thread for contemplating the serious issues raised by the Men's Rights movement

none? who cares? toxic male groupthink can exist in frats just as easily as on sports teams but the latter are harder to ban and arguably have more value. ban frats.

That's definitely the way to approach social science and policy issues: Who cares? I wish you great success!

xp Don't ask the question like you're trying to son me if you're going to get smugly stupid about the answer.

at my college the fraternities had terrible hazing policies that traumatized a person i knew. he dropped out of college and now he makes documentaries about his roommate.

http://stream1.gifsoup.com/view6/2481222/ahahaha-what-a-story-mark-o.gif

also because of their existence and the fact that they had the best houses they came to dominate social life on campus. these male dominated spaces (sororities didn't have houses) where nobody except "brothers" were made to feel fully comfortable. everything about it was awful.

i had friends who were in frats by the way and would even hang out at one or two semi-regularly to drink and smoke and listen to music. it's not about the people. but as institutions they were toxic as could be.

also, saying that frats by and large promote a worse, more exaggerated form of patriarchal values than some other institutions people could be a part of is not the same as saying that sexism doesn't exist across the culture as a whole. this doesn't even make sense.

I would be ok with banning fraternities without reference to whether they are incubators for rape culture, simply on the grounds that they demonstrably do more overall harm than good.

Treeship, you should check the numbers for sexual assault on campuses for countries that don't have frats, like France for example.

My alma mater did not allow off-campus housing, or any kind of separate housing , for Greek organizations. They had floors designated in otherwise regular residence halls.

xp there might be other complicating factors in france. if the rates there were the same or higher than in america, that doesn't mean that banning frats here couldn't still have a salutary effect.

obviously, it won't solve the issue but i think it might be a start.

You've made it clear that you don't care about "other complicating factors" already so

http://msmagazine.com/blog/2014/03/03/of-frats-rape-culture-and-tfm/

stumbled across that while trying to look up what percentage of frat brothers play varsity sports. whatever it is, i doubt it accounts for the 300% more likely to assault figure cited in the guardian piece hurting quoted. beyond that though, the degree to which frat culture is synonymous with sexism seems impossible to ignore. from the ms magazine piece:

For one thing, fraternities tend to enforce gender norms of men showing off their masculinity and power over women. Take the hot-spot website for fraternity members, totalfratmove.com. Popular columns such as “An Ode to Shackers” explain the all-too-common embarrassment felt when a frat brothers realizes he slept with a girl who was than a “10″ and not “anything to boast about,” but, hey, she was there, so why not?... The article explains:

You figure you might as well take advantage of the situation. You’re still a tad drunk, and some morning sex wouldn’t hurt. … Alright, sexually dissatisfy her and get her the hell home. Pronto.

The website also includes a wall that fraternity members can post to with the hashtag #TFM (total frat move). #TFMs include such gems as “Your friend having a ‘very important and private question’ for you as soon as the ugly girl starts talking to you,” or “Complimenting a pledge’s girlfriend on her cleavage.”

this is clearly a really great facet of our culture that needs to be preserved.

my call to ban frats might have been rhetorical. my main point is that they are a cancer on university life in america and something should be done to address this.

I really don't think the point I'm trying to make is #notallmen, I'm actually saying all men will probably be worse wrt to this if placed in a toxic culture and better if they are not. TBH I find the line of argument against what I am saying here kind of maddening, like what are we arguing for, original sin? If targeting institutions that are known to especially promote rape culture isn't a good way of mitigating rape culture, what is?

I don't intend to get all #notallfrats in here, because no, but it might help if your argument wasn't seemingly centered on what you've learned about frats from 80s comedies. I was not in a frat and actively avoided Greek life at my school (it was tough to escape sometimes at a Big Ten school - fwiw, the sororities DID have houses), but I was in studio classes with guys in frats that represented the complete opposite of what you describe.

xpost

because of their existence and the fact that they had the best houses they came to dominate social life on campus. these male dominated spaces (sororities didn't have houses) where nobody except "brothers" were made to feel fully comfortable. everything about it was awful.

i had friends who were in frats by the way and would even hang out at one or two semi-regularly to drink and smoke and listen to music. it's not about the people. but as institutions they were toxic as could be.

i am talking about what it was like at my mid-level liberal arts college in the northeast between the years 2007-2011

hurting is more diplomatic about this issue than i am, so i should probably cede the floor to him.

I've seen that kind of male-dominated toxic environment in all sorts of places though - theater departments, restaurant serving staffs, sports teams, role playing groups, etc etc.

message boards

ban ilx

xp to NA, (and somewhat off topic), how is this dude a speaker at so many conferences on the future of libraries and his resume lists only one librarian job? (ps NA i am a librarian)

― marcos, Friday, September 26, 2014 12:54 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I honestly don't know that much about it but he seems to be more of a "library thought leader/futurist" than a librarian.

Hey, I'm perfectly willing to concede that my experience at a small liberal arts college in Ohio in the late 1980s - early 1990s was atypical, if for no other reason than that Greeks were not permitted to live off-campus. (Out of six fraternities on campus, there were two that did get into the sorts of hazing and sexual assault trouble that one typically thinks of, and to nobody's surprise, they were the "jock frats." And this was a Div III school, so it's not like they were on easy-street football scholarships.)

But aside from the fact that, as jon says, that kind of culture can arise in any male-exclusive place (and often does!), this is almost a buried lead in that Ms. piece:

Perhaps it’s partially because fraternities hold power over universities financially. They provide students with off-campus housing that the university would otherwise have to provide, and so the university also doesn’t have to provide insurance for those students. Fraternities save universities a tremendous amount of money. And as with all cases of campus rape, universities don’t want to be thought of as being unsafe and unsavory, so they don’t like to have to deal with (and thus have to publicize) sexual assaults if they can avoid it.

Ban frats for all I care -- my college days are two decades behind me -- but I'm skeptical that the kind of men who want to be in an environment like that and participate in that culture won't simply organize in other ways that will allow them to continue in the same behaviors. Institutions are nothing more than the people in them.

yeah i am down with that sort of solution. too often frats are privileged institutions on campus, which gives institutional legitimacy to what they do as i described on this thread a few months ago. whether you think frats are the cart or the horse, it doesn't make sense for them to have so many privileges over other campus institutions

as far as I'm concerned, phi beta kappa can eat a bag o' keys

The financial argument doesn't make sense -- there's no requirement for universities to provide housing for all its students, and the ones that live on campus pay for housing. There might be a financial argument but surely that's not it.

At my university -- fifth on list of largest public universities if you count enrollment -- institutional student power lies in the Greek system. If you want a voice in student government, you join a frat or sorority. This is a fact, and it's depressing. The frats and sororities form coalitions organized in support of a candidate and expend resources on his or her behalf. I've told a few students that if they only got the non-Greek housing vote they'd trample the Greeks (which are only a few hundred at most) but hey we're a commuter school too

I was going to say, when I started college the university had 20k students but only a tiny fraction lived on campus. The university owned apartments nearby but the majority of students' living situations were completely separate from the school.

The most powerful frat was asked to leave campus last year when this video appeared.

fran bats
http://a.espncdn.com/photo/2012/0325/mlb_u_soriano_gb1_200.jpg

http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2013/049/2/8/they_re_pinky_and_the_brain__brain__brain__and_rem_by_crankshaftrabbit-d5vekn1.jpg

stab narf

a lot of posters itt have given some really great anecdotes to counterweigh the data hurting's describing

reverse sexism!!

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2014/09/29/hollywoods-attack-on-men-will-industry-change-its-gender-stereotyping-following/

http://deadspin.com/the-future-of-the-culture-wars-is-here-and-its-gamerga-1646145844

There is a reason why, in all the Gamergate rhetoric, you hear the echoes of every other social war staged in the last 30 years: overly politically correct, social-justice warriors, the media elite, gamers are not a monolith. There is also a reason why so much of the rhetoric amounts to a vigorous argument that Being a gamer doesn't mean you're sexist, racist, and stupid—a claim no one is making. Co-opting the language and posture of grievance is how members of a privileged class express their belief that the way they live shouldn't have to change, that their opponents are hypocrites and perhaps even the real oppressors. This is how you get St. Louisans sincerely explaining that Ferguson protestors are the real racists, and how you end up with an organized group of precisely the same video game enthusiasts to whom an entire industry is catering honestly believing that they're an oppressed minority. From this kind of ideological fortification, you can stage absolutely whatever campaigns you deem necessary.

The best solution to that would be to actually cover the gaming world in a way that is cognizant of non-gamers. I have no idea what goes on in gaming - just that the graphics hurt my eyes. I guess I worry that young people won't learn anything from it, but I don't believe in being alarmist about it.

I'm having some trouble parsing all three of those sentences tbh.

ppl interested in reading more about #gamergate, who may otherwise not read ILG, should know that there's a long, ongoing thread on the topic over there:
Why is casual racism/sexism more accepted in video games than other forms of media (these days)?

i'm not sure that #gamergate has anything to do w/ men's issues and so this is probably not the best thread for it - esp considering it has a devoted thread already

Even a cursory glance at the Deadspin article demonstrates that self-described "gamer" resentment is p much 100% about men's right issues (ie the right for everything to be all about them all the time forever). Bullying the industry and the rest of the world into complying with their priorities by using threats of violence against women, educational institutions, and the general population is also perfectly in line with how disaffected, disengaged, emotionally stunted mostly young white dudes lash out violently and leave manifestos that prove their alignment with MRAs generally.

by that token the tea party + IS are also men's rights phenomena

the serious issues raised by Men's Rights movement don't include "the right for everything to be all about them for all the time forever." they include things like higher fatality rate in male occupations, the predominant use of young males in armies, disdain for maleness in popular culture, court prejudice against fathers in custody battles -- ie actual serious issues that men face!

I have seen gamergate dudes explicitly say things like "Gaming is one of the last spaces guys have left and they're trying to ruin it." If that's not MRA talk I don't know what is.

it's just not serious MRA talk. it's insane talk.

MRA/antifeminist/"red pill" scenes were the first to blow this thing up, they are deeply implicated and their language is all over the "movement"

by that token the tea party + IS are also men's rights phenomena

lol yes?

yr going to force me to start a new thread that's just called men issues or something aren't u

"the predominant use of young males in armies" <--- this is not a serious issue; the serious issue is the exclusion of women in armies and the misuse of military might throughout the entirety of human history, but the fact that militaries use young men isn't a serious problem by itself

also in order for "disdain for maleness in popular culture" to be an actual issue, you need to define "maleness" in a pretty insulting way

Also it takes chutzpah of a major fashion to have purposefully, for decades, kept women out of (or discouraged them from working in) high risk jobs or front-line military roles, then to complain that you're the ones at risk in the workplace and at war.

disdain for maleness in popular culture

I can't even.

thread for contemplating the serious issues raised by dudes who spend 90% of their waking hours disengaged from reality

posts that effortlessly etc

It hadn't occurred to me when I clicked on this thread that people would actually be discussing this self-evidently moronic concept seriously.

― Matt DC, Tuesday, 19 November 2013 16:00 (10 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

nobody is discussing it, we're trying to discern why deems made it into a thing

― just got dope thai food (Nilmar Honorato da Silva), Tuesday, 19 November 2013 16:01 (10 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

don't get me wrong, there's nothing i dream of more than addressing phil d on ilx but i'm gonna pass. i'll probably start just a plain 'men's issues' thread (i'll even attach some kind of DNRIYHM) the next time i have something relevant to post or whatever

and those of you who believe there is no such thing as a 'men's issue' or a problem facing men specifically in society can note yr objections here or whatever