(Soy) Boys Don't Cry
Tonight's main event: feminists against men's rights activists (MRA's). Feminists are made out to be "soy boys" by the right, and MRA's are made out to be a product from the evil Patriarchy by the left. These are the extremist opinions cultivated by click-media platforms that fare well under such ridiculous polarization...
Image by Pexels - source: Pixabay
I say "ridiculous" because the caricatures painted by either side don't really exist. In this "battle of ideas" every participant is assigned to one side, even if the participant doesn't choose one. For people on the far right, when they hear "feminist" they picture a screaming woman, usually with her hair dyed in some bright primary color, blaming men and their evil patriarchy for everything wrong in their world, and in the world in general; this caricature doesn't actually exist, or if they do, they are an insignificant minority. And the men who support these crazy "feminazi's" (yes, there's a plethora of rich and sometimes funny portmanteaus to be found here), are derogatorily called "soy boys".
When hearing the term "men's rights activist" some people on the far left picture a whining white male crying about being discriminated against; I'm one of those soy boys ;-) That doesn't mean however that I discount out of hand the things that these MRA's put on the agenda; they have very legitimate complains, just like the feminists do. And that's why this polarized online verbal war between the sexes would be funny, if if it wasn't just one of many lines drawn in the sand, breaking us further apart in a time when we should be growing closer together. What feminists fight for and against is clear I believe; their gripes come from simple observations like the pay-gap between men and women, the "pink tax" on products for women and being underrepresented in professions where biological differences shouldn't play a role, to name a few. These things exist. They're not fighting against windmills here.
Men's rights activists are no Don Quixote either, as their gripes are equally real; men are more likely to be lonely, more likely to commit suicide, have shorter life-spans, have more accidents, suffer more mental illnesses, always get the short end of the stick in parental laws and so on. These are real, not made up, and need to be looked at in order to make things better. So why then, am I a soy boy that thinks feminists are right and MRA's are wrong?
That's because everything in life resides on a scale, at the very extremes of which we find the caricatures painted by either side, the fictional one-dimensional extremist fundamentalist that never existed. Feminists aren't always right and MRA's aren't always wrong. It's just that in the heavily polarized atmosphere of online political discourse I never see those crazy "feminazi's," but I regularly see right wing nationalists denying the existence of the patriarchy, denying that there's a pay-gap, that the difference is almost all due to individual choices by individual men and women, that there are no systemic or social forces at play here, and so on.
Feminists fight against those very real social influences, against the expectations placed upon them by a society that's been formed by the sweat and tears of mostly men. That's the thing; you can't in one breath claim to be responsible for everything that's good in the world without also taking some responsibility for the bad that came with it. Society traditionally has told women what their role in society was by men, and the funny thing is that these feminists completely support that part of men's rights activism, where this applies to men. Men are told by society that they must be strong, self-sufficient, independent and so on. "Boys don't cry," remember? That's a sweet little song by the way, by The Cure. There I go again; revealing how old I am. Still, I'll leave that song at the end of this post; it's kind of topical anyway, such a manly man singing about boys not crying... ;-)
Feminists are very aware of the fact that the gripes expressed by men's rights movements are also in large part a result of the expectations society places on them; men are less likely to ask for help, for example, trying to resolve their problems on their own, making them more likely to succumb to them. Men are more inclined to take extreme risks, and less inclined to share their emotions and feelings, with sometimes very negative results. Men have problems as a result of the expectations placed on them by society as a whole, and this is true for women as well. Women suffer more because the patriarchy is not a windmill.
The Cure - Boys Don't Cry HQ
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