(Part 2) Best men gender studies according to redditors

> I have yet to find someone who self identifies as a feminist that writes about problems men face.

If you haven't observed any self-identified feminists that write men's issues, then you haven't been paying attention. The pro-feminist men's movement goes back as far as the 1970s, and gave rise to an entire field of academic study that addresses men's issues. There are many specific examples of feminists engaging in this discourse; in fact I can list more feminists just named Michael that have done more to concretely address men's problems than the entire men's rights movement combined. Michael Flood compiled the Men's Bibliography, and co-edited the International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities. Michael Kimmel wrote and edited numerous books and papers addressing men's issues, and is establishing a center for the study of men and masculinities in Stony Brook. And Michael Messner similarly wrote volumes on men and masculinity, with a particular focus on sports. In addition to the Michaels there are many other examples. The National Organization for Women campaigned against the draft. Susan Faludi wrote Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man. David Lisak was a founding editor of Psychology of Men and Masculinity (a publication of an explicitly pro-feminist organization), and is on the board of 1in6.org, an organization that supports male victims of childhood sexual abuse. Jennifer Siebel Newsom is creating a documentary about American masculinity called The Mask You Live In (supported and no doubt funded in large part by feminists). Feminists like Joanna Schroeder and Hugo Schwyzer wrote for and edited The Good Men Project. Ozy Frantz and Noah Brand are writing What About The Men. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

In contrast, what have men's rights activists written or done? You have Paul Elam, infamous for writing bombastic and inflammatory articles on A Voice for Men, and Karen Straughan, an uncredentialed college dropout who posts videos about "gender theory" on YouTube without the slightest pretense of academic rigor or peer review. I'll grant that MRAs have Warren Farrell, but even he came from feminism. The rest of the MRAs I'm familiar with seem content to complain on reddit and various blogs about feminists not caring about men, while never seeming to lift a finger to do anything themselves to help them.

Have you actually looked? Feminists have a presence in academia and the real world and do lots of things to help both genders. Never mind the fact that fixing gender roles would help men immensely, as well.

Here:

> Of course, you’ll find women (and, gasp!, even feminists) in leadership in most of the institutions actually working to make life safer for men. It’s feminists who fought a long and recently successful battle to ensure that male victims are included in the FBI’s definition of rape.

>Some feminists are working to integrate the military so that the burden of war doesn’t just fall on men, and some are working against the militarism that not only enables rape in the armed forces, but underpins the narrow, confining cultural ideas about masculinity that make so many men feel trapped.

>Feminists have ensured that, through the Violence Against Women Act that MRAs oppose, the overall rate of intimate partner violence in the U.S. declined 64 percent between 1994 and 2010, and that decline is distributed evenly between male and female victims.

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>If you haven't observed any self-identified feminists that write men's issues, then you haven't been paying attention. The pro-feminist men's movement goes back as far as the 1970s, and gave rise to an entire field of academic study that addresses men's issues.

> There are many specific examples of feminists engaging in this discourse; in fact I can list more feminists just named Michael that have done more to concretely address men's problems than the entire men's rights movement combined. Michael Flood compiled the Men's Bibliography, and co-edited the International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities.

>Michael Kimmel wrote and edited numerous books and papers addressing men's issues, and is establishing a center for the study of men and masculinities in Stony Brook.

> And Michael Messner similarly wrote volumes on men and masculinity, with a particular focus on sports. In addition to the Michaels there are many other examples. The National Organization for Women campaigned against the draft. Susan Faludi wrote Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man.

>David Lisak was a founding editor of Psychology of Men and Masculinity (a publication of an explicitly pro-feminist organization), and is on the board of 1in6.org, an organization that supports male victims of childhood sexual abuse.

> Jennifer Siebel Newsom is creating a documentary about American masculinity called The Mask You Live In (supported and no doubt funded in large part by feminists).

> Feminists like Joanna Schroeder and Hugo Schwyzer wrote for and edited The Good Men Project. Ozy Frantz and Noah Brand are writing What About The Men. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

I'll have to grab the book later to find the actual source, but in manthropology they talk about how the roman legionnaire would shave every day by using a pumice stone to grind down the hairs.

Wow. This article was like an onion... a rotten onion. The deeper I dived the worse it got. At first I thought it was your bog standard "NAMALT" article, a point I agree with. Then I was a little miffed that it was using the book they hadn't read as a prop for its point. Then I was upset that it was making assumptions about the authors views that they couldn't possibly justify without having read the book. And then I was even more upset that the sources Mr. Green used in fact strongly contradicted the view he presents of Ms Kipnis and her book.

So this post kind of evolved as I dove into it. Warning, long post is long.

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> This is a review of a book’s promo blurb. I simply could get no further than the promotional copy.

Sigh. Look if you are unwilling to engage with the book any deeper then the promo blurb and some reviews others have written, I really don't think that's very fair. This isn't even a strawman. This is just holding up a book as a prop for some points you want to make. The author and your audience both deserve more then this.

So lets look at the promo blurb he finds so terrible:

> It's no secret that men often behave in confusing ways, but in recent years we've witnessed so many spectacular public displays of male excess-disgraced politicians, erotically desperate professors, fallen sports icons-that we're left to wonder whether something has come unwired in the collective male psyche. (emphasis added)

I'll be honest, language that generalizes men is something I'm personally sensitive to, but this barely makes me twitch. Kipnis does hedge with often indicating that she is not attributing this behavior to all men. I could call issue as to is it fair to attribute the excess of disgraced politicians and what not to all men under "male excess'. On the other hand, while I'm not certain exactly what sort of behavior would be characterized as 'male excess' but anything that is in 'excess' is probably behavior that is outside the normal for 'male.'

The last bit is the most 'problematic' and I do think it can be a bit duplicitous to try and couch an offensive generalization ('have things come unwired in the collective male psyche') as a hypothetical. Most of the time when this is done, its clear that the question or hypothetical posed is not genuine. Ie "When did you stop raping your wife?"

But look I just wrote two paragraphs to try and decode the meaning contained in just one. If I wanted to say more it would probably behoove me to look for some deeper context. Like the fact that the book is a collection of essays about public figures and men in Ms Kipnis's life who have behaved badly, and what their lives are like. To me this makes the above blurb make a lot more sense.

Now Mr. Green goes on to write a whole essay about it. At some point I think you have to admit you are digging to deeply in a single source and have to look for more information if you wish to keep engaging it. And Mr. Green does that... but in the most terrible (and frankly disingenuous) way.

So instead of reading, you know the book that Kipnis actually wrote. He now reaches out to quote reviews of what other people wrote. Come on now, this is just terrible. He quotes another review which contains a quote from Kipnis book. But the lines is without context. It doesn't even appear to be a complete sentence!

This is just stupid, and insulting to the Ms Kipnis and the reader. If Mr. Green had actually read the book perhaps he could enlighten us to the context that was written in. Perhaps it makes more sense in context. Perhaps its even worse! We certainly can't make a fair determination from just this. Of course that doesn't stop Mr. Green, from this quote of a quote he is able to make the determination that "Kipnis is compulsive in her need to generalize about men." And a whole host of other generalizations of her views.

Point blank, this is emphatically not the way I would wish someone to treat my words. I do not think it would be fair to draw several paragraphs worth of conclusions about my views based upon one promo blurb (that I probably didn't write) and one incomplete quote without context. I do not think it would be the way I think Mr. Green would want his words treated. And so I cannot condone his treating Ms. Kipnis's words this way. He has a whole book from which to draw information about her views. He should use it.

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To counter point, lets take some other quotes, directly from Ms. Kipnis's mouth. These are contained in one of the articles he linked to.

> There’s a human tendency to recognize your own vulnerability but see the other person as having caused it, being indifferent to it or not suffering from the same condition. So much of post-feminist attitudes toward men is very condemnatory. There’s a real impatience as if men have it all figured out. In some ways men are in the better position but not necessarily in all ways.

> I sort of identify with men. If I were in that position, I suppose I would probably be doing the same thing. There used to be this idea during second-wave feminism that if women came to power everything would be different and there would be a humanist utopia. I think women are capable of acting just as despicably.

> We hear about a sense of disappointment with men on the part of women. But the disappointment is so wide-ranging that the question becomes whether there would be any way with men that wasn’t disappointing. It’s probably a dire thing to say but there is a contradiction between feminism and heterosexual desire. Those things come up against each other. In the book I was trying to write from that sense of contradiction between desiring and loving men and also having this critique of masculinity and phallic sorts of behavior.

I don't know if I agree with all that Ms Kipnis says here, but clearly her views are much more nuanced then the way he portrays them in his article. Frankly it's disgusting that he only quotes a quote that indirectly quotes her book when the very review he is quoting from, contains an interview with her which probably exposes her views in much more detail!

And lets look at what the other reviewer he quoted had to say about the book:

> At a glance, Kipnis looks like a feminist at a shooting range where the targets are faceless "pin-ups" of fallen men. But in fact she's taking paper cutouts and rendering them with great dimension and humanity.

> She takes the least sympathetic public figures—the kind pundits like to lacerate with their manicured claws—and somehow finds humanity underneath their hubris.

And this is where it seems to me that Mr. Green is being dishonest and not engaging in good faith. He quotes from these reviews, so presumably he has read it. And so he should be aware that at least one reviewer found the book to actually contain more depth and insight then his reading of the promo copy would indicate. And that Ms Kipnis's own words show that her own views are more nuanced then how he portrays her.

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It fundamentally stupid to write a review of a book you have not read, which would be bad enough. But this article is dishonest in the way it portrays Ms Kipnis's views, and I do not think this is the kind of mistake that could have been made honestly. This is nothing more then a hit piece really. I'm disappointed that The Good Men Project published it, and it achieved the opposite of its aims. I've purchased a copy of the book.

There's actually a well-researched book on this topic for the interested.
Manthropology: The Science of Why the Modern Male Is Not the Man He Used to Be

TL;DR - Modern males are much weaker in almost all ways than our ancestors.

ち、ち、ち、ち、違うし！！１
『男はなぜ暴力を振るうのか』を参照にした。

I'd never heard of Lionel Tiger, but I feel ashamed now that I hadn't. His book published back in 2000 looks interesting, and outlines trends that are well-known to MRA's today. A look at the reviews suggests to me that maybe his ideas needed some more refinement, but one can hope he has made some progress by now. I wish him the best of luck with the men's centre.

Also interesting to note that the International Men's Day ebook publicised by it's author in the AVFM article "International Men’s Day: Compliments of the Men’s Rights Movement" published on November 16 2014 has now been removed from the Amazon bookstore. Here it was and this is where the link goes now (404 Not Found).

Aside from Christina Hoff Somers, I'd be curious who exactly the "non-radical" feminists are. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any. Gloria Steinem, maybe? IIRC, it seems that she can be fairly reasonable at times...but not so much at others. Susan Faludi? From what I remember of reading Stiffed, I'm not really certain how she should be classified.

As far as feminism goes, seemingly the more radical the better. And where Postmodernism and Feminism meet? Fuhgeddaboutit. Dworkin's, errm, metaphorical penis as a "symbol of terror," Sontag's idea that the white race is the "cancer of humanity," etc.

PS: Also, isn't this sort of thing better posted in /r/KiAChatroom ?

This isn't surprising. There have been numerous articles, like this and books like this around for years now. Some look at it as an opportunity to redefine masculinity, others take a more doom-and-gloom approach.

> I don't know what that means.

Someone who, knowingly or unknowingly, believes in the values of Liberalism, the ideology of Capitalism that was born out of the Enlightenment, and comprising such values as Individualism, Universalism, Egalitarianism, Meliorism, etc.

>That doesn't mean I'll condone lists that say "beware of women who vent their frustrations, but exaggerate events to goad you into a fight."

Dr. Michael Kimmel, a sociologist and psychologist, studied the phenomenon of why young and middle-aged white men have flocked to join groups like the MRM. A great many of them have as a catalyst the fact that they were dumped by their female partners. These self-reported instances that he documents are more than a separate set of individual, atomized cases, they present a pattern that we can then use to, for example, make a list of blokes to watch out for.

>I also worry about random murders, but I generally push those thoughts to the side, because they're irrational and not constructive.

Except they're not so random. Women very rarely, if ever, go on a shooting spree the way Elliot Rogers did, killing men because... reasons. Whereas men have historically had feminicides, such as witch hunts, where we routinely killed women simply to put them in their place and assert our dominance. We still have them today in the form of honour killings and they aren't just a thing that happens in fundamentalist, Islamist geographical areas.

> Well first of all you’re part of the problem.

Ah, I'm part of the problem - with my single motherhood and putting down straight white males and my man-hating. Interesting.

>I don’t know what you gain by denying what I have said but okay

I gain the truth, and I gain the opportunity to show others what the truth is.

>Like I said you don’t have to put men down to raise everyone else up.

Did you read ANYTHING AT ALL that I typed, or did you just assume what I said because that was easier for you to respond to?

>I think it is your false assumption that just because someone is white and male means they are somehow impervious from human problems specifically.

I think it is your false assumption that I believe anything of the sort.

>This is actually sexist and racist.

Sure thing, snowflake.

>In fact the things I have said would benefit society as a whole, specifically the African American community and even women.

Because a woman can't do anything "without her man"?

>Can I not advocate for white men?

Do white men really need someone to advocate for them? Is this another "War on Christmas" thing where someone in conservative media made up a bad situation so that they'd have something to rant about? Because white men are in an awfully good position in our society.

>Do you have a problem with this?

What I have a problem with is ignorance. Something you would appear to have in droves.

>If you do then fuck off. Label me alt-right if you want, makes no difference to me.

You absolutely sound like you get your information from the alt-right media, at the very least. What is most worrying is that you don't seem interested in correcting your poor information at all.

>The decline of men (https://www.amazon.com/Decline-Men-American-Getting-Flipping/dp/0061353159)

Your sourcing about the decline of men is a link to a book that some dude wrote. Sorry to be the one to break this to you, but that's not sourcing your statement at all. You're going to have to do a lot better than that to convince anyone of anything.

>Side effects (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-02-14/the-side-effects-of-the-decline-of-men)

So my question here is...did you even read that article? Or did you just Google something and that title met the match so you included it? Because that article doesn't say what you seem to believe it is saying.

>I was referring to interpersonal male role models. A father figure. Not some guy on TV

First of all, that's not at all what you said. You said there were no positive male role models or models for masculinity. All of those I cited are exactly that (plus many more).

As for the ridiculous suggestion that there aren't positive role models for young men to look up to in their everyday lives, well I'm not sure how you could possibly know such a thing. Where is your documentation of this evidence? Or is it just something that you were told?

I've got to be honest - you're clearly not here to find out what we think. You're clearly here to rant at us. We're not going to buy into the idiocy that someone sold you on.

I'm sorry that your life sucks so bad that you fall for crap like this...I really am. Maybe you can find a positive male role model in your life to fix this...of course, my emphasis would be on "positive", because it's clear to me that you have more than enough negative influences in your media.

The Second Sexism.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Second-Sexism-Discrimination-Philosophy/dp/0470674512

The Decline Of Males

http://www.amazon.com/The-Decline-Males-First-Unexpected/dp/0312263112/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

You'd enjoy this.

> Esther Vilar truly is a brilliant author.

Thanks. I'm going to give The Manipulated Man a read.

http://www.amazon.com/Manipulated-Man-Esther-Vilar-ebook/dp/B0047745S0/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=

https://www.amazon.com/Angry-White-Men-American-Masculinity/dp/1568589611

See, I think we're talking at cross purposes. You are literally defining the word "feminism" as the result of "whatever perfect moral good dictates you personally believe should happen in any situation". But how is that definition useful unless you have some way to guarantee that everyone uses the word that same way? Because — spoiler alert — nobody else really does.

Most people who identify as feminists either hew to their own personal moral compasses — including biases and prejudices and blind spots — instead of knowing anything about let alone hewing to your biases and blind spots and prejudices, or else they just hew to "whatever some other famous-sounding feminist told them to hew to". Whatever some author wrote in their book, whatever some celebrities endorse on their talk shows, whatever some academics espouse that gets enshrined in several federal laws, etc.

Plus, this misunderstanding leads to the false solidarity of running to the defense of any person who hides behind that word as a banner. Why would abusers fail to flock to whatever unquestioning haven opens their arms to them for naught but the utterance of some magic word?

Like I said, somewhat of one. I'm getting a lot better. Actually, reading some PUA stuff helped, though I steered clear of most of the creepy stuff. This book was really good, even at helping me with everyday social interaction.

Not what I mean at all. Where the hell do you live? As I told you, I live in SoCal. Give me examples that are somewhat remotely relavent to me. Do you think that Egalitarians/MRAs support ANY of those things? Are you new to this subreddit? If you are trying to justify the evils of feminism by comparing them to the Taliban, you're setting the bar pretty damn low.


For over half a century, feminism has been Spreading Misandry, Legalizing Misandry and Sanctifying Misandry.


Waging a war on men and sadly, even a war against boys.

That is why I, like most members of this subreddit, are vehemently antifeminist.

My own father passed away when I was just a kid. Mom remarried a few years later, couldn't relate much to step-dad, he was alright I guess.

A few decades ago (in my 30's) I read Iron John by the poet Robert Bly. Worth a read. This speaks to the difference between the 'women's movement' and a 'men's movement'.

Male-ness is different - and nothing can replace a role model. Am in the middle now of being the model to my boys that I never had.

https://www.amazon.ca/Women-Klan-Foundations-Modern-Feminism-ebook/dp/B00OYA0TY4

Edited to add, author is a retired lawyer and prosecutor with 35 years experience. So, not exactly uneducated.

Yup, got some good ones for you:

Three Years of Hate: The Very Best of In Mala Fide: http://www.amazon.com/Three-Years-Hate-Very-ebook/dp/B00AWJVZXK

The Way of Men by Jack Donovan: http://www.amazon.com/The-Way-of-Men-ebook/dp/B007O0Y1ZE/

Here a good review of the Donovan: http://uncouthreflections.wordpress.com/2013/02/02/jack-donovans-the-way-of-men/

I also liked Feminism and Men

> SCUM Manifesto is a radical feminist manifesto by Valerie Solanas

Literally the first phrase in the page. Look, if now you understand that this kind of shit is not cool and want to repudiate her because she is not useful for your agenda that's ok.

But that is pretty man-hating, also this shit right here https://www.amazon.com/Are-Men-Obsolete-Debate-Gender/dp/1770894519

Like, seriously, calling half the population that has worked in providing pretty much all the technology we have now obsolete is just laughable

http://www.michaelkimmel.com/

Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era https://www.amazon.com/dp/1568589611/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_mhcBCbAP0FQQE

http://www.amazon.com/Make-Her-Chase-You-Attracting/dp/1440461546/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1299380069&sr=8-1

"Make Her Chase You" by Tynan (Herbal). There's a kindle edition also. It's a very interesting read.

I've read my share of "why are white men so full of murderous rage?" on liberal sites.

Edit: fucking FINE. I'll link to a few of the garbage articles

http://www.salon.com/2014/05/27/white_guy_killer_syndrome_elliot_rodgers_deadly_privileged_rage/

http://jezebel.com/5928584/why-most-mass-murderers-are-privileged-white-men

Hey here's a whole book:

https://www.amazon.com/Angry-White-Men-American-Masculinity/dp/1568585136

Edit2: all these downvotes and no one responding. Puhhhh-thetic.