Cognitive dissonance is a thing.
Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, one MRA is confused: How on earth was Roe v Wade overturned, he wonders, given that women run the world and men are the ones who are truly oppressed? It’s almost like the court decision was designed to make Men’s Rights look bad!
He writes:
I think that probably the worst thing that happened to the men’s rights movement/awareness in the last year was the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Yes, because that’s the critical question here: WHAT ABOUT THE MENZ?
Systemically and socially women were living in the golden age, whereas men on average were suffering a sharp decline in all aspects of life from education to just staying alive. I think we were at the very brink of highlighting those important and serious issues to become more mainstream and yet coincidentally the craziest thing happened.
“Coincidentally.”
Women in several states in the US were no longer able to access abortion and seeing that we’re living in a gynocentric society in which feministic ideals were deeply ingrained in everyone so the natural conclusion that people took from that event was that we’re living in a patriarchy that oppresses women, men are privileged, women don’t have any bodily autonomy, and so on…
Yes, how on earth could removing women’s bodily autonomy be taken as a sign that women don’t have bodily autonomy?
The feminism that was already conditioned into everyone seemed to mutate after that and became all the more powerful giving no chance for men’s issues to rise back up.
I am just curious, how could something like that happen?
How? How? HOW!?
In the comments, one non-MRA offered a clear and concise answer:
Because the US is run by men who control the government and Supreme Court
Unfortunately, this answer got downvoted to negative thirteen points, making it the least popular answer of all 100 comments in the thread. Because MRAs don’t want to live in reality.
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I hate this phrase.
1)It’s evidently false, since men <i>can</i> get pregnant.
2)If perisex cis men could get pregant, then it would be really easy for rich white cis heterosexual heteroromantic able-bodied neurotypical perisex men to get abortions. Politicians, doctors, and insurance companies would still have no shortage of excuses for why black, queer, poor, neurodivergent, or disabled men should not be allowed bodily autonomy.
@bcb:
Politicians, doctors, and insurance companies would still have no shortage of excuses for why black, queer, poor, neurodivergent, or disabled men should not be allowed bodily autonomy.
What they’d get would be Mississippi appendectomies. Which by definition occur without the patient’s informed consent.
@FM Ox: Agree completely.
@bcb I totally agree with you. These are all ways to discriminate against the poor and lower class. Right now that might be denying abortion. But if men needed abortion too, they’d just discriminate against undesirable men in other ways. And this is already ignoring upper class women who have ways to get abortions when they think they are justified, and who are at the forefront of the efforts at restricting abortions lower class women get.
I saw a comment on an article about abortion that said something like “if men got breast cancer, they’d cure it by now.” But in fact, breast cancer is a disease of affluent women. Or rather, it’s a disease that does not spare affluent women, and therefore it actually gets a far higher proportion of US grants and donations than diseases that kill more women, but hit the lower class and women of color harder, such as heart disease and lung cancer. The lung cancer deaths are not just due to smoking, but also from radon and from particulates and other air pollution, all of which are found in higher quantities in Black neighborhoods. (and cigarettes were aggressively pushed at Black people and continued to be aggressively marketed to them, even once upper and middle class white people began to push back against tobacco marketing. So the smoking related deaths are also not even across all demographics in the US)
@Dave:
Regarding the breast cancer bit, well, it also ignores that cancer is next to impossible to ‘cure’ in general.
I’ve commented before that we’ll cure the common cold before we cure cancer, and they’re difficult for some of the same reasons:
So it’s not something easily targeted and removed.
On top of that, of course, men do get breast cancer. Even cis men. It’s rare, but it’s not unknown.
Yeah– cis men getting breast cancer is certainly much less likely in proportion to the smaller amount of breast tissue they’ve got. (Everyone has breast tissue; it expands in response to puberty hormones but it’s there from birth.) It’s not some freak lightning strike event, though; it’s rare over the population and not evenly distributed. Men with a family history of breast cancer are at meaningful personal risk and are encouraged to get screened as they age.
Soooo, no. The idea that any of these things would magically go away if men suffered them is just plain not correct.
@Nentuaby:
Yeah, instead what happens is the misogyny gets weaponized against the men who do get breast cancer, as that’s a ‘women’s disease’.