About 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever, according to new government data posted Thursday.
About 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever, according to new government data posted Thursday.
In my left leaning circles it’s pretty well understood that feminism is about helping women. And that’s a good thing. Trying to make feminism an ideology which serves all genders is problematic because it implies an omniscient perspective counter to proper intersectionality. Men experience oppression but only men can represent their oppression in discourse.
Women can’t and shouldn’t feel like they can have an opinion on men’s issues. “Stay in your lane” comes to mind.
How far do you take this perspective? As a lefty that doesn’t sound like a very leftist take, rather it sort of completely eschews the principles of solidarity and reason-based argumentation…
I do agree that feminism is about helping women (and that’s great!), but should mothers not advocate for better mental health resources for their sons? Should I not advocate for better access to birth control for the women in my life because I’m male or for Ukrainian liberty because I’m not Ukrainian? Denying someone access to public discourse about a topic because they’re not suffering the consequences of the topic seems a bit silly to me. And of course, men do actually suffer under patriarchy, albeit in a different way than women obviously.
I am taking some rhetorical leeway towards a more radical presentation of the perspective, for clarity.
Solidarity can only be achieved once people can recognize one another as equals, and “women tell men how men should advocate for themselves” is not equal recognition. Of course women don’t think they’re womansplaining the oppression men experience.
I don’t believe in reason-based argumentation. Reason is how consent is manufactured. I trust reason only within the confines of the emotional message a so-called rational actor is emitting within the performance of the ritual of discourse. Too many women have been told to shut up for being ‘unreasonable’ for me to take reasonability all that seriously.
Certainly mothers should perform their motherhood within this lens. Their motherhood is centered, not the primacy of their opinion. The mistake the essentialization&monopolization type feminists make is centering feminism, when an ideology is not a cure for anything except the nagging sensation that if we come up with and communicate the right ideas the problems will go away.
I think you can help people and stand up for people being hurt regardless of what you got in your pants. Yes, education and personal experience may allow you to do a better job at it clearly a medical professsional can solve problems that I cant for example, but most of the time I think basic empathy can get you pretty far.
A homeless woman this week asked me for water, I gave her a bottle of water. I don’t think I need to be a women or ten courses of feminism to know that humans need water to survive.