#extradirty
Cosmic Funnies
Janaina Medeiros
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Stranger Things
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
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Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
One Nice Bug Per Day
Not today Justin
styofa doing anything
if i look back, i am lost
ojovivo
$LAYYYTER
izzy's playlists!
will byers stan first human second
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
NASA
roma★
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@ferventfox
apropos of nothing thinking about the psychology today article i read yesterday talking about how upwards of 50% of people with suicidal ideation don't disclose it to mental health professionals, acknowledging the role that fear of institutionalization plays in that, and then ends with "and that's why we need better screening tools to identify ppl with suicidal ideation even when they're lying to us"
I understand where they're coming from, but chalking up the disproportionate amount of M/M on Ao3 to misogyny feels a little like saying the reason there's so many girl characters in gacha games is because the devs hate men
Ok nevermind I just scrolled past a very long post about how the horse gacha is actually very feminist for being all women and wanting a hot boys in your horse gacha is male entitlement in women's spaces. I fear we may not survive the winter here, so to speak.
having being anti death penalty as one of my core beliefs is fun because it really makes me realize how even progressive people want soooooo badly for there to be a category of people they can kill. I'm sorry but "group of people okay to kill" does not exist.
Mark my words - this will have an effect precisely opposite to the intended one. Students being sat down and lectured about how they need to respect women will only increase the anti-establishment appeal of manosphere figures. It will fail for the exact same reason why hate speech laws have failed to stop the rise of the far right.
This may be me getting on my hobby horse again, but if the government is serious in wanting to make young men less sexist, they need to start by banning single-sex education. The prevalence of single-sex education in the UK is socially corrosive for a whole number of reasons, but a big one is that it leads to a lot of boys spending their whole childhoods in social environments where they never interact with girls on equal footing as peers. The only women they ever interact with are authority figures - their mothers and their teachers. (It becomes somewhat ridiculous to describe these boys as "oppressing women" - if the only women they ever interact with are those with social authority over them, who exactly are they oppressing?) I spent much of my childhood in such an environment. I did not become a misogynist not because I was better or smarter than my peers, but because I am a fundamentally servile person. Anyone with a healthy distrust and disrespect for authority is going to have at the very least a slight desire to "stick it to the woman", so to speak, after 18 years in that environment - a kind of "false consciousness" in the Marxist sense. This makes it difficult to adjust to the real world, where women aren't a ruling class whose words must be obeyed to the letter to avoid punishment, but are simply people just like anyone else. One of the main purposes of education is preparing children for the rest of their lives, and single-sex education is clearly failing to do that on this front. As such, it should be discarded.
step 1: allow 16 year olds to vote
step 2: methodically alienate every part of that demographic
the mortal mind cannot comprehend the 5d chess starmer is playing
The central pillar of MRA ideology is not that men have issues, but that feminism and mens rights are fundamentally opposed. That a win for feminism fundamentally harms men. The astonishing thing is how many self style feminists just concede that point. They don't even try to argue against it, to the point where they don't even consider it MRA ideology.
No one buys into MRA ideology harder than a self proclaimed feminist with a chip on their shoulder.
As a reminder about the cause and effect relationship here:
The reason so many MRAs believe feminism and men's rights are fundamentally opposed is because the movement was more or less founded by former self proclaimed feminists who got sick of getting death threats from other self proclaimed feminists for saying "men have issues" and continues to be sustained by people getting sick of "men have issues" being a subject of endless controversy. It's not like they made it up out of thin air and some feminists decided to adopt that belief. It's a central tenet of radfem ideology that many MRAs have conceded on and adopted, but so have many feminists who don't think of themselves as radfems.
Even then I think "Feminism and men's rights are fundamentally opposed" is a "hard" version and not universal enough to call it a central pillar. I think a more accurate "central pillar" of MRA ideology is:
Men have issues. These are not just incidental collateral damage from misogyny but active societal and institutional discrimination against men based on hostile sexist beliefs about men. These issues cause serious harm and deserve to have serious effort and resources devoted to addressing them. The idea that Feminism will help men too is bullshit. "Feminism For Men" projects are doomed to fail because it is impossible to persuade more than a tiny minority of Feminists to agree with the statements above because they are incompatible with either Feminist Theory or individual hostile sexist beliefs about men. Feminism cannot fix many men's issues because it either refuses to acknowledge them, is ideologically incapable of discussing them without reframing them in a way that prevents them from acknowledging the root causes and derails the discussion to be about how women are harmed and men are harmful, or lacks the will to take meaningful action because helping women is always prioritized. Feminism cannot be trusted as an ally in this struggle, and it has repeatedly chosen to make itself our enemy by actively opposing activism on men's issues whether it's done as 'fellow feminists' or not, and by Feminist organizations and individuals that gain any amount of institutional power actively using that power to perpetuate or worsen institutional discrimination against men. It is impossible to reform Feminism from within and all attempts to do so have failed. The only option is to have our own movement so we are not subject to constant tone policing and derailing, and can prioritize helping men because no one else will. We are willing to accept Feminist indifference to men's issues but we will not tolerate active hostility. Our mission includes opposing Feminism when it promotes anti-male beliefs and policies. We will only cooperate with Feminists who are willing to work with us on our terms, because we have tried working on their terms and it's impossible because their terms are "sit down, shut up, speak only when spoken to."
Anyway in reality this has turned into blind and universal opposition to anything feminists do or say, including opposition to women's rights issues out of spite and playing tit for tat, and this is the fundamental failure of the men's rights movement. It gave up on the moral high road and stooped to the level of its worst detractors. But, like, ahistorically attributing other self-identified feminists' bad ideas like treating gender rights as a zero sum game to MRA influence and not acknowledging the homegrown roots of these problems is continuing the exact same patterns of behavior that led to this situation in the first place.
tl;dr/disclaimer: you're partially right but using MRAs as a bogeyman for disagreements with other feminists is bullshit. Second wave radfems predate and heavily influenced the MRM: primarily as MRAs reacting to radfems but sometimes adopting some of their bad ideas out of spite, (e.g. MGTOW is extremist MRAs taking Separatist Feminism and going "Oh yeah? Well what if WE did that?") and if you see a commonality between toxic behavior in MRAs and other Feminists it's more likely that either it came from radfems first, or it's something that every extremist reactionary ideology reinvents.
People in the notes really want to attribute this to radfems but, it's basically impossible to get so-called libfems to acknowlege men's issues on its own terms. They fundamentally believe men cannot be "sytemically" oppressed and if you point out things like the sentencing gap or men's higher homelessness rates--things that would be seen as straightfoward proof of structual oppression if it was about any other demographic--they will engage in a series of mental gymnastics to not listen to what you are saying.
The MRM has most of the the ugly flaws that feminism has, but they don't "believe" that feminism is hostile to attempts to address men's issues, they know that from experience. Because it's true.
If you're an atheist, why are you an atheist?
Problem of evil (or some variant on it, e.g. injustice, pain, etc.)
God's perfections are logically inconsistent
God has no explanatory role in the natural sciences
Existence of God inconsistent with plurality of being
Some other argument persuaded me
Raised without God, never thought about it
Religious trauma, rejected the whole shebang
Vibe's off, just seems wrong
Something Else
Not an atheist
initially: problem of evil ish stuff/ inconsistencies in scripture -> god might exist but he's not good/ as described by religion i grew up in
eventually for maintenance: (an active and interacts with humans) god doesn't seem necessary to explain anything. maybe there's a deist god or something but have not been convinced of the existence of a god with any particular specific properties.
this seems very monotheistic god coded. like, yeah, many of those reasons for that one god specifically, but in the general case "no evidence in favor of any gods, not needed for anything" is the only one that makes sense
imo "fuckoff complexity penalty for a mind with 0 reductionistic models behind it" does not get enough love
God gets to be infinitely complex if he wants, he does things just to do them
My argument against God is "in the historical record we can track the process of making God up and we know why people do it and what role it served so what are the odds the real God would come out just like that
I recall being *sort of* religious as a child - being read bible stories and hearing that atheists were dumb for thinking we decended from monkeys. I remember another kid (we were ~9 or so) saying something about evolution and me thinking "awh, she doesn't have a soul, that's so sad ;( - but I didn't really think about it very *much*. I remember one time I tried praying and it felt really stupid.
Then I watched my first Creationist Pwned youtube Epic Atheist video when I was ~10 or ~11 and it instantly clicked, like the second I realised that 'this shit's made up like santa claus' was a possibility that I could have it was obvious and I never once felt any kind of spiritual conflict about it.
Problem of evil is pretty big and pretty obvious (though I could see the god just being evil as a possibility) - the big thing really, and the one that I always circle back to nowadays is...
I think theists have, like, at least a *bit* of a point when they talk about an Uncaused Cause, like there's a bit fuzzy mystery hole around 'what caused the big bang' and 'what happened before the big bang' and 'if there was nothing before the big bang and no cause, why?', and, sure, it seems like there's got to be some kind of exception to causality right at the start. "Why is there something rather than nothing". It's weird. Mysterious.
But there's just nothing linking this Uncaused Cause to a big floating grey-bearded man in the sky who is Always Right About Everything, created people intentionally, has opinions on what they do with their lives, and punishes and rewards them based on his standards of those people's (unjustified) beliefs in how great he is and whether they have gay sex or not. As described in supernaturally perfect detail by this book, written and translated piecemeal by many different faliable imperfect mortal humans over the course of many thousands of years.
Even if there *was* something legitimately divine by any definition - why the fuck would you ever trust a *human* to be able to accurately tell you what it is - humans lie all the time, and given how there are many religious claims that conflict with eachother, most of them necessarily have! If two people claim to have recieved divine revelation directly from god, and they claim two completely different contradictory things, how would you be able to tell which one is correct?
It's frustrating that "I don't know the answer, and nobody else does either" can be so much less rhetorically persuasive than "I have an answer! It may be completely made up and unsupported by any evidence, but I DO have one!"
In first study of its kind, Cambridge researchers found AI toys could misread some children's emotions.
I love how there was just this whole untapped market of people that was like "I hate existing, I hate having agency, I hate making decisions, won't some benevolent corporation come and rid me of these burdens? Why can't I be a passenger in my own life?!" and suddenly out of nowhere the technology exists and they're freebasing it like a 70s rockstar snorting coke at Studio 54.
I totally understand and even largely agree with posts that assert that masculinity is fairly empty and that you can't really construct a masculinity that doesn't suggest women aren't that and in some way constricts womanhood.
but, at the same time, you do have to tell boys they can be something, a type of man, besides "beats his wife". especially today when they are constantly being told that "beats his wife" is the kind of man they should be. Boys are, largely, going to become men. and we, socially, have the ability and responsibility to shape them into better men, through cultural ideas of masculinity and manhood. I think abandoning this front simply exposes our flank in the fight for gender equality or liberation.
okay well first of all I didn't say we need to centre men let alone entirely so let's start from that position and not put words in my mouth. Secondly you are dumb as bricks if you think it is either correct or useful to go "men will always hate women" so... what we kill every man alive and raise every male child as a girl or do uou a different and even stupider idea to suggest? maybe we should just all kill ourselves or something?
also I just want to say men have not entirely gotten worse which is obvious to anyone who was sentient during the early 00s. maybe you're young as and have lived through the current period of reactionisation of men, but I was alive when it was the sincere desire of every man to drive Brittaney Spears to suicide. My grandmother was rejected from uni because they didn't have any female bathrooms. get some fuckin perspective
More fundamentally is the fact that, like, the person you're responding to *doesn't want to eliminate masculinity* because they still want to draw a moral distinction between men and women and assert that men should be understood to be different than women and that because of this men must be treated as socially distinct from women and, in fact, *trained to see themselves as socially distinct from women*.
You cannot have a purely negative masculinity. "Everybody is right to see you as suspicious and dangerous, but if you work really, really hard you can get people to conditionally accept that you might be 'one of the good ones'" is a psychologically corrosive thing to internalize. It breaks people.
Also, the particular kind of insane conservative masculinity that people are concerned with today is an extension of two principles:
Nobody gives a shit what happens to you, if you died in the gutter tomorrow nobody would notice or care and it wouldn't even be a tragedy.
Literally the only thing that matters in life is doing the things that will force people to care about you.
Like, they say that shit out loud really explicitly all the time.
So, like, I feel like going "We can fight this by telling men that both of those things are true and there's nothing they can do to change it!" is like, maybe not actually a productive strategy?
started watching The Amazing Digital Circus and…why are people so insane about this show? I don’t know what the fandom discourse is even about but I’ve seen a lot of icebergs floating past and is it just like a vivziepop situation or what
or maybe Steven Universe is a better comparison
it's very optimized for That Kind Of Audience, whether it was intentional or not. it has kiddie aesthetics and is not a kiddie show, and a bunch of the creators are LGBT, it is character-driven in a mystery world, the characters have clearly defined personalities and relationships but no romantic feelings towards each other and are thus very shippable, there's things to make Lore Theories about, and the delay between episodes is long enough for people to go insane and write a bunch of fic but not long enough to move on to something else
there's nothing that could be interpreted as a Morally Good Political Message by any but the most devoted "all art is political" types, so it doesn't have that element when steven universe did, but other than that it's a Fandom Drama Accumulator waiting to happen
also in episode 6 Jax does a Twosome Time and a Rainstorm, so that was cool
I'm only two episodes in but I'm getting a strong "if you liked Severance you may also enjoy..." vibe from it, does this continue?
I would say it's halfway between that and "we have Severance at home" it's obviously not nearly as tight as Severance is. we've still learned almost nothing about the world, it's been all adventure-of-the-week-in-which-character-is-revealed episodes
word of mouth helped spread it but it also got a similar effect to Pibby as in people started doing a lot after the announcement and that got a lot of people into the show before it even really started rolling.
yeah that was weird, it seemed like it had a whole pre-made fandom after it premiered
like my girlfriend watched it and that was how I saw it, and she showed me it when there was only the one episode, and it like seemed to have a fandom already? I should have asked at the time how she got into it, iirc it wasn't TOO long after the premiere? there was a Matpat video about it stating the very obvious
I guess that was just because it was so Fandom Ready?
I think fans of indie animation are maybe just like that? If you're into that kind of thing and want to Do Fandom about it, you're going to have to make your fun based off a small number of episodes with significant gaps between release.
And they're a little too good at it; it's becoming apparent it's stressing the animators the hell out before they're even two episodes into their project. See also: Knights of Guinevere accumulating discourse immediatley upon release of the pilot because the creator said a character was meant to be cis...and apparently people were already very emotionally invested in a headcanon about character from a 30 minute pilot.
remember that every demographic disparity in crime statistics is due to systemic injustice, except for gender disparity, which captures the objective truth
Bella Swan being a blank slate for projection purposes was Fine in hindsight, we see the same technique in a lot of fiction today
It's not necessarily a totally new trend. Like, back in the 30s, the first person narrators of The Star Maker (homebody English husband undergoing a bit of a midlife crisis when he has an out-of-body experience) and Rebecca (the second woman to marry Maximilian de Winter) are blank slates to the point of not having names.
(Although I haven't read Twilight, so IDK whether Bella Swan is actually blanker in characterization than those two in spite of having a name.)
Would not call the narrator of Rebecca a blank slate at all. She is a very specific fucked up person. Her having no name serves a totally different purpose.
well there's "incel" as is like guys who can't get any even though they want it. Mostly this comes down to a lack of self-confidence and not knowing where to start. and then there's "incel" as in the online sub-culture based on seething self-hatred and a whole load of misogyny. Then there's "incel" as an insult meaning basically "loser", which i've seen applied to people who are definitely having sex, like celebrity sex trafficker andrew tate. well i think a lot of crap feminist discourse works by moving between these concepts (though not necessarily the term itself) at random
I really have zero patience with the whole "man vs. bear" / "you're alone in an elevator with three adult men BUT you feel completely safe. Who are they" / "male night joggers are the natural predator of female night joggers" thing. Like, it's jokes, but it's also sincere, and it reinforces the idea that it's normal and good for women to be afraid all the time, especially of men.
It is not good for women to be afraid all the time, and we should not encourage it! When you consume a media diet of mostly true crime, buy a surveillance device for your house, and commiserate with the girlies online about how scary it is to see a man in a public place, you are basically cultivating an anxiety disorder. This will make your life more unpleasant, because you have trained yourself to be scared all the time, and it will not benefit you, because your fears are based on memes, not reality. You're not protecting yourself from anything; you're just giving yourself an extra flinch response.
And it plays right into the hands of conservatives! The right wing would love it if all women, especially all white and/or wealthy women, were terrified to leave their houses alone because they might see a strange man. They want you to be on a quest for One Good Man who will protect you from all other men and to be too scared to go anywhere without him. They want you to be on a hair trigger, ready to call the cops on anyone who makes you uncomfortable, because that is your function within their hierarchy.
If you are a woman, especially a white woman, then your fear is used to justify violence against poor people and people of color, especially men. From the perspective of conservatives, this is what your fear is for. And your fear is, in large part, what you are for.
Don't let them use you. Don't cultivate your fear.
Peer-reviewing @poorpoorpitifulme's tags.
lol come on
Guys I found it, I found the ultimate “cultural Christianity brainrot”
Not being a young earth creationist is cultural Christianity
basic civility as a means to build coalitions to bring about social change? That pales in comparison to my strategy, posting "punching up" jokes on social media, which will deliver results any day now
like i dunno man. if you look at the junior far-right misogynist league i don't see how it isn't obviously downstream of all that "male tears lol" shit from 15 years ago. Yeah "the true male feminist will hear a woman say she hates all men, understand where she is coming from and sincerely agree" ok maybe, but is the point to push away everyone but "the true male feminist" or is it to pursue the political goals of feminism? If it's the latter then this rhetoric needs to be spoken about in terms of strategy rather than whether someone who objects is a bad person or whatever. And I think if you speak in terms of strategy then it's obvious that this shit is rather self-defeating.
It also has a good chance of pushing away the true male feminist after a while, because most people will only put up with "You must put up with constant verbal abuse to earn your place in our movement" for so long, regardless of their political beliefs.
or turn them into weirdly repressed nervous wrecks!
morbidly i think the stereotype of the "non-threatening feminist boy" sex pest may have been downstream of this too. when you dont forbid men from participating in a group but do everything you can to make them feel unwelcome, the men who stick around are not necessarily going to be "true male feminists" even! it's much easier to fit yourself into that absurd box, which forces any honest person to engage in numerous self-effacement rituals, if you're misrepresenting who you actually are
When you set unreasonable standards, you don't select for perfection. You select for dishonesty.
Feminists will talk about about how men are trash and then be shocked when the men who can stand to be around them turn out to be trash people.
When he was laughing and nodding along to those jokes about how terrible men are he was telling you who he was!
