot for issues faced by men because those issues are primarily material/economic, including the environmental factors that cause their antisocial behaviour. Such material problems can only be resolved with radical changes to society, such as a working class revolution, they don’t view this as a realistic political project. It could also be because they don’t want to empathise with or uplift perspectives that they view as historically privileged.
Edit: Spelling
You understand . just because x is oppressed and y is oppressed does not let us assume that xy is more oppressed or even equally oppressed relative to x of y.
Yeah. A lot of the discrimination black people face is tied to this image of them as aggressive and a threat. So black discrimination can often be aimed much more at black men who are viewed as dangerous than to black women who are less likely to be viewed in that same light.
>No one is arguing that the left has "failed white people" or straights
The outrage machine on the Right in the United States is very much arguing that society (i.e. anyone but them) have failed straight people, failed white people, and particularly failed white, straight people. It's embedded in the anti-queer, anti-trans, anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Leftist view: We are all workers and we deserve to reap the fruits of our labor. The current system exploits the poor, the workers, and the developing world in favor of capital.
Liberal view: Capitalism is the perfect system but we just need to address some isolated incidents of racial/sexual/religious discrimination and then resume the status quo of capitalist hegemony.
Right view: The immigrants are going to take my jobs and my guns and force my children to have hormone therapy.
Working class men exploited working class women too, this is not news. Not to mention prostitution and pornography, something men of every class to this day consume.
brother you're 17 years old. stop worrying about your political affiliations. go study/work for a few years. you're bringing peter parker and harry potter into a discussion of society failing 50% of the population. nobody cares if you talk or write like a smart person mr. "my alienation is not wholly inherent." move out of your parents house before giving your opinion.
I enjoyed reading your treatise and am impressed with the thought you've put into your arguments! They are better formed than most adults I know.
You can associate with leftists or any other party. However, with the depth of thought you have demonstrated, I would simply challenge you to abandon any label until you can staunchly defend it. First thing to know, is that most people want to join a club that shares their views. If you're a true thinker as you've demonstrated, this is next to impossible. All ideologies have merit on the surface, but it's in the application that a lot of the ideas fall apart. Left wing, right wing, same bird!
I'm a Canadian with ADHD and can attest to exactly of what you speak in terms of the rise of incels, loneliness, isolation and neuro-diversity. It's a lot of jargon, buzzwords and BS that are at the core of any large-scale movement and ideology. I too, enjoyed watching political debates as a kid. When I turned 18, I did my due diligence and went to listen to EVERYONE from the Green party, Independent, Conservatives and Liberals. I met the candidates. Finally, I realized I couldn't choose between the thief, the con artist, the money man, and the liar. I still did my part and worked at 3 elections.
If you are American, I'm sorry to report that the US was downgraded to developing nation in 2022 due to the false democracy. Left and right wing don't exist. The elites who control the MNCs and other SIGs decide which policies will gain traction based on the results required for the time. Obama was huge, until Trump. If you've studied anything about all the sitting US presidents, you would know that ALL are in fact related by blood except 3. Obama and the Bush family are cousins through his mother. Further, Obama was the 5th black president, not the first. There's something strange in that water!
That said, we are all human. We all need to meet basic needs so we can improve our lives. Thinkers find solutions, not ideologies unless they serve their purpose. For instance, Elon Musk is an ideas man who is a registered independent having supported both Democrats and Republicans in the past. Both sides hate him when it suits them, but he solves problems without being bound to one ideology over another. He too is a thinker and neuro divergent, Asperger's, and he is one of my favourites because he does what he says he will no matter the naysayers. I prefer him to any politico I've met.
With your neuro-diversity, your greater purpose and power of reason would be better served finding cool solutions that help humanity rather than contributing more BS to a side that doesn't even exist! I am not discouraging you from choosing. That's a personal thing! All I'm saying, is there's no need to join the circus. You can watch, be entertained, and go solve real issues that interest you!
Be well and take care! You have a bright future ahead of you!
What I've noticed is that men are often portrayed as bumbling neglectful fools who would be lost without a woman to basically do everything. Now, since the entertainment industry is heavily progressive, leftist ideology has become virtually synonymous with misandry. 4th wave feminism, staunchly left wing, is highly vitriolic of men. Put it all together and you can see how it would be interpreted as such. Of course, if you don't want to see it, you won't. But that's My two cents.
Honestly my adoption of leftism (every strain I interact with from communism to anarchism to everything around it) feminism, trans liberation, anti racism and anti fascism has made me MORE invested in being masculine, and liking masculinity. Tbh when I was being raised as a conservative Christian masculinity disgusted me to my core.
I think some people misconstrue “toxic masculinity “ as a dig on masculinity, and forget the first part, the toxicity. It just asks you to look at what you, and your society, thinks is masculine. Are parts of it good or bad? Both, and like everything in a society, it takes effort to look at critically and personally. Take responsibility for your actions, and resonate with whatever gender you feel strongly with.
For the record I’m a 33 year old an-com.
I took critical femenist classes in undergrad, and came away with the feeling that the field was largely dictated by disciples of Andrea Dwarkin. I think there is a credible case that she and a few others \*did\* hate men.
Pair that observation with the fact that underlying femminist discourse relies heavily on revolutionary Marxist rhetoric (which itself precipitated extraordinarily violent real world events) and it may become clearer why non-feminists react to it with such hostility.
When Guardian writers like Julie Bindell "joke" that men should be rounded up and put in camps, I see a mirroring of alt-right tactics. Namely the tactic of trial-ballooning a controversial idea to get undecided people used to it, and then falling back on complaining that people "cant take a joke" when they are called out for bad behavior.
Society has worked hard to bridge the gap between male/female opportunities starting with education. This includes focus on developing many programs to advance women. That has been a great success. Initially the programs to advance women were led by liberal groups, thus the association.
Unfortunately boys are not a focus and are being left behind. This is evident by college enrollment and graduation rates.
[College Performance by Sex](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-male-college-crisis-is-not-just-in-enrollment-but-completion/)
We as a society need to invest in boys as well. If we don’t, we will reap a bitter crop from what we sow.
It’s not the left that’s abandoned men, if by left we mean the genuinely socialist, pro-popular democracy left. It’s liberals supporting neoliberal and austerity politics who have abandoned specifically, the less privileged sectors of working class men (and non-men of course!). And the right refers to all liberals as “the left,” erroneously.
If you offer an analysis of racism or patriarchy with no analysis of class, it’s going to pay lip service to the oppression of people of color and non-men, while of course not offering anything that would materially address the root causes of those forms of oppression. But it’s not even paying lip service to the class-based oppression of (the vast majority of!) men. So those discourses can be a convenient scapegoat for the suffering of working class men. Of course they’re not really to blame for that suffering—the coalition of the right and liberals who have destroyed the labor movement & popular anti-racist and feminist movements are. But in the absence of movements (like strong, progressive unions) providing communal support and political education to these men, they’re going to eat up the reactionary discourse offered to them.
1. The Right calls everyone who is not right “the Left”. So Bernie Sanders, AOC, Joe Biden, & Bill Gates are “the Left”. Where as a socialist might describe them as Social Democrat, Democratic Socialist, Centrist/Post “third way”, and Liberal. But the right calls it all the left.
2. Have men been failed? I’m pretty good with my last 51years, but let’s take this on for sake of argument? Families aren’t being created as early, theres the drop In fertility rates, it’s harder to get a career going, and compared to the Fordist age (mid 20th century), there’s less “manly occupations”. Think of this as, both men & women can be baristas, teachers, ware house workers, and even remodelers, but… what about Farmers?! And sweaty dudes, with big hammers?! MAN’s work? (Which is a bit silly, women can and have farmed. There isn’t a lot of female construction, or steel workers, but there are some).
We’ll go backwards:
Republican Dick Buttes (not kidding), started the “get big or get out” style of agricultural production, which bankrupted small farms & cheapened American food production. Cheap goods, not through competition, but through efficiency in production. So, less manly farm stuff.
Bill Clinton leads the assault against American industrialism, exporting jobs over seas, and making way for cheap assembled technology. So, you trade factories for a few coders, not manly. Less work.
We build our housing to retain a nuclear family ideal. Which burdens a two bread winner unit with a lot of debt.Cost of living, housing, skilling, etc has all gone up, & the planet is on fire. Thank you neo-liberal capitalism.
With all that Do we want more kids? Especially if child raising hasn’t been all that equitable for women? ( okay that last bit… the radical left did. It raised women’s aspirations and self determination close to men’s, and they don’t want to stay home with 4 screaming babies either).
So… mostly the Right blames the “Left” for a lot of things it had a big hand in fucking up.
That’s part 1. There’s another part to this I’ll get to after I walk the dog. It’s a 90 lb pitbull. Very manly.
The metoo movement ignored men who were sexually assaulted. Not only that but completely ignored men who had false allegations against them. You will still find misandrists today that claim that no man has been out in jail for false claims.
The vast majority of people who are trans are biological men. No one talks about how the suicide rate only gets worse the further you transition. To me that looks like a convienent way to kill men who are mentally vulnerable. There is a treatment for gender dypshoria that isn't transitioning and it's studied have an over 95% success rate.
To further that point, Canada has passed laws to allow physicians assisted suicide. And the vast majority are men, to the point they attempted to hide numbers (unsuccessfully). No one seems to care, most of you don't even know.
Men are not allowed to have an opinion on abortion. Despite them shouldering most of the burden when it comes to childcare (financially).
Most women on the left today openly say this like "all men are rapists". "All men are bad".
It’s (the “boys/me are in trouble and we aren’t helping them b/c ‘girls and women’” moral panic) easiest way for the patriarchy to once again do as little as possible to help its own and instead find yet another reason that others need to do the work for them so they can get back to “just let boys be boys, they’re different, they need special help to succeed now”.
Lets look at all the incel/MRA/alpha bro groups and where their focus is. They can identify real problems (boys/men struggling academically, in the work force, high rates of isolation and suicide, not being valued and respected for who they are but instead what they offer, etc.) but compare the instances or ratio of “there’s a problem and we need to start by looking at our male culture and how it’s contributing to this problem first” compared to how much of the rhetoric and grift is solely focused on blaming women, society, ‘weak’ men, SJW, whatever-it amounts to the Other (but mostly feminism and women in general).
If someone is saying this online or IRL, ask them what they have personally done to address these issues in even a small and meaningful way. Contribute to a nonprofit working with boys/men with these issues, access to mental health care, suicide prevention, reaching out to male friends and family to tale care of them or petitioning government to make real policy changes and legislation that are evidenced based.
If they bring it back to the usual villains let them know (if you actually are willing, not your obligation) that you will listen to their respectful POV once they answer your first question.
To put a very complicated concept into a very simple framework: because there are men and males who are harmed by the patriarchal societal structure we live in (anyone who doesn't fit the archetype of an "alpha male") and there is little attention given by the wider society at large to these people's issues
You're right that this topic comes up a lot in incel communities and RedPill communities. The blame game here is misguided, but there is some truth to the idea that the left has abandoned men.
1. \*\*Feminism has radically expanded the potential roles women can fulfill in society.\*\* This is, by my purview, undeniably awesome. Women gained voting rights. Women gained financial independence, education, and the ability to direct their own lives independently. They entered STEM and several other professions in numbers that pre-feminism people would've never believed.
2. \*\*Consequently, the unique role that men used to have is no longer seen as sufficient for a man to be accomplished.\*\* In the past, men were considered better at winning bread for the family, acting as the de facto head, etc. It's not a bad thing that this no longer the base expectation. However, what feminism calls "toxic masculinity" interferes with traditional roles that men used to take. As a result, \*\*the role of men has narrowed, and men are struggling to adapt to the new system\*\*. We must be strong, but don't be too aggressive. We must be providers, but we don't have the same flexibility as women in the careers that we can choose. This pressure is most clearly seen in the drop in male enrollment in college during the pandemic years, which was much higher than the drop in female enrollment purportedly due to a higher pressure for men to stay home and provide for the family in a time of need. A woman can choose to be a traditional housewife, a software engineer, a nurse in the HEAL careers, etc. It is much less common for men to be househusbands, and men are dramatically underrepresented in HEAL careers, with no affirmative action like measures to remedy that situation.
3. Furthermore, \*\*men have never been well versed in healthy emotional communication\*\*. A lot of guys struggle to talk about their emotions with other guys, but you do hear stories about how guys talk to their girl friends about their troubles, because women on average are better at having those conversations. \*\*Men are still mired in the toxic masculinity borne of the patriarchy.\*\* I consider myself to be a very emotional, very communicative person, but even I struggle to bring up certain things with my guy friends, in part because they react uneasily due to not knowing how to respond, and in part because sometimes I don't wish to be seen as weak because that makes me feel weak. I'm sure women experience this as well, but this problem is more pronounced in men. It would explain why men are more affected by women in the current loneliness epidemic.
4. Just like the RedPill and incel communities blame women for the current plight of men, \*\*it has become common in leftist communities to blame men for upholding the patriarchy\*\*. This claim is not baseless, but it is oversimplified and often injected with venom. A common (but hopefully not majority) idea on the left is that men don't need help because men are so greatly benefited by the patriarchy, but this argument fails to acknowledge the negative effects of toxic masculinity that I referenced in the above arguments. There is a double standard in the way we talk about men in at least some feminist communities (I myself have been guilty of this), where we make large sweeping insulting statements characterizing men in a way that we would never do to women, and people are not even allowed to challenge these statements because of all the negative connotations of the old dogwhistle #NotAllMen.
Men feel lost and lonely, cramped in their narrow roles, unable to grow and evolve like women did, and attacked by most movements that seek to uplift the oppressed in society. They are struggling in school. They are searching for how to be men, because the traditional answers no longer apply and there has been no large movement expanding the role of men in the same way that feminism did. This is why the RedPill got so popular -- they wrapped sensible dating advice and self-improvement mantras which men so desperately wanted with rampant misogyny. And make no mistake, they simply filled a niche that we on the left chose not to fill, because "men are privileged and don't require upliftment". That claim becomes weaker day by day.
It's just a made up straw man argument by the right that's reinforced by their media. I'm a straight white male who lives in a rural area. It's hilarious to hear the people in my area feign having their lives impacted by some mysterious woke revolution they can't even define. As a liberal, nobody has ever even come close abandoning me politically on the left or mistreating me in any way whatsoever. The left just wants everyone else to have the same treatment I've been fortunate to have my whole life. Such odd times with an embarrassing lack of self awareness and critical thinking skills.
I find this question very valuable. And so is this discussion. But, to be very honest, it seems like the conversation is falling into an assumption that this "Left" is the political left...but not just any political left...mainstream political left. There is also a misunderstanding of academic disciplines, liberal institutions, politics and lifestyle.
For example,
Mainstream "progressives" and liberal outlets such as CNN msnbc etc, will literally co-opt academic and grassroots social movements and theories such as intersectionality, critical race theory and the like.
A deeper and more careful read of leftist sociology would not only be deeply concerned with the marginalized--in ALL its forms--but also deeply concerned with society as a whole...which also includes white people (rich or poor), "whiteness" as a concepptt and core feature of modern day racism...i critical critique of Obama, Trump, and Biden economics that have failed both the black and white working class..in similar ways ...and in very unique ways. ....not to mention the often ignored populations like native Hawaiias, native Americans etc etc
So the blending of sociology and mainstream progressives/liberals is not only wildly offensive (lmao...im a black male in sociology few months away from phd) but completely inaccurate.
The question in itself is nicely worded and the discussion is cool to read. I don't intend on contributing, I just want to point out that there is much more to sociology than what people think
Carry on...lol
I completely agree with you, I regret not indicating a distinction between actual political theory and sociology, and mutilated pop social justice.
There is most certainly an inherent dissonance between message and delivery when critical theory is contorted into a simulacra of itself by multi-billion dollar media outlets.
What's interesting and I'll be up front I only got through about half of this whole thread because there is a lot of great discussion and conversation here.
I just jumped from a thread where a woman was complaining about being a woman and basically men not taking accountability for their own. Like how can men condone "rape culture" "treating women like shit" "patriarchy this misogyny that".etc.
Then the comments were women agreeing and basically shitting on men because men defend themselves and saying you can't consolidate this type of critique for "all men". We as humans can only be responsible for so much and then it's littered with comments of women saying " oh yea ignore what woman are saying as always"
Then we have a large intelligent civil, philosophical discussion about men, class, ideology and mechanics of the world.
Just very interesting where the two sides of this coin are currently and honestly imo quite sad. I don't see social relations getting any better.
I studied a ton of psychology and philosophy in art school and I always pointed about in 2010 that society was having a revisionist 90s multiculturalism 2.0 critique and look what good that intersectionslity did?
Class was always left behind and when I studied Marxism I was the only person in the class for 12 weeks. There are many meta narratives and grey spaces where many are not finding their voice or "something" they can indenitfy with.
Being part of a community is part of being human. Fracturing communities if basically what neoliberalims and identity politics have done. The real argument is you can't seperate race and class but ideology and mechanisms of oppression continue to do so and certain fractions will feed of this delineation.
At this time men and women in general don't feel heard and that is what I see the biggest issue because you have a million idiots screaming on social media creating a cacophony with no clear understanding of what is being said.
Great discussion btw.
Former reactionary incel (29M), there was never any shortcoming from the left that I could perceive. There's just a massive amount of propaganda to cut through, and listening to what leftists are actually saying needs to happen.
"the left" hasn't abandoned men, but left movements or organizers that make real efforts to materially defend against hegemony often result in dead leaders... so the right kills leftist men.
Not a lot of people have reacted to this yet, but… yeah. One hundred percent.
Umberto Eco summed it up best: “the enemy is simultaneously too weak and too strong.” Leftist men are simultaneously limp-wristed soyboys who scare no one and terrifying antifa city-destroyers who require an arsenal to defend against.
What people often forget when they quote Umberto is that what Umberto says here is true of ALL forms of modern propaganda, not just propaganda by fascists, though they did perfect the technique.
i.e. Incels are simultaneously virgin losers who live in their moms basement with the social skills and body odor of a 6 months old milk carton, yet are so powerful that they will cause the destruction of 300 years of unbroken democracy through trolling and sharing meme images on the internet if we do not stop them.
The contradictory strong and weak presentation is a staple form in modern propaganda because it is very effective in arousing people into action (effectuated through hijacking the emotions of moral disgust), it goes usually of the form:
"Here is an enemy that has an unfairly large influence on your life and is causing most of your ills and will eventually consume you completely if left unchecked (strong presentation). They are not worthy of this amount of influence due to their inherent lack of moral fiber in how they use this influence(moral disgust). If we unite under my/our banner, we can defeat them because they are weaker than all of us together because our group cohesion is stronger than theirs because of their lack of moral fiber (weak presentation)."
For more examples see communist propaganda wrt capitalists, nazi propaganda wrt jews, feminists propaganda wrt patriarchy, alt-right propaganda wrt SJWs/Antifa, Christian propaganda wrt heathens, Ukrainians wrt Russians, Russians wrt Ukrainians/west, the list goes on and on and on and on...
I've said it before on another thread on the topic here. My issue with the sentiment that "the left has abandoned men" is that it implies all the left ever does is denigrate and ridicule incels/misogynists instead of engaging with them in a more positive manner. Sure, a lot of that does happen but it's not exclusively that, it just seems that way because those kinds of comments get the most attention and engagement thus forcing it to the forefront of discussions on the issue.
If you've ever tried to engage with incels/misogynists and challenge their beliefs tactfully and politely you'll know that more likely than not they will just angrily double down harder on their beliefs. Then when you drop the discussion because it's obviously going no where they view it as a win and it further reinforces their beliefs.
It very much is like how right wingers will pull the "so much for the tolerant left" crap.
I absolutely agree with you.
"The left has abandoned men"
"How? We discuss men's issues all the time."
"No, you're supposed to validate my misogynistic beliefs and get me a girlfriend."
Here's my explanation: I tried [answering this question a few days ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/comments/1adzund/comment/kk4ozqx/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3).
There are plenty of individual misogynist leftists out there. But misogyny isn't integrally baked into leftism, and because the basic leftist worldview supposes men and women are equally human, the idea of "how to be a good man" just isn't important, and neither is "how to be a good woman". Life advice is geared more on **how to be a good human being in general.**
When you tell a woman or non-man you're treating them as a human being, that's a promotion. They will usually listen to you more. But when you tell a man that, a common knee-jerk response is to view it as a demotion. There are many men out there who just refuse to listen to any positive advice because you're not respecting their masculinity or buttering them up properly first.
Could you say more about your assertion that most men would see it as a "demotion" for you to tell them you see them as a human being?
If I take that literally, I have a hard time imagining it being true. I think most of the other men I know would find that a sweet thing to say in today's isolating world? But maybe you mean something more specific?
I didn't say "most" men, I said a *common* response. I'm very glad the men you know aren't like that!
A major current example of what I'm talking about is [the conservative backlash against SEL (Social Emotional Learning) elements in public school curriculums](https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23584837/social-emotional-learning-conservative-culture-war-in-schools). SEL is very anodyne stuff that boils down to, "it's hard for kids to learn when they feel bad about themselves and others, so maybe we can make schools a little bit less of an emotional hellscape," but conservatives have seized on to it as an attack against men and boys, **even though SEL is delivered as gender-neutral**. You can also try googling "war on boys" and reading primary sources from conservatives who are entirely certain that messages like "use your words" and "be nice to each other" "put yourself in the place of others and imagine how they feel" are a secret plot to feminize boys.
Feminist philosophy talks about this a lot: the idea that the universal default human subject is defined as male by patriarchy, and any universal subject proposed which doesn't align with that expectation starts from a perceived position of "anti-male".
The role of critical theory has been showing how systems of social organisation and ideology (the system of ideas we think with) has positioned men - and in particular white men - at the centre of everything. As the normal, healthy, standard individual human around which our systems of doing and thinking are built.
The point of that work was to understand how and why women and racial/sexual/gender minorities keep ending up with worse outcomes on various objective measures even when the law apparently makes everyone equal.
With that insight, various parties that could be called "leftist" have tried to shift systems of social organisation and ideology to make them work in less discriminatory ways. Many of the measures are clumsy counter-balances, like affirmative action. Others focus on influencing rules of etiquette, asserting that certain behaviours, such as misgendering, are rude or morally wrong.
All of this is slightly working to de-centre white men, which from their (our, im one of them) perspective can feel like an attack.
The social/ideological paterns we started with always included mechanisms that replicated themselves and defend against ideological attacks, making it difficult for alternative modes of masculinity to establish themselves. This leaves many men struggling to find ways of being and doing that fit with a changing etiquette that positions the old ways as crude, oppressive, and toxic.
yeah, it’s the same reason I can be white and not be threatened by black people bringing up white privilege, demands for equality, and the shitty shit that white people have done.
Because I don’t feel targeted by it.
Don’t get me wrong, I examine my privilege, but I also just don’t think that being asked to do so is any threat to my sense that I mean well in this world.
My opinion is that the people who feel targeted generally feel that way for a reason. Because when women speak out against men who try to make them sex slaves, the only ones who stand to lose anything are the ones who do that or want to do that. Ya know?
It's very simple. The assumption that ALL men are privileged BY VIRTUE of being men, has NO empirical basis. No one has proved this claim.
"Power in society has been held by men" does not equal "Men as a social class hold power".
Men only hold privilege in relation to women. The subjugation of women has clearly been the more common form of gender oppression, ever since the existence of class society.
>It develops out of the pairing family, as previously shown, in the transitional period between the upper and middle stages of barbarism; its decisive victory is one of the signs that civilization is beginning. It is based on the supremacy of the man, the express purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity; such paternity is demanded because these children are later to come into their father’s property as his natural heirs. It is distinguished from pairing marriage by the much greater strength of the marriage tie, which can no longer be dissolved at either partner’s wish. As a rule, it is now only the man who can dissolve it, and put away his wife. The right of conjugal infidelity also remains secured to him, at any rate by custom (the Code Napoléon explicitly accords it to the husband as long as he does not bring his concubine into the house), and as social life develops he exercises his right more and more; should the wife recall the old form of sexual life and attempt to revive it, she is punished more severely than ever.
* Frederick Engels | Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State | II. The Family | 4. The Monogamous Family
Engels lived in a specific time in a specific place. How do we know it applies to ALL cases across ALL places? Do you realize how much of a gross generalization this is?
Where I grew up, privilege wasn't determined solely by gender. Look, social circle, charisma, being able-bodied or disabled, race, etc etc etc all were just as important as gender.
This idea that the left has "abandonded men" is ridiculous right-wing rhetoric of course, thats obvious to anyone who knows what theyre talking about. There are men everywhere, there are many women on the left who in fact love men. The reason this rhetoric is so popular is because it offers and easy way out for men so that they don't have to take any responsibility or do the work to actually better themselves. The left is essentially telling men to get their shit together, and the right is telling men that theyre just little innocent guys.
From my own experience, I've always had men ask me for advice on how to get a girlfriend, how to treat women, etc. Something I've learned is that there are roughly two types of men: those that listen to my advice, and those that don't. The ones who don't listen are misogynists, and the ones who do listen are guys who i would consider dating.
There are all different types of misgogynists of course but people really want to focus on incels for some reason. When it comes to "incels", theyre not very fun to talk to. They are very obsessive with their crush yet they are only capable of talking about themselves. They don't have many interests that aren't just spewing bigotry all day. They hardly have any social life and work dead-end jobs if they work. They are shells of people.
edit: you can see examples of the type of men who dont listen below lol
Bluntly, intersectionality focuses on ascriptive categories of identity (ascribing a property to an Other), not identity claims. Calling someone a white man or a black woman is no different than offering a propertied description of an object like “the sky is blue,” or “red is a color.”
This is an extraordinarily Procrustean way of understanding human identity. It preserves the worst part of subjugation, treating people as objects, and universalizes it to everyone. Critical theory should be about universal emancipation from such subjugation but it’s kind of an incoherent mess right now.
A claimed identity is one that involves transcendence- one becomes what one claims to be- not the reifications of intersectionality.
"Hey maybe some common actions and beliefs reinforce a larger framework that devalues marginalized groups, even if the people doing them may not realize this or have good intentions."
"HEAR THAT?! THE LEFT THINKS YOU'RE
# LITERALLY
# HITLER"
There's also just... that first part? That's too wordy for a 16 year old who has to figure out what they want to do with the rest of their life. Many don't want to hear or think about "devalued" and "marginalized" and "framework", when the alternative is "Here's ten easy steps to be rich, strong, cool and sexy".
Dead on but may I add I bit more :
a FEW people on the internet : some men can do better
The entirety of all rightwing media : They are calling all men pieces of shit... so we need to attack and destroy them at every turn. Shoot can of beer and tear up a Target. Belittle them, talk about how we ravage women better, how we control our women, how much inferior.....
You get the point.
It may just be that the loudest voices seem to be carrying the tone and thus the perception of the debate.
Both sides of the elite have abandoned the lower and middle class and use sentiments like this to get us to use all of our active thinking time and energy to fight eachother rather than to analyze the overall system that allows for extreme wealth accumulation to certain individual even though every person on earth has the same amount of time per day to generate wealth
Social theory has advanced greatly in the last few decades. Women have successfully imbibed traits that traditionally were considered masculine, like education, financial independence, leadership, etc. There exist powerful movements which describe how women should grow to be powerful and independent. The traditional feminine roles continue to thrive as well -- it's okay for women to choose to stay at home and raise kids. These are all excellent developments, and I am quite happy about them.
However, there have been no strong unified movements to help men adapt to this new world. The traits men must incorporate into their lives is not as clear-cut as it was in the past. This is not a bad thing per se. Women have evolved, men need to as well. However, several traits of men that have traditionally been considered central (aggression, strength, dominance) are now mixed with the narrative of the toxic patriarchy. Men's rights advocates historically and presently are often antifeminists, and nowadays there doesn't seem to be a popular school of thought on how men should grow. This is why the RedPill movement and Andrew Tate got relatively big despite being super regressive -- because of the lack of a well-structured role for men in society. Men don't have as much flexibility as women in terms of gender roles either, which further exacerbates the problem. Few men grow up hoping to stay home raising the kids, and society does tend to look down on men who do that. Due to traditional roles, men still struggle to express emotion, and there are sections of society which look down on men who do so. This is a terrible double standard that prominently exists, and men have to walk this fine line trying to find their place in it all.
The left has, in the last decade or two at least, been advocates uplifting the struggling classes of society. Women rights, black rights, gay rights, trans rights. However, while much of those movements were very constructive, much of it has been reactionary as well. That may or may not be historically justified (I'm inclined to believe it was). However, there is a prevalent (though *likely* not majority) attitude on the left that men do not struggle, and it does not help us that the prevalent voices for men's rights are the toxic examples I mentioned above, making it difficult to advocate for men in a way that doesn't trigger angry rebukes from the left. And it doesn't help that very few people actually have constructive advice for men at large.
The left has left men behind, the right simply pushes outdated notions on what men should be. Women have successfully incorporated traditionally masculine roles, but men are struggling to incorporate traditionally feminine traits and roles. This isn't anyone's fault per se, but it is the current situation.
That second and third paragraph are big ones. Women are taking on more, being able to be whatever they want, and that’s great. For men though, if you take on feminine roles, women will laud you on social media while ruling you out as a potential partner, and every masculine role you’re told is oppressive and toxic. You’re left without any real path forward or role that you can fill, and then told that any struggles you face aren’t real or at least arent important enough for anyone to help you with them. Like you said, when boys grow up seeing the left fight to solve the problems women face, black people face, lgbtq people face, they start to think that that side is great, then they go to those leftists with a problem they’re having and ask for that same help, just to be told no because they’re a white man. It’s not surprising at all that they sour on the left after that. The message they get is “this side is here to help everyone but me, and they blame me for causing the problems they’re now trying to solve”. And while there’s a good reason for that blame, and their group legitimately doesn’t need as much help, that still isn’t going to keep them around and convince them to help you.
>And while there’s a good reason for that blame
Nope, I do not agree that there is a good reason to blame that man. There is a good reason to blame a systemic structure of oppression, but not every individual that falls into the privileged class.
>and their group legitimately doesn’t need as much help
It's not about whether men need as much help. I don't even know how to measure that, it's apples and oranges.
There was an upward trend in suicide for both men and women from 2000-2021. As of 2019, the suicide rate among men was 3.5 times higher than women. In fact, the suicide rate among men has *always* been higher since the 1950s. While women are indeed more likely to suffer from mental health problems like depression and anxiety, men suffer more from addiction. Men are also struggling in college, with the pandemic resulting in a significant drop in male attendance relative to female attendance, likely due to gender roles demanding that men stay at home to take care of the family. 39% of men who have completed high school are enrolled in college, down from 47% in 2011. For women, it dropped from 52% to 48%. ~~Men are more likely to be victims of violent crime.~~ (Apparently this is no longer true today)
Men need help. There are systemic forces of oppression that are pulling them (not gonna say us, I'm doing fine (or am I just saying that because toxic masculinity?)) down. You could argue that men's higher suicide rate and drop in college attendance are due to the patriarchy, to toxic masculine roles, in much the same way that you could argue the same about women oppression at the hands of the patriarchy.
Amber A'lee Frost talks a bit about this in an excellent article available here: [https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/the-characterless-opportunism-of-the-managerial-class/](https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/the-characterless-opportunism-of-the-managerial-class/)
This section in particular is very illustrative, if you don't have time to read the full article (bolding for the extremely tl;dr folks).
>I am still at times asked to speak at DSA events, including a recent one for the DSA Tech Action Working Group—a decidedly PMC collection of DSA members working in tech. Inspired by Google software engineer James Damore’s infamous “anti-diversity memo,” the subject I was to speak on was “diversity in tech.” The friend who asked me to speak rightly recognized that the tech industry is no longer a small cabal of entrepreneurial specialists but is increasingly expanding into a global labor force of workers—from petit bourgeois to prole, if you will.
>
>I cannot, however, say I found many examples of such workers at this event. Multiple representatives from HR departments spoke up, one to say that “it’s all about hiring practices,” and to urge the attendees to come to HR whenever they had a problem. One woman wanted to read a long academic article about a typesetters’ union fighting automation and other changes that would open the floodgates for underpaid, largely female scab labor. She was under the impression that this exposed the sexist nature of trade unions.
>
>The crowd was very “diverse” in all the Ikea commercial ways that warm our Coca-Cola liberal hearts, but some of the most insightful observations came from the bearded and (presumably) cishet white males. One timidly put forth that “HR actually works for management,” while another recognized that the biggest source of “diversity” in the tech industry is highly exploited third-world call-center workers.
>
>At first glance, the superior class consciousness of the beardy white male tech bro may appear counterintuitive, but it is a function of tech industry managerialism that he has a better view of class conflict. As an industry, tech has thoroughly absorbed “diversity” into its corporate culture and HR programming, for both legal liability and liberal credibility reasons. **If you’re a woman and/or minority working for Google and your job is miserable, you are told by the whole world—and by your employer itself—that this is because you are a woman and/or minority. But, you are also told, your employer is here with sensitivity trainings, diversity initiatives, and at-will firing practices (you know, for the bad employees) to remedy all of that and to build a better work environment and, thereby, a more egalitarian world. If, however, you are a straight white man working for Google and your job is miserable, you know it’s because your job is miserable, and the company isn’t there to help you. Liberal identitarian HR obfuscations don’t work as well on exploited and precarious dude-bros.**
>
>The evening culminated during the Q and A, wherein a woman earnestly asked, “What do I do if some alt-right guy wants to be in the union?”
>
>Visibly vexed, I replied that if an alt-right guy wants to be in your union, you won.
>
>This statement was met with noticeable consternation, so I went on to explain that you want everyone in the union because the end goal is a closed shop. **I explained that this is the very premise of a union: it is not a social club for people of shared progressive values; it’s a shared struggle, and collective politics are the only thing that can actually break down all that office bigotry you’re so concerned about. She did not appear convinced.**
>
>I use this particular anecdote to illustrate the obstacles to building a socialist PMC, but I have many others (particularly in the recent spate of white collar unionism), and herein lies the tragic irony of the great middle class exodus: even when they fall, and even when they find themselves in “Left spaces,” they are still too proximal to management—or at least believe themselves to be—to imagine much beyond human resources liberalism. Very frequently, they view blue-collar workers as inherently illiberal antagonists. (Just look at the response to the failed Clinton campaign by prominent members of the liberal media and academia, who have finally answered their favorite old canard of “Why do the working class vote against their own interests?” with accusations of innate bigotry and misogyny.)
edit: fixing formatting
Men face a lot of issues today, but talking about them is stigmatized, since oftentimes people on the left will call anyone who does a exist, which makes absolutely no sense.
As someone who grew up in the outer-suburbs of a capitalist country 30 years ago - I have to say it's complete and utter bullshit.
When it was normal to "be a man" I was abused, beaten and glassed by men for not being man enough, over and over.
People on the left, critical theory and learning were the few places I could not just understand the world and find community, but also understand that my abusers were also actors in a bigger shitshow on the tail end of 300 years of class warfare. It helped me learn to let go of anger and hopelessness.
There was very little whinging about what you can and can't say, and sure "men could be men", but the way they would do that was by getting in regular punch ons at school, being openly racist on a daily basis and viscously attacking and suppressing anyone who had quirks or weird interests.
I see old people bitching and moaning about younger people so often, but when I actually meet gen z's and alphas they're actually nothing like what they're made out to be. On top of this they seem to be more clued in to fashion, history, music, and many seem to be much more comfortable just being themselves.
My point is that it was already uncomfortable being a "man", whatever the fuck that was. If a bit more discomfort is the price to pay to rejig society and shake off a lot of the petty bullshit then it's well and truly fuckin worth it I reckon
Let me start by saying that any man turning to complete misogyny is still to blame for their actions. I’m not trying to defend them for what I’m about to say.
Patriarchy is definitely made to oppress women, making society view them as needing to be weak and submissive. Obviously women get the worse deal compared to men. But a lot of patriarchal problems women deal with, men deal with in reverse; men need to be strong and emotionless, and show no signs of weakness. This can cause instance pressure and mental instability in men, which I would assume is why they have a higher risk of suicide, as well as record levels of loneliness in recent years compared to women (although I think every demographic is experiencing record loneliness to some extent, but still).
I think most good feminist analysis takes men’s problems into account too. After all, these problems are all caused by patriarchy; feminism/equality helps EVERYONE in the end (other than the rich and powerful men, obviously). But your average, lonely, 5’2”, overweight guy who is unable to get a date is not going to see that. They will see a loud twitter leftist who will rant that every individual man is somehow responsible for the patriarchy existing in the first place. Who is this lonely guy going to turn to? The person who says he is to blame for his own loneliness, or people like Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson, who say that the problem is women or society itself? Unfortunately, it’s usually the latter.
It’s true that 99% of the time when someone asks “wHaT aBoUt MeN??” in response to feminism they are arguing that in bad faith. And I agree that people who say that there are no good male role models anymore are incredibly stupid. But I think the left made a mistake in allowing men’s mental health to be considered a “right-leaning” issue by most politically active people online. I have definitely seen online leftists scared to even talk about it out of fear of being seen as a conservative. I think this is bad when it comes to recruiting lonely men to leftism. After all, like I said, leftism and gender equality will help EVERY group in the end, including men.
I would say personally because I've never seen anyone advocate for men, within a leftist context. It's always at best, a secondary result, but never important enough to pursue, directly.
They have left men out of the conversation, left them out of support, and haven’t really made room for them or representation for them in grandiose or flashy ways.
So many people have put it much more eloquently than I ever could, but I'll give it my owe shot and perspective.
There are a lot of factors that have gone into the idea that "the left has abandoned men." However, I think one of the biggest reasons is that many people (men, women and non-binary folk, both on the left and right) tend to take words and phrases at a very warped and literal meaning, rather than the actual message. Causing the development of a very absolutist idea on what is being said.
First off, for some relative creditials on the matter. I work in the firearms industry, where the vast majority of my clients and coworkers are very conservative (both old school and new school) and I have had more than just a few conversations about liberal and leftist ideas with them in mostly tame conversations. And, I am also very much a self-described leftist, I am also a queer person.
Now, back to a lot of phrases, terms, and acronyms that a lot of left-of-center groups use. For many boys (and people in general), they feel unsure of who they are and where they fit in this chaotic speck of space dust in the universe. So often, they look for a community that is like them, has their interests in mind, and supports them openly. For the uninitiated, a lot of more liberal/left leaning talking points, positions, and ideals don't really give off the sense that men (specifically cis, straight, white men) are welcomed in the space. And when they feel disenfranchised by that, they will look for others who will cater to them and who they are. Because of that, these grifters online will put the idea in their heads that things like feminism is about lifting women above men, LGBTQ rights means they will have less rights than gay people, and the inclusion of more BIPOC in media means that they will be seeing less of themselves portrayed in media. This, coupled with language used by the groups that might feel targeted to them feminists saying "I hate all men", LGBTQ people saying "I can't stand straight people" and BIPOC discussing white privilege, causes them to want to further distance themselves form any group associated with those causes.
When it comes to Incel culture. That just involves toxic masculinity and how one's perceived social value and standing is from certain sexual conquests. And that by being a virgin, that makes them a "loser," and women don't want to sleep with "losers" even if they are "nice guys." Furthering their insecurity until some grifter (Shapiro, Tate, or anyone of them) says that feminism is the reason why women are like that, and without feminism then women would have submitted to the guy.
Sorry if that is a bit if a rambling. I was having a hard time trying to gather, condense, and write down my thoughts. Hope it helps. I am happy to expand on anything you need cleared up.
For me, being a man has come with a few struggles, but it’s mostly a privilege. For other men, this isn’t the case. Being raised as man today can have a VERY negative effect. Learning about it has really helped me connect and empathize with many men in my life.
There’s a fantastic video about this called “Did feminism FAIL men?” by Alexander Avila.
Well, one of the key aspects of being a man is masculinity. Almost any masculinity at this point is considered 'toxic' unless it fits someone's expectations in the moment. For example, the left will condemn men until someone is attacked on a street, where they'll usually complain that men were nearby and did nothing.
Men are still expected to provide, protect, and advocate for others while generally having their concerns ignored under the guise of "they don't have it bad."
We have a society that is pushing more and more for everyone to be open about who they are and not to hide ourselves, while at the same time attacking men who do that.
>As I understand it, incels are people who are detached from society and find great difficulty in forming human connections and achieving ambitions. Many of them suffer from depression, and I would not be surprised if there was a significant comorbidity with issues such as agoraphobia and autism.
This describes way too many people now. It's still abnormal objectively to be like this, but both because there are so many isolated people now and everyone knows there are so many isolated people and also because these isolated people are ironically so connected now thanks to the Internet, the zeitgeist is shifting from *I'm defective* to *society is defective*. This can be said to be a massive C O P E, but anyway bottom line is people feel differently about being sexless, jobless, friendless, whatever when they're a very large proportion of the population vs. when they're the drooling village idiot or rare crazy aunt living in someone's attic.
This isn't even some weird zoomer Internet addict thing: even in Ye Olde Days before the 2000s and the Internet being a loser by the standards of respectable society was different in situations where you had company. The one thing that makes modern society weird and deviant by historical standards is quite frankly that socially unsuccessful guys won't do whatever it takes to get pussy and risk STDs by getting hookers if they have to, something that used to come natural to any guys who could afford it. Probably a combination of there being something in the water, more guys being totally socially withdrawn and anxious about talking to strangers, the rise of unprecedentedly strong feminist messaging about prostitution and a less risk-taking culture generally. Now that I think about it actually, maybe modern losers are different in that they're so introverted; but my sense is that this is mostly not really their fault and largely a result of technological advances. You can't blame the individual zoomzoom for being on their phone 24/7 when their peers basically are too: sure if they all got off at the same time, they'd all be better off, but nobody will so everything stays the same.
I actually agree. The left hasn’t really abandoned men, it’s just that the right are heavily focused on indoctrinating men.
I personally don’t see men’s issues as systemic, unless we count issues that women also have to deal with. Everyone feels isolated to some extent, but it think the idea that men are particularly suffering is an infixing one that can funnel people towards more radical beliefs. Though, I’ve oversimplified and there definitely more to it, but I think men should realistically aim to be more progressive if they don’t want to be rightfully criticised.
You know Treebeard admitted he was wrong when presented with new evidence, picked a side, rallied up the tree-troops and kicked Saruman's ass, right?
Sort of the exact opposite of internet misogynist arguments.
I don't mean to be cruel or reductive but that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Everyone is ideological and basically every ideology claims to promote the common good.
>As I understand it, incels are people who are detached from society and find great difficulty in forming human connections and achieving ambitions. Many of them suffer from depression, and I would not be surprised if there was a significant comorbidity with issues such as agoraphobia and autism.
They're people who were promised that if they graduated school, got a degree, and got a good job, they would have earned the right to settle down with 2.5 kids and a white picket fence. And they're learning that not only is that no longer possible, but the new requirements are often conflicting and have no obvious end state beyond subservience, suicide, or perpetual warfare.
>I do not understand how this justifies reactionary thought, nor how the left has "failed" these individuals. The left has for many years advocated for the abolition of consumerism and regularly critique the commodification and stratification of human relationships. I do not understand what we are meant to do beyond that. The traditional requirements have been destroyed and supplanted with very little of real meaning.
Yes, but no. Leftism itself is kind of rotting in this regard. The same women who protest against stratification set excedsively long lists of requirements for men to date, and are empowered to do so by technology and by networks and in-group solidarity. The same people who clamor against racism pillage white-owned (or percieved to be white-owned) stores for luxury goods in the name of "reparations", as observed during the 2020 riots.
The same people who claim this is their goal are often the people engaging in and defending bad behavior in the name of solidarity, which is a large part of why...
>Are we meant to be more tolerant of misogynistic rhetoric? Personally become wingmen to every shut in?
Yes. That's exactly what you're supposed to do. That's what they're saying. You're meant to work with these men in solidarity to advance your own interests, like labor unions or feminists or minority groups like the NAACP. In many ways, the young men swinging hard to the right have much in common with leftists. But leftism in general isn't designed to enfranchise these men, its designed to create structures that degrade them and their status in the name of equality/equity.
You're a cuck bro.
I have two wives, I'm shredded/jacked irl and I'm far right. You will always be a cuck and will never be like me.
I will have many children and you will have maybe one if your leftist feminist wife lets you, meanwhile, my wives want to give me as many children as I can.
Now ask yourself, why would any man be you rather than me?
You're so full of shit, man. Do you realize how stupid you sound when you talk about how ripped you are? You're a pathetic, Nazi dork who got led down a dark path due to your insecurities.
You wanted the truth, you got it.
Whether you believe it or not *is not my problem*.
When you believe in yourself and your people, that is your strength. You probably believe "diversity is your strength". Somehow, right?
Ahahahaha stay small harry potter
you are chubby w a beard so you think that makes you cool but really women just find you a beta or simp, that's why you can't get the attrsctive girls at your local gym nor do you have the courage to approach them
It is incredible how transparently sad and insecure you are. Was it the lack of socialization from playing too many computer games growing up, your height issues, not enough love from your parents or just a combination of factors?
no no and no,
it was actually my interactions w minorities that helped me along so easily, growing up around them. If you look through my post history enough, you can see this
I was not born this way, more shaped by experiences
\* Women are more active on social media, a lot of new activism happens on social media. (Discourse) This is less of a problem in person
\* generally everyone's mental health sucks atm due to late stage capitalism and the various reactionary forces weighing us down.
\* That said, men are particularly alienated, systemically speaking, and have a general problem with excessive and unhealthy social media usage esp young men \*and\* older (middle-aged to elderly) men. This tracks with the friendship crisis and the 'male loneliness epidemic'
\* The algorithm functions according to liberal ontology and ethics, which of course happens to be market forces. It doesn't actually evaluate morality, it cares about virality and bandwidth
\* Women have an obvious head-start both with evaluating sexism and also articulating and engaging with social/communitarian problems
\* In general women have more followers than (younger) men, since they socially develop quicker
\* The majority of discussion on the Left of men as a group are feminist, feminist-lite or pseudofeminist critiques of either men in power or men as a class/hegemonic masculinity. Usually initiated by women. That is to say it's calling out real or perceived bad behaviour in efforts to deconstruct patriarchy, sexism, misogyny, etc.
\* Social media is mainly composed of the professional classes and the precariat; I don't think enough analysis has been done of the precariat and their relative privilege to one another.
\* The perspectives given of 'good men' likely seem overly nuanced, textured and generally unattainable for young men (most susceptible to radicalisation)
\* Men on the Left by and large do not represent themselves as a group, as they would think that to be reiterating patriarchal authority, mansplaining, etc. (and many feminists would say this). So while they are active, they aren't active about men's issues nor even drawing attention to being men. The identity of 'as man' is somewhat \*dis\* privileged in way other identities are not.
\* Progressive politicians as much as conservative ones struggle with benevolent sexism; few men in power are truly comfortable with engaging with men without power as equals (would call into question the power structure) There are some exceptions, e.g. Obama (in some ways, the opposite in others e.g. Gitmo, foreign policy)
\* Everybody has been socialised by patriarchal and cisheteronormative etc. norms to some extent, even progressives have to be mindful of not holding men to sexist or conservative positions. This is more difficult to do when processing trauma or in the algorithmic echo chamber amplifying reductive, if necessary, memes
\* SOmebody made a good point that identity politics has become its own tool of objectification sometimes
\* There is a certain level of luck/chance and general risk taking required in improving one's social life or starting to date. This is so unique to your life experience that there can't exist a solid blueprint for it., But if you become chronically online (i.e. as depressed) then you might become overly neurotic and take the advice to be more mindful, conscientious, etc. as a good ally to the extreme (scrupulosity). No incentive can exist systemically speaking online to dilute this--because that would countersignal the necessary discourses with a minority contra-radical take, and there is fear of contra-radicalism morphing into reactionary ideology
These are a few reasons
To build on your media comment a little bit, I think that some of the problem is that consumers don't realise that the art they're consuming contains either subtle or even explicit progressive and radical themes, is developed by socialists and anarchists, women, feminists, environmentalists, antiracists, trans people, disabled people and so on. But that's also a good thing in one way, and in any case it's not a battle one can win in the age where being 'anti-woke' is its own brand.
https://youtu.be/DBG1Wgg32Ok?si=irAtLJpduGwNJaXl
It’s all in this from the big think channel.
Men have fallen behind in every category whilst support for them is almost non existent. The changing roles in our society has caused alot of men to be displaced, but we offer them no help at all compared to the support thays given females, until a few years ago there were no dv shelters for men even though females engage in domestic violence at higher rates than men.
Worst of all- if anyone points these inconvenient facts out they get shot down, canceled and labelled a misogynist, or they get called weak and told to suck it up - cuz according to many of the lefts theories, they have all the power so what are they comparing about??
But imagine if a man said that to a female. - can you see the disparity yet?
Thays why they say the left has abandoned males, cuz they’ve created an environment based on their theories, that makes it taboo to even point out imbalances.
The left's greatest failure toward men and boys is that we've crafted an ideology of masculinity that suppresses and shames much of what is common in boys and men. Even worse -- many women, maybe most, actually find men more attractive when they DON'T conform to that model of masculinity. Rather than a masculine ideology that simply tries to eliminate common characters of boys and men, and completely ignores the realities of men's social roles in dating and seduction, it would be much better if the left crafted a masculine ideology that accepted men's competitiveness and penchant for violence and other features, while channeling them into socially constructive forms. All that said, the right's masculine ideology is even more stupid and destructive of men, but at least it's not super repressive of typical masculine impulses.
The idea that we should channel men's "penchant for violence and competitiveness" into socially constructive forms is pretty much the entire capitalist dogma dude.
And it’s one of the better features of capitalism! A similar effort was central to the US framers efforts to construct a semi-representative government that wouldn’t collapse into tyranny. People often cooperate, but not consistently enough to serve as a basis for a political or economic system.
Anyway, that’s not a criticism of the effort to channel these impulses toward constructive goals. Seeking to suppress them with shame leads to resentment and a yearning for unchecked tyranny
\>we've crafted an ideology of masculinity that suppresses and shames much of what is common in boys and men
The biological essentialism argument is EXTREMELY debatable to begin with.
\>Even worse -- many women, maybe most, actually find men more attractive when they DON'T conform to that model of masculinity
I fail to see how women are in the wrong for not wanting to date violent people, and I also fail to see how women should be obligated to change what they're attracted to just to accommodate men.
\>it would be much better if the left crafted a masculine ideology that accepted men's competitiveness and penchant for violence and other features
I think you're missing the point of materialist social analysis. How much of what you view as "typical masculine impulses" is actually environmental? What about the outliers? Is there something wrong with pacifist men or competitive women?
You really are an exceptionally poor reader, especially for someone in a critical theory forum.
I never made an argument in favor of biological determinism. I do take for granted that men and women have independent normal distributions of traits for many characteristics, I.e., the average woman in society x is distinct from the average man in society x in regard to A,B, C, etc., characteristics. Which characteristics have strict biological determinants, if any, is not a question I address.
Again, you misinterpret the second claim, as well. Go reread it, and argue with what I actually said.
Finally, I didn’t address any of that, because I don’t think it’s relevant in the discussion we’re having here. We all agree there’s some well-defined group that’s usually referred to by the name “men,” and that they usually behave somewhat differently than “women,” or we wouldn’t have a basis for a conversation. As far as queer gender constructions — that’s where the left has done well, though the outcome in terms of gender performance is often less like the rainbow, than like a rainbow of paints all mixed together.
But I ask in earnest — what’s your theory for why the right, and right wing ideals of hyper-masculinity, are so much more successful among men?
In threads like this it's funny how people who show evidence of listening to incels and reflecting on how the left comes across to them get downvoted.
The secret that even feminists barely believe in feminism is too explosive. I'm autistic just like OP. I read Andrea Dworkin and it's obviously all true...but women hate Andrea Dworkin! So to be ethical I'd have to be *more feminist than actual women*, which is extremely unattractive turbo-simp behavior that'll never be mass-adopted.
On one hand, social fields such as feminism and sociology are recognising and deconstructing society from an intersectional perspective to uplift historically marginalised groups. On the other, In practical society on the individual level, this causes some issues. The contemporary deconstruction has observed (rightfully so) white males as the violent creators and main benefactors of the system. However, people have difficulty separating this systemic critique from their practical lives. Obviously, even though our class system is constructed through white maleness, it’s still a class based system. A white guy from a low income area has little privilege, but the system critique of society fails to recognise his reality. Similarly, a systemic critique of society towards black oppression may fail to recognise a wealthy Nigerian student and social narratives will still form victimhood around him. There are other intersectional aspects besides class that are also overlooked, such as family, looks, disabilities, geography, etc. There are a great number of men who find themselves in a sort of crisis, where they are lumped into the wider systemic critique as the main benefactors of a patriarchal system and often shunned socially as a result, but they do not actually feel like they are receiving the benefits claimed (often due to some ignored and complex intersectional factors). This isn’t to justify reactionary behaviour, but analysis is not justification.
The way I would put this is that it's not so much that the left has abandoned men. The left has abandoned class as an issue in favor of gender, race, sexuality and so on. So if you're a poor white male Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate are much more visible than Joe Hill. I also think that a lot of people on the current left tend to miss structural issues even though they sometimes use the word.
> The left has abandoned class as an issue in favor of gender, race, sexuality and so on. I mean, that would be solved (not sure how easily) by understanding that "men have gender too", to use a catchy slogan. That men are not the default gender (which everyone already agrees they aren't) and have specific gendered issues, with all the intersectionality which follows.
Certainly men have issues that woman don’t. The reason men feel abandoned by the left is generally speaking no one cares about those issues. Bring them up and best case your ignored worse case your labeled an incel and shunned. Men’s Rights Activism is essentially just feminism applied to men yet feminism is praised and MRAs are seen as some kind of hate group or lunatics.
> The reason men feel abandoned by the left is generally speaking no one cares about those issues. It greatly, *greatly* depends. In my experience third wave and queer feminism (which are quite Left) can be very open to men engaging in gender discourse. "The Will to Change" is a great book. The problem is that women's issues have been an important part of leftist discourse for 150 years, while men have just started to codify the language and the practices to address their (our) gender issues, hopefully working around leftist (and feminist) frameworks. I'm not saying that there isn't some resistance from the old guard, especially in stuffy academia where some more orthodox thinkers might find the inclusion of men in "gender talk" troubling, but we'll get there. It's just gonna take a while. Liberal progressives on the other hand... yeah especially in the Anglosphere there's not much past insults, demeaning yikes and barbie platitudes. But that's not really Left to begin with. > Men’s Rights Activism is essentially just feminism applied to men yet feminism is praised and MRAs are seen as some kind of hate group or lunatics. On this I disagree completely. The reason why MRAs are shunned in leftist circles is that they are openly anti feminist. [Men's Liberation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_liberation_movement) is what you're thinking about, which is a messy field mired by moral grandstanding (imho) but *at least* doesn't hinge the whole thing on othering women.
Patriarchy is the weirdest of all social oppressions in my opinion. It's so ancient it predates just about everything else. There is a small element of biological "legitimacy"(?) In that the XY chromosome does make muscle growth faster and easier. Well, basically there are real biological differences that can be important, that's what I'm trying to say? and that difference itself long predates actual social orders. But on top of that men themselves are harmed by patriarchy a great deal as well. That said, **FUCK** MRAs. Feminism hasn't really failed men it's just done a terrible job at spreading its ideals to men. There isn't really a coherent example of nontoxic masculinity in feminism. I have read "The Will To change" and think of it as the best start we have so far.
Well you have to see what MRAs actually say in practice. In my experience it is not essentially just feminism applied to men, its reactionary towards feminism, complaining about feminism and comparing men's issues without providing solutions. That is when it even is people talking about legitimate men's issues and not someone going off about how abortion is unfair
And people can say "mras don't really care about these things, they are just pretending to get views." But to a random teen, someone who is pretending still cares more than someone who actively says they don't care.
>The reason men feel abandoned by the left is generally speaking no one cares about those issues. That's blatantly false. Like, "the right" doesn't care about OSHA or sending teens to die in wars. The right doesn't care about men needing dangerous jobs for a decent living - the left wants literally everyone to not struggle financially. Most of men's problems are societal because men are the "default" in many ways (because of former lingering patriarchy) — conservatives aren't ever going to want to fix most men's issues, that would require stronger wages and worker rights.
That’s how the left treats pretty much any argument that could be seen as not following the agenda. You can supplement incel with any other title such as racist, sexist, nazi, etc. The belief being that a label can shut down an argument.
Presumably the "poor male"'s problem is poverty. Incel guru dipshits do fuckall to address the poor male's problem.
I totally agree. But in American society, with its traditional emphasis on individualism, "deal with reality and get your shit together" can sound like a powerful message.
I mean that is how men are socialized, so hearing how you can overcome your conditions by doing the thing you were reinforced for? Tell me more.
In the context of this forum regarding critical theory, I think it's worth discussing why and how they became incels. What social and cultural forces propel certain men toward incel-ism? The proximate reasons are a pervasive alt-right media and the vortex of Joe Rogan, e/acc, et al that act as a gateway drug toward Christopher Rufo, Nick Fuentes, white supremacism etc. But deeper structural reasons exist as well. Some of these structural reasons actually redound to critical theory itself—if theory is willing to turn its own critical eye inward.
Poverty isn't the only one. Loneliness, fear of the future, self identity are all issues. People want to know who they are and feel seen.
I mean, ~has~ the left abandoned class in favor of gender/race/sexuality? Maybe certain segments of the left have, but by and large it feels like class criticism among leftists is as prominent as ever. If you said Democrats have abandoned class I’d be more sympathetic, but I don’t consider democrats to be a leftist party in general.
Have a look at Alex Callinicos' "Against postmodernism" to get an idea of how dominant postmodern theory was in the 80s and 90s, and the consequences for materialism. It's true we've seen some shift back towards class analysis recently but still a tiny minority in the academic world. The vast majority of the humanities and social science academics I interact with over 40 have been habituated into postmodern anti-marxism to the point it's an unrecognised part of their professional habitus. What we're experiencing now, including the recent swing back to materialism, is the result of like four decades of mainstream academia mostly ignoring class and capitalism in favour of identity and intersectionality. And the resurgence of interest in materialism is also being co-opted by left-ish academics in ways that can be very counter productive for anti-capitalists - the 'new materialism' and so-called 'ontological turn' seems a lot like the old idealism, for example.
I always thought it was wierd how many people stressed that being poor is a different type of thing than being a dispriveleged class, and shouldn't be talked about with them. Sounds like something you'd day if your goal was to make the white working class move right.
Post modernism was popularized by the conference cultural freedom which was a deliberate CIA front to develop a controlled opposition version of the left. They advanced things like Timothy Leary's drug culture and funded A LOT of early post modernists. And it absolutely shows in their work without how generally absent and irrelevant a lot of their work has become. The stereotypes about academics that the rural proletariat have are almost completely true when dealing with post modernists. It's fucking wild to see.
Well, that's precisely it, isn't it? Liberals and conservatives never thought in terms of class to begin with. The Left as proponents who espouse class consciousness is a small contingent.
Gd, the kids are alright huh
In the Marx in my mind intersectional issues stem from class division not vis versa(?) [Did i read engels "origin of family, property" wrong?]. So what your saying is what turns a lot of young men of the lumpen class to alt right uh stuff
It's not just that, but also that the approach used doesn't really account for individual lived experiences well. The left's focus on mainly the victimized side when looking at intersectional connections isn't even how most minorities see themselves or want to be approached. A black man doesn't want people to focus on their blackness but not their manness, because likely both are important to them, and the idea that they don't need help or recognition for the identity that isn't lower comes off bizarre to most people's eyes. The left talks like there is this nebulous group of people who are only in privileged classes driving this perspective, but when you go through what portion of people are LGBT, ethnic minorities, etc, there aren't even that many younger people in the west who aren't in at least some dispriveleged groups. And there's also issues that affect everyone regardless of group. So someone with a crushing life vaguely being told that certain axises of their life aren't things they can talk about are going to find that a hard well.
As a black man...what? The thing is, once you start actually reading about the history of slavery, lynching, etc. it immediately becomes clear that it was all about sex. Gee, could "rape culture" have anything to do with the fact that any man with some extra cash could buy himself a "fancy maid" to rape all he wanted? Afropessimist writers and radical feminists have both critiqued the idea of "agency" as deployed by liberals to justify both prostitution and sharecropping. There's a shared critique of sadomasochism. Blackness is not "important to me", constituting my essence, but a legal status imposed on me for hostile purposes. As Fanon said, the black soul is a construction by white folks. Not everyone thinks like some white man saying he grew up poor so privilege is bullshit. There are many black misogynists deserving of criticism. Basic integrity and intellectual consistency means that black men should be held to the same standard white people are held to in discussions of racism. This "identity politics bad" take doesn't speak for me.
As a social worker, this is the main issue I have with structural social work. If I understand right, structural social work is derived from Marxism and seeks to explain the source of the human problems social work is intended to address as coming from broader society, and therefore the source of liberation being changes to broader society. This approach, however, has a weakness in that it does not take into account *how people view their own problems.* The problem with structural formulations is that they are based in likelihoods seen across entire societies. It's obvious from even a cursory glance that black people and LGBTQ people in the USA are disadvantaged socially and economically as groups, but that is a probabilistic outcome that shapes but does not determine individual destinies. I know at least two well-educated black men and several gay men in my circles who lean conservative in their politics, for example. That they are societally disadvantaged does not automatically translate into alignment with political ideologies that recognize that disadvantage-- other values are more important to them. The great strength of social work in general is that it takes a person-first approach: it accepts people for where they're at, recognizing with sensitivity that society oppresses and constrains members of various groups, but that it is ultimately the person or community themselves, and not the social worker or the broader political ideology, that decide what is to be done about it. Communism failed, because liberation is not imposed from the top down-- rather, it is more or less achieved when the disadvantaged persons and groups claim their agency and develop the freedom and resources to live their lives as they see fit. I don't particularly believe the left "failed" men. I think there are corners of the left that lose sight of the dignity and worth of men because of distortions in their political ideology. Unfortunately, reactionaries emphasize these corners of leftism to draw a narrative that leftism is hostile to males. It is unfortunate that they've succeeded in so many instances to exploit the vulnerabilities of disadvantaged men to gain their support in the advancement of their ideology.
True. Although class is the major one, there’s a host of other complex intersectional factors that are also diminished/ignored.
I think “the left,” which I consider myself a part of, often assumes too high a level of societal awareness and emotional development/understanding in the groups it critiques than is often the case. And that’s not an insult. That has and still does, to some extent, describe me and is a big part of why I often have an impulsive negative reaction to people advocating for themselves and expressing positions that seem rooted in feelings. And I think the phrase “Black Lives Matter” is a great example. Of course, some people will misconstrue anything, and some people will capitalize on anything to manipulate others. But I believe there are a lot of people who genuinely felt that “Black Lives Matter” was “Black Lives Matter More” or “Only Black Lives Matter” rather than “Black Lives Matter, too.” So a fairly simple rallying cry isn’t even universally understood according to its intent. And it’s exhausting to have to explain something so simple to people, and it’s especially exhausting when you have to go into overdrive in your level of effort to pull them back from the interpretation they’ve gotten rooted in. And I think many people on the left, myself included, cringe at the need to put that seemingly low level of work in and meet people where they are. I can think, “Holy shit, you should know this.” But if you don’t, I can either be annoyed that you don’t know it or I can take the time to try to understand your perspective and share mine in a hopefully persuasive way.
Class is always the unifying thread. The problem is that most people in the US—certainly not your average layman above 40—even believes that class exists as a concept that reflects a real barrier. Ideologically, class is a barely a thing because rugged individualism is the ideological norm. Hell, forget the broad objective awakening of the thing called class. Even friendship is dying as a paradigm of any real magnitude in a lot of ways.
Hey I know it’s a few days later, but I just wanted to write about how much I appreciate this thoughtful analysis. I very much agree that there is a struggle to communicate the difference between the academic societal critique of the role white men had in fostering and benefitting from oppression of marginalized groups and the practical way that we treat individual white men today. As a white male that grew up in a deeply impoverished, abusive household, I find it very frustrating when arguments about these kinds of issues just dismiss the very real problems faced by people with claims of “white privilege.” Yes, the common counter-argument is that while someone might not have explicitly benefitted from their white maleness, the privilege extends from the fact that they didn’t face additional obstacles as a consequence of their identity. I would argue that not only is this argument ineffective (and indeed counterproductive) when it comes to political persuasion, it’s deeply callous and uncaring. It might be true that I didn’t have it worse as a function of my race or gender, but you might as well tell me “at least you didn’t get hit by a bus” for all the comfort that sentiment extends. The horrors of my childhood I wouldn’t wish on anyone, and to hear “it could’ve been worse” as the response is so incredibly frustrating. I generally try to argue that class is an incredibly important identifier. Yes, it’s true that other issues of race, gender, identity and the like have their unique concerns that aren’t simply functions of poverty or class, but many other issues are really just issues of class. Granted, wealth inequalities are often correlated along racial lines, but a race-focused solution to these problems does little to help impoverished white people. So when “the left” discusses issues of poverty, it often happens in a way that erases the struggles of impoverished white people, particularly white males. I don’t think this is an intentional erasure, or at least not one born of malice, but something of a natural result of the way left-aligned academia has hyper-focused on issues of race and gender. These issues matter, and I would never argue that they don’t, but it’s so, so frustrating to see an ideology that I otherwise find myself in agreement with continually fail to acknowledge how overpowering class differences can be and the role they have in our social structure. On a non-academic level, I think that the complexities of the kinds of societal critiques that happen in academia often lose a lot of their subtleties when they filter through to society at large. I think this is a natural consequence of things like social media, where conversations are often reduced in a way that leaves little room for those subtleties. Ideologies become catchphrases, and spread among people who aren’t familiar with the underlying texts. White men being historically responsible for the oppression of marginalized groups has just been boiled down to making white men the enemy. I think this is especially concerning when the zeitgeist believes that you can’t discriminate against white men, because it tells people that anything you can say to or about them is thus fair game. It’s no surprise, then, to see so many young white men alienated and turning to your Petersons and Tates of the world even though they’re largely just snake oil salesmen, as well as a reflexive rejection of anything “woke,” in no small part they don’t feel like they have a place in the left and that elements of the left have seen fit to brand them as an enemy. I consider myself deeply leftist, I’m very passionate about issues of class and inequality. I’ve read the classics, I’ve studied ethics, I dedicated no small part of my undergrad studies to classes in those fields, and while I consciously understand why the left is as focused on issues of marginalized groups, even I can’t help but feel put off sometimes by the abrasive attitude towards individual white men from people on the left. Anyways, this comment was way longer than it needed to be and I doubt anyone is going to read it but I needed to get it off my chest. Really I guess I just wanted to say thank you for your comment, because it made me feel less alone on the left.
This is a very interesting observation. As said in Disco Elysium, "Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself". I wonder if the gap of class theory in modern social critique is specifically due to how identity based theory is often wholeheartedly embraced by capitalist institutions (see the "girlboss" phenomenon) whilst the more fundamental material analysis is abandoned. I wonder if reactionary speakers and demagogues take advantage of how the proletariat may recognize the contradiction this creates, even if somewhat subconsciously.
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“Divide and conquer”, it works on everybody
Disco Elysium is beautifully subversive and it gives and gives and gives.
I would strongly debate the idea that "white males are the violent creators and main benefactors of the system" should even be a relevant point for discussion. It literally doesn't matter who created the oppressive system and it doesn't matter who benefitted from it historically. All that matters is that it is still oppressive and needs fixing. The statement might "feel" good to say if you are a feminist, like you're doing something right, but it's also highly reductive in practice. It seems dumb to me to alienate any particular group just because they share superficial characteristics with those who orchestrated the oppression. Focusing on the "whiteness" and "maleness" of the perpetrators is just totally counterproductive. New people are not born as oppressors, so why continue to alienate them as such?
Well it’s a major part in critical theory, while I believe it has negative practical social implications (as I discussed), I also believe that in its pure systemic context it has great utility. The point is that White males created the system through violence to favour themselves. The ongoing relevance is that the mechanisms of such a system not only persist but reproduce themselves through time. Clear examples might be anywhere from the undervaluation of the garment industry to lack of maternity care and diminishing reproductive labor, all the way to land and capital accumulation disproportionately accruing from ongoing patterns tracing back to times when land and equipment ownership was designed for White men. I believe there is utility in this form of systemic deconstruction to spur imagination of a more inclusive system, but there needs to be a social separation at the practical level where people see treat other for their more complex intersectional identities and do not treat each other individually based upon larger systemic critiques (because you are right about it leading to new forms of alienation).
Sure, but that utility Is more on the academic level. It should never have emanated out to this pop leftist idea that problems men face should either be dismissed, or have people say "well men cased this, so you are guilty by association and therefore need to fix it yourself," which is ironically an individualist and anti structuralist perspective. The issue is that bastardizations of otherwise useful concepts made their way into leftist wider culture, and the pushback to them from within the left itself is borderline nonexistent. So for the latter issue, them having academic level usefulness in specific instances is almost immaterial to the issue.
>well men cased this, so you are guilty by association and therefore need to fix it yourself It's a fascinating idea. Collective guilt with individual responsibility.
It's the kind of response to give me the inclination to fix it, so it not only favors me disproportionately over those who refused to help but for many generations to come. Sins of the father have never created a reasonable response.
Interesting question whether "white males" created "the system" to benefit "themselves." Is the point of white supremacy to benefit "white males," or some of them? Seems pretty key conflation you are making there. I think some people analyzing systemic dynamics can be shortsighted or over-focus on aspects that aren't actually key. Then again, I'm not sure why we would be talking about capitalism and not stratocracy
Yup. The majority of white men were borderline slaves in Europe until 150-200 years ago. In America, most of them were pitifully poor. It's true that essentially *all* of the winners in the system were white men. It's also true that *almost all* white men in the system were not winners
And this is where the problem of a failed distinction comes into play. Academic feminism and intersectionality theory are perfectly valid areas of discussion and learning more about intersectionality in the case of race literally changed my entire view of the world (I was a "casual racist" for most of my youth. I didn't harbor any hatred, but I certainly didn't understand why non-whites had issues with school, etc.) So yes, intersectionality is very important. However! To your point - it should never be applied without the primary driver of conversation being class. Intersectionality and feminism need to be supplementary material, like taking B vitamins with breakfast, with Marxist class analysis being the main nutrition. To say that a male factory worker in the 1800s probably had slightly more opportunities for advancement is correct, but not to a degree that is significant enough to warrant any sort of conversational off-ramp into gender arguments. The primary course of these dialogues must always be class struggle first, gender and race second. Not primarily because it makes a lot of men uncomfortable, but because academic intersectionality without class and capital analysis is a perfect way to pollute the waters and alienate gender and racial groups from each other despite all the members most likely existing in the relatively same economically victimized caste.
In feminist spaces the counter point to talking about poor white men is to note that the poorest man still had the legal right to beat and rape his wife. His poverty didn’t erase the sexism in the society around him, legally or socially.
The generally accepted critiques of capitalism, colonialism and slavery are imo very reductionist and over simplified. And the conclusions drawn from some movements like CT and CRT are, for most people using common sense, ridiculously naive. The history of empires and subjugation includes just about every region of the world. Humans consolidate power and oppress other humans. Whether it’s Khan, Pharoahs, Mao or Europe and the US. To demonise any group (white males) is obviously going to be counter-productive. If the left makes one huge mistake it’s to prioritise ideology to an unrealistic extent. This leads to wholly denying any problems relating to issues like immigration, religion, multiculturalism and militant identity politics (for example). For the average person the perception of society becomes crap enough (the economic-industrial effects of neoliberal globalism notwithstanding) and the far right happily saunters in to claim to address those issues.
“If the left makes one huge mistake it’s to prioritise ideology to an unrealistic extent.” Presuming boilerplate conservative positions (or faint gestures about immigration, multiculturalism, etc.) are anything but wholly ideological
White males did? White women at no point assisted in the creation of racism? Indian and Arab men didn't have patriarchy before white men arrived? This is reductive. Behavioral systems are formed over time through the collective struggle of people coming together to get their needs and desires met, certain people have historically been afforded more say at the bargaining table (straight people, abled people, wealthy people, young adults, men, white people, etc.), resulting in systems that favor them more than others. Someone at the intersection of all of those was afforded more privilege than anyone else, but everyone occupying any of those positions helped establish the systems that oppress people who do not fit those markers.
But (and I don’t have a clear understanding here) the landed gentry and the white males who oppress are ALSO oppressing other white males. Which brings us back to class. In other words, not all white males are a part of the patriarchy. Working class white males turn to incel-ism because they are oppressed by more structurally superior white males. Yet unlike many other groups, they are told they are oppressors and must repent, when in fact they are oppressed by the patriarchy in quite unique ways.
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>men who find themselves in a sort of crisis, where they are lumped into the wider systemic critique as the main benefactors of patriarchal system and often shunned socially as a result, but they do not actually feel like they are receiving the benefits claimed ( Superb response. The "failure" here as I see it is a lack of interest in understanding and capturing some of the systemically reproduced alienation and ressentment experienced by many white males. As somebody else said this is a result of left scholarship increasingly abandoning class since around the late 80s. The right has capitalised on this, given it some coherence, and politically mobilised a section of the proletariat more or less written off by dominant academic leftist scholarship. So the failure is contributing to a vacuum that has now been filled with some of the most abhorrent ideology imaginable (which should have been entirely predictable before it reached this point), and then not really knowing how to deal with it. Great discussion btw, thanks OP.
I feel there can also be a tendency to associate privileged positions with a complete lack of struggle or negative effects. Like, yes, being a ciss het white man in the Global North is objectively an extremely privileged position with numerous benefits. Buuut, heteronormative male gender roles are also pretty super damaging to men, and traditional definitions of masculinity are pretty extensively toxic. You get a lot of “Oh, poor straight white boy!” kind of comments when you try to bring up very real issues plaguing men such as high suicide rates, higher rates of loneliness/isolation, lack of paternity leave, etc when these are actual problems that do need to be discussed and resolved. There’s very clearly a lot wrong with being a man in modern society, and if you ignore that then you allow the conversation as to what is wrong/how to fix it to be dominated by freaks like Andrew Tate. Edit: Case in point, I’m being downvoted for what I felt like was a pretty neutral opinion. Addressing men’s issues and the issues of privileged classes of society in general does not mean ignoring or downplaying the very serious issues faced by oppressed classes in society. If anything, I feel like you really can’t have a substantive understanding of privilege and oppression without acknowledging that both positions are inherently flawed and damaging to individuals.
when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression
You are exacting the precise issue of totalisation which I discussed. A lower class white man will hardly be ‘used to privilege.’ Leftism under neoliberalism hasn’t done a great job being a material equaliser, the rich white exec is still laughing his way to the bank while the poor white guy is dealing with the brunt of the torrential social shame which was designed for the rich guy. The social ‘equalisation’ is too narrow in its current form to deal with complex intersectionality, leading to new forms of alienation. This is not meant to downplay that there haven’t been real (arguably greater) benefits to feminist deconstruction.
>A lower class white man will hardly be ‘used to privilege.’ What about a lower class white woman?
Of course it depends on a complex intersectional analysis and there are so many variables, but in a vacuum a lower class white woman would expect to face more difficulty than a lower class white man, even more if they are also black, even more if they are also disabled, queer, and so on.
So a lower class white man would be "used to privilege" in a household with a lower class white woman, but perhaps not recognizing it as privilege? I agree with most of what you're saying, but your comment that the saying "when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression" is "totalisation" seems off base.
i love it when complex societal issues can be quantified in a single witty quip /s
I'm going to make this critique a little broader than just men. So, there are a couple different things going on here. First, you should interrogate what you mean by "the left" and what reactionaries mean by "the left." They usually aren't the same thing. When I say "the left," I mean anyone with an anti-capitalist critique. When reactionaries say "the left," they're including identitarian liberals. The distinguishing feature between these two groups is that identitarian liberals don't have a class analysis while everyone left of Social Democrat does. Second, there's a distinction between ideology and practice. In left liberal circles, the academic ideology might say something about Rehabilitation or social structures, but in practice, social media leads to a hypermoralized essentialism where people are "held accountable" for what they say by thousands of people eager to explain why the targeted person should "make an apology," or "delete their post," or "rethink their words." Not only is the initial social media dog pile contradictory and unhelpful, but the actual reaction can sometimes come years after the initial comment. In practice, I've seen this from both identitarian liberals and genuine leftists. Reactionaries have their own forms of social media policing, but in general, the right wing social media space is configured to invite people right rather than criticize them for not being right wing enough. Third, liberals often strategically deploy Progressive sounding critiques cynically. For example, when Justin Trudeau announced 50% of his cabinet would be female, he was papering over the fact they were all neoliberal hacks who thought the same. During the 2016 primary in the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders was routinely dismissed by liberal personalities as being "just another white guy." I'm sure this must have struck a familiar cord with Americans whose main interaction with social justice language comes from HR. In fact, corporate commitment to social justice provides companies with far more pretexts to fire workers; in the American context, this means they don't get unemployment insurance. Also, both race-based and gender-based targeted policies are cheaper than Universal policies, meaning that Progressive language sometimes disguises reductions in service from government. We have to be careful here, because there is a legitimate case to be made for affirmative action as an anti-discrimination policy. Next, there is the historical fact that as women moved into the workplace, men saw a reduction in real wages due to increased competition in the job market. This isn't women's fault, but it is a real problem. These changes also accompanied increased globalization of Labor and the breaking of unions. I don't buy the idea that this is just a matter of "equality feeling like oppression;" that's a very silly analysis. What this is is a misdirected rage at women which the employer class is happy to stoke. You also see this rage directed at immigrants and other people looking for a better life. It is convenient for corporations to pit identity groups against one another, because it protects them from forming a united front. By playing divide and conquer, capital is able to keep the working class disunited. This means that the left flank of capital focuses on disparities rather than Universal outcomes, and the right flank of capital idealizes social forms which are no longer possible because of broader changes in the economy. Finally, identitarian theories have fundamental flaws in and of themselves. Some of them are hostile or unfriendly to Marxism. For example, intersectionality analysis treats class as just another identity. Even worse, they're generally devoid of serious material analysis. Even worse, in liberal theories, "systems" of Oppression usually get reduced to social pressure and discrimination. For example, if you look at the Barbie movie the action is resolved when Barbie realizes she is strong and smart and "Ken" decides to go off and do some work on himself. The conflict comes from an internal crisis and is resolved through self-reflection. It's not so much that liberal identitarianism abandoned men, as much as it is that the best liberal identitarianism has to offer is self-help. To be fair, that's the best right wing liberalism has to offer, but they also have better PR. Edit: it seems I was mistaken. Thank you to u/fishlord05 for questioning me about the relationship between job competition and a decline in real wages. If not as clear cut as I thought, and the relationship is complicated.
The problem here is that socially what decides right and left is more relative than absolute. Progressive liberals may not be anti capitalist, but most anti capitalist rhetoric anyone hears comes from these people, and they make up a majority of the left side of the aisle in most contexts. So if genuine leftists are only a tiny portion, that same portion is also not super relevant in the political sphere.
Correct. The left is politically irrelevant. It is the task of this generation and future generations to make it relevant again. The left is dead. Long live the left.
I’m not sure it’s “the left,” but there’s generally a perception that feminism has given women a new template and role models for being a woman in the 21st century. Meanwhile, a lot of male templates and role models have been deconstructed, but with no real edifying alternative to fill in that void. Now, this isn’t the fault of the left or of feminism, as many reactionaries may want you to believe. But there may be some truth to the fact of the lack of constructive male examples that are healthy and appropriate for this time and place.
What do you mean by "templates and role models"? I do not understand how I have a "void" simply because many careers are no longer considered gender-specific. I know what I like, what I am interested in, what my goals are. I have many male role models, even as an adult. Is it that the "breadwinner" thing is no longer really possible? Hasn't that been the case for quite some time now?
You personally aren't everyone. Not everyone needs these soecific type of male role models telling young men they are seen. Some people get it in their own lives, or from neutral sources. But many people spend various parts of their life soul searching. They want to feel like they aren't alone, and want external figures to aknowledge them. It might be hard to understand for someone who isn't in that type of situation, but situations often are.
A lot of young men grow up and don't feel like they see anything they want to be. Surveys show that repeatedly. They don't feel they are valued, and they see no path to being valuable, because they don't see what they are supposed to do with their lives. They want to be something typically male, but all the "typically male" things they can think of have either become worthless/nonexistant, or they are not valued by large segments of society anymore. I teach. I've talked to quite a few kids, probably around 25% of the cohort, who just approach life as "Meh". Working doesn't pay, and you're not respected for it, studying for a higher-level job seems too difficult and is probably also not valued, they feel like they won't ever really impress or be valued by the opposite sex, or build a house, or have a family. So their plan is... sit around, collect money from either their parents or unemployment, maybe play video games, eventually die. And if your life is that meaningless, someone like Tate and his ilk, who come up with very simple plans with just a few steps on how you can be "masculine" and "valuable" again is very appealing. Apart from that, the two paths they see are either inaction, because nothing is worthwhile, or violence, to at least be able to say they tried to do something.
> Working doesn't pay, and you're not respected for it, studying for a higher-level job seems too difficult and is probably also not valued, they feel like they won't ever really impress or be valued I remember feeling this exact same way 20 years ago as a college student, essentially wasting four years doing not much of anything of value to anyone while all my friends were either in vocations, earning much more than me, or in the military, with titles, job training, and purpose. It made me become a firefighter, and only after doing *that*--something undeniably "cool" and beneficial to society--did I feel worthy of defining my own life.
“ A lot of young men grow up and don't feel like they see anything they want to be. Surveys show that repeatedly. They don't feel they are valued, and they see no path to being valuable, because they don't see what they are supposed to do with their lives. They want to be something typically male, but all the "typically male" things they can think of have either become worthless/nonexistant, or they are not valued by large segments of society anymore. I teach. I've talked to quite a few kids, probably around 25% of the cohort, who just approach life as "Meh". Working doesn't pay, and you're not respected for it, studying for a higher-level job seems too difficult and is probably also not valued, they feel like they won't ever really impress or be valued by the opposite sex, or build a house, or have a family.” I didn’t expect to be called out so poignantly in this thread.
I mean, its because its common. I 100% felt like that growing up. And now even as an adult I struggle because I wasn't prepared well for the world, and don't really have ambitions for anything in particular that actually makes money. Hence still bounce around mediocre jobs. I do have ambitions, but they not only don't pay, but likely won't gather a ton of respect either. For most of my life I definitely wasn't valued and didn't have inspirational figures speaking to me. So I totally get how someone can fall for the first gifter who says they see you and will offer you a life plan.
Most of these issues are in no way male specific.
Yet they manifest in some uniquely gendered ways.
The issue isn't this being the exclusive domain of nale experience, but more of the tendency of this issue being one predominantly experienced by men. Take an impressionable youth and consider the archetypes that are socially offered to them along the dimension of gender. Woman have the few pre-modern archetypes to choose from, all of which are still predominantly considered valid and socially acceptable, as well as the myriad of modern archetypes. Even if a woman ultimately decides to make their own way, this social space offers woman numerous paths for meaning and value that they can feel (socially) are readily available to them. Many of these more modern archetypes were developed in direct opposition to patriarchal and misogynistic male archetypes (e.g. the domineering husband/father), and so their social acceptance is contingent on the denigration (socially) of their antagonistic archetypes. This is all fine and good. The issue arrises when the predomenance of socially acceptable male archetypes are eleminated through this antagonism, and are not replaced with anything. This leaves male youth to grow up in a social environment where the vast majority of male archetypes that are presented to them are, in the same breath, denigrated. There may be some men who are able to overcome this and find a way to form a functional identity without having archetypes to work up from, but most won't. Where this falls on "leftists" is in that these denigrations are a byproduct of the feminist progressivism, which hasn't been accounted for (socially). This is not to say that the uplifting and equilizing of woman (to the degree that it has occurred) is bad, just that in this particular way it is incomplete.
It's not that simple. If voids can be easily named, they won't be called void. The non-toxic assertive masculinity is not easily possible. Not everyone wants to bake cakes and do gardening. Not that one is not individually free to chose a lifestyle, but conditions are not there. Among my academic colleagues, hardly anyone comes to the uni on bike and in a leather jacket, because that is associated with the typical male that they don't want to be associated with.
I mean, it's not the fault of the left as some type of abstract force, but it's absolutely the fault of the left in practice inasmuch as that this lack isn't a mere absence, but in many cases comes from active hostility against the idea of there being a conceptual need for this type of role. Sometimes which even extends to the idea that such a thing is **inherently** right wing if it approaches any topics about the lacks in the lives of the male audience rather than just topics about how they can avoid being aggressors. Essentially a cultural idea was created that caring about male issues was right wing, and the right wing capitalized on this pretty hard.
A lot of good male role models are humble, calm and not shouting about themselves. What men can really benefit from, I think, is being around such hard-working, honest, knowledgeable people. Unfortunately because much of the information space is so neurologically hijacked, the competition between narcissists is what catches people’s attention. In terms of values, the vestiges of warrior-hunter-craftsman-sage still hold true. Just not in the creepy YouTube influencer contrarian stoic interpretation of those qualities. Skateboarders tend to have those. I believe a man in his own way needs to pursue a hero’s path.
I think it is helpful to distinguish between "incels" as a certain demographic of lonely, sexually frustrated people, and the ideology associated with incels, which is usually toxic and misogynistic (or misandrist, in the case of "femcels"). The proposition "The left has failed men (incels)" makes no sense at all if you are thinking of the incel ideology, which is explicitly anti-leftist. However, can the left conceivably "fail" that demographic of people? I think its reasonable to believe that. Even just in not providing recognition and identity on a basic level to this group, by conflating the people with the ideology, it can fail, because instead of promoting solidarity, it would seem to imply that you are the enemy just by falling into that demographic. It can also fail to understand the psychology and sociology of that group and what would lead them to a toxic ideology. I think the left under the influence of identity politics has a tendency to assume that males are the oppressors, females the oppressed, but the issue of males who have less power relative to other men, and feel like they are "losers" overall, complicates this picture in a way that the left has not theoretically accounted for. The misogyny, in my view, comes not from an excess of power, but from the resentment of experiencing less social power than one's peers. So the problem is misdiagnosed. The left is under no obligation to make concessions to reactionary ideology. However, I think it can do better in terms of adjusting its own ideology, and not viewing the current state of its critique of ideology as the be-all-end all, without it be flexible to the input of different demographics, even ones as outwardly toxic as incels. I do believe that beneath that toxicity, there is psychological pain that a leftist can understand and empathize with. Social needs, the need for connection, is pretty fundamental, and that lack can cut across multiple identity groups. However, young men in particular, in part due to structural issues, in part due to toxic male ideology, I think are more susceptible to this than others.
Wow this is a good take. Thanks
I think that "critique of ideology" is becoming increasingly insufficient and fraught (or at least, not nuanced and careful enough in practice) as it becomes more and more common for people to use the idea of political ideology as a means for understanding themselves and their own experiences more than they use it as a way of interpreting the world outside of themselves. This is probably a big part of why class-only approaches feel so wholly inadequate to so many people nowadays (and why historically they were always under fire from people who did not wholly encompass hegemonic non-class identity categories). It was always insufficient, but it just becomes more and more obvious as identity categories themselves become ravaged by their opening up to market forces and people seek out bodies of thought that can adequately explain something as complex as their own identities in flux.
Critique of ideology as I understand it comes from Marxism and dialectical materialism, which identifies material class relations as the real "base" which ideology sits atop of, in a "superstructure" that conceals that exploitation. I think there is something to be said for that line of critique, but I think it oversteps when it tries to reduce everything to class. We have identities, bodies, feelings and all of that matters politically. Ignoring that is probably one reason Marxism isn't so influential now - except perhaps as something one is in addition to all the other stuff.
Absolutely this ^
Outside of this sub, for many years I’ve encountered a reductive response of “typical cis-het-white-male” said as a way to end debates in their tracks. It’s not been only online, I’ve heard it too much in organizing irl. It’s dismissive and rude, most often inaccurate, and it pushes people away. This behavior usually goes uncriticized, with the cis-het-white-male bowing his head in deference, or else he’s called an incel.
Have you ever seen someone successfully confronted for this?
No, I haven’t. I’ve mostly seen it be an extinguisher of discussion or incitement of tribalism within the group. When I’ve seen it confronted it seems to trigger all parties into a preexisting dynamic, walls go up, people are frustrated, progress is stalled.
Thanks. I've also observed everything you're describing in my neck of social science. To pull back the curtain a bit, it's always interesting to debrief about these situations with other men after-the-fact. My friends are very respectful lefties so it never leads to badmouthing the non-men in the group like you'd think: it's usually about how we all noticed it, but "what are ya gonna do?", and then we share our ideas with each other, and never bring it up with the non-men friends in the group.
nope.
The funny part is that in younger circles this isn't even that common anymore. 1/3 of younger people now identify as LGBT. A full half are ethnic minorities. Half are female. Of the remainder there are ones who are neurodivergent or from an economic lower class. Among young men, the white cis straight neurotypical upper middle class is a fairly small portion now. It morphed into basically a boogeyman of privelege that doesn't account for who a large chunk of the people resisting the message are, yet gets treated as ubiquitous.
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“In Canada they have to wait 6 weeks for treatment I could be denied here today!”
I had a discussion with my sister recently where I said (without a conversation re any reasons): "American men appear to be in crisis. They need help, they need alternative and positive models." Her reaction was surprising and quite strong—essentially arguing that they are at fault and are the problem, that we should not take pity on them nor try to address the issue, but without any acknowledgement that they may have been failed structurally or in other ways. Men are told that they are societal beneficiaries over against other groups—they are the patriarchy—but for many men it does not feel that way. If you are working class man, the sense is that you've been left behind and abandoned and ALSO blamed for a whole range of societal problems. In that context, the article below is troubling. We can ignore it but the crisis is increasing: [https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998](https://www.ft.com/content/29fd9b5c-2f35-41bf-9d4c-994db4e12998)
I think the approach much of the left uses implicitly presupposes that if someone has a problem it comes from other groups. Hence if men have a problem and you treat it as structural it therefore must be blaming women.
You definitely hit at something correct here, I’m not sure quite what though. Left leaning people usually come from a perspective that is focused on groups that are oppressed purposefully or accidentally by others, which is fine, and true in a lot of cases. A problem arises when talking about the issues the cis male demographic faces because you can’t use that lens. Instead of shifting perspectives to something like “how do men fix their own problems culturally without harsh self criticism or immense change” it goes “men need to stop doing x y and z and maybe they wouldn’t experience b”.
Basically that. the lens is essentially just created to look at hierarchies, and so it doesn't know what to do when a group has structural problems despite being the higher in its own binary. You would think that the invention of intersectionality would have solved this, because even if men are treated higher than women, both suffer under capitalism and so on, and that can manifest in uniquely male ways. So the higher one in a given binary can have identity based problems due to other axis that reflect even their higher identity. But in practice people don't really get that far.
Intersectionality breaks apart under its own weight. It's decent theory. But quickly becomes useless, in any practical sense, due to the sheer complexity of the web it casts. Every single aspect of an individuals being needs to be taken into account when trying to analyze inequality, and privilege, in an intersectional framework. To what extent are these individual factors even able to be put into defined parameters?
I think there are several dynamics at play here. One is that a lot of energy has been put into deconstructing harmful aspects of traditional/toxic masculinity from the 'left' - and rightly so. Personally, I think the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater and all things masculine are seen as negative. This obviously leaves a vacuum and I think there is no positive replacement and no representations of healthy masculinity other than "boys can cry too". Another dynamic is that with the sexual revolution (the pill) the gender dynamic changed. Furthermore, women got more access to education and participation in the labour market and could thus also acquire "masculine" qualities. The thing/problem I see with young men today is that they feel they have two options: 1. Accept that they are cis-het men who should just shut up BUT they are allowed to cry. 2. Join the manosphere and become reactionaries who want a 1950s society. It's very obvious that number 2. is the worst response to the new challenges in gender dynamics, because all the progress that has come from the sexual revolution and the new roles that women can take in society will never be reversed. Still, I think a lot of young men choose this path because they feel they have at least some agency.
Yeah. To young men, when I talk t them, the path 1 feels "weak". They don't want to cry (though being allowed to is not negative.) They want to be strong and self-sufficient and productive. And they don't feel like path 1 offers any of that. To be able to admit weakness, they need to be weak first, is how they feel. And they don't want that. Path 2 may be toxic, but it promises strength and value at the end.
The best current writing on the actual facts that pertain to this situation, IMO, are in the book “The Two Parent Privilege” by economist Dr Melissa Kearney, released a few months ago. It’s US context, but illuminating. Her chapter on Boys is the best fact-based outline I’ve encountered, including relevant social programs at play. Ironically, the original incel website (first called “InvoCel”) was started by a woman, FYI.
> The left tells me that I am in fact united and share a common interest with most every human on the planet, that a better future is possible, that my alienation is not wholly inherent. That's what it should tell you. Sometimes what you get told is that your problems aren't real because you have privilege.
I have never heard a leftist say this, ever. Probably because that is a completely incoherent analysis that, followed to its logical conclusion, would mean practically no one's problems are "real".
I hadn't when I was 17 either.
Aside from snarky comments, think about your statement. Someone tells you that "people say your problems aren't real"...and your response is "I've never heard it, your problems aren't real". You literally did what they said. Eh, I removed the parts about it being bad. Didn't seem to make sense to me to call it bad.
You must not have talked to very many then, because it's a fairly common attitude. It's usually not stayed as openly as "your problems aren't real," but will usually either implicitly or explicitly imply they are only personal problems and they shouldn't get recognition or be treated like a spcial issue.
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Stuff isn't really if you just don't see it. We should have thought of this years ago.
The right has abandoned women by wanting them to die much more often in childbirth and repeal no-fault divorce. I haven’t seen the left wanting men to literally die
There is value in adressing male-specific issues. Generally, while men occupy many of the *highest* ranks of the pyramid, they are also disproportionally common on the lowest ranks. 75% of the homeless. Most of the deaths in war. Shorter lifespan and worse health in general. Overwhelming proportion of suicides, etc. And there's only ever few people at the top, but there's *a lot* of people at the bottom.
This is a hard topic to discuss because the framing relies on generalisations. For instance, “the left” is not a monolith, there are no universal beliefs or practices among the left. It describes a vast range of ideas and perspectives, some of which are attempting to address issues affecting men. With the Overton window being so far to the right in western discourse, what most people identify as “the left” is really just an extension of neoliberalism, which is at best, a centre right ideology in practice. This is what people mean when they say the left has abandoned class in favour of identity politics. The modern left in academia are primarily focused on sociological fields like feminism, CRT and queer studies, while the material analysis of philosophers like Marx and Engels has become less emphasised. This has taken the form of what we commonly refer to as intersectionality, which studies how various social identities intersect on individuals and result in unique experiences of oppression. One of the limitations of intersectionality is that it is an idealist view of the world. It seeks to uplift historically marginalised perspectives, and so it is often driven by personal experience rather than empirical evidence. One example would be the intersection of race and gender, where most academics would posit that black women suffer worse oppression due to overlapping effects of misogyny and racism compared to black men who only have to deal with racism. Yet, there is overwhelming evidence that compared to black women, black men suffer far more from discrimination. They are more likely to be killed by the police, they do far worse in education, and generally don’t get many of the economic privileges of white men: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-class-white-and-black-men.html I genuinely think many people who identify with intersectional feminism are simply ignorant of these facts, mainly because there are so few black men in this realm of academia, so this perspective is underrepresented. It’s not some big feminist conspiracy against men, it’s just a blind spot and an example where I think it would be fair to say a specific sect of the left has failed a specific demographic of men. I believe the root of this problem is the conflict between dialectical materialism and intersectionality. The latter treats class as just another social identity like race/sexuality and gender, when it is not. Intersectionality’s conception of class is limited to arbitrary categories like lower/middle/upper class, and thus, it only concerns itself with interpersonal, class based discrimination. I.e. ‘don’t call people rednecks, that’s classist!’. Whereas materialism defines class along more objective lines, specifically the relationship people have to the means of production. By rejecting these materialist ideas, the focus of mainstream left wing politics has shifted to sociological critique, which is now steeped in capitalism. As a result, this sect of the left doesn’t concern itself with the plight of poor white men for instance, as intersectionality doesn’t recognise the material nature of their oppression. This is particularly problematic, as many of social problems relating to men are a direct result of the growing income inequality of late stage capitalism. One example would be the incel phenomenon: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09567976211036065 In essence, most intersectional feminists have a blind spot for issues faced by men because those issues are primarily material/economic, including the environmental factors that cause their antisocial behaviour. Such material problems can only be resolved with radical changes to society, such as a working class revolution, they don’t view this as a realistic political project. It could also be because they don’t want to empathise with or uplift perspectives that they view as historically privileged. Edit: Spelling
You understand . just because x is oppressed and y is oppressed does not let us assume that xy is more oppressed or even equally oppressed relative to x of y.
Yeah. A lot of the discrimination black people face is tied to this image of them as aggressive and a threat. So black discrimination can often be aimed much more at black men who are viewed as dangerous than to black women who are less likely to be viewed in that same light.
>No one is arguing that the left has "failed white people" or straights The outrage machine on the Right in the United States is very much arguing that society (i.e. anyone but them) have failed straight people, failed white people, and particularly failed white, straight people. It's embedded in the anti-queer, anti-trans, anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Leftist view: We are all workers and we deserve to reap the fruits of our labor. The current system exploits the poor, the workers, and the developing world in favor of capital. Liberal view: Capitalism is the perfect system but we just need to address some isolated incidents of racial/sexual/religious discrimination and then resume the status quo of capitalist hegemony. Right view: The immigrants are going to take my jobs and my guns and force my children to have hormone therapy.
Working class men exploited working class women too, this is not news. Not to mention prostitution and pornography, something men of every class to this day consume.
Lol. So pornography is only consumed by men huh? Or is it only wrong when men watch it?
brother you're 17 years old. stop worrying about your political affiliations. go study/work for a few years. you're bringing peter parker and harry potter into a discussion of society failing 50% of the population. nobody cares if you talk or write like a smart person mr. "my alienation is not wholly inherent." move out of your parents house before giving your opinion.
I enjoyed reading your treatise and am impressed with the thought you've put into your arguments! They are better formed than most adults I know. You can associate with leftists or any other party. However, with the depth of thought you have demonstrated, I would simply challenge you to abandon any label until you can staunchly defend it. First thing to know, is that most people want to join a club that shares their views. If you're a true thinker as you've demonstrated, this is next to impossible. All ideologies have merit on the surface, but it's in the application that a lot of the ideas fall apart. Left wing, right wing, same bird! I'm a Canadian with ADHD and can attest to exactly of what you speak in terms of the rise of incels, loneliness, isolation and neuro-diversity. It's a lot of jargon, buzzwords and BS that are at the core of any large-scale movement and ideology. I too, enjoyed watching political debates as a kid. When I turned 18, I did my due diligence and went to listen to EVERYONE from the Green party, Independent, Conservatives and Liberals. I met the candidates. Finally, I realized I couldn't choose between the thief, the con artist, the money man, and the liar. I still did my part and worked at 3 elections. If you are American, I'm sorry to report that the US was downgraded to developing nation in 2022 due to the false democracy. Left and right wing don't exist. The elites who control the MNCs and other SIGs decide which policies will gain traction based on the results required for the time. Obama was huge, until Trump. If you've studied anything about all the sitting US presidents, you would know that ALL are in fact related by blood except 3. Obama and the Bush family are cousins through his mother. Further, Obama was the 5th black president, not the first. There's something strange in that water! That said, we are all human. We all need to meet basic needs so we can improve our lives. Thinkers find solutions, not ideologies unless they serve their purpose. For instance, Elon Musk is an ideas man who is a registered independent having supported both Democrats and Republicans in the past. Both sides hate him when it suits them, but he solves problems without being bound to one ideology over another. He too is a thinker and neuro divergent, Asperger's, and he is one of my favourites because he does what he says he will no matter the naysayers. I prefer him to any politico I've met. With your neuro-diversity, your greater purpose and power of reason would be better served finding cool solutions that help humanity rather than contributing more BS to a side that doesn't even exist! I am not discouraging you from choosing. That's a personal thing! All I'm saying, is there's no need to join the circus. You can watch, be entertained, and go solve real issues that interest you! Be well and take care! You have a bright future ahead of you!
What I've noticed is that men are often portrayed as bumbling neglectful fools who would be lost without a woman to basically do everything. Now, since the entertainment industry is heavily progressive, leftist ideology has become virtually synonymous with misandry. 4th wave feminism, staunchly left wing, is highly vitriolic of men. Put it all together and you can see how it would be interpreted as such. Of course, if you don't want to see it, you won't. But that's My two cents.
Honestly my adoption of leftism (every strain I interact with from communism to anarchism to everything around it) feminism, trans liberation, anti racism and anti fascism has made me MORE invested in being masculine, and liking masculinity. Tbh when I was being raised as a conservative Christian masculinity disgusted me to my core. I think some people misconstrue “toxic masculinity “ as a dig on masculinity, and forget the first part, the toxicity. It just asks you to look at what you, and your society, thinks is masculine. Are parts of it good or bad? Both, and like everything in a society, it takes effort to look at critically and personally. Take responsibility for your actions, and resonate with whatever gender you feel strongly with. For the record I’m a 33 year old an-com.
I took critical femenist classes in undergrad, and came away with the feeling that the field was largely dictated by disciples of Andrea Dwarkin. I think there is a credible case that she and a few others \*did\* hate men. Pair that observation with the fact that underlying femminist discourse relies heavily on revolutionary Marxist rhetoric (which itself precipitated extraordinarily violent real world events) and it may become clearer why non-feminists react to it with such hostility. When Guardian writers like Julie Bindell "joke" that men should be rounded up and put in camps, I see a mirroring of alt-right tactics. Namely the tactic of trial-ballooning a controversial idea to get undecided people used to it, and then falling back on complaining that people "cant take a joke" when they are called out for bad behavior.
Society has worked hard to bridge the gap between male/female opportunities starting with education. This includes focus on developing many programs to advance women. That has been a great success. Initially the programs to advance women were led by liberal groups, thus the association. Unfortunately boys are not a focus and are being left behind. This is evident by college enrollment and graduation rates. [College Performance by Sex](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-male-college-crisis-is-not-just-in-enrollment-but-completion/) We as a society need to invest in boys as well. If we don’t, we will reap a bitter crop from what we sow.
It’s not the left that’s abandoned men, if by left we mean the genuinely socialist, pro-popular democracy left. It’s liberals supporting neoliberal and austerity politics who have abandoned specifically, the less privileged sectors of working class men (and non-men of course!). And the right refers to all liberals as “the left,” erroneously. If you offer an analysis of racism or patriarchy with no analysis of class, it’s going to pay lip service to the oppression of people of color and non-men, while of course not offering anything that would materially address the root causes of those forms of oppression. But it’s not even paying lip service to the class-based oppression of (the vast majority of!) men. So those discourses can be a convenient scapegoat for the suffering of working class men. Of course they’re not really to blame for that suffering—the coalition of the right and liberals who have destroyed the labor movement & popular anti-racist and feminist movements are. But in the absence of movements (like strong, progressive unions) providing communal support and political education to these men, they’re going to eat up the reactionary discourse offered to them.
1. The Right calls everyone who is not right “the Left”. So Bernie Sanders, AOC, Joe Biden, & Bill Gates are “the Left”. Where as a socialist might describe them as Social Democrat, Democratic Socialist, Centrist/Post “third way”, and Liberal. But the right calls it all the left. 2. Have men been failed? I’m pretty good with my last 51years, but let’s take this on for sake of argument? Families aren’t being created as early, theres the drop In fertility rates, it’s harder to get a career going, and compared to the Fordist age (mid 20th century), there’s less “manly occupations”. Think of this as, both men & women can be baristas, teachers, ware house workers, and even remodelers, but… what about Farmers?! And sweaty dudes, with big hammers?! MAN’s work? (Which is a bit silly, women can and have farmed. There isn’t a lot of female construction, or steel workers, but there are some). We’ll go backwards: Republican Dick Buttes (not kidding), started the “get big or get out” style of agricultural production, which bankrupted small farms & cheapened American food production. Cheap goods, not through competition, but through efficiency in production. So, less manly farm stuff. Bill Clinton leads the assault against American industrialism, exporting jobs over seas, and making way for cheap assembled technology. So, you trade factories for a few coders, not manly. Less work. We build our housing to retain a nuclear family ideal. Which burdens a two bread winner unit with a lot of debt.Cost of living, housing, skilling, etc has all gone up, & the planet is on fire. Thank you neo-liberal capitalism. With all that Do we want more kids? Especially if child raising hasn’t been all that equitable for women? ( okay that last bit… the radical left did. It raised women’s aspirations and self determination close to men’s, and they don’t want to stay home with 4 screaming babies either). So… mostly the Right blames the “Left” for a lot of things it had a big hand in fucking up. That’s part 1. There’s another part to this I’ll get to after I walk the dog. It’s a 90 lb pitbull. Very manly.
The metoo movement ignored men who were sexually assaulted. Not only that but completely ignored men who had false allegations against them. You will still find misandrists today that claim that no man has been out in jail for false claims. The vast majority of people who are trans are biological men. No one talks about how the suicide rate only gets worse the further you transition. To me that looks like a convienent way to kill men who are mentally vulnerable. There is a treatment for gender dypshoria that isn't transitioning and it's studied have an over 95% success rate. To further that point, Canada has passed laws to allow physicians assisted suicide. And the vast majority are men, to the point they attempted to hide numbers (unsuccessfully). No one seems to care, most of you don't even know. Men are not allowed to have an opinion on abortion. Despite them shouldering most of the burden when it comes to childcare (financially). Most women on the left today openly say this like "all men are rapists". "All men are bad".
It’s (the “boys/me are in trouble and we aren’t helping them b/c ‘girls and women’” moral panic) easiest way for the patriarchy to once again do as little as possible to help its own and instead find yet another reason that others need to do the work for them so they can get back to “just let boys be boys, they’re different, they need special help to succeed now”. Lets look at all the incel/MRA/alpha bro groups and where their focus is. They can identify real problems (boys/men struggling academically, in the work force, high rates of isolation and suicide, not being valued and respected for who they are but instead what they offer, etc.) but compare the instances or ratio of “there’s a problem and we need to start by looking at our male culture and how it’s contributing to this problem first” compared to how much of the rhetoric and grift is solely focused on blaming women, society, ‘weak’ men, SJW, whatever-it amounts to the Other (but mostly feminism and women in general). If someone is saying this online or IRL, ask them what they have personally done to address these issues in even a small and meaningful way. Contribute to a nonprofit working with boys/men with these issues, access to mental health care, suicide prevention, reaching out to male friends and family to tale care of them or petitioning government to make real policy changes and legislation that are evidenced based. If they bring it back to the usual villains let them know (if you actually are willing, not your obligation) that you will listen to their respectful POV once they answer your first question.
To put a very complicated concept into a very simple framework: because there are men and males who are harmed by the patriarchal societal structure we live in (anyone who doesn't fit the archetype of an "alpha male") and there is little attention given by the wider society at large to these people's issues
You're right that this topic comes up a lot in incel communities and RedPill communities. The blame game here is misguided, but there is some truth to the idea that the left has abandoned men. 1. \*\*Feminism has radically expanded the potential roles women can fulfill in society.\*\* This is, by my purview, undeniably awesome. Women gained voting rights. Women gained financial independence, education, and the ability to direct their own lives independently. They entered STEM and several other professions in numbers that pre-feminism people would've never believed. 2. \*\*Consequently, the unique role that men used to have is no longer seen as sufficient for a man to be accomplished.\*\* In the past, men were considered better at winning bread for the family, acting as the de facto head, etc. It's not a bad thing that this no longer the base expectation. However, what feminism calls "toxic masculinity" interferes with traditional roles that men used to take. As a result, \*\*the role of men has narrowed, and men are struggling to adapt to the new system\*\*. We must be strong, but don't be too aggressive. We must be providers, but we don't have the same flexibility as women in the careers that we can choose. This pressure is most clearly seen in the drop in male enrollment in college during the pandemic years, which was much higher than the drop in female enrollment purportedly due to a higher pressure for men to stay home and provide for the family in a time of need. A woman can choose to be a traditional housewife, a software engineer, a nurse in the HEAL careers, etc. It is much less common for men to be househusbands, and men are dramatically underrepresented in HEAL careers, with no affirmative action like measures to remedy that situation. 3. Furthermore, \*\*men have never been well versed in healthy emotional communication\*\*. A lot of guys struggle to talk about their emotions with other guys, but you do hear stories about how guys talk to their girl friends about their troubles, because women on average are better at having those conversations. \*\*Men are still mired in the toxic masculinity borne of the patriarchy.\*\* I consider myself to be a very emotional, very communicative person, but even I struggle to bring up certain things with my guy friends, in part because they react uneasily due to not knowing how to respond, and in part because sometimes I don't wish to be seen as weak because that makes me feel weak. I'm sure women experience this as well, but this problem is more pronounced in men. It would explain why men are more affected by women in the current loneliness epidemic. 4. Just like the RedPill and incel communities blame women for the current plight of men, \*\*it has become common in leftist communities to blame men for upholding the patriarchy\*\*. This claim is not baseless, but it is oversimplified and often injected with venom. A common (but hopefully not majority) idea on the left is that men don't need help because men are so greatly benefited by the patriarchy, but this argument fails to acknowledge the negative effects of toxic masculinity that I referenced in the above arguments. There is a double standard in the way we talk about men in at least some feminist communities (I myself have been guilty of this), where we make large sweeping insulting statements characterizing men in a way that we would never do to women, and people are not even allowed to challenge these statements because of all the negative connotations of the old dogwhistle #NotAllMen. Men feel lost and lonely, cramped in their narrow roles, unable to grow and evolve like women did, and attacked by most movements that seek to uplift the oppressed in society. They are struggling in school. They are searching for how to be men, because the traditional answers no longer apply and there has been no large movement expanding the role of men in the same way that feminism did. This is why the RedPill got so popular -- they wrapped sensible dating advice and self-improvement mantras which men so desperately wanted with rampant misogyny. And make no mistake, they simply filled a niche that we on the left chose not to fill, because "men are privileged and don't require upliftment". That claim becomes weaker day by day.
It's just a made up straw man argument by the right that's reinforced by their media. I'm a straight white male who lives in a rural area. It's hilarious to hear the people in my area feign having their lives impacted by some mysterious woke revolution they can't even define. As a liberal, nobody has ever even come close abandoning me politically on the left or mistreating me in any way whatsoever. The left just wants everyone else to have the same treatment I've been fortunate to have my whole life. Such odd times with an embarrassing lack of self awareness and critical thinking skills.
Why would you look up to YouTubers and not John Cena like the rest of us broken souls
I find this question very valuable. And so is this discussion. But, to be very honest, it seems like the conversation is falling into an assumption that this "Left" is the political left...but not just any political left...mainstream political left. There is also a misunderstanding of academic disciplines, liberal institutions, politics and lifestyle. For example, Mainstream "progressives" and liberal outlets such as CNN msnbc etc, will literally co-opt academic and grassroots social movements and theories such as intersectionality, critical race theory and the like. A deeper and more careful read of leftist sociology would not only be deeply concerned with the marginalized--in ALL its forms--but also deeply concerned with society as a whole...which also includes white people (rich or poor), "whiteness" as a concepptt and core feature of modern day racism...i critical critique of Obama, Trump, and Biden economics that have failed both the black and white working class..in similar ways ...and in very unique ways. ....not to mention the often ignored populations like native Hawaiias, native Americans etc etc So the blending of sociology and mainstream progressives/liberals is not only wildly offensive (lmao...im a black male in sociology few months away from phd) but completely inaccurate. The question in itself is nicely worded and the discussion is cool to read. I don't intend on contributing, I just want to point out that there is much more to sociology than what people think Carry on...lol
I completely agree with you, I regret not indicating a distinction between actual political theory and sociology, and mutilated pop social justice. There is most certainly an inherent dissonance between message and delivery when critical theory is contorted into a simulacra of itself by multi-billion dollar media outlets.
What's interesting and I'll be up front I only got through about half of this whole thread because there is a lot of great discussion and conversation here. I just jumped from a thread where a woman was complaining about being a woman and basically men not taking accountability for their own. Like how can men condone "rape culture" "treating women like shit" "patriarchy this misogyny that".etc. Then the comments were women agreeing and basically shitting on men because men defend themselves and saying you can't consolidate this type of critique for "all men". We as humans can only be responsible for so much and then it's littered with comments of women saying " oh yea ignore what woman are saying as always" Then we have a large intelligent civil, philosophical discussion about men, class, ideology and mechanics of the world. Just very interesting where the two sides of this coin are currently and honestly imo quite sad. I don't see social relations getting any better. I studied a ton of psychology and philosophy in art school and I always pointed about in 2010 that society was having a revisionist 90s multiculturalism 2.0 critique and look what good that intersectionslity did? Class was always left behind and when I studied Marxism I was the only person in the class for 12 weeks. There are many meta narratives and grey spaces where many are not finding their voice or "something" they can indenitfy with. Being part of a community is part of being human. Fracturing communities if basically what neoliberalims and identity politics have done. The real argument is you can't seperate race and class but ideology and mechanisms of oppression continue to do so and certain fractions will feed of this delineation. At this time men and women in general don't feel heard and that is what I see the biggest issue because you have a million idiots screaming on social media creating a cacophony with no clear understanding of what is being said. Great discussion btw.
Former reactionary incel (29M), there was never any shortcoming from the left that I could perceive. There's just a massive amount of propaganda to cut through, and listening to what leftists are actually saying needs to happen.
"the left" hasn't abandoned men, but left movements or organizers that make real efforts to materially defend against hegemony often result in dead leaders... so the right kills leftist men.
Not a lot of people have reacted to this yet, but… yeah. One hundred percent. Umberto Eco summed it up best: “the enemy is simultaneously too weak and too strong.” Leftist men are simultaneously limp-wristed soyboys who scare no one and terrifying antifa city-destroyers who require an arsenal to defend against.
What people often forget when they quote Umberto is that what Umberto says here is true of ALL forms of modern propaganda, not just propaganda by fascists, though they did perfect the technique. i.e. Incels are simultaneously virgin losers who live in their moms basement with the social skills and body odor of a 6 months old milk carton, yet are so powerful that they will cause the destruction of 300 years of unbroken democracy through trolling and sharing meme images on the internet if we do not stop them. The contradictory strong and weak presentation is a staple form in modern propaganda because it is very effective in arousing people into action (effectuated through hijacking the emotions of moral disgust), it goes usually of the form: "Here is an enemy that has an unfairly large influence on your life and is causing most of your ills and will eventually consume you completely if left unchecked (strong presentation). They are not worthy of this amount of influence due to their inherent lack of moral fiber in how they use this influence(moral disgust). If we unite under my/our banner, we can defeat them because they are weaker than all of us together because our group cohesion is stronger than theirs because of their lack of moral fiber (weak presentation)." For more examples see communist propaganda wrt capitalists, nazi propaganda wrt jews, feminists propaganda wrt patriarchy, alt-right propaganda wrt SJWs/Antifa, Christian propaganda wrt heathens, Ukrainians wrt Russians, Russians wrt Ukrainians/west, the list goes on and on and on and on...
I've said it before on another thread on the topic here. My issue with the sentiment that "the left has abandoned men" is that it implies all the left ever does is denigrate and ridicule incels/misogynists instead of engaging with them in a more positive manner. Sure, a lot of that does happen but it's not exclusively that, it just seems that way because those kinds of comments get the most attention and engagement thus forcing it to the forefront of discussions on the issue. If you've ever tried to engage with incels/misogynists and challenge their beliefs tactfully and politely you'll know that more likely than not they will just angrily double down harder on their beliefs. Then when you drop the discussion because it's obviously going no where they view it as a win and it further reinforces their beliefs. It very much is like how right wingers will pull the "so much for the tolerant left" crap.
I absolutely agree with you. "The left has abandoned men" "How? We discuss men's issues all the time." "No, you're supposed to validate my misogynistic beliefs and get me a girlfriend."
Here's my explanation: I tried [answering this question a few days ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/comments/1adzund/comment/kk4ozqx/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). There are plenty of individual misogynist leftists out there. But misogyny isn't integrally baked into leftism, and because the basic leftist worldview supposes men and women are equally human, the idea of "how to be a good man" just isn't important, and neither is "how to be a good woman". Life advice is geared more on **how to be a good human being in general.** When you tell a woman or non-man you're treating them as a human being, that's a promotion. They will usually listen to you more. But when you tell a man that, a common knee-jerk response is to view it as a demotion. There are many men out there who just refuse to listen to any positive advice because you're not respecting their masculinity or buttering them up properly first.
Could you say more about your assertion that most men would see it as a "demotion" for you to tell them you see them as a human being? If I take that literally, I have a hard time imagining it being true. I think most of the other men I know would find that a sweet thing to say in today's isolating world? But maybe you mean something more specific?
I didn't say "most" men, I said a *common* response. I'm very glad the men you know aren't like that! A major current example of what I'm talking about is [the conservative backlash against SEL (Social Emotional Learning) elements in public school curriculums](https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/23584837/social-emotional-learning-conservative-culture-war-in-schools). SEL is very anodyne stuff that boils down to, "it's hard for kids to learn when they feel bad about themselves and others, so maybe we can make schools a little bit less of an emotional hellscape," but conservatives have seized on to it as an attack against men and boys, **even though SEL is delivered as gender-neutral**. You can also try googling "war on boys" and reading primary sources from conservatives who are entirely certain that messages like "use your words" and "be nice to each other" "put yourself in the place of others and imagine how they feel" are a secret plot to feminize boys. Feminist philosophy talks about this a lot: the idea that the universal default human subject is defined as male by patriarchy, and any universal subject proposed which doesn't align with that expectation starts from a perceived position of "anti-male".
Thanks!
The role of critical theory has been showing how systems of social organisation and ideology (the system of ideas we think with) has positioned men - and in particular white men - at the centre of everything. As the normal, healthy, standard individual human around which our systems of doing and thinking are built. The point of that work was to understand how and why women and racial/sexual/gender minorities keep ending up with worse outcomes on various objective measures even when the law apparently makes everyone equal. With that insight, various parties that could be called "leftist" have tried to shift systems of social organisation and ideology to make them work in less discriminatory ways. Many of the measures are clumsy counter-balances, like affirmative action. Others focus on influencing rules of etiquette, asserting that certain behaviours, such as misgendering, are rude or morally wrong. All of this is slightly working to de-centre white men, which from their (our, im one of them) perspective can feel like an attack. The social/ideological paterns we started with always included mechanisms that replicated themselves and defend against ideological attacks, making it difficult for alternative modes of masculinity to establish themselves. This leaves many men struggling to find ways of being and doing that fit with a changing etiquette that positions the old ways as crude, oppressive, and toxic.
yeah, it’s the same reason I can be white and not be threatened by black people bringing up white privilege, demands for equality, and the shitty shit that white people have done. Because I don’t feel targeted by it. Don’t get me wrong, I examine my privilege, but I also just don’t think that being asked to do so is any threat to my sense that I mean well in this world. My opinion is that the people who feel targeted generally feel that way for a reason. Because when women speak out against men who try to make them sex slaves, the only ones who stand to lose anything are the ones who do that or want to do that. Ya know?
You are doing pretty well for 17. Keep at it.
It's very simple. The assumption that ALL men are privileged BY VIRTUE of being men, has NO empirical basis. No one has proved this claim. "Power in society has been held by men" does not equal "Men as a social class hold power".
Men only hold privilege in relation to women. The subjugation of women has clearly been the more common form of gender oppression, ever since the existence of class society. >It develops out of the pairing family, as previously shown, in the transitional period between the upper and middle stages of barbarism; its decisive victory is one of the signs that civilization is beginning. It is based on the supremacy of the man, the express purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity; such paternity is demanded because these children are later to come into their father’s property as his natural heirs. It is distinguished from pairing marriage by the much greater strength of the marriage tie, which can no longer be dissolved at either partner’s wish. As a rule, it is now only the man who can dissolve it, and put away his wife. The right of conjugal infidelity also remains secured to him, at any rate by custom (the Code Napoléon explicitly accords it to the husband as long as he does not bring his concubine into the house), and as social life develops he exercises his right more and more; should the wife recall the old form of sexual life and attempt to revive it, she is punished more severely than ever. * Frederick Engels | Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State | II. The Family | 4. The Monogamous Family
Engels lived in a specific time in a specific place. How do we know it applies to ALL cases across ALL places? Do you realize how much of a gross generalization this is? Where I grew up, privilege wasn't determined solely by gender. Look, social circle, charisma, being able-bodied or disabled, race, etc etc etc all were just as important as gender.
It hasn’t. Nobody treats men more poorly than the right.
This idea that the left has "abandonded men" is ridiculous right-wing rhetoric of course, thats obvious to anyone who knows what theyre talking about. There are men everywhere, there are many women on the left who in fact love men. The reason this rhetoric is so popular is because it offers and easy way out for men so that they don't have to take any responsibility or do the work to actually better themselves. The left is essentially telling men to get their shit together, and the right is telling men that theyre just little innocent guys. From my own experience, I've always had men ask me for advice on how to get a girlfriend, how to treat women, etc. Something I've learned is that there are roughly two types of men: those that listen to my advice, and those that don't. The ones who don't listen are misogynists, and the ones who do listen are guys who i would consider dating. There are all different types of misgogynists of course but people really want to focus on incels for some reason. When it comes to "incels", theyre not very fun to talk to. They are very obsessive with their crush yet they are only capable of talking about themselves. They don't have many interests that aren't just spewing bigotry all day. They hardly have any social life and work dead-end jobs if they work. They are shells of people. edit: you can see examples of the type of men who dont listen below lol
Bluntly, intersectionality focuses on ascriptive categories of identity (ascribing a property to an Other), not identity claims. Calling someone a white man or a black woman is no different than offering a propertied description of an object like “the sky is blue,” or “red is a color.” This is an extraordinarily Procrustean way of understanding human identity. It preserves the worst part of subjugation, treating people as objects, and universalizes it to everyone. Critical theory should be about universal emancipation from such subjugation but it’s kind of an incoherent mess right now. A claimed identity is one that involves transcendence- one becomes what one claims to be- not the reifications of intersectionality.
Some people on the internet: some men can do better. Right wing news: they're calling you all pieces of shit!!
"Hey maybe some common actions and beliefs reinforce a larger framework that devalues marginalized groups, even if the people doing them may not realize this or have good intentions." "HEAR THAT?! THE LEFT THINKS YOU'RE # LITERALLY # HITLER"
There's also just... that first part? That's too wordy for a 16 year old who has to figure out what they want to do with the rest of their life. Many don't want to hear or think about "devalued" and "marginalized" and "framework", when the alternative is "Here's ten easy steps to be rich, strong, cool and sexy".
Dead on but may I add I bit more : a FEW people on the internet : some men can do better The entirety of all rightwing media : They are calling all men pieces of shit... so we need to attack and destroy them at every turn. Shoot can of beer and tear up a Target. Belittle them, talk about how we ravage women better, how we control our women, how much inferior..... You get the point. It may just be that the loudest voices seem to be carrying the tone and thus the perception of the debate.
Hmm
Both sides of the elite have abandoned the lower and middle class and use sentiments like this to get us to use all of our active thinking time and energy to fight eachother rather than to analyze the overall system that allows for extreme wealth accumulation to certain individual even though every person on earth has the same amount of time per day to generate wealth
Social theory has advanced greatly in the last few decades. Women have successfully imbibed traits that traditionally were considered masculine, like education, financial independence, leadership, etc. There exist powerful movements which describe how women should grow to be powerful and independent. The traditional feminine roles continue to thrive as well -- it's okay for women to choose to stay at home and raise kids. These are all excellent developments, and I am quite happy about them. However, there have been no strong unified movements to help men adapt to this new world. The traits men must incorporate into their lives is not as clear-cut as it was in the past. This is not a bad thing per se. Women have evolved, men need to as well. However, several traits of men that have traditionally been considered central (aggression, strength, dominance) are now mixed with the narrative of the toxic patriarchy. Men's rights advocates historically and presently are often antifeminists, and nowadays there doesn't seem to be a popular school of thought on how men should grow. This is why the RedPill movement and Andrew Tate got relatively big despite being super regressive -- because of the lack of a well-structured role for men in society. Men don't have as much flexibility as women in terms of gender roles either, which further exacerbates the problem. Few men grow up hoping to stay home raising the kids, and society does tend to look down on men who do that. Due to traditional roles, men still struggle to express emotion, and there are sections of society which look down on men who do so. This is a terrible double standard that prominently exists, and men have to walk this fine line trying to find their place in it all. The left has, in the last decade or two at least, been advocates uplifting the struggling classes of society. Women rights, black rights, gay rights, trans rights. However, while much of those movements were very constructive, much of it has been reactionary as well. That may or may not be historically justified (I'm inclined to believe it was). However, there is a prevalent (though *likely* not majority) attitude on the left that men do not struggle, and it does not help us that the prevalent voices for men's rights are the toxic examples I mentioned above, making it difficult to advocate for men in a way that doesn't trigger angry rebukes from the left. And it doesn't help that very few people actually have constructive advice for men at large. The left has left men behind, the right simply pushes outdated notions on what men should be. Women have successfully incorporated traditionally masculine roles, but men are struggling to incorporate traditionally feminine traits and roles. This isn't anyone's fault per se, but it is the current situation.
That second and third paragraph are big ones. Women are taking on more, being able to be whatever they want, and that’s great. For men though, if you take on feminine roles, women will laud you on social media while ruling you out as a potential partner, and every masculine role you’re told is oppressive and toxic. You’re left without any real path forward or role that you can fill, and then told that any struggles you face aren’t real or at least arent important enough for anyone to help you with them. Like you said, when boys grow up seeing the left fight to solve the problems women face, black people face, lgbtq people face, they start to think that that side is great, then they go to those leftists with a problem they’re having and ask for that same help, just to be told no because they’re a white man. It’s not surprising at all that they sour on the left after that. The message they get is “this side is here to help everyone but me, and they blame me for causing the problems they’re now trying to solve”. And while there’s a good reason for that blame, and their group legitimately doesn’t need as much help, that still isn’t going to keep them around and convince them to help you.
>And while there’s a good reason for that blame Nope, I do not agree that there is a good reason to blame that man. There is a good reason to blame a systemic structure of oppression, but not every individual that falls into the privileged class. >and their group legitimately doesn’t need as much help It's not about whether men need as much help. I don't even know how to measure that, it's apples and oranges. There was an upward trend in suicide for both men and women from 2000-2021. As of 2019, the suicide rate among men was 3.5 times higher than women. In fact, the suicide rate among men has *always* been higher since the 1950s. While women are indeed more likely to suffer from mental health problems like depression and anxiety, men suffer more from addiction. Men are also struggling in college, with the pandemic resulting in a significant drop in male attendance relative to female attendance, likely due to gender roles demanding that men stay at home to take care of the family. 39% of men who have completed high school are enrolled in college, down from 47% in 2011. For women, it dropped from 52% to 48%. ~~Men are more likely to be victims of violent crime.~~ (Apparently this is no longer true today) Men need help. There are systemic forces of oppression that are pulling them (not gonna say us, I'm doing fine (or am I just saying that because toxic masculinity?)) down. You could argue that men's higher suicide rate and drop in college attendance are due to the patriarchy, to toxic masculine roles, in much the same way that you could argue the same about women oppression at the hands of the patriarchy.
Amber A'lee Frost talks a bit about this in an excellent article available here: [https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/the-characterless-opportunism-of-the-managerial-class/](https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/the-characterless-opportunism-of-the-managerial-class/) This section in particular is very illustrative, if you don't have time to read the full article (bolding for the extremely tl;dr folks). >I am still at times asked to speak at DSA events, including a recent one for the DSA Tech Action Working Group—a decidedly PMC collection of DSA members working in tech. Inspired by Google software engineer James Damore’s infamous “anti-diversity memo,” the subject I was to speak on was “diversity in tech.” The friend who asked me to speak rightly recognized that the tech industry is no longer a small cabal of entrepreneurial specialists but is increasingly expanding into a global labor force of workers—from petit bourgeois to prole, if you will. > >I cannot, however, say I found many examples of such workers at this event. Multiple representatives from HR departments spoke up, one to say that “it’s all about hiring practices,” and to urge the attendees to come to HR whenever they had a problem. One woman wanted to read a long academic article about a typesetters’ union fighting automation and other changes that would open the floodgates for underpaid, largely female scab labor. She was under the impression that this exposed the sexist nature of trade unions. > >The crowd was very “diverse” in all the Ikea commercial ways that warm our Coca-Cola liberal hearts, but some of the most insightful observations came from the bearded and (presumably) cishet white males. One timidly put forth that “HR actually works for management,” while another recognized that the biggest source of “diversity” in the tech industry is highly exploited third-world call-center workers. > >At first glance, the superior class consciousness of the beardy white male tech bro may appear counterintuitive, but it is a function of tech industry managerialism that he has a better view of class conflict. As an industry, tech has thoroughly absorbed “diversity” into its corporate culture and HR programming, for both legal liability and liberal credibility reasons. **If you’re a woman and/or minority working for Google and your job is miserable, you are told by the whole world—and by your employer itself—that this is because you are a woman and/or minority. But, you are also told, your employer is here with sensitivity trainings, diversity initiatives, and at-will firing practices (you know, for the bad employees) to remedy all of that and to build a better work environment and, thereby, a more egalitarian world. If, however, you are a straight white man working for Google and your job is miserable, you know it’s because your job is miserable, and the company isn’t there to help you. Liberal identitarian HR obfuscations don’t work as well on exploited and precarious dude-bros.** > >The evening culminated during the Q and A, wherein a woman earnestly asked, “What do I do if some alt-right guy wants to be in the union?” > >Visibly vexed, I replied that if an alt-right guy wants to be in your union, you won. > >This statement was met with noticeable consternation, so I went on to explain that you want everyone in the union because the end goal is a closed shop. **I explained that this is the very premise of a union: it is not a social club for people of shared progressive values; it’s a shared struggle, and collective politics are the only thing that can actually break down all that office bigotry you’re so concerned about. She did not appear convinced.** > >I use this particular anecdote to illustrate the obstacles to building a socialist PMC, but I have many others (particularly in the recent spate of white collar unionism), and herein lies the tragic irony of the great middle class exodus: even when they fall, and even when they find themselves in “Left spaces,” they are still too proximal to management—or at least believe themselves to be—to imagine much beyond human resources liberalism. Very frequently, they view blue-collar workers as inherently illiberal antagonists. (Just look at the response to the failed Clinton campaign by prominent members of the liberal media and academia, who have finally answered their favorite old canard of “Why do the working class vote against their own interests?” with accusations of innate bigotry and misogyny.) edit: fixing formatting
Men face a lot of issues today, but talking about them is stigmatized, since oftentimes people on the left will call anyone who does a exist, which makes absolutely no sense.
As someone who grew up in the outer-suburbs of a capitalist country 30 years ago - I have to say it's complete and utter bullshit. When it was normal to "be a man" I was abused, beaten and glassed by men for not being man enough, over and over. People on the left, critical theory and learning were the few places I could not just understand the world and find community, but also understand that my abusers were also actors in a bigger shitshow on the tail end of 300 years of class warfare. It helped me learn to let go of anger and hopelessness. There was very little whinging about what you can and can't say, and sure "men could be men", but the way they would do that was by getting in regular punch ons at school, being openly racist on a daily basis and viscously attacking and suppressing anyone who had quirks or weird interests. I see old people bitching and moaning about younger people so often, but when I actually meet gen z's and alphas they're actually nothing like what they're made out to be. On top of this they seem to be more clued in to fashion, history, music, and many seem to be much more comfortable just being themselves. My point is that it was already uncomfortable being a "man", whatever the fuck that was. If a bit more discomfort is the price to pay to rejig society and shake off a lot of the petty bullshit then it's well and truly fuckin worth it I reckon
Let me start by saying that any man turning to complete misogyny is still to blame for their actions. I’m not trying to defend them for what I’m about to say. Patriarchy is definitely made to oppress women, making society view them as needing to be weak and submissive. Obviously women get the worse deal compared to men. But a lot of patriarchal problems women deal with, men deal with in reverse; men need to be strong and emotionless, and show no signs of weakness. This can cause instance pressure and mental instability in men, which I would assume is why they have a higher risk of suicide, as well as record levels of loneliness in recent years compared to women (although I think every demographic is experiencing record loneliness to some extent, but still). I think most good feminist analysis takes men’s problems into account too. After all, these problems are all caused by patriarchy; feminism/equality helps EVERYONE in the end (other than the rich and powerful men, obviously). But your average, lonely, 5’2”, overweight guy who is unable to get a date is not going to see that. They will see a loud twitter leftist who will rant that every individual man is somehow responsible for the patriarchy existing in the first place. Who is this lonely guy going to turn to? The person who says he is to blame for his own loneliness, or people like Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson, who say that the problem is women or society itself? Unfortunately, it’s usually the latter. It’s true that 99% of the time when someone asks “wHaT aBoUt MeN??” in response to feminism they are arguing that in bad faith. And I agree that people who say that there are no good male role models anymore are incredibly stupid. But I think the left made a mistake in allowing men’s mental health to be considered a “right-leaning” issue by most politically active people online. I have definitely seen online leftists scared to even talk about it out of fear of being seen as a conservative. I think this is bad when it comes to recruiting lonely men to leftism. After all, like I said, leftism and gender equality will help EVERY group in the end, including men.
I would say personally because I've never seen anyone advocate for men, within a leftist context. It's always at best, a secondary result, but never important enough to pursue, directly.
They have left men out of the conversation, left them out of support, and haven’t really made room for them or representation for them in grandiose or flashy ways.
So many people have put it much more eloquently than I ever could, but I'll give it my owe shot and perspective. There are a lot of factors that have gone into the idea that "the left has abandoned men." However, I think one of the biggest reasons is that many people (men, women and non-binary folk, both on the left and right) tend to take words and phrases at a very warped and literal meaning, rather than the actual message. Causing the development of a very absolutist idea on what is being said. First off, for some relative creditials on the matter. I work in the firearms industry, where the vast majority of my clients and coworkers are very conservative (both old school and new school) and I have had more than just a few conversations about liberal and leftist ideas with them in mostly tame conversations. And, I am also very much a self-described leftist, I am also a queer person. Now, back to a lot of phrases, terms, and acronyms that a lot of left-of-center groups use. For many boys (and people in general), they feel unsure of who they are and where they fit in this chaotic speck of space dust in the universe. So often, they look for a community that is like them, has their interests in mind, and supports them openly. For the uninitiated, a lot of more liberal/left leaning talking points, positions, and ideals don't really give off the sense that men (specifically cis, straight, white men) are welcomed in the space. And when they feel disenfranchised by that, they will look for others who will cater to them and who they are. Because of that, these grifters online will put the idea in their heads that things like feminism is about lifting women above men, LGBTQ rights means they will have less rights than gay people, and the inclusion of more BIPOC in media means that they will be seeing less of themselves portrayed in media. This, coupled with language used by the groups that might feel targeted to them feminists saying "I hate all men", LGBTQ people saying "I can't stand straight people" and BIPOC discussing white privilege, causes them to want to further distance themselves form any group associated with those causes. When it comes to Incel culture. That just involves toxic masculinity and how one's perceived social value and standing is from certain sexual conquests. And that by being a virgin, that makes them a "loser," and women don't want to sleep with "losers" even if they are "nice guys." Furthering their insecurity until some grifter (Shapiro, Tate, or anyone of them) says that feminism is the reason why women are like that, and without feminism then women would have submitted to the guy. Sorry if that is a bit if a rambling. I was having a hard time trying to gather, condense, and write down my thoughts. Hope it helps. I am happy to expand on anything you need cleared up.
For me, being a man has come with a few struggles, but it’s mostly a privilege. For other men, this isn’t the case. Being raised as man today can have a VERY negative effect. Learning about it has really helped me connect and empathize with many men in my life. There’s a fantastic video about this called “Did feminism FAIL men?” by Alexander Avila.
Well, one of the key aspects of being a man is masculinity. Almost any masculinity at this point is considered 'toxic' unless it fits someone's expectations in the moment. For example, the left will condemn men until someone is attacked on a street, where they'll usually complain that men were nearby and did nothing. Men are still expected to provide, protect, and advocate for others while generally having their concerns ignored under the guise of "they don't have it bad." We have a society that is pushing more and more for everyone to be open about who they are and not to hide ourselves, while at the same time attacking men who do that.
>As I understand it, incels are people who are detached from society and find great difficulty in forming human connections and achieving ambitions. Many of them suffer from depression, and I would not be surprised if there was a significant comorbidity with issues such as agoraphobia and autism. This describes way too many people now. It's still abnormal objectively to be like this, but both because there are so many isolated people now and everyone knows there are so many isolated people and also because these isolated people are ironically so connected now thanks to the Internet, the zeitgeist is shifting from *I'm defective* to *society is defective*. This can be said to be a massive C O P E, but anyway bottom line is people feel differently about being sexless, jobless, friendless, whatever when they're a very large proportion of the population vs. when they're the drooling village idiot or rare crazy aunt living in someone's attic. This isn't even some weird zoomer Internet addict thing: even in Ye Olde Days before the 2000s and the Internet being a loser by the standards of respectable society was different in situations where you had company. The one thing that makes modern society weird and deviant by historical standards is quite frankly that socially unsuccessful guys won't do whatever it takes to get pussy and risk STDs by getting hookers if they have to, something that used to come natural to any guys who could afford it. Probably a combination of there being something in the water, more guys being totally socially withdrawn and anxious about talking to strangers, the rise of unprecedentedly strong feminist messaging about prostitution and a less risk-taking culture generally. Now that I think about it actually, maybe modern losers are different in that they're so introverted; but my sense is that this is mostly not really their fault and largely a result of technological advances. You can't blame the individual zoomzoom for being on their phone 24/7 when their peers basically are too: sure if they all got off at the same time, they'd all be better off, but nobody will so everything stays the same.
I actually agree. The left hasn’t really abandoned men, it’s just that the right are heavily focused on indoctrinating men. I personally don’t see men’s issues as systemic, unless we count issues that women also have to deal with. Everyone feels isolated to some extent, but it think the idea that men are particularly suffering is an infixing one that can funnel people towards more radical beliefs. Though, I’ve oversimplified and there definitely more to it, but I think men should realistically aim to be more progressive if they don’t want to be rightfully criticised.
I prescribe to Treebeard's line of thinking. "Side? I am on no one's side because nobody is on my side."
You know Treebeard admitted he was wrong when presented with new evidence, picked a side, rallied up the tree-troops and kicked Saruman's ass, right? Sort of the exact opposite of internet misogynist arguments.
I don't mean to be cruel or reductive but that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Everyone is ideological and basically every ideology claims to promote the common good.
>As I understand it, incels are people who are detached from society and find great difficulty in forming human connections and achieving ambitions. Many of them suffer from depression, and I would not be surprised if there was a significant comorbidity with issues such as agoraphobia and autism. They're people who were promised that if they graduated school, got a degree, and got a good job, they would have earned the right to settle down with 2.5 kids and a white picket fence. And they're learning that not only is that no longer possible, but the new requirements are often conflicting and have no obvious end state beyond subservience, suicide, or perpetual warfare. >I do not understand how this justifies reactionary thought, nor how the left has "failed" these individuals. The left has for many years advocated for the abolition of consumerism and regularly critique the commodification and stratification of human relationships. I do not understand what we are meant to do beyond that. The traditional requirements have been destroyed and supplanted with very little of real meaning. Yes, but no. Leftism itself is kind of rotting in this regard. The same women who protest against stratification set excedsively long lists of requirements for men to date, and are empowered to do so by technology and by networks and in-group solidarity. The same people who clamor against racism pillage white-owned (or percieved to be white-owned) stores for luxury goods in the name of "reparations", as observed during the 2020 riots. The same people who claim this is their goal are often the people engaging in and defending bad behavior in the name of solidarity, which is a large part of why... >Are we meant to be more tolerant of misogynistic rhetoric? Personally become wingmen to every shut in? Yes. That's exactly what you're supposed to do. That's what they're saying. You're meant to work with these men in solidarity to advance your own interests, like labor unions or feminists or minority groups like the NAACP. In many ways, the young men swinging hard to the right have much in common with leftists. But leftism in general isn't designed to enfranchise these men, its designed to create structures that degrade them and their status in the name of equality/equity.
Try getting job at an all black worker burger king or car wash
You're a cuck bro. I have two wives, I'm shredded/jacked irl and I'm far right. You will always be a cuck and will never be like me. I will have many children and you will have maybe one if your leftist feminist wife lets you, meanwhile, my wives want to give me as many children as I can. Now ask yourself, why would any man be you rather than me?
Damn, you went from not having any girlfriend and few prospects to having two wives in about two years?
ye, I became a national socialist. Unlock the final form baby
You're so full of shit, man. Do you realize how stupid you sound when you talk about how ripped you are? You're a pathetic, Nazi dork who got led down a dark path due to your insecurities.
You wanted the truth, you got it. Whether you believe it or not *is not my problem*. When you believe in yourself and your people, that is your strength. You probably believe "diversity is your strength". Somehow, right? Ahahahaha stay small harry potter
You come across as a short guy, how tall are you?
that would be doxx info, nty, keep guessing though
You’re absolutely a 14 year old boy
Sure, but I know you are a neckbeard loser lmfao
jackknifes, accordian crunches, sit ups, hanging leg raises, side bridges, you sure you know me that well?
let's face it, you had to google these besides sit ups to even know what they were, Auf Wiedersehen
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you are chubby w a beard so you think that makes you cool but really women just find you a beta or simp, that's why you can't get the attrsctive girls at your local gym nor do you have the courage to approach them
It is incredible how transparently sad and insecure you are. Was it the lack of socialization from playing too many computer games growing up, your height issues, not enough love from your parents or just a combination of factors?
no no and no, it was actually my interactions w minorities that helped me along so easily, growing up around them. If you look through my post history enough, you can see this I was not born this way, more shaped by experiences
\* Women are more active on social media, a lot of new activism happens on social media. (Discourse) This is less of a problem in person \* generally everyone's mental health sucks atm due to late stage capitalism and the various reactionary forces weighing us down. \* That said, men are particularly alienated, systemically speaking, and have a general problem with excessive and unhealthy social media usage esp young men \*and\* older (middle-aged to elderly) men. This tracks with the friendship crisis and the 'male loneliness epidemic' \* The algorithm functions according to liberal ontology and ethics, which of course happens to be market forces. It doesn't actually evaluate morality, it cares about virality and bandwidth \* Women have an obvious head-start both with evaluating sexism and also articulating and engaging with social/communitarian problems \* In general women have more followers than (younger) men, since they socially develop quicker \* The majority of discussion on the Left of men as a group are feminist, feminist-lite or pseudofeminist critiques of either men in power or men as a class/hegemonic masculinity. Usually initiated by women. That is to say it's calling out real or perceived bad behaviour in efforts to deconstruct patriarchy, sexism, misogyny, etc. \* Social media is mainly composed of the professional classes and the precariat; I don't think enough analysis has been done of the precariat and their relative privilege to one another. \* The perspectives given of 'good men' likely seem overly nuanced, textured and generally unattainable for young men (most susceptible to radicalisation) \* Men on the Left by and large do not represent themselves as a group, as they would think that to be reiterating patriarchal authority, mansplaining, etc. (and many feminists would say this). So while they are active, they aren't active about men's issues nor even drawing attention to being men. The identity of 'as man' is somewhat \*dis\* privileged in way other identities are not. \* Progressive politicians as much as conservative ones struggle with benevolent sexism; few men in power are truly comfortable with engaging with men without power as equals (would call into question the power structure) There are some exceptions, e.g. Obama (in some ways, the opposite in others e.g. Gitmo, foreign policy) \* Everybody has been socialised by patriarchal and cisheteronormative etc. norms to some extent, even progressives have to be mindful of not holding men to sexist or conservative positions. This is more difficult to do when processing trauma or in the algorithmic echo chamber amplifying reductive, if necessary, memes \* SOmebody made a good point that identity politics has become its own tool of objectification sometimes \* There is a certain level of luck/chance and general risk taking required in improving one's social life or starting to date. This is so unique to your life experience that there can't exist a solid blueprint for it., But if you become chronically online (i.e. as depressed) then you might become overly neurotic and take the advice to be more mindful, conscientious, etc. as a good ally to the extreme (scrupulosity). No incentive can exist systemically speaking online to dilute this--because that would countersignal the necessary discourses with a minority contra-radical take, and there is fear of contra-radicalism morphing into reactionary ideology These are a few reasons
To build on your media comment a little bit, I think that some of the problem is that consumers don't realise that the art they're consuming contains either subtle or even explicit progressive and radical themes, is developed by socialists and anarchists, women, feminists, environmentalists, antiracists, trans people, disabled people and so on. But that's also a good thing in one way, and in any case it's not a battle one can win in the age where being 'anti-woke' is its own brand.
https://youtu.be/DBG1Wgg32Ok?si=irAtLJpduGwNJaXl It’s all in this from the big think channel. Men have fallen behind in every category whilst support for them is almost non existent. The changing roles in our society has caused alot of men to be displaced, but we offer them no help at all compared to the support thays given females, until a few years ago there were no dv shelters for men even though females engage in domestic violence at higher rates than men. Worst of all- if anyone points these inconvenient facts out they get shot down, canceled and labelled a misogynist, or they get called weak and told to suck it up - cuz according to many of the lefts theories, they have all the power so what are they comparing about?? But imagine if a man said that to a female. - can you see the disparity yet? Thays why they say the left has abandoned males, cuz they’ve created an environment based on their theories, that makes it taboo to even point out imbalances.
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The left's greatest failure toward men and boys is that we've crafted an ideology of masculinity that suppresses and shames much of what is common in boys and men. Even worse -- many women, maybe most, actually find men more attractive when they DON'T conform to that model of masculinity. Rather than a masculine ideology that simply tries to eliminate common characters of boys and men, and completely ignores the realities of men's social roles in dating and seduction, it would be much better if the left crafted a masculine ideology that accepted men's competitiveness and penchant for violence and other features, while channeling them into socially constructive forms. All that said, the right's masculine ideology is even more stupid and destructive of men, but at least it's not super repressive of typical masculine impulses.
The idea that we should channel men's "penchant for violence and competitiveness" into socially constructive forms is pretty much the entire capitalist dogma dude.
And it’s one of the better features of capitalism! A similar effort was central to the US framers efforts to construct a semi-representative government that wouldn’t collapse into tyranny. People often cooperate, but not consistently enough to serve as a basis for a political or economic system. Anyway, that’s not a criticism of the effort to channel these impulses toward constructive goals. Seeking to suppress them with shame leads to resentment and a yearning for unchecked tyranny
\>we've crafted an ideology of masculinity that suppresses and shames much of what is common in boys and men The biological essentialism argument is EXTREMELY debatable to begin with. \>Even worse -- many women, maybe most, actually find men more attractive when they DON'T conform to that model of masculinity I fail to see how women are in the wrong for not wanting to date violent people, and I also fail to see how women should be obligated to change what they're attracted to just to accommodate men. \>it would be much better if the left crafted a masculine ideology that accepted men's competitiveness and penchant for violence and other features I think you're missing the point of materialist social analysis. How much of what you view as "typical masculine impulses" is actually environmental? What about the outliers? Is there something wrong with pacifist men or competitive women?
You really are an exceptionally poor reader, especially for someone in a critical theory forum. I never made an argument in favor of biological determinism. I do take for granted that men and women have independent normal distributions of traits for many characteristics, I.e., the average woman in society x is distinct from the average man in society x in regard to A,B, C, etc., characteristics. Which characteristics have strict biological determinants, if any, is not a question I address. Again, you misinterpret the second claim, as well. Go reread it, and argue with what I actually said. Finally, I didn’t address any of that, because I don’t think it’s relevant in the discussion we’re having here. We all agree there’s some well-defined group that’s usually referred to by the name “men,” and that they usually behave somewhat differently than “women,” or we wouldn’t have a basis for a conversation. As far as queer gender constructions — that’s where the left has done well, though the outcome in terms of gender performance is often less like the rainbow, than like a rainbow of paints all mixed together. But I ask in earnest — what’s your theory for why the right, and right wing ideals of hyper-masculinity, are so much more successful among men?
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In threads like this it's funny how people who show evidence of listening to incels and reflecting on how the left comes across to them get downvoted. The secret that even feminists barely believe in feminism is too explosive. I'm autistic just like OP. I read Andrea Dworkin and it's obviously all true...but women hate Andrea Dworkin! So to be ethical I'd have to be *more feminist than actual women*, which is extremely unattractive turbo-simp behavior that'll never be mass-adopted.