Even intellectual people who you would think would be the first to entertain foundational questions will have no patience for a carefully laid out argument like yours.

That’s because those “intellectual people” have already decided that discussing the basics is beneath them due to the fact that they, in their minds, decided that they have already carefully examined all possibilities and have decided that they already know all there is and further discussion is a waste of time.

I’d another question to Pat’s and hopeless’s list.
1. If men are so privileged over women then why was the scoring system of the World Economic Forum’s annual Gender Gap Report specifically structured so that the only negatives that were counted were ones that mainly effected women while the metrics that showed to mainly negatively affect men were actively ignored. Surely if men are so privileged over women then the writers of that report could have easily shown it without resorting to such a sexist scoring system right?

I think your point here is very well put:

Paradoxically though, I believe that that this set of beliefs itself - that men are responsible for anything bad that happens to us as a species - is actually a retrograde force - it ascribes to men far more power than we actually possess sometimes to the point of omniscience.

I have also encountered a lot of “how dare you” reactions to any attempt to challenge the idea that men-as-a-group have always taken advantage of women-as-a-group.

Even intellectual people who you would think would be the first to entertain foundational questions will have no patience for a carefully laid out argument like yours.

If you want to get anywhere, you need to hit hard and fast with questions that cry out for answers.

I like Pat’s question:

Starting from a position of mutual equality, how did men arrive in a position that enabled them to impose their will on women?

Here are some more:
1) why do you suppose that throughout history, 80% of women have managed to have at least one child, but only 40% of men have? What generally happens to the childless men of history

2) If society advantages men so much, then why do men have 4 times the suicide rate that women do, and life shorter lifes (in the U.S. in 2005, for example, women were expected to live 5 years longer than men on average)

3) If men in the U.S. had so much more power than women in the early 20th century, then how did women gain so much throughout the 20th? With what weapons did women fight that battle?

Is it more effective to challenge idealogues by making statements or by asking questions?

Which example (”A” or “B”) is a more effective challenge to the following statement?

…history was replete with evidence of systematic, wilful domination of women by men.

A) …the structures in society result from often poorly understood forces that include evolutionary pressures, cultural history, phisical differences etc.

B) Starting from a position of mutual equality, how did men arrive in a position that enabled them to impose their will on women?
==

They were making the argument that history was replete with evidence of systematic, wilful domination of women by men.

I tried to counter this with several points including:
(i) that we (men & women) are in this together,
(ii) that the structures in society result from often poorly understood forces that include evolutionary pressures, cultural history, phisical differences etc.
(iii) that the evidence shows how men came out of this no better than women, pointing to the disposability of men as above
(iv) that though men indisputably do far more physical violence to women than the reverse, this is usually a symptom of a wretched social or mental state of men from whatever cause
(iv) that women uphold as much as men the ‘patriarchal’ practices they mentioned (I think that genetic mutilation was one of their examples)
(v) that, in terms of the span of history, the last 20 years had seen enormous cultural change in gender roles and expectations, perhaps more than we could reasonably expect while maintaining the stability of society

I dont normally have such arguments and am not too polished in the presentation. However I was really astounded how they could not begin accept any of these arguments:- I made not the slightest impact on their opinions.

Paradoxically though, I believe that that this set of beliefs itself - that men are responsible for anything bad that happens to us as a species - is actually a retrograde force - it ascribes to men far more power than we actually possess sometimes to the point of omniscience.

I find that I could never support a woman for president for this reason. How vulgar and heinous is the image of a female who has no risk in war sending a male army to die?

Emil, you are not making yourself quite clear here, but I sense that you are trying to make a distinction between men and maleness. would tyyou dare tell a owmn that she would be all good if she just stopped being so female and tried to eb more of a man? Frankly in that sense this comment is offensive, and it reminds me preachments we gays often hear to the effect that we aren’t the targets of homophobia, only our homosexuality is.

Or it may simply be that you are having trouble with the terminology when you use the term “male type” instead of the already available word “yang” - sunny side of a hill, heat, edgy, straight-lined. That is a better term because it is non-gendered and in fact doesn’t refer specifically even to humans. Yes, of course a proper balance calls for balance between yin and yang, and it is common to blame the West for being too yang. The problem with that complaint though is that the non-Western civilizations that are progressing are doing it by imitating our yang features, and a lot of what is wrong with the approaches they are dropping is that they were too yin.

Certainly women who present as men (whether by choice or if their choices just happen to lead to that) do face problems that face men because of how they present however for those of us who are/were born with biologically male bodies there are a few things that target us specifically. Namely circumcision. Time and time again people are trying to find some excuse to justify mutilating newborn boys. Also in the event that we transition into women we face the possibility of not being accepted by other women and be accused of trying to attack them or invade their spaces.

But whether its men who are born as men, men who don’t follow the script on being a “real man”, women who present as men, women who transition to into men, etc… we should be here, there, or whereever to help each other.

Question. When talking about men who transition into women and are then treated as if since they were once male they must really be just men in disguise laying in way to attack women because “all men are rapists” and/or trying to invade women’s spaces would that be transmisogyny and misandry at work? Such an accusation implies that said woman is not really a woman (thus attacking her status as a woman) and implies that men are just looking for ways to attack women and/or invade their spaces (thus making a gross generalization about men).

and let’s direct our energy to becoming a part of the solution, wherever we came from; lets do some soul searching after we’ve made sure we’re heading in a more compassionate direction

for the clueless: do some soul searching first

Yes, either men and women are jointly responsible for the disasters and traumas of humanity, or else men are solely responsible for *both*.

You cannot have your cookie and eat it too…