To say those people aren’t feminists is a way to avoid accepting that feminists can believe those terrible things. Yes, it’s destructive and yes it discredits the rest of the movement. Feminists rarely if ever disown them.

The fact that the boiling is not spontaneous is not obvious especially on account of how it’s not true. So that definition is going to need some tweaking. And anyway I think it’s much more likely that the person just didn’t notice they were replying to an astronaut than that they thought they could elevate their status. They were trying to share their (incorrect) knowledge.

OK, I’m just going to throw it out there that most people consider extreme feminists to be feminists.

It’s extremely unclear what you’re trying to say. When were you defending me?

Is extreme feminism not considered feminism in your mind?

Sure thing. Thanks for asking. Well, I would say main ones are:

• Family court — completely asymmetrical treatment of men, basically for every 7 chances a woman gets in family court, a man gets 1. This is a made up number but it’s to get the essence across.
• Male disposability is widely accepted and not compensated for at all. A good example of this is mandatory selective service which still exists today.
• As a result of the accepted disposability, men have a far higher death rate both by accident and by suicide rate (which is 400% that of women)
• Title IX imposes unjust punishments on men in colleges by favoring “preponderance of the evidence” standard over the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard — basically, if there’s even a slight chance of sexual misconduct, men can be thrown out of college without any kind of trial.
• Asymmetrical definitions of rape which only apply to men in definition and also in practice are enforced mostly on men.
• The above denial of female rapists leading to severe mental health issues for men who are raped or sexually abused by their female parters.
• Generally men’s lagging acceptance rates into university (this would be more of an equity issue on par with the 83 cents to a dollar issue, as opposed to an equality issue like the others)
• Demonization of fathers — the number of stories of fathers getting dirty looks for taking their kid into a changing room or even just existing in a playground with their kid are unending.
• Last but not least, “male loneliness epidemic” which I think is a stupid phrase and this is one of the more unaddressable issues by everyone but it’s still a problem.

I never said the core idea of feminism isn’t egalitarianism. Just that you can be egalitarian without being a feminist, since feminism involves so many other ideas. They don’t all spring from “equality” and equality itself has many different conceptualizations. Feminism’s conceptualization of how to achieve equality is essentially limited to, “women should be given more supports” which is not a good way of thinking about it any more than an elevator’s best way of operating is “just move the person higher and higher.”

Well, I’m on my phone so apologies if my replies are shorter generally. I will attempt to answer some of these. Yes, I have engaged in a ton of discussion with hardcore feminists. I have listened to podcasts by them including Stuff Mom Never Told You and unfortunately read Brotopia. This is not my first rodeo. And you don’t need to listen to Tate or Kirk any of those extremely distasteful people to know that feminism claims to speak for men’s interests while completely ignoring them. Feminism 100% claims to be acting in the interest of both men and women, and at least for men, it completely falls short of that. You will try to correct me. That is the problem.

Any ideology that posits “<ideology> is necessary” is self-serving and borderline cult. The ideas of the ideology are what matter, and the ideology itself is just a name. If the ideas were any good, you should just as easily be able to create a new ideology from those ideas with a different name and have it be just as valid.

Which is really funny because masculism and feminism both claim to be about equality. But only feminism is the one that is right, apparently.

A good chunk of the population has been listening to feminism for… decades. What do you mean, when will the grievances be heard? We’ve heard them. Women are oppressed, the second sex. Abortion is a right. Equal access to healthcare. 84 cents to a dollar. Alimony. Some of these are addressable, some of them have been addressed, and some of them are not addressable. It’s complicated.

Perhaps I should be asking you when will men’s grievances be heard?

Can someone just do the needful?

Well, it’s a perfectly well-formed sentence.

There are several parts of the word’s meaning, some of them optional:

1. man explaining thing to woman
2. poorly / incorrectly
3. dismissively
4. that she already knows
5. to someone who knows more about it

But the only real requirement is #1. Despite what anyone says, even if the thing is not explained dismissively and is explained well to someone who doesn’t know about it, you could still call it mansplaining because it’s punching up. Which again only serves to say that attempting to explain is the shameful part.

Second, and pretty unrelated, I think feminism is a dishonest platform and has far exceeded its mandate. Women are oppressed in the Middle East. To say they’re oppressed here currently, relative to males, is somewhere between dishonest and delusional.

First wave feminism had a very strong reason to exist. Second wave as well. But intersectionality is a complete mess that only creates problems instead of solving them, and ideas like antiracism are positively counterproductive

Anyway, feminism doesn’t have a monopoly on egalitarianism. You can be pro-equality without being feminist, despite what feminism would say.

I guess your mind lacks the ability to imagine implied punctuation:

And in your book, incels can have sex — right. We can skip all the mental-institution-worthy nonsense, then.

Saying someone is mansplaining is a normative statement. You’re stating a moral position by using the word. One aspect of that moral position is the use of this obnoxious spelling, “splaining,” which is clearly meant to denigrate the desire to explain things. This is anti-intellectual, yet it’s couched in the oh-so-innocent veneer of being pro-feminism.

To contrast, calling someone a bigot is stating a moral position, but the only moral position it states is that bigotry is bad, which isn’t anti-intellectual.

Yes, likening one person saying to another that they are mansplaining, to defending oneself from literal death by chemical weapon, is misrepresenting my argument. If you are being threatened with death, defending yourself is not punching up or punching down, it’s not even a voluntary action at all, it’s just human instinct and you can’t even call that a choice.

Also, are you trying to paint a random commenter on the Internet who probably didn’t even fully read the post they’re replying to, as an “authority?”

(re edit: thanks, I appreciate that)

It’s tempting to see authority as an ordering of humans, but it isn’t. Anthony Fauci is not more of a human than you are. And it’s not okay to punch Anthony Fauci for the same reason it’s not okay to punch you. But we still need authorities and so it can’t be the case that every person in the country is the authority on diseases.

No, punching back is not the problem. The problem is the idea that there exists something called “punching up” that is more excusable generally than “punching down.” THAT idea reinforces social hierarchy and oppressive structures. Particularly if you believe that “punching up” will always be punching up, invariant of what happens in the world, because that asserts that the hierarchy is fixed which even further reinforces it.

And in your book incels can have sex, right, we can skip all the mental institution worthy nonsense

Are all your comments that low-effort?

Why is it wrong to punch up? Because there being “up” requires an ordering of humans, so speaking in feminism terms that would be reinforcing the patriarchy, in regular terms people aren’t above or below each other, they’re all people. Punching up is still punching, is destructive and not constructive. Destruction isn’t becoming of anyone.

To draw a specific example, the fact Taylor Swift is a billionaire doesn’t mean it’s okay to treat her like a piece of shit and insult her to her face, make up mean names for her, etc.

Why widespread? Well because it’s “punching up” and catchy and plays in to the traditional feminist narrative that women are oppressed in $WESTERN_COUNTRY particular in science even though women regularly outperform their male counterparts in terms of college grading and admissions. You’re basically asking why feminism is popular.

Wouldn’t it be natural that having existed as an idea for over 10 years I would have a preconceived notion of it?

It wasn’t rude at all, it was one of the most neutral ways of “correcting” someone (in quotes because yes the correction was wrong) but it was basically “I think it’s actually X” which is about as non-aggressive as it can get.

The issue I take with it is not at all about group dynamics. Even if it’s one guy saying this to another, if someone is going to call that “mansplaining” I have an issue with it because it’s just explaining. Incorrectly, and maybe very slightly patronizingly (but only because the person being spoken to is a scientist and not because of the way it’s said), but still at its core simply explaining something they think is true. That is the core of scientific discourse and I don’t care what the genders are, giving it a stupid name and using that as an insult is antithetical to the open and curious exchange of information.

It also has an anti-intellectual aspect to it. People like to explain things, that’s sort of the whole idea behind science, is to be able to do that. Sometimes people try to explain things and they’re wrong. And that’s okay, it’s part of the process of science. Further, the notes of patronization are subjective and not everyone would agree they’re present here.

So to automatically label things like this as “mansplaining” makes a few unfair assumptions.