I just stepped down as moderator from all five of the subreddits I used to moderate over on Reddit. I just can’t ethically justify continued activity on Reddit, and especially free volunteer labour for an openly greedy company that is engaged in scummy behaviour, forcing mods to open protesting communities or be demoted.
So my online activism for boys and men is now focused here and on Mastodon. And I am welcoming everyone coming over from Reddit, especially from LeftWingMaleAdvocates, the sub I put in the majority of my time and effort as a mod.
Let’s build something good here, as we did previously on Reddit. It appears we have a wider reach here, so let’s debate in good faith and with civil manners.
Here, in this magazine (i.e. community or subreddit in Kbin-speak) we wish to discuss and spread awareness of various issues that disproportionately affect males.
We believe men are not being well-served by either side of the mainstream political spectrum. We oppose the right wing’s exploitation of men’s issues as a wedge to recruit men to inegalitarian traditional values. But we also oppose feminist attempts to deny male issues, or shoehorn them into a biased ideology that blames “male privilege” and guilt-trips men.
We have no objection to the genuinely egalitarian aspects of feminism, but we will criticize feminist ideology wherever it is inegalitarian and/or untruthful, especially now that it holds institutional power. Too often feminism has promoted a one-sided “equality”, dismantling male advantages while exploiting, reinforcing, preserving, and downplaying female advantages - particularly in cases involving alleged abuse.
In practice this means that most of us are politically homeless. The natural home for male advocacy should be the left wing, which professes to be explicitly egalitarian. But in modern practice, men’s issues are habitually ignored, denied, or even opposed.
We seek to address male issues without falling into the traps of an impossible return to the past or a disastrous sexism. Men and women have equal value, and we need to work together for a better future.
Friend, I think you’re already falling into the “us vs them” mentality. We should be able to separate the loud, misandrist, “men are the problem, women are the solution”, feminists from the “we’re equal before the law, but I still perceive inequality and something should be done about it”, passive feminists.
That is what is done to MRAs who were just saying “men have issues too, here are some” and being labeled as misogynist, radical, dangerous, and incel (which also shouldn’t be an insult, much less one exclusive to men).
Each community has their loud, obnoxious members, but they shouldn’t be representative of that community unless the community is mostly loud and obnoxious itself.
As such, I’d like to challenge your view that feminism is the problem and propose that it has much more to do with tradition and religion. Men and women alike face irreconcilable gender roles, prejudice, and traditional and societal obligations, that lead to their oppression:
The issue is much deeper than simple “women say men are the problem, which is the problem”. Tribalism, identity-politics, and myopic, single-viewed, unidirectional thinking is toxic.
We do not say that women are the problem. But we also disagree that men are the problem.
We need to address traditional gender norms in an egalitarian way. We support freeing women from them. But we must not forget about freeing men also.
That means we can’t accept misandry from any movement that claims to fight for gender equality. And that unfortunately leads us into conflict with feminist ideology and feminist praxis.