Do feminist hate being women and the only way they can feel elevated and good about being women is to try to put men down and get them under foot?

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• I don't think you can see what we are seeing.

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  by Benjamin_P on January 27th, 2011

• What are you seeing?

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  by r i p facebook on January 27th, 2011

• Most feminists I know lack empathy, and are quite unaware of the impact some feminists have. I do understand that not all women are the same, and that for the most part you personally have no desire to hurt others - but it is your lack of acceptance that men have been hurt by feminism that is a problem. So when you call yourself a feminist, you are taking their side against us. You just don't understand.
  
  The other thing you need to know is that men ARE insecure, as you are trying to make changes at a fundamental level, and many men draw personal identity from their work (even though I disagree with that). To attempt to make workplace changes without first addressing the male identity crisis is insensitive and invasive.

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  by Benjamin_P on January 27th, 2011

• Benjamin, feminism isn't the root cause of the problems between men and women, sexism is. I could take what you wrote and replace 'sexist' where you wrote 'feminist' and replace women where you've referenced men. Especially this - "But it is your lack of acceptance that women have been hurt by sexism that is a problem." If sexism wasn't alive and well, there would be no need for feminism.

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  by r i p facebook on January 27th, 2011

• But that is just it. I DO understand that sexism hurts women. But that still doesn't give you the right to hurt others. Most men I know are not sexist, I think male chauvenism is far and gone from society at this point. Most of the male sexism today comes from social damage, and immature adults. Men are not raised with the same values that they used to have, due mostly to broken families. There is an abandonment of the long standing social contracts between men and women - and radical feminism is at the center of it all.
  
  This division of the sexes only serves to tear us apart, and the hurt and pain is on both sides... I am at this point more interested in final solutions - and the best solution I think is not to take a side at all. This is an argument I have had with MRA's and Feminists alike.

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  by Benjamin_P on January 27th, 2011

• I have a brother, two grown sons, and two teenage grandsons who all admire and support my stand for social equality for women. Alan Alda, Rosie Greer and many other famous men outspokenly refer to themselves as feminists. So you don't represent men in this equation anymore than I represent feminism. Despite what the average American believes, wages for women are still far below that of their male counterpart, and the same is true of promotions, etc. So how, specifically, is wanting equal pay for equal work (what the equal rights amendments was about - and it never passed) hurtful to you in any way?

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  by r i p facebook on January 28th, 2011

• Equal pay for equal work is not hurtful to me in any way - I never said that it was...
  
  What I do consider hurtful is the fact that you don't consider my pain worth addressing, or even mentioning. Which is futher added to by the arrogance you have as a woman that you 'think' you understand me. When infact you do not.
  
  I am not a father and I am not a grandfather. I am a 30 year old man, who attended school between the years 1986-1998. I know several female teachers who scorned me, simply because I was a boy - and I had done nothing to deserve it, how could I have? Yet there was genuine anger in the classroom, and as an emotionally sensitive boy I could sense it. They let me know exactly where I stood.
  
  I could point to several specific and traumatic experiences during my childhood and secondary education, things that would make you cringe and be called emotional and even in one case sexual harrasment... I never spoke about those events, even with my parents, because I didn't think anyone would believe me, and I was to young to understand it all. I was always bullied, and never had any friends. I was too insecure to talk to girls. We were taught that all the bad things in history were caused by men, and it was all our fault... The worst thing was, that as I look back to those memories I found myself believing those accusations, even as they were directed at me personally. I remember this little voice of protest in my head, "but that is not me, I'm not like that" I would say to myself. I wanted nothing more than for girls to affirm my value as a human being, but they did not.
  
  As I look back over the last 30 years of my life (as many men do when they reach this age) and saw only darkness and dispair... The last 3 years I have been in severe depression and been through several jobs. I was even unfit to work for a great deal of that time. But what has brought me out of that depression was the simple realisation that I have been languishing under the burden of a false accusation - as I now begin to see that the sole motivation for EVERYTHING I have done, was to gain the approval of others. I have been trying (subconsiously) to proove that I am a good person, and clear my name of an accusation that WAS NOT TRUE.
  
  I have a fear of intimacy that is based in a subconsious, and deep seated fear of women. In my heart I am TERRIFIED of women, because I am afraid that they will not love me. I am afraid that they will tear my heart into tiny little pieces (as they have done before). I do love women, and want nothing bad for them, but I am so terribly afraid! The fear is so strong that I am in physical pain all the time.

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  by Benjamin_P on January 29th, 2011

• Benjamin, I'm sorry for your pain, but having read through what I've written to you I didn't find any arrogance, and I didn't say I understood you. I have kept this strictly about feminism, which I will agree with you has changed since the 70's when we were fighting for equal pay. And whereas I haven't accused men of anything, you accuse women of a lot. But as I said before, you are not men and I'm not women, it's just you and me discussing this. So if I can ask you a question that might be a starting point for a conversation, it would be why you personalized what you've heard said about men in general? There's plenty of women bashing that goes on, especially when I was younger, but I never took it personally and I didn't blame all men for thinking and behaving that way, I took it as a symptom of the ills of our society. My sons and I are very close, do you have a good relationship with your mother? Sisters? I don't mean this to be condescending in any way, but at age 30 we're all challenged to look at our approach to life up to that point and decide a new, more mature approach .. or not. We're all burdened by false accusations, and we live in a very unkind society. I applaud you for your realizations, especially for understanding that you've been motivated by the approval of others. But it's a trap to stay in a place of blaming others. I really hope you can overcome your fears because fear is a painful way to live. You've raised so many points here that I'll keep it to this for now, but I'm open to continuting this conversation.

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  by r i p facebook on January 29th, 2011

• After I wrote the above I went on to the read the headlines and found this article by a male doctor titled: 'Why Men Don't Listen to Women.' I don't agree with everything he said but I have experienced everything he writes about with one man or another throughout my life. But what I found enlightening was what the young women had to say in the comments at the bottom of the page. If you're interested:
  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-leahy-phd/why-men-dont-listen-to-wo_b_808187.html

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  by r i p facebook on January 29th, 2011

• I'm sorry, after reading my last post, I realised that I may not have made myself clear. I do understand the idea of having a thick skin in the school yard, because children can sometimes do some pretty nasty things. As I remember it, I always was a bit of an individual - and prided myself on this. I whore my distain for peer pressure and stereotypes as though it were a badge of honour. I remember towards the end of junior school I started to accumulate a small group of fans, particulary amongst the junior boys who were younger than me.
  
  There was one particularly amusing story I could tell about a game of "slaps" I played with another kid when I was 17 that turned violent. Because this guy was pretty tough and no-one could beat him. He was very fast and hit really hard... So I challenged him. Then we played - but he was much faster and stronger than me. He slapped the back of my hand again, and again, and again. But I just held my hands still. I didn't even try to hit him back, I just held my hands while he hit them... This when on for about 10 minutes, and there had accumulated a small crowd watching us. My hands had long since turned red and were now starting to go blue, My arms were shaking uncontrollably, but I still held them out. So the other guys stopped and claimed victory. But as he walked off with his mates I came right up to him and said "I haven't given up yet. We need to keep playing, or else I'm gonna say you lost".
  
  So we continued the game. But my hands were in such agony, I couldn't move them or hit back if I had tried. It was all I could do to hold them out... By this time there was quite a large crowd watching, and the other guy started to become visibly upset, and said "Look. I don't want to hurt you anymore". With that he walked off and the game was over. But I was not bullied at school after that, and I never even saw anyone play that game again while I was there.
  
  So I do understand mental toughness, and was no stranger to peer pressure. I am not a 'macho guy' and though I am quite sentitive, I am also tough. But when I was talking earlier about the emotional and sexual harrasment and the anger I sensed in others, I was not talking about the strudents. I was talking about the TEACHERS. Teachers who were openly feminist, and openly radical, and open about their dislike for boys. Teachers who SHOULD have known better.
  
  What I experienced in junior school was COMPLETE DISEMPOWERMENT, and I very nearly lost my sense of self. My low self esteem came from a low self image of myself which was given to me when I was 9 years old. And while I recognise that I need to own my feelings, I can't excuse the part that they had to play.

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  by Benjamin_P on January 30th, 2011

• I really do understand where you're coming from by two kinds of experience. When I was growing up in the 50's and early 60's, teachers (even the women) were openly sexist. It was expected that boys would go to college and girls would get married and be their wives. Girls weren't supposed to be smarter than boys, even if they were, and they weren't supposed to be better at things than boys, even if they were. I was told that if I didn't let boys win they wouldn't like me, etc. And then I entered a work force that promoted guys less educated and less capable than me because I was a woman. So I went back to school and studied to become a teacher in the 80's. I made it through student teaching and then changed my major because of what the public education system had become. And among the things it had become was biased toward girls in the way the classroom and activities were set up. I saw it play out in the education of my sons and now I'm seeing it play out in the education of my grandsons. (There are scores of books written about the new gender inequity in public education.) But I don't accept that as an excuse to fail. As I tell them, we all have a choice we make daily in life, to become better or to become bitter. You're a really intelligent man, Benjamin. Why not reach out to a junior high boy who's having the same problems you did and become his Big Brother? Big Brothers/Big Sisters is always short big brothers. That's how we change this skewered system that pits the genders, the races, etc. against each other, and it's a way to fight the bitter and become better.

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  by r i p facebook on January 30th, 2011

• If you are really interested in understanding the historical content that brought us to this lousy state of affairs, I would recommend for starters:
  'Stiffed, The Betrayal of the American Man', and 'Backlash, The Undeclared War Against American Women', both by Susan Faludi.
  
  We are all victims of this, and at some time we have all been oppressors, and largely because the greatest crime against our public education is the decree against real history and its implications and the killing of critical thinking. The group in Texas that decides the history curriculum for American school children is currently debating whether to remove the word 'slavery' from our text books lest it offend someone. Children in Birmingham, Alabama don't know what the Civil Rights Movement was. As Emma Goldman said a hundred years ago, the most violent thing in the world is ignorance. And as U2 sang, throw a rock in the air and you're sure to hit someone guilty.
  
  To get beyond being a part of the problem requires work, and I've found that most people (again, male and female, black and white, etc.) would rather hang onto the resentment in their minds than open their minds and educate themselves so they can be a part of the solution. You have yet to address my answer, which was that feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment, regardless of what they've morphed into or are falsely accused of, is about social equality. How can you expect women to be sensitive to the hurt feelings of men, when we live daily with this reality:
  Census statistics released September 16, 2010 show that the women still earn 77 percent of what men earn, based on the median earnings of full-time, year-round workers in 2009. Both men's and women's earnings showed slight increases from 2008 to 2009, with men's at $47,127 and women's at $36,278, a difference of $10,849.
  
  Median earnings for most women of color are even lower. In 2009, the earnings of African American were $31,824, 67.5 percent of all men's earnings (a slight drop from 67.9 percent in 2008), and Latinas' earnings were $27,181, 57.7 percent of all men's earnings (a slight drop from 57.9 percent in 2008). Asian American women's earnings in 2009 were $42,331, 90 percent of all men's earnings, a drop from 91 percent in 2008. The National Committee on Pay Equity's The Wage Gap Over Time shows how little the wage gap has changed in this century. (See also the fact sheet from the Institute for Women's Policy Research: The Gender Wage Gap 2009.)
  
  Additional state Census data show that women working full-time, year-round continued to earn less than men working full-time, year-round in every single state, although the wage gap among them varies. In 2009 the District of Columbia had the smallest wage gap, with women earning 88.2 cents for every dollar men earned, up .2 percent from last year. This 12 cent gap in wages was well ahead of the next best state, California, where women on average made 82.7 percent (down from the California percentage in 2008, which was 84.9 percent). The state with the worst wage gap, where women’s earnings represented only 65.5 percent of men’s earnings, was Wyoming, up less than one percent from 2008.
  
  Overall, women in 20 states saw the wage gap between men and women widen. In Maine, for example, there was a three percentage point drop in the wage gap; women in this state earned only 76.7 percent of what men in Maine earned, down from 79.7 percent in 2008. As the recession lingers on, women’s wages have never been more important: in 2009, 40 percent of women were the primary breadwinners for their families.

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  by r i p facebook on January 30th, 2011

• Thanks for the suggested reading, I will look into those. Books that I have read in the last 4 months include:
  
  Who Stole Feminism? - C.H. Sommers
  The War Against Boys - C.H. Sommers
  Raising Boys - S. Biddulph
  The New Manhood - S. Biddulph
  Professing Feminism
  
  Each of which I would highly recommend. I have some reservations with the works of both Christina Hoff Sommers and Steve Biddulph. But I can identify with the vast majority of what they are saying. But I have also broadened my reading with some of the following less agreeable titles:
  
  Changing Men
  What About the Boys?
  What is Happening to our Boys?
  Theology and Feminism
  Changing the Gods
  Feminism and the Classroom Teacher
  Y: The Descent of Man
  Manthropology
  The Manipulated Man - Esther Vilnar (1970)
  The Female Eunich - Germaine Greer
  
  I could write many pages of argument with regards to many of these books, but I'm sure at your age, you must already be familiar with most of this stuff.
  
  I do appreciate you mentioning those books, I'm not familiar with Susan Faludi. But I will add those to my reading list...

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  by Benjamin_P on January 30th, 2011

• As for the wage gap, I think that this may or may not indicate an underlying problem. I am a professional engineer by trade, and am familiar with numbers and the errors that can occur by way of underlying assumptions. I am not sure of what the underlying assumptions in those statistics are... but I might look into that.
  
  If we are interested in "equal work for equal pay" than we need to measure both work and pay - which seems only reasonable. But factors that affect how much a person is paid include: The type of work, hours worked, training, qualifications & skill level.
  
  Essentially, I'm saying that: "When a man and a woman are paid the same amount, to do the same job, have the same training, with the same experience level, for the same length of time." Then equal pay for equal work is satisfied.
  
  So these factors need to be considered when looking at the pay gap. Whilst the statistics can say something about the situation, they cannot give a hypothesis - nor can they prove causality on their own.
  
  ---
  
  That however is not my primary calling into this debate. Because I am willing to admit that you will still find various forms of discrimination in the workplace... I think that my primary point of entry into this debate is to go beyond discrimination issues and get into the philosophical heart of the matter. Because I believe that when we get our thinking straight on this issue, then correct actions will follow - and that incorrect actions follow from incorrect thinking.
  
  I have what I think is an original insight into the problem. I think that this problem is part of a much larger issue that has been going on for some time, and that it was the failure of feminism to correctly identify the ‘underlying problem’ that caused further problems, and caused things to become exacerbated. I think that the issue that feminism was not in response to a womens issue, but a MENS issue. Which I believe has been going on for 200 years or more. This is something that I like to call the masculine identity crisis – which ultimately causes a lot of the angst and frustration that we faced over the last 50 years. The simple truth is that men just don’t know how to be men anymore.
  
  I want to do something about that problem. I want to help men – and particularly men younger than myself. I want to help them purely for their own benefit, and I want to help them be themselves. And THAT I believe is where the heart of the issue lies.
  
  I have actually decided to make a career change, and want to become a school teacher. I also want to do research and write books. I want to be a mentor and a role model, because I believe that that is what we are most desperately lacking... and as much as I enjoy fixing machinery, I think that working with people is of infinitely greater importance.

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  by Benjamin_P on January 31st, 2011

• When you mentioned the discrimination you saw in your own schooling around 1950, the primary motivation given was that "it would make the boys insecure". You as a young girl, you were being forced into a stereotype and a modified behaviour pattern - not to put you down, but to help the boys with their own issues. Boys of that age are tormented with a variety of insecurities - both biological and social. Boys are essentially "late bloomers", and the added social loss of an entire generation of fatherly role models (1940-1945) saw to it that many of these boys would be mal-adapted. Even the fathers that did return from that terrible war would have been so traumatised – and reduced to a shell of their former selves. They would have been angry emotional wrecks, and incapable of showing affection.
  
  You must realise that it was not entirely their fault, and that they were just as trapped in this mess as you were. The sad thing is: That while the women were washing dishes together in the kitchen and thinking "is this all there is to life". The men that were working at jobs they didn't like where asking themselves the exact same question. Many of the men of your generation must have found the feminist ideals of self liberation truly appealing. Because in their hearts, they wished that they could be free as well.
  
  I think the greatest tragedy of history was that those men got blamed for everything, particularly by the likes of Gloria Steinem and Germaine Greer. This only served to reinforce all of those accumulated insecurities that men had about themselves. It didn’t solve the underlying problem at all – it made it worse.

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  by Benjamin_P on January 31st, 2011

• I have either read or been made aware of many of the titles you shared. As a (mostly) single mother of boys, and as a human being always interested in education, the condition of all children is important to me. And I'd like to be among the first to congratulate you on your career change decision. Passionate, dedicated, open-minded teachers are desperately needed and desperately under-supported. I know many and I always try to give them the due that society doesn't. In my mind, the good ones, the ones I described above, are heroic.
  
  I've committed myself for the rest of my life to actively promote the erasure of division among us, and when I say us, I mean the human race. All of this division is a carefully constructed manipulation by the media and the corporations that own the media, and it's done nothing but destroy unity and our ability to coooperate with each other to change the conditions we all struggle under. We live on one tiny planet, and it is imperiled. United we stand, divided we fall is being played out in marriages, families, communities, and countries around the world. Hell, it's played out on this site incessantly. Until men and women stop blaming each other, until races and relgions stop blaming each other, until we all stop blaming each other there can be no compassion, and that (in reading back through what we've written) is what you were asking for. It's all any rational, informed person is asking for when they write an answer or state their thoughts, and I believe it's the job of the teacher to set the ground for compassion through unbiased, historical enlightenment of the agendas and strategies that have got us into a state of affairs where the center of social respect and courtesy has been all but forgotten.
  
  Do you know John Trudell? He was the spokesman for the American Indian Movement in the 70's, and as a result of his activism, his young wife, baby and two small children, and his mother-in-law, were all burned in their beds in a mysterious night time arson on their home on a reservation in Oklahoma. He is an outstanding man, creative spirit, and passionate spokesman for the disenfranchised. I'm going to leave you with one of his poems, and then suggest that if we want to continue this conversation, we might take it to email? Let me know.

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  by r i p facebook on January 31st, 2011

• 'Thing Is' by John Trudell:
  
  Thing is
  Nihilistic desires
  Civil lies gone insane
  Didn't imagine it turning like this
  
  Some things start good and go bad
  Some things get bad and stay bad
  Are we caught in between
  Living a lie or not living at all
  
  Eliminated choices
  Lost in dreams we let go
  Memoreis we never got to have
  Something else to think about
  
  Waking up in industrial society
  Surrounded by angry days
  Going through motions of not being
  Wanting the best but not expecting it
  Surviving paid for in dreams
  
  Feeling like a world alone
  Serving god with the devil to pay
  Feeling like something in no place
  
  What goes on in hell anyway?
  
  Thing is
  It has to do with Heart man
  We have to understand
  What hearts are for
  Before we can get back
  To heaven or paradise
  
  Or the power of our mind.

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  by r i p facebook on January 31st, 2011

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