Examples of How Feminism Helps Men.

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Communism is a good idea in theory but really hard to put into practice.

Wow. Thanks. That made my parents' divorce much easier to process. My parents were nothing more but fake choices because they were doomed to fail! Never mind victims of circumstance, the only "real" choices are soulmates!

I was speaking in the context of when the nuclear family was considered the atomic unit of civilization. I did not say I felt it should be the standard today.

However, I do feel a family is important, regardless of its structure. I will be offering a son's perspective on this, but I must admit it is more emotional and rhetorical than rational. I do not want to get too personal, so I'll avoid sharing too much of my background. All I'll say is that my parents care so much about their post-divorce disputes with each other that they often do not see how it makes me feel.

Please understand I really wish I had a close-knit family. I have weak emotional connections in my family that are dwarfed by bonds with my friends. This bothers me because it makes me feel as if being related to someone directly by blood does not mean they won't feel like strangers. Even if society's idea of the family changes, I feel it is vitally important that a solid one exists for kids. The alternative is emotionally taxing, but it is likely to happen when parents focus more on their own independence than the relationships they've developed.

After your mother changes her last name to not share yours or your father's, mediating hundreds of phone calls between parents that refuse to talk to one another (even when it comes to issues that concern you), and listening to your father threaten to physically hurt your mother to your face, you start to secretly wish they did not have the choice to break up. You wish that they could not simply toss aside their responsibilities as parents. You wish that they could understand that in their pursuit for liberty, they destroy any emotional safety net for their kids that they once agreed to maintain.

I want emotional connections to my own blood. I can't really explain why, but I really do.

That's a bit of a false dichotomy, Sage. My parents divorced when I was 14, and it was better for all of us. People can be 'not good' at living together, but still be good people.

Maybe so, but divorce was not the best option for my family. As someone who did not have a good experience with a divorce, I got the impression from DW's comment that my parents did not make "real" choices. It felt personal for me, so forgive my reactive sarcasm.

Terlingua, several people made posts early in this thread pointing out that feminism has broadened the scope of practice for men in this society, allowing them to take greater part in childcare and to have non-stereotypical interests like cooking or decorating.Your response was, 'well, men have done that in these other cultures deep in the past, and there's this famous Chinese guy who likes to cook.'

I then asked, are we talking about what feminism, as a movement that emerged in western culture over the last 100 years, has done for western culture over the last 100 years, or are we asking what feminism has done for men that's new on the face of the earth? You have not answered.

By its nature, challenging the definitions of women's social roles and what they're allowed to be/not allowed to be it also challenges that for men - whether by the same people or different, just by contagion.

Change and benefit are entirely different things though. I am not asking how feminism changes things for men, but rather how it supposedly benefits men.

I think this is an impossible question to answer, because "benefit" is a subjective term.

advancing human rights is a good thing. if we imagine for a moment that feminism does NOT benefit men (obviously not true, but for the sake of argument), why would it matter? just like the american civil rights movement helped black people, which was a good thing. it would not really matter if white people received any benefit would it? i think you might be missing the point. it's easily demonstrated that feminism has both directly and indirectly helped men, but why is that important?

so far it hasn't been detrimental to men as far as i can tell, so that doesn't seem to be a problem.

are you planning to join a feminist cause if it can be shown that it promotes men's rights or offers a benefit to men as well?