I feel you and I are on the same page, I'm sorry if sometimes my posts seem extreme to you, I'm mostly trying (in vain I think) to get through to some people with very hostile attitudes, if I'm making sense?
I believe you're suffering, and your issues need to be taken care of, and I don't mean literally for you to wait a century. But if you're looking from my perspective, what I'm trying to talk about is when women are shut down and spoken over, our voices drowned out. Whenever women's issues are brought up, you'll immediately see a bunch of guys start with things basically saying "But what about the poor men??" And another group basically will start saying "Not all men," and when he says that he's basically trying to say he's not part of the problem so he doesn't need to be part of the solution.
I feel in these conversations you generally get three types of men. You have those who listen to women, who realize men play such a role in oppressive sexist culture, and want to find ways to help. On the other side you've got very sexist men who become really hostile towards you, and want to propagate systems of misogyny, and will make arguments basically "Sexism works, so that means it's not real" like you can see a few posts back. And then unfortunately you have good men who mean well, but get defensive, and I do acknowledge a lot of things are hard to hear, I'm sorry I'm so worked up but I think it might be hard to understand how that second group really makes me feel, if I'm making sense?
I feel for example if it was just you and I having a conversation, it'd be very different, please know I'm not addressing you specifically in everything I'm saying. And I'm trying to use metaphors to explain on a cultural level, like my example wasn't meant to be literally a single man and a single woman, I mean over all issues in general.
Don't worry, I'm not complaining about you specifically.
More the issues I have dealing with feminism in general.
"Not all men," when it's only used to derail a discussion about what women go through, is not helpful, I agree. But it's also a valid statement that some people need to be reminded of, because there really are quite a few people who believe men are inherently bad and that any decent men are welcome aberrations, like vegetarian lions to a gazelle, as
@Synsensa aptly put it. While generalized man-hating is nowhere near the level of seriousness overall as misogyny, it's still kinda alienating to be a man who wants to do good but who can't help but notice hostility towards him when he himself isn't a misogynist. Why help people who want nothing to do with me?
It's also interesting to note that the same people who don't like hearing "not all men" are the same ones who hastily add, "not all Muslims!" whenever there's anger over the latest Islamist terrorist attack. I don't think it makes sense to oppose one "not all x" statement and not the other. I believe it's worth reminding people that generally, not all people within a given group are alike, and can't all be blamed. When I'm getting upset with feminists over what some of them are saying, I have to remind myself that not all feminists are hostile to all men; I have female feminist friends who aren't, and who supported me when I was picked on and mocked by my man-hating feminist date. It's very easy and convenient to generalize, so we have to work to resist that temptation.
As for the waiting period of a hundred years, I really do think that's what it will take. Seneca Falls happened close to 150 years ago. Women have had the right to vote in the US for a century, but here we are, still facing widespread misogyny. It can take centuries for social attitudes to really change; you have to raise the overwhelming majority of new generations to accept an idea and hold onto it for life, AND you have to wait for stubborn people to die off entirely, since the mind usually solidifies in the 20s or 30s and then there's no changing it short of trauma. Unmoving stubbornness is why society changes one funeral at a time.
Even if we raise basically all young people to oppose misogyny, and outlive the incorrigible misogynists, there's always the threat of backlashes and backsliding. And there's the natural human tendency to stereotype that leads to bigotry. That's why I don't think ending misogyny is comparable to healing a broken arm. It's not going away anytime soon, not next year, not a decade from now, not 25 years. I agree misogyny is a higher priority than man-hatred, but in the meantime we have to be able to deal with several problems at once.
It would help if there were sincere discussions, especially between men, on male issues that are not just brought up to interrupt women when they're trying to talk about misogyny. It would be ideal if men got together in groups to discuss male issues like suicide, homelessness, encouraging a non-toxic sense of masculinity, and if the men kept it from being used as a place to complain about women, like incels and the laughably misnamed "Men Going Their Own Way."
