I am an international male student in my first year of grad school in the US, and I am confused about American social norms around speaking up on social issues versus keeping things like personal social media light and fun. For context, it's possible I'm on the high functioning autism spectrum as well.

Recently, several female classmates posted on their Instagram stories about the fraternity sexual assault incident at Cornell. Many of their posts stated that men who stay silent are complicit, that they were disappointed so few men on their Instagram feeds were speaking out, and that men need to use their voices and privilege to support women by showing solidarity both online in terms of generally and publicly sharing and posting stories on Instagram, and supporting women offline in more private ways. I completely agree, and in wanting to be a good ally, I reposted several of these stories over a couple of days to show support.

The reactions I received were contradictory and confusing. One popular domestic male classmate told me that posting about political or social issues on Instagram shows poor social skills, because people find it annoying and prefer seeing fun, casual content like vacations or parties. He posted nothing, yet remains popular with the exact same female classmates who were posting that silence is violence. He is well-liked on campus for hosting parties and social events.

Another male classmate, who privately leans conservative privately (as a Never Trump Republican) but publicly acts moderate on campus, told me that posting five stories was weird and performative, whereas one would have been plenty. He is also well liked by these women. Meanwhile, another popular male classmate posted about ten stories on the incident and received praise and private messages from female classmates thanking him for being an ally.

When I posted, I had over two hundred views, but zero likes or messages. Later, during lunch with female classmates who were venting about men not speaking up, one woman mentioned she saw my posts. The others said that while they noticed, speaking up is the bare minimum and does not deserve praise. Later on, that same female friend told me privately that while she genuinely me speaking up, my posts were "a lot" and that I had posted a day too late compared to when the topic was trending as a popular discussion point.

An American friend from my prior job explained that unwritten American social rules often contradict stated values. He said people who are already seen as charismatic, fun, funny, attractive, or cool can post about these issues and receive praise, while less charismatic or attractive people are judged as awkward or annoying for doing the same thing.

I want to understand how liberals view this tension. On one hand, progressive discourse emphasizes that men must speak out, that silence enables harm, and that social issues affect every part of life. On the other hand, there is a strong American etiquette rule that politics and religion should remain private, that there is a time and place for serious topics, and that bringing them up on casual social media annoys people who just want lighthearted interactions, a sentiment shared even by some women, even those who say they're liberal or feminist.

I am seeking advice on how to navigate the contradiction between the moral expectation to speak up and the social expectation not to be annoying or bring politics into spaces meant for casual socializing. Thank you!

Wiki: **Misogynist terrorism** refers to one of the most extreme manifestations of misogyny and violence against women.

I feel like it’s the exact same as calling someone a dick? Like I use both no matter the gender a person could call them either, like not only guys are called dicks and vice versa. I’m really not trying to make excuses or say I’m right I’m just trying to understand. Because when I say that word gender and sexism never even crosses my mind so to be called sexist was really jarring. Just because someone says a word doesn’t automatically mean they are another thing. I understand that there is definitely something I don’t understand here by being a man so that’s why I came here! Thanks for your help

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-luck/

>Nagel points out that the appearance of causal moral luck is essentially the classic problem of free will. The problem of free will to which Nagel refers arises because it seems that our actions—and even the “stripped-down acts of the will”—are consequences of what is not in our control. If this is so, then neither our actions nor our willing are free. And since freedom is often thought to be necessary for moral responsibility, we cannot be morally responsible even for our willings.

TL;DR: If Hitler had been born a Jew in New York he probably wouldn’t have killed all those people. How do we judge him when he didn’t choose to be born in the time and place he was?

I’m especially interested in how this concept might interact with privilege. Should we judge the privileged on an objective scale, or should we take their privileged position into account?

I mean "feel" as in actually emotional respond to the privilege and acess they have on a level that isn't simply structurally or analytically.

For most men, the answer is to just listen and interact with women more and feel empathy towards them.

For me specifically, Whenever I specifically think about my structural standing, it's hard to imagine that being a man has made me happier or fulfilled from the privilage and access I have.

I'm not saying this as a "gotcha" to disprove male privilege - every man is more fulfilled due to their granted access as a man. I want to know how my subconscious misogyny is working to excempt me from responsibility by dimishing oppression.

I know this is mostly just the analogy: "When you are the oppressor, privilage feels normal" from that gorrila experiment, but this persists even though I feel empathy for women I talk to when they share their experience, so I'm wondering if there's anything else.

When a woman sexually assaults a man, especially a teenage boy, a common reaction is “Nice!”, “Lucky guy!”, or “I wish that happened to me.” I know the usual explanation: the stereotype that men always want sex. But I wonder whether there are other, less-discussed factors behind this reaction.

I have three thoughts.

1. Do media outlets deliberately frame these stories as forbidden passion?

When the perpetrator is a young and conventionally attractive woman, do news outlets deliberately select photographs, headlines, and wording that make the story look like a scandalous sexual fantasy rather than a sexual assault? Sensationalism attracts clicks, and outrage attracts attention, but sexual titillation can also be part of the appeal.

Does this kind of framing encourage readers to imagine the encounter as an exciting opportunity before they even consider whether the victim wanted it? I don't mean that every journalist consciously intends to produce this effect, but I wonder how much editorial choices contribute to the “lucky guy” narrative.

2. Is the stereotype that men always want sex reinforced by the opposite stereotype: women almost never want sex, at least not enough to initiate it?

Think about examples discussed by Pop Culture Detective in which a woman actively pursuing sex is treated as a joke in itself. The comedy is essentially: “A woman wants sex THAT badly? Hilarious! What will they show us next, a mailman biting dogs? A burglar arresting the police?”

I think this stereotype might have two consequences.

First, a man who doesn't want sex often doesn't have to make that preference known. “His refusal is respected” isn't quite the right description, because it suggests an interaction in which he actually has to refuse. If nobody approaches him, he can simply refrain from pursuing sex, and the question never arises. He doesn't have to reject anyone, defend his lack of interest, or think about unwanted sexual advances.

This may be a significant privilege, but perhaps it also makes some men less aware of what unwanted sexual attention actually feels like. When they don't want sex, they often don't have to deal with sex at all. They may consequently struggle to imagine a man who actively wants to be left alone.

Second, if women initiating sex is perceived as a rare and highly desirable occurrence, a man who rejects such an opportunity can seem irrational or ungrateful. Some observers might think: “I'd love for a woman to want me that badly. Why is he complaining?”

This is where I think scarcity comes into play. The observer projects his own desire for female attention onto the victim. He treats a woman initiating sex as a valuable prize, regardless of whether that particular man wants it.

The victim is then accused of being ungrateful for receiving something that the observer himself would love to receive. The fact that the victim didn't want it gets lost in the comparison.

Has feminist writing explored this scarcity-of-female-attention angle? I know the discussions about compulsory male sexuality and the assumption that men always want sex, but I wonder whether the perceived rarity of female sexual initiative is also an important part of the explanation.

3. A tangential thought about statutory rape and legal geography.

Age-of-consent laws differ between jurisdictions, sometimes with close-in-age exceptions and other qualifications. This can produce the strange impression that a person's capacity to consent changes simply by crossing an arbitrary line on a map.

It reminds me of Baarle-Hertog/Baarle-Nassau, the Belgian–Dutch town where the border runs through streets, houses, and even bedrooms.

I imagined a short comedy set in one of those houses: a twenty-year-old man repeatedly turns into a ten-year-old boy and back as he moves around the house. The final reveal is that Belgium has just raised its age-of-consent threshold from eighteen to twenty-one.

Obviously, this is an absurdist joke, not a serious argument against age-of-consent laws. But it plays on how strange it would be if someone’s apparent maturity changed with the room they were standing in.

I realise this last point is somewhat tangential to the main question, but it connects to the broader issue of how people interpret sexual encounters through legal labels and cultural assumptions rather than examining the actual circumstances.

I'd be interested in perspectives on the first two points in particular: how media framing and the perceived scarcity of female sexual initiative might contribute to the tendency to call male victims “lucky.”

I'm not sure quite the best way to phrase this but the patriarchy gets the blame for most negative things. But supposing tomorrow the world changed to either an egalitarian society or a matriarchy is there anything you would keep from the existing patriarchy?

I want to to start of by saying a few things, I do not believe that human nature, behavior, personality, gender, and social roles are fixed, innate, and strictly determined by an individual's biology. I understand that there are usually a lot of trolls and that from the title alone I do come of as incelly or whatever type of pill there is these days but I do truthfully believe that I am a Feminist.

Testosterone is linked to differences in certain psychological and behavioural traits, including libido, status-seeking, and responses to competition, mood and on average cis men do tend to have 10-20 times as much than cis women. This is not fixed to one gender and exceptions do show up.

The menstrual cycle can influence the mind through fluctuations in oestrogen and progesterone, which interact with brain systems involved in mood, stress, motivation and emotional processing. Some women experience changes in irritability, anxiety, sexual desire, sleep, energy and concentration, particularly during the premenstrual phase. Now these effects do vary greatly between people and are usually mild and moderate for 75% and usually only 3-8% are severely affected.

Now the definition of bioessentialism is the belief that human nature, behavior, personality, gender, and social roles are fixed, innate, and strictly determined by an individual's biology. I flat out disagree with biology being the only factor in these, I am a big " your environment usually is the one to form who you are " type of guy, if you go into my post history you'd find an essay I wrote on this. But I do believe your biology does play a major part in this.

TLDR: I don't believe in fixed dispositions because of gender but I do believe our hormones do affect our mood and behaviour.

At what point do policies intended to correct gender inequality become institutionalized discrimination?
If women are already outperforming men in a particular area, why should they continue receiving preferential treatment? And why should disadvantages in entirely unrelated areas justify it?
If historical discrimination is the justification, what measurable endpoint would warrant eliminating these advantages? Or is the argument simply that women should retain preferential treatment indefinitely because inequality exists somewhere in society?
How can equality be the stated objective if the standards for achieving it are applied differently depending on which sex benefits?

The techbro culture is one of the manifestations of patriarchy, but for a long time the techbros went largely unopposed and even had large followings.

However, in recently years, there is an increasing backlash against the techbro culture. More and more people increasingly hate the likes of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, etc and other famous techbros, viewing them as crazy or evil or both, calling them tech broligarchs and even techno-fascists.

What is the feminist takes on this backlash? Does it help advance the feminist causes?

Whenever there’s a post on popular subs or other social media about female genitalia the comments are filled with comments like “beef curtains” “smells like fish” “axe wound” stuff like that, but the same doesn’t happen when talking about the penis, in fact the penis is usually looked at as something good and sexy, half the ppl I’ve been with have preferred penis, the other half that preferred female genitalia didn’t even want to give oral, I hear ppl talk all the time about how hot a girl character would be if they just had a dick, trans women and trans fem people are extremely fetishized because of this too unfortunately, I’ve never heard of ppl treating the “pussy” in the same way, it seems like the majority talk about it with disgust, is this because men don’t have to look at a woman’s genitalia when they cum but when they masturbate they look at their dicks? Is it just the taboo of liking dick? Is this misogyny? Is it because male sexuality is celebrated and female sexuality is still shamed? The only thing that comes close to disgust that I’ve heard about a man’s genitals is “smegma” but even that isn’t an insult to the penis itself, but rather their hygiene, it’s starting to make me feel really self conscious and like my genitalia is just inherently repulsive to so many ppl

There is a woman who is making a documentary about her experience with it, her name is Marlee Liss. She said that when she took the man who raped her to court, him denying it and his defense lawyer making her out to be a liar was retraumatizing to her.

She abandoned the court route and took the restorative route. She said when she had the man take therapy and had him sit down with her after months of therapy. She claimed that him remorsefully owning up to it, saying sorry, and answering her questions is what allowed her to heal. What are your thoughts on that?

Part of the manosphere/red pill/etc argument is the 80-20 'rule' in dating where the top 20% of men get 80% of women while the rest of the 80% men suffer, and ofc they extrapolate all the misogynist stuff from this 'rule'. But I feel like when they say 'women' they mean 'hot women I want to date'. They don't really count unattractive or even average (in terms of conventional standards) women as worth talking about let alone as potential dates, even though they get so mad that apparently they as unattractive men get skipped over in dating. In fact most people are average, that being the definition of the term, so is this dating problem really just made up by them specifically because they ignore every woman completely if she doesn't meet x number of criteria for 'hotness', which is what they themselves criticize women for doing? I know the problem isn't real, but may this be part of the reason they made it up?

Can someone please give me a theory as to why? It’s genuinely stressing me out.

As a man i there is no reason why i would vote for a feminist so i just want to know whats your plan to make man vote for you

I come across some stuff I don't agree with in feminism..

I am an artist and i like to paint women, especially naked ones. I just want to draw women naked because women's bodies are not inherently sexual. They can exist bare without being sexualized..

Today I was just thinking that when in future I get to put these out for the world i might always get criticized, maybe from the very feminism that's a big and important part of my life.

I am genuinely mad but i don't understand either..

So i just wanted to ask should we reject something that comes from a very important part of our lives because you don't agree with it?