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I feel like it’d work better if you’d ask them “should men be treated like how you want to treat women: without a right to decide whether to have a child, without being able to work, without being … etc.”.
I feel like most men don’t really understand, unless if they were put in our shoes. I’ve seen shows where that exactly happens: they get whistled at by even stronger people, they’re derided and told their views don’t matter, they get lower wages (in simulations), and so on. Some do change their mind after that, at least.
A large part of the issue is the framing the right wing uses. The right wing will say something like, “well, if you want equal rights, you’d be egalitarian, not a feminist.” And then point to the most extreme examples of feminism like, I dunno, a woman killing a bunch of people and claiming to be a feminist? as what all feminists stand for, and only use uncharitable examples. And if a viewer doesn’t have enough feminine friends to vouch, it seems to them like the issues either don’t exist or are exaggerated.
I think conservative leaders try to tell people that everything is equal now. That Martian Luther King ended racism in the 60’s, that women can have jobs and that the wage gap is this crazy left wing conspiracy theory and just give it time because we live in a meritocracy, and the BLM protesters are all insane. They had pivoted so far abstract with the southern strategy that over the past ten years I think they started to have the audacity to be self righteous about it, and say that any push forward towards equality is actually a reversal of the hierarchy. They will point to positive stereotypes and paint them as privilege rather than boxes to other and expectations to be enforced. And this type of thinking goes so deep into every “identity politics” issue with conservatives, I don’t know what could ever get the moderate conservative voters out of it. They just trust the feelings that were instilled in them about themselves and “other kinds” of people in the world and don’t stop to question any part of it when sexist things happen to the women around them. And from what I have seen, it does look like to me that the propaganda will always try to scare people away from the solutions if they dare question their own ideology, so they never even stop to read about or listen to the issues straight from the horse’s mouth.
In the many times I’ve had men (and some women ffs) force this explanation upon me, they usually:
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Have fundamental misunderstanding of what feminism is. They often think women want dominance over them or something, giving them a victim complex.
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Support feminist values in theory, but get annoyed when literally anything at all is asked of them to contribute to meaningful change. (see also: systemic racism)
Neither of these are an excuse and I’m so exhausted hearing them over and over.
I think the logic on #1 (though they probably don’t consciously realize this) is women have generally been treated terribly for millennia, they don’t want the same treatment themselves.
There also is a fair amount of (very understandable) misandry mixed in with feminism. Not that all feminists are misandrists but all misandrists are feminists and this is amplified in media.
Misandrists are fake feminists
Real feminists are not misandrists
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