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View submission: Tuesday Check In: How's Everybody's Mental Health?
What am I supposed to take away from all this? Are we men just inherently worse than women?
You know, early feminist movements struggled with the same question for women.
As an early 20th century feminist, what do you do with the fact that men are just *better* at certain things than women?
Do you argue against it? Do you try to disprove the inherent advantages that men have over women? Because that's almost impossible. Women as a group have a whole bunch of measurable disadvantages compared to men. Less muscle mass, worse spatial perception, less detailed eyesight, whatever, you could write an endless list.
Some of those disadvantages are biological, some are taught to girls at a young age, but either way, by the time you're an adult woman, the average men is better than you at certain things.
In the early days, some feminists struggled with that, because it's such an in-your-face attack - almost a challenge: either disprove that men are better at some things than women, or accept that women are lesser humans.
But of course there's a third option, and by now, feminism has pretty much settled on that. In hindsight it seems obvious:
They do not matter for what you deserve as a human: rights, opportunities, love and appreciation... none of that should be dependent on your strengths and weaknesses, as an individual or a group.
If you walk up to the average feminist nowadays and tell them: "Men are stronger than women"... they will likely just shrug and say ***so what?***
But that's a process that feminism had to go through: going from "women can do everything that men can do" to "it doesn't matter what you can do, you deserve equality".
And issues like racial equality or equality for people with disabilities went through the same process. Our first instinct seems to be to argue that differences do not exist, before we realise "huh, even if the differences exist, it doesn't matter".
----- Anyway, men now have to go through that same process. We are now bombarded by social media and online articles and influencer grifters telling us about all the weaknesses of men, and men are struggling with that.
It's the same old attack - a challenge: either disprove that men are more violent, or accept that they are lesser humans.
So you'll find people tackling that challenge head-on: noooo, violence is taught and can be untaught; or the violence comes with equal benefits; or it applies to the group but not to the individual; or it's just a lie...
But I suspect that eventually, like we always do, we will settle on that third option:
Maybe men are inherently more violent, worse at communicating, bad at seeing colours... could be -- but they deserve the same rights, opportunities, love and appreciation as any other human being.
There's nothing here!