Male bashing in the media

Sometimes Women are just better.:wink:

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“IN EXAMINATION of these murder cases, what should be immediately evident is that all of these six murders incidents which have drawn public attention out of the in the past month were all committed by men against women.”

I’m glad he spelled this out; it would have been too subtle for me otherwise.

The going gets a bit easier after this interminable section.

“One observes that these cases rather uniformly demonstrate cases of men viewing themselves entitled to violence against women.”

Well, if we can forgive them for focusing on a sample of six cases, there’s certainly something to that and many other statements in this article, and let me be clear that efforts to correct the situation are admirable. I disagree with the overall thesis though. It seems to me that in the local culture people generally take their familial and romantic relationships pretty seriously. They tend to be bound up with various power dynamics–which operate in all directions and in no way exclusively out of a “patriarchy”. Things can get stressful and violence is not an uncommon result. If you hear about a case of violence here, it’s probably more likely than not to result from such a situation. I don’t think we needed the author’s dedicated analysis of six cases to make it clear that men are going to be responsible for far more cases of violence than women. If this wiki page can be believed, “A 2013 global study on homicide by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime found that males accounted for about 96 percent of all homicide perpetrators worldwide.” This study shows that the situation in Taiwan is similar.

I’d guess that efforts which draw exclusively upon prevailing Western social science notions and ignore the deeper realities of Taiwanese culture aren’t going to have an optimal effect here, but of course in the local context there’s virtually no chance of such efforts gaining any traction or even attention.

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But, I would argue this is not the topic of the discussion. These are men that are being bashed, for good reason. Just like Harvey Weinstein and many of the other serial sexual rapists and abusers that came to light in the “pound me too” campaign, they were being bashed for good reason.

This thread is about men being bashed, for no good reason.

So said @Mick, about 70 posts ago.

Is it the phrase “toxic masculinity” that constitutes bashing, in your opinion?

But it seems many Women are being bashed too​:thinking:recent Miss America contest decisions to exclude swimsuits, evening wear and results not be based on “ appearance “ , may indeed result in less “bashing “ by men :joy:Guess things are changing . image

I think “toxic masculinity” is some bs they teach in some gender studies course in uni.

Dude, that counts as a swimsuit! :wall:

We can say every abstract concept was “invented” by someone. (Cue a member whose name starts with F lecturing us about how human rights don’t exist, corporations don’t exist, no legal concepts at all exist… but honor exists, at least when you’re on the battlefield and trying to figure out whether or not it’s okay to kill an enemy soldier with long hair because you’re not sure if it’s a dude. Not to get off topic though…)

We can also say abstract concepts are ways of commenting on phenomena that we observe/experience/desire, from creation to the apple falling on Isaac’s head to all kinds of projections of and plans for the future, and depending on how well we think we understand an abstract concept, we may say it’s less abstract and more solid, sometimes even calling it an objective rule.

So who invented the concept of toxic masculinity as a way of commenting on human psychology and specifically the phenomenon of men being assholes in general and violent criminals in particular?

Apparently, it was people who said things like this:

So what exactly is the concept of TM?

This concept of toxic masculinity is not intended to demonize men or male attributes, but rather to emphasize the harmful effects of conformity to certain traditional masculine ideal behaviors such as dominance, self-reliance, and competition.[3][4] Toxic masculinity is thus defined by adherence to traditional male gender roles that restrict the kinds of emotions allowable for boys and men to express, including social expectations that men seek to be dominant (the “alpha male”) and limit their emotional range primarily to expressions of anger.

If the concept has merit, it should be able to shed light on some very real problems:

How useful is the concept in explaining specific murder cases? Is the author of your article really guilty of projecting western values onto Taiwan, as Tempo suggests? I don’t know the details of those cases and haven’t read the article yet.

But with the concept itself, what’s so horrible about it that it makes you think it must have been devised by a cabal of Cultural Marxists sitting around a faculty lounge plotting the destruction of civilization through insidious propaganda in the form of gender studies courses :runaway: and not by a bunch of guys chilling in a sweat lodge?

Perhaps what upsets you is the implication that masculinity itself is to blame, because of how the concept is named. Wikiland has no article on “toxic femininity” per se. Yet if we so desire, we can say toxic femininity also exists and use it to comment on phenomena like anorexia, bulimia, certain other kinds of irresponsible behavior… oh, and perhaps beauty pageants where the contestants literally wear ass glue (to prevent wardrobe malfunctions) in the hope of winning fame, fortune, and supposedly a big scholarship. But there are other ways of explaining that last one. :2cents:

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I don’t feel the issue is where the concept of toxic masculinity came from or even what it is, yyy. For me it’s how it is used. Similar to most identity concepts it’s basically just a put down. It could easily be replaced with “all men are bastards”. It’s the nature of the debate.

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Schoolperson error. All of those examples are the result of patriarchy. Toxic femininity doesn’t exist, although there may be instances of internalized misogyny as a result of patriarchy when women do harmful things to themselves or others. The rule of thumb is everything bad can be traced back to systemic patriarchy and white supremacy while everything good can be traced back to something else.

When I were a lad capitalism was the boogeyman.

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spoken like a true current year progressive!

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The whole article overlooks the simple fact that there are no bad people, ie., all criminals think they have done nothing wrong (also known as “prisons are full of innocent men”). Virtually nobody ever says “I’m a bad person”.
There’s also the trite observation that most violent crime, in every society, is committed by men between 15-25.

Thank God it’s just “most” and not “all”. That helps a lot as it allows us to dismiss the whole argument using the all-progressive strategy:" #notall, just because category X is overly represented in problematic topic Y doesn’t mean anything, it’s clearly just statistical bias".

So on one side we have someone claiming toxic masculinity is related to violent crimes, which is what the originators of the term (men’s rights activists from the pre-Covfefe era) also said, and on the other side we have people who love to perpetuate memes about “triggered feminists” and “landwhales” complaining that uttering the term is wrong because it makes them feel triggered and constitutes “bashing” of “all men” and – horror of horrors – it’s anti-patriarchal (which probably means it’s another insidious attempt to destroy civilization). :tumble:

You were saying something about a boogieman?

Oops, I mean boogie person. I wouldn’t want to “bash” all men by suggesting they like to boogie. :zipper_mouth_face:

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It’s a shame that we’re down to two sides, yyy. I’m going to try and remain somewhere in the middle and hope not to get hit by both lanes of traffic.

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I should address your questions.

Firstly, yes, “toxic masculinity” was first adopted by men’s rights activists. Similarly, as an example, “social justice warrior” was originally a positive term adopted by people who felt they were forwarding social justice. This has since been turned into a pejorative for whatever reason. Perhaps as attempt to shut down debate. I quite like it as I value social justice. Obviously, “toxic” could only ever be a pejorative.

Secondly, of course anyone who refers to women in terms such as “landwhales” is a problem.

It’s my mistake for being overly flippant. My general point is that one ‘side’ has a list of beliefs that are not open to debate, as does the other ‘side’. There’s not much room to work with in such a debate.

Because men are trash. The end. Fin. 完成了

So what’s his name? :sunglasses:

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Use of the term “road rage” doesn’t make (most) drivers feel triggered, does it? Even the term “drunk driving” doesn’t trigger (most) drunks. “Toxic masculinity” should be understood as just that – a thing going too far and/or in the wrong direction.

As for “social justice”, since it has no historical baggage to speak of (unlike for example the N word), it should be easy to de-pejorativize. All we need is for someone with near-impeccable social injustice credentials to tweet about how he’s the world’s leading SJW. :smile:

Secondly, of course anyone who refers to women in terms such as “landwhales” is a problem.

Let me clarify: I believe in the existence of landwhales (of both the human kind and the actual whale kind). I just find it odd when a man praises the men of a certain country with a well known culture of sexual harassment by suggesting sexual harassment is a figment of people’s imaginations, bringing out the tired “feminist landwhale” trope – even throwing in the blue hair – even in the same thread where his girlfriend from that same country is telling us the sexual harassment culture is real and affects all women there, from beautiful to ugly.

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I’m saying it’s a far better balance than the situation where you can make a harmless joke and lose your job and be shunned from society because of the radial feminists crowd. That’s far from praise get it right. Of course sexual harassment exists, and more so in some countries. I don’t do it and I say and something when I see it. Yet I don’t see any of these feminists go off to Saudi Arabia or even Italy to do anything. They come to Taiwan talking about toxic masculinity and completely ignore that there is actually a sexist law that makes men responsible for the security of the country through conscription and have a whole women’s march talking about “invisible discrimination” and yes I watched their speeches there to see if there’s any weight to what they’re saying. My response is why they don’t say anything about a clearly sexist law of only men having to do conscription, they said most women aren’t physically capable of being a soilder dispite me explaining not every person in the military is a combat soilder. They still wouldn’t hear it.

And If a man says something to my girl or any girl with me I’ll be sure to do something. Not a single person said anything to her my entire time there.