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In contrast, I find it exceptionally hard to sympathise with this sentiment, given the state of the overall culture. It's been quite surreal to watch various women taking offence at the fact that in a few places online, some of which have been sequestered, men are saying mean, denigrating and in their opinion untrue things about women.
I've seen it put like this: "[This] upsets you. You find it unjust and unfair and unjustifiable. What if that was what you saw when you watched CNN or MSNBC? Read Slate or Salon or the Guardian or the Washington Post? What if it was constantly trending on Twitter? What if your HR department instantiated it in company policy? What if your union promoted it as a true fact that needed rectifying? What if the American Psychological Association, in their guidance for treating women and girls in crisis, was promoting the ideas espoused by /r/TheRedPill and recommending treatment practices based on them? What if this narrative had convinced your country or state to reverse hundreds of years of jurisprudential advances, and return to an era where due process is an inconvenience that should be abandoned? That's what men see when they turn on the TV or open the newspaper. It's what they're confronted with when they come into contact with the criminal justice system, or the mental health profession."
The high-status, influential, thought leaders of our time do in fact promote such negative narratives about men, and it's ubiquitous in our institutions to the point that it's overtly endorsed by governments and many prominent organisations. Such viewpoints have actively influenced law and public policy. And yet a commentator on some nowhere forum online can make @FarNearEverywhere "want to introduce mandatory castration for all men". Well, I suppose in some way you kind of understand how the "extremist" redpillers feel, then.
I understand how this would be frustrating to some women who find themselves attacked when they personally did nothing to contribute to that state of affairs, and I do wish gender relations weren't the way that they currently are. But quite frankly, I don't think many women understand that this kind of thing is just daily background noise for men. And if the red pill is a response to anything at all, it's a response to the fact that said anti-male cultural trends have been allowed to go on for so long without any significant correction. Even if their defection is anti-social, it's a reaction to incredibly dysfunctional social conditions that they did not create. You can't make situations that resemble a boot stamping on a human head forever and expect people to never chafe under it and never create their own compensatory rhetoric - this is just a classic example of "You reap what you sow".
Would I like to see better sexual relations? Yes. Do I think things are headed somewhere bad? Absolutely. But the redpillers did not start this, they don't have institutional power, and in accordance with this they are not the ones upon whom I place the obligation to change first.
EDIT: clarity
Well hey man, I actually agree with many of your points here. I feel a lot of sympathy and pity for the anti-social men who turned into red-pillers.
But I think the mature response is to accept the truth, buck up, and work to change it. Change people's minds, especially women, not by hating them but by walking through the issues and appealing to their emotions like their boys brothers fathers etc.
Now is this path much more difficult than just posting angry screeds about sexism online? Absolutely. But it's more effective overall, and much less likely to lead to actual bloodshed or societal upheaval.
Some MRAs are conflict theorists. They believe that relations between the sexes are fundamentally a negotiation, and that women have more bargaining power which makes the negotiations leonine. These MRAs believe that feminism is in fact good for women in at least the short term, and as such they don't see a point in what you advocate - they think everyone already knows the facts, and their difference with female feminists is simply that they happen to be self-interested men instead of self-interested women.
"Angry screeds about sexism" are an attempt by these people to increase men's bargaining power by unionising men, much as they perceive feminism as unionising women (and male feminists as scab workers begging for scraps).
Even within the conflict-theory frame, there are other ways to increase men's relative bargaining power. Unfortunately, most of them are "run away screaming" levels of horrible. Banning smartphones is the most prosocial one I can think of, by a very long way, and I'm not even sure it'd work (certainly, their introduction brought women onto the Internet in huge numbers and thus enabled instant feminist shame mobs, but it's not super-clear whether removing smartphones now would cause those women to log off or merely to buy PCs).
(There are definitely mistake-theory MRAs as well, though, and some who are a bit of both.)
I would not disagree that some MRAs have a view of gender relations that resembles conflict theory (but as you already noted, many MRAs are also mistake theorists or are a blend of both). However, in contextualising this viewpoint it's necessary to note that the predominant feminist view of gender relations is itself an antagonistic one (patriarchy theory), it arose much earlier than MRAs, and much of feminist political activism is informed by this idea. And when you stand in opposition to conflict theorists, you need to understand that they believe they are at war and will treat it as such. Perhaps their belief is mistaken, but through their actions they have created a dynamic that's fundamentally indistinguishable from what you'd see if conflict theory was true.
In other words, the funny thing about conflict theory is that it’s self-fulfilling, to some degree. Once it is believed by enough people and acted upon, conflict theory frameworks then actually become a somewhat correct framework to view the world through, regardless of the prior validity of the theory. So when the primary lobbying group that purportedly works on behalf of women is essentially treating gender relations in this way and actually getting what they want, I do believe that does indeed introduce a strong aspect of conflict to the relationship, and I think the "conflict theorist MRAs" are simply perceiving this fact. Gender relations might not inherently be one of conflict, but in the current environment, they have gained a distinct shade of antagonism wherein one side seeks to incessantly improve the position of "team woman" in some shockingly zero-sum ways, and while they do feed into the gender hostility as well it's clear that the conflict-theorist MRAs were not the primary progenitors of this antagonism. The way I see it, a large part of the purpose of their rhetoric and activism is to create some kind of necessary counterbalance to trends they didn't start, and they're doing this without benefits such as the backing of institutions.
Once again, I don't like how things are going and find the entire thing to be almost excruciatingly tiring at this point, but once someone starts a memetic arms race (and I do indeed place the blame primarily on feminists for instigating that arms race) it's almost impossible to stop.
I think I mostly agree with your position on the fundamentals. I left my post as conditional as it was for a few reasons, including but not limited to:
it wasn't necessary to argue the truth of the premises to get TheDag to understand the logic
I'm too close to the feminism/MRA issue, as both a victim of misandrist child abuse and a 30-year-old virgin, to be confident in my objectivity
I'm trying to follow something like that Doctor Who quote "I help where I can; I will not fight", and arguing the fundamentals would be wading into the Culture War for real (if you go through my posts you'll see that while they're not always taken as such, most of my CW posts at least technically stick to clarifications).
I think nuclear war's fairly likely inside the next few years, and I think there's a significant (if small) chance of AI X-catastrophe by the end of the decade. So a) CW issues feel trivial by comparison, b) raising the temperature of the CW worsens both of those risks because it weakens the West, c) if we do have a nuclear war, a substantial chunk of the Blue Tribe is going to literally die in a fire and the SJ movement is probably going to collapse in on itself, so opposing them now feels at least somewhat moot. Luke 12:20 and the Warcraft 3 introduction convey my attitude pretty well.
And to come full circle, this means I kinda do agree with TheDag on high-temperature actions being a bad idea right now even if I mostly agree with you on who's at fault (and even if I'm too much of a deontologist to actively oppose people fighting for ideals I sympathise with).
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This runs into the problem that the people who are upholding the current state of affairs have a much larger megaphone than we do, and are using their disproportionate authority/power to deplatform those who would ever possibly challenge their position effectively.
So how can you 'appeal to their emotions' when it's your still, small voice vs. a massive screaming egregore of social media/pop culture that is pumped into womens' brains during all waking hours?
How exactly do you change someone's mind when every single social force is pulling them the opposite direction? (without directly attacking the source of the pull, see below)
We have guys like Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, Matt Walsh, Tucker Carlson I guess, and a plethora of manosphere types that are trying to 'walk through the issues' in a semi-rational matter.
They take on the institutions, and they get literally imprisoned, fined, fire, deplatformed, hacked, and otherwise shouted down by every single mainstream outlet at once.
That is the message that is coming across. "Rock the boat in any way that might actually change minds and we bring the full weight of our combined power down to crush you."
So you say "accept the truth, buck up, and work to change it."
Please, if you think there's a version of "changing it" that doesn't involve directly 'attacking' the institutional power wielded against those aforementioned men, and men in general, and dismantling, possibly via violence, the mechanisms they use to suppress alternate opinions, I'd love to hear it.
Its the whole problem of "why are conservatives/libertarians/populists complaining about censorship online when they should be trying to change hearts and minds and building parallel stuctures?"
Because this response ultimately becomes "Build your own internet/payment system/social media platform" and thus the work required to actually get any change done is a couple orders of magnitudes more than it would be if they were allowed to speak their piece unmolested.
It sounds like a kafkatrap when read uncharitably:
"If you're just complaining about it online and not doing something to change it, you clearly don't care about the issue enough to take action."
Then on the other hand, if you DO take action:
"Whoah buddy, you can't just directly go after the people and institutions that you think are responsible for suppressing male concerns and preventing any response to issues facing men, that makes you look like an overzealous psycho! Work to change people's minds first!"
Yes yes, work to change things.
But can we be, perhaps, REALISTIC about the amount of effort and strife that 'changing things' will entail, given how TPTB are quite happy to keep things the way they are?
Societal upheaval seems like an unavoidable outcome if things continue on their current trajectory (never a guarantee!) though.
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