this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2025
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Feminism
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Of course things always could have been done better, but I still need to see any evidence for this:
Considering those are just "small changes", there should be examples of groups, contexts, communities, parties, regions or social circles that actually done that and succeeded though it in a quantifiable way. I constantly see talk about this concept of appealing to the white straight male, but never see any actual effective examples. (Maybe this would be a fitting question for !mensliberation@lemmy.ca ...)
I say it's a "small change" because I think it's a small but vocal group of people who are unwelcoming to people of privilege. (Of course, that's a moronic strategy -- since privilege is power, you want privileged people on your side.) I think it would require the right meme (in the dawkins sense) to get people to call out those who are unwelcoming -- but instead I think the unwelcoming ones had (and still have) the memetic advantage. Privilege = bad is a powerful idea, so you don't see groups of any appreciable size which have this as the winning philosophy. But if the idea were usurped by a more powerful idea -- that could be a small change, just requires someone to think of exactly the right meme.
I'm gonna out myself here.
I got a lot of shit from a small handfull of 4th wave feminists because I decided that I preferred monogamy over open relationships. I got shit because the things I enjoy doing are traditionally masculine, things like firearms, longsword fencing, motorcycles, weightlifting... I was told that leaving poly relationships for monogamy meant I had 'toxic jealousy', and my enjoyment of traditionally masculine past times meant that I was engaging in 'toxic masculinity' (or, alternatively, 'toxic heteronormativity'). Were they using those terms wildly incorrectly? Sure. But that's not actually relevant. They were attempting to shame me for choices that I was making for myself. There was no point where I told other people that they couldn't make choices for themselves, but I certainly got told that my choices for myself were wrong.
Is this all 4th wave feminists? Of course not. I'm old enough to realize that the people I knew aren't representative of all feminists, or even a majority. But just like the 'not all men', there are enough, and they're vocal. They do real damage to young men by telling them that, by simply existing and being traditionally masculine--even when they support women's rights--that they are the problem.
I don't know how to prevent that small number of people from doing an outsized amount of damage, short of trying to be inclusive to everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity/expression, or sexual orientation.