'what about the men' -any tips for how to respond?

[Interestedwoman]

I hope I'm posting this in the right place. Either way, please be gentle with me :)

I have a male friend, and often if I say stuff about women's experience or feminism, he'll say 'women can be controlling to men, too' or 'that happens to men as well' etc lines.

In part of a discussion of whether there were any political outcomes it was worth losing friends for, and whether we cared about any goal enough that if we knew it would lose us all our friends we would still rub the lamp and have a genie make it come true (this was at my instigation as friends are very important to me, I have a complex about it.) I said :-

'I suppose if it was 'end all violence against women on this earth' I'd probably still go for it.'

He said (yep you guessed it) 'End all violence against people on this earth, surely?'

Any tips on how to respond to stuff like this? (I still want to keep him as a friend.)

It strikes me as being a bit like when in response to 'Black Lives Matter,' someone says 'All lives matter.'

@ErrolTheDragon
And what is your evidence that violence is caused by carrying the Y gene?
I did immediately before post a 8 page white paper that summarises dozens of studies showing that violent adults are made not born. Perhaps read through it? It’s a lot more evidence than your comparison of humans to animals: .
Among non-human mammals, the XYs are very often significantly more aggressive (as opposed to defensive) than XX. ?

Where is your evidence for that statement? Link please.

It's arguable that it's non-violent men who are made, thanks to human civilisation.

Yes, exactly. But, logically, if non violent men can be made, then so too can violent men be made. You cannot believe in one without the other.

"Do you have any evidence of this special mocking of women but not men on a general level?"

On a general level, there's this for starters, "misogyny dictates that smart women are ugly and beautiful women are stupid."

Men find nonsense reasons to try and discredit all women so no matter what side of a debate women take they're always wrong.

@insideandout3
sorry but my opinion cannot be used as evidence. I did clearly say “In my opinion, misogyny...” when I wrote that so as to be clear that it is an opinion not fact.

Wishing for world peace should be a selfless, altruistic expression of one person given a hypothetical wish, but beauty pageant contestants are deemed fake and lacking personality for saying that obviously the world would be utopian if there were no violence.

The woman who made a specific hypothetical wish that reflected her personal beliefs (usually the point of such questions when asked to men) is also held to an unfairly feminized altruism that expects her to forfeit her still quite altruistic personal wish for 0% violence against women and instead make a bland beauty queen statement of how all lives matter.

Violence is inherent in the bodily manifestation of XY.

They have the physical capacity to do more damage. That fact underlies all psychological development of the sexed human. It's inescapable. We (both sexes) try to civilise it out of them but it's a horribly imperfect process with compound accumulation of fuckups.

'I suppose if it was 'end all violence against women on this earth' I'd probably still go for it.'

He said (yep you guessed it) 'End all violence against people on this earth, surely?'

Any tips on how to respond to stuff like this? (I still want to keep him as a friend.)

I think that you need to sit him down and have a heart to heart about his constantly correcting you. That is not how friends treat friends and if he wants to keep you as his friend he needs to respect your right to voice your own opinions.
This particular male dominance display is on my last nerve, OP.

Do you have any evidence of this special mocking of women but not men on a general level?
If you google world peace and beauty pageant you will get all the evidence anyone could possibly want on the mockery by men of women who advocate "whirled peas".

This was on FB yesterday (although originally from 2017).

People found it very uncomfortable when the pretty ladies didn't conform:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/peruvian-beauty-pageant-focuses-on-womens-rightsnn_59fa23c8e4b0a75e6f59b262

I think it is bizarre that people expect a species to not show aggression/violence.

The same testosterone that deterred a sabre toothed tiger or another warring tribe cannot be evolved away from that quickly (if desirable at all). It is also intimately bound up in the male’s ability to procreate.

What society does is try to channel the aggression into useful rather than harmful channels.

Viewing ‘male’ aggression in isolation is ridiculously reductive and something that (as a male) I would never apologise for (not that stupid apologies for other people are ever anything other than annoying). All I do is be non violent myself and teach my children that violence is a last resort and to treat everyone with respect.

Incidentally ‘male’ violence is very correlated to education and socio-economic position. If I asked what are working class people going to do about working class violence, I suspect it would not be well received, (And correlation is not a 1-2-1 mapping).

And, as for the OP, she does not need to stop seeing her friend and it is not ‘tiresome’ that he brings up what you would term ‘whataboutery’, it is the basis of an interesting discussion between friends and a chance for them both to evolve their perspectives.

Echo chambers are not healthy.

I think it is bizarre that people expect a species to not show aggression/violence

Males aren’t a species Larry

Cor, can you imagine if the feminazis went around saying that men are a separate species? Men like Larry would lose their shit

The same testosterone that deterred a sabre toothed tiger or another warring tribe cannot be evolved away from that quickly (if desirable at all). It is also intimately bound up in the male’s ability to procreate.

Yep. If the inherited characteristic gets you past the goal post - that of contributing to the next generation - any downsides can go hang.

"All I do is be non violent myself and teach my children that violence is a last resort and to treat everyone with respect."

Give yourself more credit, that's not all you do. You also post in feminist spaces about how testosterone makes men naturally destructive by their very nature and male violence inevitable in everything from interpersonal conflict to sexual intercourse, at least for blue collar cretins if not for refined men like yourself.

"Incidentally ‘male’ violence is very correlated to education and socio-economic position."

Like Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump, Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, Brett Kavanaugh.....?

But now I'm confused; is it more testosterone or lack of money that makes billions of men hyperviolent rapey thugs?

Testosterone doesn't make you aggressive in itself. It's one point in a web of variables arising from the bodily manifestation of the Y chromosome which reinforce one another to affect the way specimens of each sex express aggression.

We're just as aggressive as men, but "aggression" is usually used in a very narrow definitional sense centred around the male-typical spectrum of variation.

'Testosterone fuels aggression' is a causal hypothesis rooted in the centreing of the male as the true human. It's patriarchal bias.

But now I'm confused; is it more testosterone or lack of money that makes billions of men hyperviolent rapey thugs?

Doesn't need to be mutually exclusive.

We're just as aggressive as men

Kind of what the OP's friend said.

Yep. OP and OP's friend are using definitions of aggression that are divorced by their experiences of sexed reality.

OP is right that class Man displays a greater and wider spread of physical and psychological behaviour that damages bodies.

OP's friend has a blind spot around how his experience of sexual dimorphism has guided his interpretation of his experience, which is preventing him from noticing that OP is using a deep-yet-narrow definition of aggression while he himself is using a shallow-yet-broad definition of the same word.

He just doesn't quite get how he's upsetting OP - because he has a global psychological blind spot as a result of emerging as a perceptual entity within a male-sexed body in a sexually dimorphic world.

Feeling angry and then feeling selfishly entitled to act violently on those emotions are two very different things..

The difference between male aggression and female aggression is that men lack the emotional control that women retain when angry.

Male physical advantage acts as an intensifier on the development of emotional regulation and control in women more so than in men. Results vary based on individual experiences and exposures. But we all grasp that class Man has an edge over class Woman when it comes to the potential to be physically overpowered, and adjust our behaviour accordingly.

The tales we tell of testosterone serve to absolve the violent male of his perception of his own responsibility for the human suffering he causes. It lets him off the hook.

The problem isn't being in possession of heightened testosterone resulting in aggression. The problem is lack of ability to simultaneously guide&endure the emotional roller coaster that is being human in ways that don't break anyone.

If we could accurately detect and count inwardly-directed aggression incidences in males and females, you'd see the pattern - we are just as violent, just as aggressive, we experience this just as intensely - but we mask by reframing and directing inwards, and it skews the available data.

Men only call women's experience of aggression by that name when it's directed at them. They miss most of it because the bulk of it's directed at ourselves and other women.

(If I were in OP's shoes I suspect I'd be expressing my aggression through an epic rant about how the language of the oppressor shapes perceptual reality, with a side-rant about the evolutionary pressures guiding the usage of the tag "dick" when describing patterns of behaviour. I doubt it would be well received!)

you're on fire at the moment Tyrotoxicity if I may say so!

I love this

''‘There’s only three things you can be certain of in life: taxes, death and some randomer yelling ‘what about men?’ every time you talk about women’s issues.’'

Tyro,

Your post is both erudite and eloquent but it is based on hypotheses with no evidence in fact and counteracts plentiful available evidence on how aggression is highly correlated to aggressive behaviour (and the causal mechanism is also well understoood).

The below study is one of many suggesting more aggressive men have higher levels of testosterone. In addition, anecdotally, both male and female sportspeople taking androgen supplements report increase feelings of anger.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1991.tb02379.x

It is true, as stated above, that fear of being hurt suppresses aggression but there are plenty of people who do just lose their temper and attack bigger people as well,

(I am also aware that males are not a species but if male violence were non existent, human violence would be much decreased).

Testosterone is correlated to aggressive behaviour (corrects typo above).

larry you have a very shallow understand of the linguistic tags you are using.

Your definitions of "hypothesis" and "evidence" are biased by your sexed reality; you prioritise your own subjectivity over others' along the axis of perceived realness; you believe your subjectivity correlates with a really-real thing which you label "objectivity".

You have failed to grasp that your subjective inference of an objective reality is not, as you believe, a definitive indication that the object-plane has a greater existence-value than the subject-plane.

Truth is a social construct, and in a very fundamental level I don't think larry quite appreciates what that means. It's just words to him. Gibberish. With no ramifications.