Just got muted by a mod over at LWMA for *checks notes* being a marxist in a left-wing sub
My original post:
“All societies that have survived have survived based on their ability to prepare their sons to be disposable, in war and at work – and therefore as dads”
I think most of us here have, at some point heard this quote from Warren Farrell about male disposability. I wanted to talk about this quote because I want to expand on the war part of his analysis.
One of the unfortunate facts of history is that there’s always gonna be some asshole who will ransack and pillage your tribe/city state/kingdom/country if they can. This means that a society which is either unable or unwilling to defend itself through violence will, at some point, become a target for that asshole and be destroyed. The idea of “defending your country” has obviously been used throughout history to justify fighting wars that are, in fact, not defensive, but it remains true that having a fighting force able and willing to commit some violence has, thus far, been necessary to maintain the existence of large scale societies.
It will come as no surprise to any of you that, in the vast majority of cases, it is men who are expected to both carry out that violence, and risk having it carried out on them.
Violence is, therefore, a burden imposed on men by societies, in much the same way that child-rearing and domestic labor are burdens often imposed on women.
All of these things have to happen. In order for a society to function, violence must be used to defend and deter against more violence, food must be cooked and served, homes cleaned, children raised, etc.
The thing is though, these gendered burdens are not treated with equal weight by feminism. As usual, they are pretty good at identifying the gendered burdens of women, but fall short when it comes to male burdens, such as violence. When they do acknowledge those burdens, it’s only ever within the context of patriarchy, which they will be sure to remind you was built up by other men (essentially the “black on black crime” argument but for men’s issues)
You see this burden at all levels of society too, a man encountering someone being physically attacked in an alleyway, for instance, is generally expected to use violence to intervene, especially if that someone is a woman. A woman, however, would never be called a coward or weak for running away from that situation.
Some women also feel they have the right to use their male partner as a physical threat or weapon against others - as an 8th grader, I was asked by my then-girlfriend to beat another boy up because he insulted her at a football game. I didn’t, because that’s stupid and wouldn’t help anything, but it still stuck with me.
There’s also this idea that, in general, a man should never run away from a fight, whatever fight that may be. You can see this in the trope/stereotype of the dad who finds out his son ran away from a fight and is utterly disappointed and ashamed of him, even to the point of disowning him.
The higher propensity for men to be violent criminals happens because some men take on that burden of violence that was drilled into them as a child, embrace it like the wire mother, and end up directing their violence towards people who don’t deserve it, usually other men.
Male violence is not a reason to hate men, it is, like all gendered roles and expectations, a burden imposed on us by the ruling class.”