It is nice to see this work being shared. These points about the treatment of men:
Trivialization (“It’s not that serious.”)
Denial (“That doesn’t really happen.”)
Justification (“There must be a reason.”)
Intimidation (“You can’t say that.”)
sum up how men's concerns are treated generally. Look at the treatment of claims of sexual harassment and rape. We are told to believe all women and never to require them to actually support their claims with evidence or afford the accused with the presumption of innocence (unless the accused is a woman of course). Men who raise the possibility (indeed the extreme probability) of false accusations and the legal and ethical requirement of the presumption of innocence will be hit immediately with the 4 claims above. What is most concerning is that those in charge of Codes of Conduct, Title IX offices and human resources are the most extremely anti-maile in using these 4 mechanisms of deflect even the possibility that the man is innocent and that the woman is actually a fraud.
When women's groups are confronted about the reverse of the female demand that MEN intervene on behalf of women by requiring that women have the same duty to due process, fairness and justice to men, the men will immediately be dismissed and told that men have to form their own organizations to do such "work". Of course, if such a group were to be formed it would immediately be attacked as misogynist for not centering WOMEN's needs.
The 4 steps of dismissing male concerns apply to any area where public resources/benefits are on the table. At the University of New Hampshire in the 1990's the institution had recently hired a new director of Diversity whose duties included being the person responsible for the university conduct system and ensuring compliance with all equal opportunity laws/policies. I served as a graduate student on the hiring committee. One of the 4 candidates we interviewed seemed well qualified and willing to perform the job fairly to all. 2 were questionable and 1 was clearly unqualified by displaying blatant feminist bias against men. This last woman was the person hired of course despite my clear written warnings about the bias she appeared to bring to the position. My words proved prophetic in the first year when she faced a challenge.
The university had long faced issues with sufficient housing in the small town of Durham. While many students lived in adjacent towns which were connected by a good university run bus system, the underlying housing situation in Durham remained problematic. The university was only able to guarantee on campus housing to freshman and incoming transfer students for their first year. To manage the rest of the students the university ran a lottery for the remaining housing slots. As part of the university's "diversity" initiatives, woke administrators proposed exempting people of color and LGBT people from the lottery guaranteeing them housing. As might be expected, students objected to this blatant example of housing administration. The diversity administrator, the person to whom students would have to report discrimination concerns and who would investigate personally wrote letters to the student newspaper defending the lottery exemption and accusing the students who were objecting of exerting white male privilege based on their race and ethnicity. At this time the university was 60% female: 40% male and mostly white. The only demographic group vastly over-represented on campus were white women like this white lesbian administrator. Despite the unwritten rule of university administrators NOT attacking individual students for daring to express their opinions in the student newspaper, this lesbian had no problem doing so in the name of her woke feminist values. She trivialized the students concerns, denied there was a problem, justified the discriminatory policy and was clearly using her position to intimidate the students into silence. It didn't work. The students stuck to their guns with support from people like myself. In the end, the university's own attorney authored a letter to the newspaper essentially stating that the university needed to stick to its original race/gender neutral approach to the housing lottery based on the very equal protection laws related to housing that the students were referencing if it wished to avoid legal complications. A male administrator who had made such a fool of himself to justify discrimination against women would have been fired faster than the speed of light. The woman in this case was neither fired nor even disciplined and remained in her important role until she chose to retire.
So yes...men do indeed face prejudice and feminism is at the core of it!
I HAVE FELT DISCRIMINATED AGAINST SINCE I WAS 3 OR 4 YEARS OLD, I WISH I HAD BEEN BORN FEMALE, I WOULD HAVE HAD A BETTER QUALITY OF LIFE INSTEAD OF SUFFERING DEPRESSION AND LONELINESS.
I've had the same experience, David, and I'm emotionally in tune with your hypothesis. With that in mind, please allow me to explore its implications.
I've lived long enough by now--78 years--to realize that being born female would not have made me a better person or even, in the long run, a happier one. Not if moral awareness is the standard of maturity, and it is for most people whether they think about it or not. On the contrary, it might well have blinded me to the needs and problems of boys and men. As an adult, at any rate, I think that indifference to injustice cannot provide anyone with the foundation for a "better quality of life." Both women and men need to learn something about the current epidemic of sexual (and racial) polarization.
Thanks, Tom. Slightly off topic: the Free Press (on Substack) just re-published an article titled, "What Went wrong with the American man?" They stated that many American men have retreated to the manosphere. There is a paywall on the page, so I couldn't view the article in it's entirety, or comment. But there were about 400 comments.
I emailed them, and told them that 50 years of man-hating feminism caused the withdrawal of men from the culture. I don't know if they will get it, but at least I tried.
From the paper: "...men are rarely portrayed as victims. Therefore, people are unfamiliar with
perceiving them in that role. For example, in the media men are almost exclusively portrayed as
the perpetrators of sexual assault and domestic violence. This creates the impression that they are unlikely to be victims of those crimes, especially by women."
Is anyone surprised?
Hilary Clinton's statement that "women have always been the primary victims of war" was made during a speech in which she emphasized her broader advocacy for women's rights and the recognition of domestic violence as a human rights violation.
Makes you wonder when, if ever, men count in her eyes?
Do white people face bigotry? Do rich people face bias? Are straight people experiencing discrimination? These are some more groundbreaking topics to discuss in your next piece!
Thanks, Tom, for letting us know about that excellent dissertation on the psychological mechanisms of gynocentrism or misandry—and the psychological effects on boys and men. It’s shocking to realize that it took so very long for psychologists (and other therapists) to realize what should be self-evident to everyone. Even feminists, after all, had to argue for years against androcentrism or misogyny before anyone took women seriously.
Only one thing is missing from the dissertation—I read the whole thing—and that is the specifically moral dimension of prejudice. No one can blame Aman Siddiqi for that, of course, because his field is psychology, not moral philosophy. But hatred remains the proverbial elephant standing invisibly in the corner. Not once does Siddiqi even mention the word “hatred.” Maybe he believes, as I do, that hatred is not an emotion at all, appearances notwithstanding, and therefore beyond his professional expertise. He could have acknowledged this in an introduction or conclusion. As for me, I define “hatred” as an institutionalized worldview that promotes the willful affliction, or worse, of one or more communities.
The distinction between prejudice and hatred, or psychology and moral philosophy, is not merely an academic one, let alone a pedantic one. Very few people are psychologists, but almost every child passes through a sequence of what psychologists themselves recognize as the stages of moral development. Whether children or adults think about this process of maturation or not, they emerge from it with the ability (though not always the inclination) to become moral agents. This means that almost everyone must accept responsibility for choosing function as moral acceptance—that is, to accept or reject whatever the prevailing worldview happens to be. Otherwise, how could the Nuremberg tribunal have condemned or even brought to trial anyone (high or low in rank) for cooperating with the extermination program of Nazi Germany? The judges concluded that some behaviors are unambiguously and inexcusably evil in the context of any human society (let alone one with an ancient tradition, accessible to everyone, of moral teaching). They held the perpetrators accountable (at least in theory) both morally and legally.
From this, I conclude that the ultimate solution to hatred is not psychotherapy for its victims (or even for its perps), although we do need that, but moral renewal.
As a footnote, I should add here that psychoanalysis, too, has a long history of assuming that even harmless non-conformity can, in itself, be a sign of mental disorder to be cured in therapy. Maybe—I’m speculating—its heyday just before and just after World War II led to the emphasis on social conformity that was so characteristic not only of the 1950s but also, in a different way, from the 1960s on.
"They then turn around and say that, after all, that is not what they meant. What they really meant is that women research subjects need to be educated to realize that feminist researchers, with their superior intellect and training, are in the best position to interpret what women's experiences are."
It is stunning that more psychologists themselves are not horrified by the demonstrable APA bias.
The very people who should know best about humans are themselves trapped in a cultural paradigm originating in unfalsifialble standpoint theories and that use postmodern frameworks to evade criticism.
They are lucky that men in general society for the most part do not read the actual research rather than the biased conclusions.
If they did, there would be far more difficult questions for the APA to answer. Ones that could not be handwaved away in the usual APA style.
The gender ratio of therapists in the United States remains predominantly female, with 70.4% of therapists being women and 24.7% being men. The question is how many are Woke. Wokeness being a feminine trait with an anti-male bias.
Men are not lucky if they require help and chose the wrong therapist. And the APA will not stand for scrutiny. See the following who are taking reasonable steps to the right direction.
It is nice to see this work being shared. These points about the treatment of men:
Trivialization (“It’s not that serious.”)
Denial (“That doesn’t really happen.”)
Justification (“There must be a reason.”)
Intimidation (“You can’t say that.”)
sum up how men's concerns are treated generally. Look at the treatment of claims of sexual harassment and rape. We are told to believe all women and never to require them to actually support their claims with evidence or afford the accused with the presumption of innocence (unless the accused is a woman of course). Men who raise the possibility (indeed the extreme probability) of false accusations and the legal and ethical requirement of the presumption of innocence will be hit immediately with the 4 claims above. What is most concerning is that those in charge of Codes of Conduct, Title IX offices and human resources are the most extremely anti-maile in using these 4 mechanisms of deflect even the possibility that the man is innocent and that the woman is actually a fraud.
When women's groups are confronted about the reverse of the female demand that MEN intervene on behalf of women by requiring that women have the same duty to due process, fairness and justice to men, the men will immediately be dismissed and told that men have to form their own organizations to do such "work". Of course, if such a group were to be formed it would immediately be attacked as misogynist for not centering WOMEN's needs.
The 4 steps of dismissing male concerns apply to any area where public resources/benefits are on the table. At the University of New Hampshire in the 1990's the institution had recently hired a new director of Diversity whose duties included being the person responsible for the university conduct system and ensuring compliance with all equal opportunity laws/policies. I served as a graduate student on the hiring committee. One of the 4 candidates we interviewed seemed well qualified and willing to perform the job fairly to all. 2 were questionable and 1 was clearly unqualified by displaying blatant feminist bias against men. This last woman was the person hired of course despite my clear written warnings about the bias she appeared to bring to the position. My words proved prophetic in the first year when she faced a challenge.
The university had long faced issues with sufficient housing in the small town of Durham. While many students lived in adjacent towns which were connected by a good university run bus system, the underlying housing situation in Durham remained problematic. The university was only able to guarantee on campus housing to freshman and incoming transfer students for their first year. To manage the rest of the students the university ran a lottery for the remaining housing slots. As part of the university's "diversity" initiatives, woke administrators proposed exempting people of color and LGBT people from the lottery guaranteeing them housing. As might be expected, students objected to this blatant example of housing administration. The diversity administrator, the person to whom students would have to report discrimination concerns and who would investigate personally wrote letters to the student newspaper defending the lottery exemption and accusing the students who were objecting of exerting white male privilege based on their race and ethnicity. At this time the university was 60% female: 40% male and mostly white. The only demographic group vastly over-represented on campus were white women like this white lesbian administrator. Despite the unwritten rule of university administrators NOT attacking individual students for daring to express their opinions in the student newspaper, this lesbian had no problem doing so in the name of her woke feminist values. She trivialized the students concerns, denied there was a problem, justified the discriminatory policy and was clearly using her position to intimidate the students into silence. It didn't work. The students stuck to their guns with support from people like myself. In the end, the university's own attorney authored a letter to the newspaper essentially stating that the university needed to stick to its original race/gender neutral approach to the housing lottery based on the very equal protection laws related to housing that the students were referencing if it wished to avoid legal complications. A male administrator who had made such a fool of himself to justify discrimination against women would have been fired faster than the speed of light. The woman in this case was neither fired nor even disciplined and remained in her important role until she chose to retire.
So yes...men do indeed face prejudice and feminism is at the core of it!
Women didn't care about men's troubles until it started to affect their marriage prospects.
They still don't.
I would say the majority of women who discuss male troubles are concern trolling.
This has been my recent experience. They do not have rational arguments and can't defend themselves.
I HAVE FELT DISCRIMINATED AGAINST SINCE I WAS 3 OR 4 YEARS OLD, I WISH I HAD BEEN BORN FEMALE, I WOULD HAVE HAD A BETTER QUALITY OF LIFE INSTEAD OF SUFFERING DEPRESSION AND LONELINESS.
I've had the same experience, David, and I'm emotionally in tune with your hypothesis. With that in mind, please allow me to explore its implications.
I've lived long enough by now--78 years--to realize that being born female would not have made me a better person or even, in the long run, a happier one. Not if moral awareness is the standard of maturity, and it is for most people whether they think about it or not. On the contrary, it might well have blinded me to the needs and problems of boys and men. As an adult, at any rate, I think that indifference to injustice cannot provide anyone with the foundation for a "better quality of life." Both women and men need to learn something about the current epidemic of sexual (and racial) polarization.
Thanks, Tom. Slightly off topic: the Free Press (on Substack) just re-published an article titled, "What Went wrong with the American man?" They stated that many American men have retreated to the manosphere. There is a paywall on the page, so I couldn't view the article in it's entirety, or comment. But there were about 400 comments.
I emailed them, and told them that 50 years of man-hating feminism caused the withdrawal of men from the culture. I don't know if they will get it, but at least I tried.
Did you not know that the Free Press is run by lesbians? And maybe they're feminists, too?
Down to basics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK7RwZOkD1w&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bing.com%2F&embeds_referring_origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bing.com&source_ve_path=MjM4NTE&theme=dark
Thanks for that information.
From the paper: "...men are rarely portrayed as victims. Therefore, people are unfamiliar with
perceiving them in that role. For example, in the media men are almost exclusively portrayed as
the perpetrators of sexual assault and domestic violence. This creates the impression that they are unlikely to be victims of those crimes, especially by women."
Is anyone surprised?
Hilary Clinton's statement that "women have always been the primary victims of war" was made during a speech in which she emphasized her broader advocacy for women's rights and the recognition of domestic violence as a human rights violation.
Makes you wonder when, if ever, men count in her eyes?
And she could have become a president.
in family law… enormously.
Do white people face bigotry? Do rich people face bias? Are straight people experiencing discrimination? These are some more groundbreaking topics to discuss in your next piece!
Thanks, Tom, for letting us know about that excellent dissertation on the psychological mechanisms of gynocentrism or misandry—and the psychological effects on boys and men. It’s shocking to realize that it took so very long for psychologists (and other therapists) to realize what should be self-evident to everyone. Even feminists, after all, had to argue for years against androcentrism or misogyny before anyone took women seriously.
Only one thing is missing from the dissertation—I read the whole thing—and that is the specifically moral dimension of prejudice. No one can blame Aman Siddiqi for that, of course, because his field is psychology, not moral philosophy. But hatred remains the proverbial elephant standing invisibly in the corner. Not once does Siddiqi even mention the word “hatred.” Maybe he believes, as I do, that hatred is not an emotion at all, appearances notwithstanding, and therefore beyond his professional expertise. He could have acknowledged this in an introduction or conclusion. As for me, I define “hatred” as an institutionalized worldview that promotes the willful affliction, or worse, of one or more communities.
The distinction between prejudice and hatred, or psychology and moral philosophy, is not merely an academic one, let alone a pedantic one. Very few people are psychologists, but almost every child passes through a sequence of what psychologists themselves recognize as the stages of moral development. Whether children or adults think about this process of maturation or not, they emerge from it with the ability (though not always the inclination) to become moral agents. This means that almost everyone must accept responsibility for choosing function as moral acceptance—that is, to accept or reject whatever the prevailing worldview happens to be. Otherwise, how could the Nuremberg tribunal have condemned or even brought to trial anyone (high or low in rank) for cooperating with the extermination program of Nazi Germany? The judges concluded that some behaviors are unambiguously and inexcusably evil in the context of any human society (let alone one with an ancient tradition, accessible to everyone, of moral teaching). They held the perpetrators accountable (at least in theory) both morally and legally.
From this, I conclude that the ultimate solution to hatred is not psychotherapy for its victims (or even for its perps), although we do need that, but moral renewal.
As a footnote, I should add here that psychoanalysis, too, has a long history of assuming that even harmless non-conformity can, in itself, be a sign of mental disorder to be cured in therapy. Maybe—I’m speculating—its heyday just before and just after World War II led to the emphasis on social conformity that was so characteristic not only of the 1950s but also, in a different way, from the 1960s on.
There are two papers;
"Heterosexual Males: A Group Forgotten by the Profession of Social Work"
Jordan I. Kosberg
https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2827&context=jssw
and
"The Unheard Gender: The Neglect of Men as Social Work Clients"
Nehami Baum
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281544352_The_Unheard_Gender_The_Neglect_of_Men_as_Social_Work_Clients
"When women stop being victims, the research stops" Warren Farrell
More interestingly, is "Manufacturing Research". https://web.archive.org/web/20050308115735/http://www.nojustice.info/Research/ManufacturingResearch.htm
"They then turn around and say that, after all, that is not what they meant. What they really meant is that women research subjects need to be educated to realize that feminist researchers, with their superior intellect and training, are in the best position to interpret what women's experiences are."
Absolutely and one of the worst offenders is the so-called justice system.
US but same in ALL western societies
There is a HUGE BIAS IN FAVOUR OF WOMEN in courts
Men receive sentences in criminal cases that are 63% higher than women for the same crimes
Prof. Starr's research shows large unexplained gender disparities in federal criminal cases
https://repository.law.umich.edu/law_econ_current/57/
It is stunning that more psychologists themselves are not horrified by the demonstrable APA bias.
The very people who should know best about humans are themselves trapped in a cultural paradigm originating in unfalsifialble standpoint theories and that use postmodern frameworks to evade criticism.
They are lucky that men in general society for the most part do not read the actual research rather than the biased conclusions.
If they did, there would be far more difficult questions for the APA to answer. Ones that could not be handwaved away in the usual APA style.
The gender ratio of therapists in the United States remains predominantly female, with 70.4% of therapists being women and 24.7% being men. The question is how many are Woke. Wokeness being a feminine trait with an anti-male bias.
Men are not lucky if they require help and chose the wrong therapist. And the APA will not stand for scrutiny. See the following who are taking reasonable steps to the right direction.
https://www.opentherapyinstitute.org/