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Neither side in this sex war seems willing to admit that both parties are deeply behaviorally flawed in terms of operating within an (at least in rhetoric) equitable society we all claim to want with one another.
I think step zero would be for both men and women to admit that both are deeply flawed in their engagement with one another, acknowledge both are trying to operate within sociocultural environments we are evolutionarily unprepared for, and therefore shouldn't expect perfection or even competency from the other, so we can work to bridge the massive empathy deficit between us.
But since healing doesn't trend on social media or in culture like vitriol, insult, or indignation, carry on.
"Please understand that a subset of your group is a serious threat to our safety"
briefcase unclasping noise
"Sure but step one is to define what the term safe really means in this context...."
i would like to request a case study from the psych department, where we make another post once this has all blown over that just says "rape bad, don't rape women MMmkay?" or something like that so we can see how the responses differ.
i'm not shitposting i just think we should do this.
Kinda hard to have an equal discussion when being a woman entails being sexually harassed and occasionally assaulted by a bunch of men, mostly ones you barely know or don't know at all, on a regular basis before you even hit puberty. Your "sex war" is more like a sex genocide with the effects biting the whole male demographic in the ass, even the ones who didn't cause it.
It's also hard when most of the men that participate in this discussion (despite often not wanting to admit it at first) subconsciously think that women should listen to their venting 5 seconds after meeting them and be in a relationship with them and hug them and bang them and stuff. Seriously, interacting with guys just feels like gambling, with most of them forming some sort of unhealthy obsession with you and taking your kindness as a sign of weakness or inability to see their red flags; to a lot of guys, interaction with them is basically a green light to move on you. It sometimes feels like life is a "don't unintentionally upset or engage with a random man too much or else he might find your phone number on the dark web and send you texts threatening to rape, torture, and murder you". We live in a society where it's relatively common for high school girls to have a guy classmate they occasionally talk to tell/text them that they wanna rape her, just unfiltered and out there because she decided to have a conversation.
Their problems are caused by patriarchy too, but that doesn't mean I'm willing to subject myself to sexism from them. They, whether they realize it or not, feel like they deserve what they want from a woman, the unfairness of women not wanting them makes them frustrated and they see gender equality as a means to an end, they see it as a way to have women finally love them.
It's not so much of "women and men are equally fucking up and need to make up" as it is "women are extremely scared by men, and negotiating with the likely emotionally unstable potentially violent people with nothing to lose who probably thought about you and them dating immediately after seeing you never seems like the good option". It's like encouraging kids to interact with people who they think are violent and might shoot up a school in order to convince them not to shoot up the school... Even talking to someone out of pity is endangering yourself.
Most guys want to get in your pants or eventually get to that point, whether you're apathetic to them or nice to them or mean to them. How am I supposed to talk to guys about sexism when usually their main concern is the lack of action with women and my main concern is interacting with men is inherently extremely risky and I fear I'm about to get raped or murdered when a man raises his voice at me?
It has to be at least 95% of straight men who are the danger women have to do conversational twister with to be relatively safe and comfortable around, and the remaining portion of men usually take an "insult" about the majority of men as an "insult" to them.
Men and women are both negatively affected by our sexist system but the playing field is not level. The solution is getting a majority of men to realize exactly what women deal with from men, and getting them to actively work against their subconscious sexism to promote a safer environment for women and remove the high risk of interacting with men, including by halting the rampant objectification of women and their bodies, so women and men can actually be humans with each other for real. The widespread outrage things like the bear meme gets show that this probably isn't going to work out any time soon. Men usually immediately think of it as a challenge to "prove" that women are worse by saying a lot of them are bitchy and hard to read and gold diggers or something, rather than a way to understand why women can't feel safe around men the same way they can around women. But instead men think of it as how women feel about any single man, including them.
At least there are communities like [email protected] that are on the right path though. Sigh.
Thank you for going out of your way to say this 💯
No because I personally am perfect and an exception.
You are, and no one else Mango.
GODDAMNIT I WAS GONNA CLAIM THAT
Lol, you must be one of the guys that get offended by this or the bear meme. If you think stuff like this attacks all men or you directly, or that women have done wrong to men even 1% of what sexism and men violence has done to them you just need to close lemmy for an hour and read a bit. And im a man in case you were wondering, i just dont have my head inside my own ass.
Edit: just to make it clear to everyone reading this guy post where he talked about both sides and all that shit https://lemm.ee/comment/11953665 ended up just saying that for them womens problems are imaginary because they have a full belly and a roof. The story is always the same it doesnt take much to show when someone is such a level of sexist even when they are trying to hide it behind bullshit rethorics.
Have a happy Wednesday.
i will, maybe you will too when you understand there is no sex wars and its just 50% of the population just wanting to feel safe.
i think you might... etymologically, be able to uh classify that statement as a "sex war"
like i get what we're saying but there also kind of is, isn't there?
I just want it to stop, it could have been productive but there's just too much vitriol now
On y va to the bookshop for a new thesaurus.
i've been saying this the entire time, and weirdly, people seem to like it, or at the very least, stop commenting to my responses because they simply don't want to engage because productive dialogue bad? Or something, idk it's the internet don't ask me, i'm not real.
amen.
but that would require taking sex out of the equation. sex is what drives all of this misery on both sides. it's much easier to empathize with people you don't want to fuck, rather than seeing them as a in terms of sexual social dynamics, where those who are sexual desirable on both sides are given leeway in behaviour that is intolerable for those who are not sexual desirable.
I would absolutely agree with you, except for all the other lines humans are always eager to draw between ourselves to the point of undermining our own brothers and sisters. Race, religion, political affiliation, economic opinions, holy shit the lines we draw for socioeconomic status, these aren't random divisions, we seek them out and make bright red angry lines, it is in our nature to draw lines in the sand between ourselves, a remnant of when there literally wasn't enough to go around and only some survived a harsh winter.
To me, again, the first step would for us all to recognize this divisive nature within ourselves and acknowledge its existence to begin mitigating its detrimental effects using societal tools and culture eyes open. Same goes for greed, same goes for hate, our impulse to divide ourselves is destructive, our only hope is to acknowledge its there, it's a near universal problem WE need to minimize.
We can't though because we prefer to play pretend we are above our deeply ingrained animalistic programming, and would consider it insult to acknowledge those vestigial dark impulses are still part of us. But we need to, not to shame us, not to rationalize the cruelty that comes from them, but to add those variables into the equation of civilization so we can solve for homeostasis/relative happiness ans harmony. Denial/Repression is never the answer to anything. It makes things worse.