Do you think that men are oppressed?

[poshsinglemum]

For example; the traditional male role is to go out and work so technically men are oppressed by capitalism. Aren't they? Mabe not as oppressed as us girls are though. Thoughts please.

Poor and nonwhite men are oppressed by rich white men. Poor and nonwhite people are oppressed by the rich and the white. Plenty of individuals are comparatively powerless (by being poor, non white, non heterosexual, physically disabled, etc) Men are not oppressed for being men.

Yes. And the Pope is a Quaker. FFS.

Orangerie - I totally agree with your friend!

Slouching - "Yes, we are all oppressed by capitalism. And yet we can all benefit (theoretically)."

Benefit in what way? Materially, maybe? But it is well known, is it not, that the people who live in capitalist societies are not as happy as people who still live in hunter-gatherer (or just more simple) societies.

"It is about expectations, and there is much overt, covert, and cultural, historical 'pressure.'"

Yup, agree here - and by other men too. DH is ridiculed at work when he challenges casual misogyny and refuses to join in the general 'look at the tits on that' banter amongst his male colleagues. His female colleagues play the game too but act completely differently when on their own with DH - like they know they don't have to put on an act - he respects them for being human, not a pair of tits on legs.

But he hates that he gets taken the piss out of for just behaving like an acceptable human being to the women in his workplace.

Darcy - "Men are expected to work and support families in a way women are not so much, I would find that oppressive."

It is quite a large burden I think - I know my DH feels a huge responsibility to keep us afloat as a family and finds the pressure to be really unpleasant sometimes (not from me...from our joint choices about how we want our family to work).

"Having said that, men also seem to be free to piss off and abandon any children they have if they want to, in a way women are not."

Not if they have a conscience! Do women have more conscience than men? I have asked myself this question so often in relation to my own father buggering off when I was a child - I asked DH if he could do it, and he said he couldn't imagine how terrible it would be to live apart from his children. I feel the same...seems many men don't though - why?

"the traditional male role is to go out and work" is it really? Aren't women now encouraged just as much to go out to work these days?

the current climate and the cuts that are being introduced are effecting women because it's a deliberate ploy to keep women in the home and narrow their options. IMO.

SGB, you're right.

This Telegraph article suggests that the experience in UK ( mirored the US) is that job losses occured most heavily among men early in the recession in the private sector while public sector job losses (where women are more prevalent) were lighter. Now job losses coming in the public sector will hit women harder. It is a matter of timing.

My comments were only that men and women may face different pressures in response to the economic climate once a man's traditional role is taken into account.

I think that men feel the children and wife are more connected to eachother than a woman thinks about her husband and children, therefore men walk out on their family, women simply abandon the relationship.

Its funny actually how we have all taken the 'paid work' point of view. Its probably the other aspects of opression that are easier to argue is all against women..

rape
pornography
lapdacing clubs
domestic violence
gender bullying
beauty pagents...

its pretty clear which gender is being oppressed..

Amen to that, foureleven.

I think men have been under attack as a group for a long time by the ruling elite. Theor main jobs in manufacturing, mining, shipbuilding etc. have been deliberately shut down and moved to the third world. Globalisation will benefit a handful of men, but the majority will suffer. I also think that the things that Hecate talked about are being done deliberately. The ruling elite is against all of us, and men represent a potential threat to them, which is why they want to weaken and attack them as a group.

Oops forgot

-eating disorders
-childcare
-girls not being given sufficient careers guidence
-sport
-education i.e. people putting sons in to private over daughters
-female age discrimination

claig - yes working class men have lost status along with their jobs. Look at young men in what is now known as the underclass. In former times they would have had low paid manual jobs. Now they cannot get a job and no woman will live them who is herself on benefits even if she has a child with him because she will lose benefits.

The ruling elite is of course mainly men.

I would agree with SGB throughout history it is not males which oppress but more specifically the wealthy/powerful which are mainly 'white' (i say the white referring only to countries which were occupied or had involvement with white men) men. If you are not in that group then you were/are a victim of oppression.

Of course the degrees of oppression varied from group to group.

working class men and women and middle class men and women and our families are under attack by a small ruling class. They use divide and conquer and try to set us against each other. The rulers are men, and they control us like the Spartans controlled their helot slaves. The Spartans would kill the best and the brightest of the helot children, as they didn't want the helots to revolt. The communists did the same wherever they ruled, with their gulags etc.

They fear opposition and strength, which is why their goal is to weaken all of us, destroy families and weaken society. This is one reason that they push out porn and horror and violence etc. They know that men without hope and jobs will eventually resort to crime and destroy their communities, but they don't care, because these men will end up killing themselves in their drug-ridden communities.

I don't believe working class men have been targeted as a group. Yes, working class skilled jobs that men did were deliberately destroyed, but so were working class skilled jobs done by women. When they closed down shipbuilding, steel works and coal mines, they also closed down mills and factories. Our clothes and textiles are now rarely made in Britain. Our electrical goods are rarely made in Britain. It used to be that you could walk on to a floor of an electronics factory and almost every single skilled worker would be a woman.

true we have all been targeted in order to destroy communities. But I think that men and women have been targeted in different ways.

And it is very hard to undo, because all those skills that people had are being lost.

I;d like to see a breakdown of the statistics BeenBEta refers to. How much is the fact that divorce increases when men lose their jobs due to the loss of the ability to 'provide' and how much is it due to the fact that these same men who can't provide don't see it as their role to perform domestic tasks in lieu of earnings? For example, one of the reasons I left my XP was because despite the fact that I was the main earner, he still saw it as my role, because I was a woman, to do all the domestic chores. It never bothered me that he didn't earn much. I certainly never saw him as less of a man because of it. However, the fact that he contributed nothing financially but wasn't prepared to take up the slack in other ways DID bother me. A lot. I considered it lazy and deeply disrespectful of me. I am sure that quite a lot of women would be happy to become the main earner if their 'D'H really took on board all the tasks that she did when he was the main earner. Trouble is, I suspect most of them will expect a huge pat on the back for remembering to fulfil just a fifth of the tasks of the average SAHM.

Sorry Lacking, didn't answer your question.

Yes, I'm sure it's true, from what I've read most people in capitalist societies are less happy.

In general I think that men do have some pressures, expectations and issues that women don't and vice-versa. On balance and taken as a whole I'd agree that there is significantly more oppression of women than men but there are at least a few issues where being a man is a hindrance.

This was the [http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/03/how-a-new-jobless-era-will-transform-america/7919/ Atlantic]] magazine article. Read form page 3.

This is an interesting quote:

"In her classic sociology of the Depression, The Unemployed Man and His Family, Mirra Komarovsky vividly describes how joblessness strained?and in many cases fundamentally altered?family relationships in the 1930s. During 1935 and 1936, Komarovsky and her research team interviewed the members of 59 white middle-class families in which the husband and father had been out of work for at least a year. Her research revealed deep psychological wounds. ?It is awful to be old and discarded at 40,? said one father. ?A man is not a man without work.? Another said plainly, ?During the depression I lost something. Maybe you call it self-respect, but in losing it I also lost the respect of my children, and I am afraid I am losing my wife.? Noted one woman of her husband, ?I still love him, but he doesn?t seem as ?big? a man.? "

Yes the article also issues highlights that unemployed men also only contribute only 37% of the housework too and domestic violence rises.

Atlantic magazine

Well that quote is hardly surprising given that it is talking about the 1930s. Eighty years and a lot of social change later and I think you would find that many many people woudl probably make fairly similar comments. Being unwanted and rejected and redundant is a horrible thing for anyone.

Again hardly surprising that families where one or both partners are made long term redundant suffer. Poverty would probably be the biggest stressor, but simply spending a lot more time with each other would probably be a big strain too (marriages break down after retirement too, where again couples are thrown together plus role change).

I think it is a bit odd to say that men are oppressed in a system where they have all the power. If men have it in for men it stands to reasons that it is in fact some men having it in for some other men and that the basis of that has nothing to do with gender.

Analysis to suggest that the rich have an interest in the poor being very unhappy is really not supported by history. Many social changes in the UK (expansions in suffrage, trade union wins etc) have come because those in power were frightened of revolution, riots and strikes, hence they make changes (often the smallest changes they thought possible) to keep the lower classes/downtrodden happy enough to be a)productive and b)quiet. It's only really in countries that could ship in new labour (like the States) and where communities were very divided that the workers were almost completely disenfranchised (one of the reasons why worker protection in the States is so incredibly minimal).

We now live in a globalised world, where it is easier to roll out the US model across the world. This is the period we are entering, one of short-term temporary contracts, competition with third world wages, cuts in benefits and social security and working till we drop style pension plans. I think it is deliberate and is what the small group of powerful men in charge want. The majority of our families will suffer under these changes. The ruling classes will try to weaken any opposition and will apply different treatment to different sectors of the population.

My versdion of feminism is for the benefit of everyone- yes men do best out of the system now, but there are many ways in which sexism and the patriarchy hurts them too. Not to mention the soul damage (if that doesn't sound too woo) of living in an inequal world.

EG- I'm white, but it makes my life worse to see racism. Obviously on nowhere near the scale as it does for people of different races, that goes without saying, but I would still rather live in a world without racism. This is the same principle.

Feminism is not a war, it is a movement. We are moving towards a more equal society, just frustratingly slowly.