Essay: Anti-male Double Standard in Society

Submitted by anthony on Fri, 2007-03-16 18:45

Essay here. Excerpt:

'Less common, however, is discourse on what words/phrases can be anti-male (such as man-slaughter or men-at-work which both imply that it is only men who experience undesirable afflictions like death and work). This semantic bias is also manifested in how the rules of gender discourse leave men at the door. It is indeed interesting to note that the term "masculism" is seldom acknowledged as a real term in mainstream media (one exception is Wikipedia)...The problem is that the very term “feminism” is sexist (at least on its own). Feminism is a female word, with a feminine prefix (fem-inism). This can implicitly create the taciturn illusion that feminism = equality. This is similar to how gender-feminists insist to define sexism in strictly female terms (despite men obviously being one of the two sexes)!'

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Comments

Let's talk about the "just-world phenomenon", one of the things the author mentions.
In Wikipedia, the entry for it says (in part):

"Studies have shown that those who believe in a "just world" may be more likely to believe that rape victims must have behaved seductively, battered wives must have deserved their beatings, that sick people must have caused their own illness, or that the poor deserve their lot.[citation needed]

"In this way, if something good (like winning the lottery) or bad (like a broken leg) occurs, people attribute the occurrence to the person, not to a chance turn of events. For example, some people feel that those living on the street are homeless because they are too lazy to find a job, rather than considering alternatives such as bad luck or mental illness. Likewise, if someone invests well and is rewarded by it, most people believe that the person is smart and a good investor, instead of just being lucky."

Note several things about the above:

1)It is biased in favor of woman-as-victim (first paragraph), and therefore against men, since for example, it is the popular (and wrong) perception that men are usually the perpetrators of domestic violence.

2) It shows where the sympathy of the psychologist himself lies in general, i.e. sympathy for women, sympathy for the poor, sympathy for the homeless..and he infers some sort of common denominator between these groups, such as having been oppressed, looked down on by society, or being weak.

3) It is one of possibly millions of examples, of how psychologists think, i.e. their lack of connection to reality. Let's take the successful investor for example: a)If there is some study that "most people" consider him smart and competent, as opposed to lucky, please let me know about it; my own experience is that there is no preponderance of one type of person over the other in this case; b)even if the foregoing is true, then if someone did study why certain investors are consistently successful, anyone with common sense (unlike the psychologist) would predict that luck would not turn out to be the biggest factor. Of course the psychologist could have meant "successful" with just one investment, but then it sounds like he's saying that that could be equivalent to winning a prize, as if the investor had no control at all over the outcome. Or as a healthy person might say, "a smarter investor has a better probability of success".

4)The author of the article is himself engaged in a phenomenon with faulty basis, that of "psychologizing". It sounds like he is attempting to analyze feminists for the purpose of discrediting them. Probably most feminists ARE psychologically "messed up" so to speak, but since most men (and many women) already know this, it is superfluous to psychologize anyway.

-ax

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Submitted by axolotl on Sat, 2007-03-17 03:06