I wish I could upvote this more than once; it aligns neatly with several things I’ve been wanting to say for months but haven’t found a chance to. There’s just a couple things I’d like to add.
First, I suspect the relatively small size of the MRA sphere distorts outsiders’ perception of it in ways other than making hateful personalities proportionally more common. Specifically, it’s too small and too new for well-developed sub-movements to be self-sustaining: there are identifiable tendencies (compare the average comment on Spearhead to the average on Owning Your Shit [ETA: or not; see below]), but there’s far more cross-posting between them than on comparable feminist sites, and I’d attribute this directly to feminism’s far greater age, size, and level of development as an ideology. Since not a few prolific cross-posters fall into the “hater” category, and since offensive comments are always going to be disproportionately salient to readers, this ends up tarring the whole community.
But that’s just a perception thing, more or less. Even if a viable egalitarian-looking men’s advocacy programme manages to magic itself into existence, I think problems might be still caused by the likelihood that both these movements conceptualize themselves as the true standard-bearers of equality, and blame any remaining inequalities the other side’s concerned about on failures to incorporate their own theoretical frameworks. Probably the most common feminist objection I’ve seen to more moderate (i.e. non-traditionalist, positive-sum) MRA ideas is precisely this: feminism objects to the same problems (discrimination against men as caregivers, narrower culturally acceptable affect and presentation, etc.) and they’d allegedly vanish in a fully feminist society, so why not just call yourself feminist and work with established approaches to privilege, misogyny, etc.? And this isn’t one-sided, either; I’ve seen almost identical sentiments from moderate MRA sources, with appropriate nouns and theory swapped.
The answer, as best I can figure, is that each theoretical framework is built up to explain a particular set of salient experiences, and since few data points outside those experiences make it into the working set we end up with a tendency to overfit. This is of course exactly the problem that third-wave feminism already confronted regarding intersections with queer theory, race, etc., but intersectional integration seems harder in this case—perhaps because MRA, even the moderate kind, doesn’t draw upon the same intellectual traditions.
I just looked at a few comments on the two sites you linked (never having visited either before) and I couldn’t tell the difference. I’m not sure what you intended to say by comparing them.
I’ll admit I didn’t review any recent comments on Spearhead before posting. I visited the site months ago and was so annoyed by the commentariat that I haven’t read much there since.
It’s possible that I caught a bad patch or that they’ve gotten more moderate since, in which case I’ve misrepresented them and I apologize. But I have seen similar sentiments expressed towards them elsewhere in the interim.
The comments were unpleasant to awful there, but they were mediocre to awful on the other site too. There were a few more “This is a great post.” style comments on Owning Your Shit but that was the main difference that I saw from clicking through a couple articles.
Fair enough. The comments are indeed awful on both sites, but that’s true in broad strokes for most political blogs. I was mainly trying to point up accusatory and gender-essentialist strains I remembered from Spearhead that seemed much attenuated in OYS, but in light of this the difference evidently either isn’t there or isn’t glaring enough to be clear to first-time readers from context-free links.
Since I don’t particularly feel like doing the muckraking myself and I can’t expect people to do it for me, I retract that comparison. Pity we can’t strikethrough portions of a post.
I wish I could upvote this more than once; it aligns neatly with several things I’ve been wanting to say for months but haven’t found a chance to. There’s just a couple things I’d like to add.
First, I suspect the relatively small size of the MRA sphere distorts outsiders’ perception of it in ways other than making hateful personalities proportionally more common. Specifically, it’s too small and too new for well-developed sub-movements to be self-sustaining: there are identifiable tendencies (compare the average comment on Spearhead to the average on Owning Your Shit [ETA: or not; see below]), but there’s far more cross-posting between them than on comparable feminist sites, and I’d attribute this directly to feminism’s far greater age, size, and level of development as an ideology. Since not a few prolific cross-posters fall into the “hater” category, and since offensive comments are always going to be disproportionately salient to readers, this ends up tarring the whole community.
But that’s just a perception thing, more or less. Even if a viable egalitarian-looking men’s advocacy programme manages to magic itself into existence, I think problems might be still caused by the likelihood that both these movements conceptualize themselves as the true standard-bearers of equality, and blame any remaining inequalities the other side’s concerned about on failures to incorporate their own theoretical frameworks. Probably the most common feminist objection I’ve seen to more moderate (i.e. non-traditionalist, positive-sum) MRA ideas is precisely this: feminism objects to the same problems (discrimination against men as caregivers, narrower culturally acceptable affect and presentation, etc.) and they’d allegedly vanish in a fully feminist society, so why not just call yourself feminist and work with established approaches to privilege, misogyny, etc.? And this isn’t one-sided, either; I’ve seen almost identical sentiments from moderate MRA sources, with appropriate nouns and theory swapped.
The answer, as best I can figure, is that each theoretical framework is built up to explain a particular set of salient experiences, and since few data points outside those experiences make it into the working set we end up with a tendency to overfit. This is of course exactly the problem that third-wave feminism already confronted regarding intersections with queer theory, race, etc., but intersectional integration seems harder in this case—perhaps because MRA, even the moderate kind, doesn’t draw upon the same intellectual traditions.
I just looked at a few comments on the two sites you linked (never having visited either before) and I couldn’t tell the difference. I’m not sure what you intended to say by comparing them.
I’ll admit I didn’t review any recent comments on Spearhead before posting. I visited the site months ago and was so annoyed by the commentariat that I haven’t read much there since.
It’s possible that I caught a bad patch or that they’ve gotten more moderate since, in which case I’ve misrepresented them and I apologize. But I have seen similar sentiments expressed towards them elsewhere in the interim.
The comments were unpleasant to awful there, but they were mediocre to awful on the other site too. There were a few more “This is a great post.” style comments on Owning Your Shit but that was the main difference that I saw from clicking through a couple articles.
Fair enough. The comments are indeed awful on both sites, but that’s true in broad strokes for most political blogs. I was mainly trying to point up accusatory and gender-essentialist strains I remembered from Spearhead that seemed much attenuated in OYS, but in light of this the difference evidently either isn’t there or isn’t glaring enough to be clear to first-time readers from context-free links.
Since I don’t particularly feel like doing the muckraking myself and I can’t expect people to do it for me, I retract that comparison. Pity we can’t strikethrough portions of a post.