I was having a discussion with my friends about crimes related to men and women and the relevance of feminism to address it. Few of my friends say ‘Women should have solidarity with each other cause the world is already cruel to them since millenniums’ but my personal opinion is ‘a whole group cannot be blamed for the wrongs just because a few members of that group cause harm and injustice to others’. Like on the social media, we can often here this argument ‘not all men but always men’ from feminists but same outrage isn’t there when any criminal activity happens against men like murder or provocating someone to kill themselves through mental harassment.
Being a sociology student, I have two different views but I’m not able to reconcile them.
1. Supporting generalized statements such as men are inherently wrong just because they are men or women are cheaters or good diggers just because they are women, create gender stereotypes and results in lack of trust between the two genders. Whenever such arguments happen, people don’t seem to identify themselves as an individual but a part of social group.
- Social institutions often have force the individuals to behave in a totally irrational way and dictate their behavior. Like, here in India, we can often see people from ‘Upper Caste’ having unnecessary proud in their caste identity just because they were born into a certain upper caste category and then same Upper Caste people taunt, shame, harass and often kills other people who come from so called ‘Lower Caste’. (https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/globalcaste/caste0801-03.htm)
So, here in this case, a social institution can be blamed to dictate the behavior of an individual. So, can we also blame all the men collectively for the crimes committed against women?
Comments
Thanks for your question to /r/AskSocialScience. All posters, please remember that this subreddit requires peer-reviewed, cited sources (Please see Rule 1 and 3). All posts that do not have citations will be removed by AutoMod. Circumvention by posting unrelated link text is grounds for a ban. Well sourced comprehensive answers take time. If you’re interested in the subject, and you don’t see a reasonable answer, please consider [clicking Here for RemindMeBot](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=AskSocialScience Reminder).
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.
[removed]
This is a discussion of individualism vs collectivism but your specific statement about ‘not all men but always men’ is how violence is overwhelmingly committed by men, so, that it’s referring to the fact that it isn’t all men in a collective sense but it’s so often men that it isn’t a fluke but a phenomenon.
Second, gender stereotypes are prevalent in all cultures due to the nature of human categorization. There is no serious movement to categorize all men as predators or all women as gold diggers, those border into propaganda movements meant to trigger knee jerk reactions. They’re not functional reflections of the culture at large but of a carefully constructed model meant to illicit certain feelings.
Third, Indian caste feelings are a way different model than unrelated immutable characteristics. Race and gender have far less cohesion than Indian castes because of the rigid social order enforced via the now unlawful system that had given groups of people near absolute authority over others. There simply isn’t a good comparison to align the collective behaviors of that group with any other group except maybe in a specific multi-tiered society that involved slavery if not chattel style slavery.
Ragebait discussion – https://muse.jhu.edu/article/795902
Individualism vs collectivism discussion – https://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/3/1/128
[removed]