Mens Rights Thread

Men need to stop trying to be our allies and just listen this time

Finn McRedmond: Fear of male violence did not begin with tragedy of Sarah Everard’s murder

While the Sarah Everard case is obviously appalling, there is a real hierarchy of victimhood here. This dreadful murder has been kept in the media spotlight because the victim is one to whom women journalists working in the UK's national media can relate. She is deemed to be "one of us, one of our sort of people."

Murder victims have always impacted more upon the public consciousness if they are pretty and photogenic; particularly if they are blonde. There are reams of research on this.

In the Everard case, when you look at the outpouring of articles by female journalists in the UK's national media about how "It could have been me," the identification with this victim is because she was white, solidly middle-class, professional, a graduate and - crucially - living in London.

For all the feminist posturing, the national media journalists writing about this case would have had no interest whatsoever if the murder had taken place in Doncaster, Derry or Dunfermline.

Plain-looking, working-class black girls who leave school at 15 and are murdered in Leeds or Bradford are local news stories for perhaps 24 hours, before being quickly forgotten. They don't get candlelit vigils or opinion pieces in the Irish Times.

The national media sisterhood has no interest in such young women, because they are not "our type of gal".

And now? Many feminists see their big mission in life as being to control men and boys. They believe that men and boys - collectively - are a 'problem' to be 'fixed' by women on women's terms.

Feminists now hope the Everard case is going to be the George Floyd moment for gender politics, the point at which rationality gives way to Twitter-inspired hysteria and nobody dares to refuse them anything.

They are certainly not our 'allies' and men should not be theirs.

Men are listening. We are listening to women in the media telling us day after day that we are collectively guilty. We are listening to women in the media and online telling us that men and boys are a 'problem' and are to be viewed as actual or potential killers and rapists simply by virtue of our sex.

We have listened and we get it.

I live in a rural area. Out on my daily walks, I used to say good morning to anybody, male or female, that passed me. But I have listened and, having had my woke moment and realised that men are to be collectively viewed as potential killers and rapists, I now walk past any women that I meet but do not know personally without speaking, making eye contact or in any way acknowledging their presence.

And you know what? When men and boys stop speaking to women and girls whom they do not know personally, journalists such as this one and feminists on Twitter will then claim that they are being 'victimised' and 'punished' by men no longer engaging with them in exactly the same way that they claimed they were being 'punished' when men stopped having one-on-one meetings with women in the workplace for fear of being the object of accusations.

This is the world that feminists want and when we have a de facto system of gender apartheid in place, with men and women, girls and boys sharing the same spaces but being too frightened to engage with one another, I sincerely hope that it makes them happy.

I'm afraid I'm with @Freedom of Speech on this. The balance of perception has shifted. All men are seen as potential rapists and murderers. While walking on my own I would never greet a female stranger. I might do so if walking with my (female) partner and the females acknowledged each other's existence. And any contact with children is totally verboten - again, unless my partner is with me.

"Allies"?

Telling men and boys that we are to be collectively viewed as potential murderers and rapists simply by virtue of the sex that we were born seems a rather unlikely way of making allies.

Our society has a problem with violence. Once you define it as gender based violence are you being selective in your approach? Are saying that the 20% of victims, male, that report sexual violence to the Gardai are not in the same league as female victims? What of the 60% of all victims that report physical violence to the Gardai. They happen to be male. Does not not matter? How about we leave gender aside and listen to all of the victims?

As someone else alluded to, in another feminist Twitter storm a man accompanying a woman to her door would be considered patronising and patriarchal. There is no winning for anyone male or female in these “debates” even though that’s the wrong term as it’s really just people shouting at each other.

Men and boys are the last remaining group that the liberal media deems it acceptable - even progressive - to accuse of collective guilt.

Try accusing any other group in society of collective guilt - or even responsibility - for anything and you will be barred from commenting.

But tar men and boys with the brush of collective guilt and shame and you are more likely to be offered a weekly opinion column on the Guardian or Irish Times.

Parental alienation: Some days you wake up and think: 'It's like a living bereavement'

Helen McEntee interview on misogyny, Seamus Woulfe, Gardaí receiving vaccines and becoming Fine Gael leader
The Justice Minister will step aside for six months' maternity leave but is seen as a future leader of Fine Gael

On Friday she convened a short meeting of stakeholders to discuss what more might be done to make women feel safer as they go about their daily lives.

"Sometimes you feel that the attitude is still what can the woman do, when can she take herself out in an environment, why was she there, what time was it, was she on her own? We need to get away from that type of attitude, but also what can men do to help women feel safe," McEntee says.

She believes boys at primary school should be taught about what is acceptable behaviour towards girls and women. "It's about respecting women, it's about understanding how your actions can impact on a woman," she says. "Do men sometimes even realise that their actions are causing a woman to feel unsafe or to feel insecure? And I mean that's not necessarily something that they intend to do. So I think it's about creating that awareness from a much earlier age."

After Easter she will bring forward draft hate crime legislation that will include a provision making gender-based violence an aggravating factor.

This will mean, for example, a sexual assault or harassment aggravated by prejudice against a woman (or a man) will be a different and more serious offence to ordinary assault or harassment. It will be classified as a hate crime which could potentially carry a heavier custodial sentence and impact on any future Parole Board hearing. The effect, McEntee argues, will be the same as if misogyny were classed a hate crime - something campaigners in the UK have been calling for in recent weeks - while protecting freedom of speech.

"Where you have a particular crime that takes place, whether it's an assault or harassment, you can have an aggravated factor based on gender, which will do the same thing and we're sure it will do the same thing as identifying misogyny specifically. So that will be an aggravating factor and that could be taken into account in a crime," she says.

Campaigners are impressed by McEntee's commitment and focus on the issue but stress it requires long-term focus. "There isn't any sort of simple solution, we need structural change," said O'Connor.

iptba wrote: »

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/helen-mcentee-interview-on-misogyny-seamus-woulfe-gardai-receiving-vaccines-and-becoming-fine-gael-leader-40247320.html

iptba wrote: »

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/helen-mcentee-interview-on-misogyny-seamus-woulfe-gardai-receiving-vaccines-and-becoming-fine-gael-leader-40247320.html

All Party Parliamentary Group for Men and Boys (in UK)

Telling men to open up is not enough – teach them how

Unthinkable: We can all learn from psychotherapy, perhaps the best place to start is school

Starting a sentence with “I” is discouraged at school, it’s frowned upon in journalism and, when followed by an expression of feeling, it’s traditionally problematic for men. I am making amends today, however, having learnt from psychotherapy how avoidance of the first-person singular can be used to interpose distance between ourselves and our troubled reality.

The messaging for men seems particularly problematic. The “strong, silent type” is still revered, and it remains much more difficult to get men to talk about their feelings. How can we make progress on that?

“Fritz Perls observed that we often distance ourselves by saying ‘you know how it is...’ or ‘you know how you feel bad...’ when really what I mean is ‘when I am in this situation I feel bad...’ Modern neuroscience has shown that when we use words like ‘I’ rather than ‘you’, when we use personal language, patterns of activity are entirely different in the brain. We are making ourselves more accessible to ourselves and therefore to other people.

“We’re told men should feel more comfortable with their emotions or talking about their emotions, but how? Men do not automatically have an understanding of how it might be achieved. Thinking about how you use language, about the specifics, can be very instructive and very helpful. And I think it is the sort of thing that would make a very good syllabus in schools so that young men can be equipped to deal with their emotions.”

Always interesting to hear from psychotherapists. Being aware of the use of language and the impact on oneself and others is very useful. It is unfortunate that this then drifts into the assumption that there is a problem with men, which is a current "narrative". That men don't express their emotions is seen as a problem. Is it? Stoic, brave, strong, reserved, logical, capable, innovative, entrepreneurial to name some qualities that men often display. Let's like and admire men and stop seeing them as a problem, shall we?

Good article, much of which I agree with. Having spent some time as an adult experiencing talking therapy with a very good therapist, I can testify that perhaps one of the best benefits for me was allowing me to see events and my reactions to them more objectively, letting me deal with them more clearly and positively with respect to making healthy life decisions.

The time came when I felt that I needed the therapy less than I needed to use the time for other aspects of my life but I’m ever grateful for the positives it provided for me.

The truth is that life can often be challenging. I’d rather have a good tool kit than a rather strained (and certainly unrealistic) belief that life should always treat me better than it does.

A judge has dismissed a prosecution against a father who was accused of breaching a safety order by sending a birthday card and a €20 note inside the card to his 12-year-old daughter.

At Ennis District Court, Judge Patrick Durcan stated that “the case should not have been brought” against the 35-year-old Co Clare man.

Dismissing the charge brought under the Domestic Violence Act against the man, Judge Durcan stated: “I mean, if we have reached a stage in our society where a man is deemed to have breached a safety order by sending
a birthday card to his daughter…”

David McWilliams: A female-led economy is coming – and it will be better

Those with money shape society. An economy with women on top will be different

“ extreme machoness, a male unwillingness to doubt one’s own decisions and ultimately a fine example of what psychologists call the Dunning-Kruger effect – whereby the truly incompetent, fuelled by their own self-regard, overestimate their competence with disastrous results.”

Would McWilliams or any other public commentator dare speak in such a way about women, gays, blacks, etc? It seems misandry is the socially acceptable bigotry of our times.

I think this is a terrible article, does everything have to be about bashing men? This article makes two stupid assumptions, 1 that there is some secret group of men in the economy who will be really angry if their wives start earning more money for the family and 2. That women are some how more morally upstanding than men, less inclined to power greed and corruption, Both are completely false. This article is utter rubbish. Lagarde .......didn’t she get convicted of something .........Quit the polarisation David.

An economy with more successful women will be one that spends more healthcare, education and insurance"

And on vacuous airhead dumbing-down-society stuff like royalty, celebrity culture, and really-not-reality tv? Not forgetting all sorts of fast fashion and environmentally destructive consumerism because it looks nice?

Or, are we only allowed one set of ridiculous generalisations about a gender?

"By the 1980s, it was well noted that girls in developed countries did better than boys in school; by the 1990s, they were outperforming in universities"

It never ceases to amaze me how this fact is always glossed over in society. Just IMAGINE if the sexes were swapped. It would be decried as institutional misogyny.

More likely it has to do with a mix of societal and biological issues, and how the structures we've set tend to favour females more in terms of education.

I'd love to see more research done on this, because at the moment it seems journalists just say "welp, boys are idiots, so *shrug*".

I mean, it could be the reason, who knows? Let's try and find out!

I really wouldn’t be expecting some kind of utopia just because you might have a female leader in charge. In the past 5 years the first female presidents of both Brazil and South Korea were impeached for major corruption. Think about that. The first ones in the door in those countries and at it right away. Others like Theresa May would hardly fill you with confidence. She wanted to deport everybody from Britain apart from her other shortcomings. Christine laggard at the IMF who David has described himself as the biggest bluffer in in the financial/political world. Let’s face it, women are way off the pace when it comes to the school subjects that really matter, the STEM subjects and males are far more likely to go into trades etc which women almost exclusively don’t. Either way I think you will find the exact same behaviour when it comes being in positions of power whether it be men or women. Would it still have collapsed if it was called Lehman sisters? Probably. Greed does that.