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Comment by telesilla

3 days ago

Respectfully, this article is not about the male experience, it's okay to talk about women without putting men in the story.

22 comments

telesilla

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zahlman  3 days ago

No, it's important context, and attempting to suppress it does everyone a disservice. Without taking these kinds of points of comparison into consideration, one becomes susceptible to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy , and may become convinced about supposed bias where the evidence doesn't support the claim, contradicts it or even shows the opposite.

Another classic example is the discourse around "missing and murdered Indigenous women" in Canadian politics. It was popular enough around a decade ago to be more or less a set phrase. To listen to politicians and wonks discussing the matter, you would imagine that Indigenous men didn't ever get kidnapped or murdered. As a matter of fact, the statistics showed that it happened to them at over twice the rate of the women. (They also showed that it was not an alarmingly high rate compared to other Canadian populations, and that the perpetrators were usually themselves Indigenous — as you'd expect for generally fairly isolated communities.) But you would get silenced in many places (e.g., banned from the Canada subreddit) for pointing to those statistics.

  • rdevilla  2 days ago

    > But you would get silenced in many places (e.g., banned from the Canada subreddit) for pointing to those statistics.

    Canada has an incredibly censorious culture. I have been downvoted to -4 [0] [1] and flagged for merely suggesting that Canadians do not care about medical privacy (or privacy in general) in light of things like Bill C-22 and DNA collection at the US border [2].

    Interestingly enough, questioning gender ideology and being trans critical (maybe even transphobic) is now acceptable on HN [3], but Canadians have something very dark to hide when it comes to respecting medical privacy given how hard posts of this nature are downvoted, flagged, and censored.

        Surprised he didn't willingly relinquish a sample.

    Privacy is not actually a core Canadian value.
    Neither in spirit nor in letter do Canadians actually
    demonstrate that they give a shit about privacy; see
    for instance Bill C-22.

    I invite commenters to demonstrate otherwise instead of
    merely downvoting incontrovertible facts.

    [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47538165

bondarchuk  3 days ago

To someone who is shocked at the prevalence of female genital mutilation in other cultures, the widespread acceptance of other types of genital mutilation in (probably) their own culture is an important piece of context, I'd say.

drfloyd51  2 days ago

I hear what you are saying. But hear me out. I think their comment is ok.

No one is forced to follow that thread. And the comment does provide additional information.

In fact, I never considered circumcision a form a gender mutilation. Despite being circumcised. But that comment got me thinking about it in a new way. And thinking about GM in a larger context.

benj111  3 days ago

On some levels yes, but if the male experience isn't being talked about, then no.

If we were to talk about domestic violence the automatic assumption is male against female. Ignoring the fact that a third of victims are men. That isn't exactly a small minority, before you take into account that it probably an undercount as no one talks about men getting abused.

The same goes for breast cancer. Men can get it, its almost never talked about.

az226  3 days ago

This is a bad take. If society takes genital mutilation of children seriously, and it gets outlawed in more and more countries, it helps save ALL children from genital mutilation. Only a shortsighted person would see it as a zero sum.

  • malfist  3 days ago

    Is it? Did "all lives matter" help prevent police brutality? Or was it an attempt at whataboutism so you don't have to do anything?

    • benj111  3 days ago

      There wasn't really an all lives matter on the same sense as the black lives matter movement.

      Plus there's 'all lives matter' as in the proponent doesn't want to do anything, and 'all lives matter' as in police brutality is bad no matter who it's aimed at, and should be stopped completely.

      The latter more closely mirrors the parents example.

      Further I would say your example is flawed. BLM assumed a level of racism that I don't think there is. This isn't a case of KKK members wanting to get the <racist slur>s out of the country and back where 'they belong' it's more an issue of laziness and profiling. That isn't to say it isn't racism, but just talking about racism allows police that aren't KKK members to tell themselves they aren't the problem. Focussing on the issues of laziness etc means they do actually need to face up to the issues.

      The same thing with genital mutilation, this isn't simply a case of something that happens to girls in a far away land, this is happening to kids right now in the west. Focusing on FGM kind of misses the point.

      4 replies →

eastbound  3 days ago

Respectfully, if we didn’t shutter men all the time, maybe there would be paradoxically more time for women. Unless we make it a zero-sum game where we’re all extremists who would lose if it makes the opponent lose too.

Mixed school is a bane for men, for example. I’m full on with the Mollahs on this one.