RE: Challenging Feminism. What's your opinion?
I am a strait white man, and I have literally never, even once, in my life felt victimized or attacked or really even inconvenienced by Feminism at all.
I know many liberal feminist women, I have dated almost entirely liberal feminists women. I have never felt somehow bullied or pushed around or manipulated by any of them.
Meanwhile, an average woman my same age, same demographic, having had a similar romantic life, by this point would almost certainly have been the victim of sexism multiple times, have been harassed, been condescended to, been passed over, ignored, spoken down to or over, many times by men.
So if men have it, in your words "Just as bad" how is it that I have pretty much never been victimized by feminism in any way, but almost every single woman by age 30 has been victimized by sexism at least a handful of times?
Am i just incredibly lucky?
Maybe you have not, but then just because you haven't does that make it the same for every man on the planet? The world is HUGE my friend.
Let's talk about the issues you raised for a moment. I have been harrassed by women before. On my 21st birthday I was literally forced into sexually dancing with a woman I didn't want to but only because I was single, and she had the hots for me. Likewise I've walked into bars before and had women look me up and down and say, "Fuck, I'd give you a right seeing to mate" and it doesn't end there; I've been groped, touched, harrassed and a bloody million other things. Yet, like I said before, it's not a gender issue it's a behaviour issue. I don't act like that to women, nor do any of my male friends, so in my own bubble I could outwardly say, "You're having a laugh mate, that doesn't happen to women" but I know you're right and it exists.
It's time to stop thinking on terms of men/women and think in terms of people :)
Be you man or woman, being catcalled or groped when it is unwanted it not cool, but unless you are just an incredibly rare and unusual specimen, it has not happened with nearly the frequency or aggressiveness to you that it has to almost every average woman. Again, maybe you as an individual has just for some reason attracted a very a-typical amount of aggressive female sexual attention, but study after study after study (not to mention just a simple clear eyed obersvation of the reality we live in) find that that kind of behavoir you have descibed, happens to women VASTLY more often than it does to men and leads to full on sexual assault/rape much more often. Like the rates are not even in the same ball park, there is a vast difference in how often it happens between the two genders. So while I certainly don't approve of you getting groped or catcalled, the simple fact is the no, men do not have it "just as bad as women" on that front. You are simply incorrect.
But, furthermore, I wasn't really talking about groping and catcalling. I was talking about sexual assault (which happens to women FAR more than men) and the way women are treated in social and professional dynamics. Overlooked, talked down to, talked over, and generally disrespected. Yes, this happens to men too, but agian, as with the groping and catcalling, it happens WAY more often to women. It's not even hard to observe. How many times in your life have you been in a meeting with mostly men and only one or two women, and it's nearly impossible for the women to get a word in edgewise, her being constantly talked over? This happens with stupendous frequency.
And the worst part is, most of them time men aren't even aware they are doing it. I recall one experiment where groups were recorded secretly having conversations and afterwards the men and women were both asked if they felt the men talked over and interrupted the women. Almost all of the men said no, almost all of the women said yes, and when they played back the tapes, lo and behold, almost every single time the men talked over or interrupted the women, while the women very seldom did so to the men in the groups.
Like I said, I cannot speak for your personal experience, maybe you are an oddity with an a-typical experience, but I can assure you that on the whole, as a population, these kinds of things happen to women with incredible prevalence, while with men they are occasional frustrating exceptions at worst.
And it goes for a thousand other things. How many men receive unsolicited genital pics from women they aren't interested in? How many men have women threaten to find them an rape them after they are turned down for a date? How many men get constantly PM'd asking for nudes on almost every social media platform just because they look a little hot in their profile picture?
Again, all of these things DO HAPPEN to men, but the rates at which it happens, the frequency, is just no comparison. Not even remotely comparable.