I hate this argument every time I see it. It could be used to justify so many terrible prejudices that we’ve been trying to get rid of for decades. I got robbed by a black man once so should I now treat all black men as potential criminals?
You put into words thoughts that I’ve been unable to for a while.
Like, I read this and I see how someone makes this argument, but I feel fucking terrible afterwards. Sure you haven’t said I’m a rapist, but you’ve said you’ll treat me as though I am. You can’t expect men as a demographic to agree to this argument if it requires society to assume they’re shitty people, at which point, why is it even being made?
The worst part I feel is that there’s a lot of incel types that conflate feminism with sexism, which we’d like to school them by pointing them at a dictionary. While incels are generally shitty, we can’t ignore the fact that this argument is telling them their behavior doesn’t actually matter because we’re going to act like they’re rapists based solely on their malehood anyways. (to be clear, this is an explanation, not a justification)
Yeah fuck it. I swear these fucking movements are almost intentionally avoiding any caveat that might make it 400% more paletable.
Imagine how many fucking arguments people could have avoided if they called the movement “black lives matter too” instead of “black lives matter”. It’s three fucking letters, but it adds an incredible amount of context and emphasis on the inequality. Same with going from LGBT to LGBTQIA2S+ or other longform acronym that is not as straightforward as LGBT+ (same as the historically well known “name” , paying homage to the idea that there are other forms of this experience(?) that are not covered by the 4 letters) or GSM (Gender & Sexual Minorities , which unambigiously covers everything).
If you want to reply anything among the lines of “The riot is the speech of the unheard”, I said it for you, just move along.
Imagine how many fucking arguments people could have avoided if they called the movement “black lives matter too” instead of “black lives matter”.
It’s so simple, so obvious…and such a missed opportunity. And while I personally saw the “too” as implied, it led to bad-faith actors really twisting it as well as inevitably some people actually not understanding it.
Same with going from LGBT to LGBTQIA2S+ or other longform acronym that is not as straightforward as LGBT+
The fear of leaving anyone out led to tacking on more and more letters, and then disagreements about which letters to include.
GSM (Gender & Sexual Minorities , which unambigiously covers everything).
I haven’t heard this one before, but I like it for its simplicity.
“Defund the police” was another fail in that the phrase didn’t accurately portray the actual intention and was off-putting to people who might have otherwise supported it.
And while I personally saw the “too” as implied, it led to bad-faith actors really twisting it as well as inevitably some people actually not understanding it.
Don’t you think bad faith actors will do that regardless? The problem isn’t that the names were bad, the problem is a large amount of people had no interest in learning anything beyond the name and/or actively fought against learning what those groups were actually for.
I have a friend who is a woman who insisted that it’s a majority of men who do things like grope women on dance floors or exhibit other such sex pest behaviors.
I pushed back on this because I quite strongly believe that not to be the case, and pointed out that encountering such men a majority of the time when going out doesn’t require a majority of men to behave that way. An incidence rate of, say, one in twenty still virtually guarantees you’ll run into multiple if you’re in a crowd of sufficient size.
I’m also not trying to downplay the seriousness of it being a very real problem. Nor do I deny her lived experience of encountering that behavior often when going to concerts or whatever. Literally just pointing out that such an experience doesn’t require a majority.
She got offended, calling me out for not believing her and accused me of making a “not all men” argument to try to invalidate what she was saying, despite explicitly agreeing that it’s a problem that needs addressing.
There is a distinction between a prejudice born of bigotry, and a prejudice born of a real fear and trauma. And while I understand your point, the difference between these two directly affects how we can effectively address them societally.
To start addressing it, we can’t just keep admonishing traumatized women. We have to understand where the prejudice comes from. The reality is that women need to be on guard constantly, not because of all men, but still specifically because of men.
They are continuously exposed to stories like the Rape Academy website, see sexual violence normalized in media, encounter rape threats online, and virtually all of them have either experienced sexual assault themselves or know someone who has.
And while this is not all men, or even most, the statistics are clear: perpetrators of violence and sexual assault against women (and against men) are overwhelmingly male. Since there is no reliable way to identify which men pose a threat until it is too late, it’s unsurprising that many women develop a prejudice as a safety mechanism.
It’s unfortunate that this can harden into bigotry, but it’s even more unfortunate that the threat giving rise to it exists at all.
Your analogy of being robbed by a black man “once” actually highlights how widely the pervasiveness of this threat is misunderstood. For women, this isn’t a single incident. It’s a lifelong threat most acute during their formative years.
So by way of a counter analogy: would you admonish a black person who grew up in the American South during the Civil Rights era with “not all white people” or “not all cops”? Or would you recognize that their wariness was, prejudiced or not, a rational response to a very real danger?
I agree that we should strive toward a society where no one is judged on anything but the content of their character. But it’s worth noting that countless men rush to admonish frustrated and traumatized women with “not all men,” while far fewer show up when stories like the Rape Academy actually break. This imbalance is itself part of the problem.
And if we as men, and as human beings, want to see less of this prejudice in the world, perhaps the more productive question isn’t whether the prejudice is fair, but why so few of us are doing anything to make it less necessary, and why so many of us are more interested in pushing back against women’s reactions than addressing the cause of them. And this, for me, calls to mind MLK’s observations about the white moderate…
The racial metaphor is misplaced and disingenuous to the conversation. Let’s say as a woman, just about all of your women friends have been at some point attacked by a dog. Some have been completely mauled, some have managed to fight the dog off after a couple of bites, some managed to run away from the dog and jump into a car before it could bite them, and most have a combination of stories from their lives. Some are traumatised and scarred for life, others have been able to move on largely as normal, but they haven’t forgotten that scary moment.
Now our woman may or may not have been attacked by a dog before, but because of all these experiences she’s seen her friends go through, the fear, the lifelong injuries they carry - the pain, the embarrassment, the shame, the blame - she’s pretty anxious about getting a dog. Especially one where she doesn’t know its history. It’s a big dog, strong, gorgeous and seems so sweet wagging his tail. But most dogs are like that when you first meet them. It’s the rarest of dog that shows you complete aggression from the beginning and you know full well to stay away from them. She doesn’t know if she brings this dog into her home, if something seemingly benign might set it off. It’s even riskier if she lives alone.
(As an aside, isn’t it ridiculous that a woman should feel embarrassed or ashamed for having been attacked by a dog… or good god - blamed for inciting it - was she carrying beef jerky visibly as she walked down the street, she should have known a wild dog couldn’t control itself at the sight of jerky??)
If the frequency of dog attacks were as prevalent as violence and assault against women is - no one would be allowed to keep a dog for a pet. Sure, it’s NOT ALL DOGS, but the likelihood and the severity of the consequences is such that you’d be crazy to go into the situation of dog ownership without taking precautions, and in the back of your mind you’ll keep remembering all those friends who’s dogs were sweet right up until they weren’t.
People who have beautiful dogs at home, who see their dog snuggle their baby and is sweet to their cat, and have only ever had warm interactions with dogs won’t understand the fear. Not all dogs they’ll say.
Someone else will come along and say it’s only brown dogs you have to worry about. (Sounds ludicrous in this phrasing doesn’t it).
But you know what the difference is between dogs and humans. In a pack of dogs, the good dogs will call out the bad ones. They’ll pin them down, bark at them, gnash their teeth - make it clear that’s not acceptable if you want to be a part of this pack. Even when play fighting gets a little rough - they say when it’s enough. The dogs keep each other in line.
What we’re seeing in life is that the dogs are saying to women, not all dogs are going to maul you and leave you with scars for life. Most of us are good dogs, and it’s not fair you’re scared of us when we’re not doing the attacking. We’re not seeing enough good dogs giving strong reinforcement. Making sure they’re being well socialised when they’re growing up. They’re not going out and engaging with younger pups and teaching them how to behave properly, they’re not even pulling their friends into line and baring their teeth saying that behaviour is not ok. Even as a joke.
The point is - every woman has multiple stories of people she knows being victimised, and sadly the odds are, she will have some kind of personal experience with it in her lifetime. The impact of being assaulted is every bit as lifelong and traumatic for the victim as a frenzied dog attack.
If we treated it with the severity it really carries, and according to the overwhelming frequency with which it occurs. We’d realise a response of “not all men” is not enough.
But you know what the difference is between dogs and humans. In a pack of dogs, the good dogs will call out the bad ones. They’ll pin them down, bark at them, gnash their teeth - make it clear that’s not acceptable if you want to be a part of this pack.
If a human man tries doing that, people will tell him to “stop white knighting” and they’ll shun him worse than the guy whose behavior he was trying to put a stop to.
The fact is that predatory behavior is often indistinguishable from typical human mating rituals when viewed from the sidelines. The difference ultimately boils down to whether the recipient of the advances is accepting of them, which is often an internal thing that no one but a mind reader could tell from an outsider’s perspective.
People tend to be aloof and circumspect about these types of things. Women don’t always openly reject unwanted advances. Sometimes they expect the guy to “just figure it out.” And women don’t always openly encourage wanted advances either. Sometimes they expect the guy to “just figure it out.”
So, if a woman is being quiet, is she just playing it cool, or is she silently resenting the guy talking to her? At what point is a nearby observer supposed to step in and say “Is this guy bothering you?” And if she says “it’s fine,” to what extent are you supposed to take her word for it?
Or are we all just supposed to magically know the secret code to perfectly interpret every situation every time? Because at that point, what’s the point of having a secret code in the first place?
I stopped talking to women because almost always they expected me to “just figure it out” without them ever having to state how they feel, good or bad. Maybe they tried dropping hints but they went over my head. Sometimes I had the feeling they were dropping a hint but I didn’t know what it meant one way or the other. And then they would get upset when I didn’t read their minds. And I’m supposed to believe that that’s a moral failing on my part? When my whole life I’ve struggled with a lack of social skills in general to begin with?
So I stopped talking to women, to avoid the situation altogether. And now I’m expected to somehow intervene in other people’s interactions?!? Which still requires a modicum of mind reading ability, by the way.
It’s ridiculous. Men don’t have this magical ability to control what other men do.
The post literally says not “all men”. I don’t know why yourself and so many other commenters are inserting a straw man to argue with. If it’s intentional, it’s a bad-faith practise. If it’s unintentional it’s a literacy issue (common problem is USA).
I read the heading “all men are dangerous” as a misrepresentation of the screenshot - which is what I’m pushing back on. I definitely don’t think that all men are dangerous. I would be relieved to think that the comments here take issue with the heading and not the body text/screenshot, but the comments I’ve responded to haven’t made that distinction.
Really? Because there’s literally a line where the OP from the image references their statement of “all men are dangerous” that her husband then defends.
It’s literally part of the screenshot. Even if they then go on to defend it with “I know it’s not all men, but I’m saying it because of sharks or something”.
a misrepresentation of the screenshot - which is what I’m pushing back on
Okay, well let’s do some analysis then. If they say they know it’s not all men, but then immediately follow it up with saying they can’t tell which men it is, what message are we supposed to get? In the context of a comeback to someone disagreeing with “all men are dangerous”
To me, it’s pretty clearly justifying the position of “all men are dangerous,” just with the caveat that they know it’s not actually all men, but that they have to act is if it is because there is no way to tell the difference.
Do you not see that as a rationalization of treating all men like they are dangerous?
I hate this argument every time I see it. It could be used to justify so many terrible prejudices that we’ve been trying to get rid of for decades. I got robbed by a black man once so should I now treat all black men as potential criminals?
You put into words thoughts that I’ve been unable to for a while.
Like, I read this and I see how someone makes this argument, but I feel fucking terrible afterwards. Sure you haven’t said I’m a rapist, but you’ve said you’ll treat me as though I am. You can’t expect men as a demographic to agree to this argument if it requires society to assume they’re shitty people, at which point, why is it even being made?
The worst part I feel is that there’s a lot of incel types that conflate feminism with sexism, which we’d like to school them by pointing them at a dictionary. While incels are generally shitty, we can’t ignore the fact that this argument is telling them their behavior doesn’t actually matter because we’re going to act like they’re rapists based solely on their malehood anyways. (to be clear, this is an explanation, not a justification)
Yeah fuck it. I swear these fucking movements are almost intentionally avoiding any caveat that might make it 400% more paletable.
Imagine how many fucking arguments people could have avoided if they called the movement “black lives matter too” instead of “black lives matter”. It’s three fucking letters, but it adds an incredible amount of context and emphasis on the inequality. Same with going from LGBT to LGBTQIA2S+ or other longform acronym that is not as straightforward as LGBT+ (same as the historically well known “name” , paying homage to the idea that there are other forms of this experience(?) that are not covered by the 4 letters) or GSM (Gender & Sexual Minorities , which unambigiously covers everything).
If you want to reply anything among the lines of “The riot is the speech of the unheard”, I said it for you, just move along.
It’s so simple, so obvious…and such a missed opportunity. And while I personally saw the “too” as implied, it led to bad-faith actors really twisting it as well as inevitably some people actually not understanding it.
The fear of leaving anyone out led to tacking on more and more letters, and then disagreements about which letters to include.
I haven’t heard this one before, but I like it for its simplicity.
“Defund the police” was another fail in that the phrase didn’t accurately portray the actual intention and was off-putting to people who might have otherwise supported it.
Don’t you think bad faith actors will do that regardless? The problem isn’t that the names were bad, the problem is a large amount of people had no interest in learning anything beyond the name and/or actively fought against learning what those groups were actually for.
I have a friend who is a woman who insisted that it’s a majority of men who do things like grope women on dance floors or exhibit other such sex pest behaviors.
I pushed back on this because I quite strongly believe that not to be the case, and pointed out that encountering such men a majority of the time when going out doesn’t require a majority of men to behave that way. An incidence rate of, say, one in twenty still virtually guarantees you’ll run into multiple if you’re in a crowd of sufficient size.
I’m also not trying to downplay the seriousness of it being a very real problem. Nor do I deny her lived experience of encountering that behavior often when going to concerts or whatever. Literally just pointing out that such an experience doesn’t require a majority.
She got offended, calling me out for not believing her and accused me of making a “not all men” argument to try to invalidate what she was saying, despite explicitly agreeing that it’s a problem that needs addressing.
She is not wrong. Pretty much every man in my firm will bully you if you don’t behave like that.
And in a bit of irony, the woman co-worker that drives me told another co-worker “oh, he doesn’t like women”.
Like, cmon, just because I don’t behave like that!?!
There is a distinction between a prejudice born of bigotry, and a prejudice born of a real fear and trauma. And while I understand your point, the difference between these two directly affects how we can effectively address them societally.
To start addressing it, we can’t just keep admonishing traumatized women. We have to understand where the prejudice comes from. The reality is that women need to be on guard constantly, not because of all men, but still specifically because of men.
They are continuously exposed to stories like the Rape Academy website, see sexual violence normalized in media, encounter rape threats online, and virtually all of them have either experienced sexual assault themselves or know someone who has.
And while this is not all men, or even most, the statistics are clear: perpetrators of violence and sexual assault against women (and against men) are overwhelmingly male. Since there is no reliable way to identify which men pose a threat until it is too late, it’s unsurprising that many women develop a prejudice as a safety mechanism.
It’s unfortunate that this can harden into bigotry, but it’s even more unfortunate that the threat giving rise to it exists at all.
Your analogy of being robbed by a black man “once” actually highlights how widely the pervasiveness of this threat is misunderstood. For women, this isn’t a single incident. It’s a lifelong threat most acute during their formative years.
So by way of a counter analogy: would you admonish a black person who grew up in the American South during the Civil Rights era with “not all white people” or “not all cops”? Or would you recognize that their wariness was, prejudiced or not, a rational response to a very real danger?
I agree that we should strive toward a society where no one is judged on anything but the content of their character. But it’s worth noting that countless men rush to admonish frustrated and traumatized women with “not all men,” while far fewer show up when stories like the Rape Academy actually break. This imbalance is itself part of the problem.
And if we as men, and as human beings, want to see less of this prejudice in the world, perhaps the more productive question isn’t whether the prejudice is fair, but why so few of us are doing anything to make it less necessary, and why so many of us are more interested in pushing back against women’s reactions than addressing the cause of them. And this, for me, calls to mind MLK’s observations about the white moderate…
How many women were in the rape academy chat groups? From what I’ve read it was all men.
The racial metaphor is misplaced and disingenuous to the conversation. Let’s say as a woman, just about all of your women friends have been at some point attacked by a dog. Some have been completely mauled, some have managed to fight the dog off after a couple of bites, some managed to run away from the dog and jump into a car before it could bite them, and most have a combination of stories from their lives. Some are traumatised and scarred for life, others have been able to move on largely as normal, but they haven’t forgotten that scary moment.
Now our woman may or may not have been attacked by a dog before, but because of all these experiences she’s seen her friends go through, the fear, the lifelong injuries they carry - the pain, the embarrassment, the shame, the blame - she’s pretty anxious about getting a dog. Especially one where she doesn’t know its history. It’s a big dog, strong, gorgeous and seems so sweet wagging his tail. But most dogs are like that when you first meet them. It’s the rarest of dog that shows you complete aggression from the beginning and you know full well to stay away from them. She doesn’t know if she brings this dog into her home, if something seemingly benign might set it off. It’s even riskier if she lives alone.
(As an aside, isn’t it ridiculous that a woman should feel embarrassed or ashamed for having been attacked by a dog… or good god - blamed for inciting it - was she carrying beef jerky visibly as she walked down the street, she should have known a wild dog couldn’t control itself at the sight of jerky??)
If the frequency of dog attacks were as prevalent as violence and assault against women is - no one would be allowed to keep a dog for a pet. Sure, it’s NOT ALL DOGS, but the likelihood and the severity of the consequences is such that you’d be crazy to go into the situation of dog ownership without taking precautions, and in the back of your mind you’ll keep remembering all those friends who’s dogs were sweet right up until they weren’t.
People who have beautiful dogs at home, who see their dog snuggle their baby and is sweet to their cat, and have only ever had warm interactions with dogs won’t understand the fear. Not all dogs they’ll say.
Someone else will come along and say it’s only brown dogs you have to worry about. (Sounds ludicrous in this phrasing doesn’t it).
But you know what the difference is between dogs and humans. In a pack of dogs, the good dogs will call out the bad ones. They’ll pin them down, bark at them, gnash their teeth - make it clear that’s not acceptable if you want to be a part of this pack. Even when play fighting gets a little rough - they say when it’s enough. The dogs keep each other in line.
What we’re seeing in life is that the dogs are saying to women, not all dogs are going to maul you and leave you with scars for life. Most of us are good dogs, and it’s not fair you’re scared of us when we’re not doing the attacking. We’re not seeing enough good dogs giving strong reinforcement. Making sure they’re being well socialised when they’re growing up. They’re not going out and engaging with younger pups and teaching them how to behave properly, they’re not even pulling their friends into line and baring their teeth saying that behaviour is not ok. Even as a joke.
The point is - every woman has multiple stories of people she knows being victimised, and sadly the odds are, she will have some kind of personal experience with it in her lifetime. The impact of being assaulted is every bit as lifelong and traumatic for the victim as a frenzied dog attack.
If we treated it with the severity it really carries, and according to the overwhelming frequency with which it occurs. We’d realise a response of “not all men” is not enough.
If a human man tries doing that, people will tell him to “stop white knighting” and they’ll shun him worse than the guy whose behavior he was trying to put a stop to.
The fact is that predatory behavior is often indistinguishable from typical human mating rituals when viewed from the sidelines. The difference ultimately boils down to whether the recipient of the advances is accepting of them, which is often an internal thing that no one but a mind reader could tell from an outsider’s perspective.
People tend to be aloof and circumspect about these types of things. Women don’t always openly reject unwanted advances. Sometimes they expect the guy to “just figure it out.” And women don’t always openly encourage wanted advances either. Sometimes they expect the guy to “just figure it out.”
So, if a woman is being quiet, is she just playing it cool, or is she silently resenting the guy talking to her? At what point is a nearby observer supposed to step in and say “Is this guy bothering you?” And if she says “it’s fine,” to what extent are you supposed to take her word for it?
Or are we all just supposed to magically know the secret code to perfectly interpret every situation every time? Because at that point, what’s the point of having a secret code in the first place?
I stopped talking to women because almost always they expected me to “just figure it out” without them ever having to state how they feel, good or bad. Maybe they tried dropping hints but they went over my head. Sometimes I had the feeling they were dropping a hint but I didn’t know what it meant one way or the other. And then they would get upset when I didn’t read their minds. And I’m supposed to believe that that’s a moral failing on my part? When my whole life I’ve struggled with a lack of social skills in general to begin with?
So I stopped talking to women, to avoid the situation altogether. And now I’m expected to somehow intervene in other people’s interactions?!? Which still requires a modicum of mind reading ability, by the way.
It’s ridiculous. Men don’t have this magical ability to control what other men do.
Well written wall of text seems AI written
Women are punching up. Racists are punching down.
Feels different cus of the power dynamic.
Welcome to the police. Here is your badge and gun. You appear to have been trained already.
Bad analogy. Skin colour was not a factor in the criminality here. Being a man absolutely is when it comes to violence against women.
Prejudice is unacceptable for any immutable characteristic, such as sex, gender, race, or sexuality.
The epidemic of male violence on women is evidence based, therefore not prejudice.
Judging all men based on the actions of others (pre-judging them, if you will) just because of what group they are in, is prejudiced.
The post literally says not “all men”. I don’t know why yourself and so many other commenters are inserting a straw man to argue with. If it’s intentional, it’s a bad-faith practise. If it’s unintentional it’s a literacy issue (common problem is USA).
Really? Because the title of the post is “All men are dangerous”
Even if the post didn’t say that, that’s what others in the comments are defending and/or advocating for.
I read the heading “all men are dangerous” as a misrepresentation of the screenshot - which is what I’m pushing back on. I definitely don’t think that all men are dangerous. I would be relieved to think that the comments here take issue with the heading and not the body text/screenshot, but the comments I’ve responded to haven’t made that distinction.
Really? Because there’s literally a line where the OP from the image references their statement of “all men are dangerous” that her husband then defends.
It’s literally part of the screenshot. Even if they then go on to defend it with “I know it’s not all men, but I’m saying it because of sharks or something”.
Okay, well let’s do some analysis then. If they say they know it’s not all men, but then immediately follow it up with saying they can’t tell which men it is, what message are we supposed to get? In the context of a comeback to someone disagreeing with “all men are dangerous”
To me, it’s pretty clearly justifying the position of “all men are dangerous,” just with the caveat that they know it’s not actually all men, but that they have to act is if it is because there is no way to tell the difference.
Do you not see that as a rationalization of treating all men like they are dangerous?
You don’t want to open that Pandora’s box.
Just get ready to say that causation and correlation are not the same… except when it confirms my priors.
Is skin color a factor in poverty?
Is poverty a factor in criminality?
Because all the CRT and BLM arguments I’ve read have said unequivocally yes to both of those things…
If you already see the world through a racial lens, then sure. But I think you missed the point.