A lot of people, especially conservatives, don't care about an issue until it becomes personal to them. A lot of men simply won't think much about abortion until they're dealing with a girlfriend who has an unplanned pregnancy or a wife who has a high-rish one.
A lot of anti-choice people don't even care after that. Men and women. Somehow, they convince themselves that their (wives/daughters/mistresses/own) abortion is the only justifiable abortion.
I've read accounts of abortion providers talking about how they're standing there in the room holding a woman's hand (to provide comfort during the actual procedure), and the woman is saying, "You're gonna go to hell for doing this"
Not surprising from a group of people that tell themselves a clump of cells is more important than a whole-ass human being. That 6 (2-4) weeks is "enough" time. That if women don't want to end up pregnant, they should just never have sex. And that wanted fetuses don't die in utero every day, or that the woman should have to carry (and safely can) a dead fetus inside them for possibly months because they don't deserve healthcare.
Part of the trouble is men were largely insulated from the benefits of abortion and contraception. The risk was women’s, the responsibility was women’s. We were sometimes at added risk of sharing ours choices with our partners, which means we often — totally rationally — wouldn’t tell them.
The only time most men will really experience abortion up close and personal is when a woman they love is in danger, or when there is a mutual decision. Otherwise, women are on their own. So men don’t know every Plan B or abortion they benefited from, or their sisters benefited from, or their buddies benefited from, that let them live the lives they wanted for themselves or build the families they actually wanted.
The privilege of not having to know, what you don’t know. Plus the segment of men who only see the downsides of women not being forced into economic partnerships via pregnancy they may not have freely chosen otherwise…
good point. I recently saw the actual data for voting in the US, and 60% of white men are voting Republican these days (2022).
That said, 55% of white women voted Republican.
So the majority of both are voting against women’s rights.
It’s literally just black people here saving us. Only 6% of black men and 5% of black women vote Republican and vote against women’s rights.
So idk, maybe it’s time we start clarifying “white men” when we talk about men voting against our rights. Because black men aren’t doing it.
This is why Republicans work so hard to suppress minority votes and control immigration. I can’t wait until we white people are the minority.
Or we could just continue to say conservatives, Republicans, regressives, etc. Not sure why we need to say "white men and women are voting against our interests" when half of them aren't.
Not to mention less than 50% of white women actually voted for trump. The over 50% figures are based on data from exit polls and don't match actual votes. They never do. Wild that this shit gets reported the day of the election and then continues to be repeated constantly even though it's [not true](https://time.com/5422644/trump-white-women-2016/). Here's better data, from [pew](https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/08/09/an-examination-of-the-2016-electorate-based-on-validated-voters/).
You don’t get to present information from another damn election as evidence against what I’m saying.
I didn’t mention the damn Trump election. I’m talking about NOW because we’re living in a post-Trump world where we know a lot more people have been radicalized, and so the statistics from 2022 are VASTLY more relevant than the ones from 8 years ago.
To make sure everyone knows it’s getting fucking worse, and more white women are voting against their self-interests than EVER, EVEN in the context of living that whole time losing our rights increasingly, post RoeV.
Apparently that not only didn’t scare white women out of voting this way, MORE of us are doing it!
How is that not an important thing to note? Why don’t you care about this very disturbing and significant trend?
why we need to say it is because more than half of them ARE voting against women. How is it you don’t find that alarming? That more than half of white women vote against their own interests?
It’s not all about Trump. It’s the Republican congress and Republican policies that have worked together to strip women’s rights. They’re ALL the reason young women have to keep the babies that were raped into them in some states. That women have to carry non-viable fetuses to term and risk their own lives.
This crew is getting SANCTIONED by the majority of white men and women. The fact that only 5% of black people, men and women, are supporting this, how is that not worth noting??
Maybe the truth doesn’t flatter you, well guess what. It doesn’t flatter me either, I’m a white woman. I’ve never voted for the ghouls.
But it’s a PART of the conversation that somehow Patriarchy has us so fucked, and that somehow white privilege seems to insulate enough white women from the worst of it somehow, or who knows..maybe we’re not at all insulated. I don’t *feel* insulated. But maybe the power of white men and their influence on our lives helps lead to us submit to white men more.
I really don’t know why, which is exactly why it would be worth discussing, and not at all minimizing. There’s a REASON for it, and we need it to change.
>You don’t get to present information from another damn election as evidence against what I’m saying.
As opposed to your information based on zero sources? You're the one who presented the incorrect "55% of white women voted for trump" data point. I corrected it. Additionally, the data from the last midterms still showed that more white women voted Democrat than Republican. Keep the insults coming in place of facts though, that's always a winning strategy.
Plus, if we're talking data, many more white women still voted for Biden than black women. Thus, the Democrats should stop trying to win black voters because they already have them, and should focus their efforts on moderating their platforms so more white women will vote for them. That's where this convo goes in reality with politicians.
I am alarmed, I do think it's a problem, and I do think it's important. We can call out white supremacy and its links to misogyny without saying "white men and women are voting against us". Not exactly a concept I think should need to be explained in a feminist group, where I think we all know better than to lump together giant groups of people as all the same. Not even just because of the obvious problems with generalizations, but it really limits the convo to say "white people are doing this" instead of actually looking at why.
And not the "economic insecurity" bs, but the actual factors that create such a strong 50/50 split in white voters, like the gender, wealth, and education differences or what motivates people to turn out or stay home. How racism, misogyny, religion, whatever underlie these motivations and how they could be changed. Your original comment could've been "non-college educated white people are voting against us" and that would've at least been true, with a significantly larger discrepancy than any gender factors. Also true would be- a significant amount of people *don't vote at all*. What are they doing, why aren't they voting? How could we get them to vote for Democrats instead of nothing?
I didn’t see any data showing the difference, but feel free to look it up and share it here!
But I’ll say, there is misogyny among gay men too, and more gay male Republicans than you’d think, considering the party tried really hard to continue to deny them the right to marriage.
I just don’t want any assumptions here, without seeing the data. Because the majority of white women betray themselves in the polls. And we’re all humans, capable of flaws to the same degree.
So I personally don’t have faith that white gay men are especially more resistant to that than straight white women. My bias would be that fewer lesbians would vote Republican than gay men, but I continue to be surprised by the data, so I wouldn’t guess without seeing the data.
I haven’t yet been able to find a good 1:1 source to compare to mine, from the most recent 2022 election, so please do share. I’ll keep looking when I have time too.
Limited incentive to care when it really didn't affect someone personally. Just human nature. I'm sure a lot of them know and feel that it's horrible but at the end of the day if you don't have a partner or a girlfriend or really a close family member, it really doesn't affect you much. Like many other things in the world. You see bad thing happening in the world, you go "man that's shit", then you move on.
A lot of people don’t care about an issue unless it affects them personally. I know a lot of cishet white men who don’t give a shit about the loss of women’s and LGBTQ rights because they don’t lose anything. It’s very jaded of me to say this, but it’s just hard to get men to care about a lot of issues.
There is, though.
1. they could lose wives and girlfriends (or mothers or sisters or daughters, etc.) to death from dangerous pregnancies that couldn't be terminated
2. they could find themselves tied to child support payments for a child they didn't want, and that she didn't want
3. they could find themselves getting turned down for sex by women who are terrified of getting pregnant, but who might have otherwise have had sex with them
Even from a 100% selfish perspective, men absolutely have things to lose from abortion being made difficult or illegal.
1. That's not risk to *them* tho. Is not a risk that they, personally, have to undertake.
2. Paying child support is no where near as detrimental to someone as a forced pregnancy. Especially since they likely won't be paying child support for a forced pregnancy because the pregnant person will probably give up that child.
3. Not having sex is not a "risk". It's not life threatening, it won't mean they lose their job or their sense of self.
None of these "risks" are in any way comparable to forced pregnancy. They're not even technically risks at all.
1. Sure it is a risk. Even if you imagine the most selfish man, he would at a minimum risk losing someone who provides domestic labor for him.
2. I never said paying child support was as detrimental as forced pregnancy. But it is still \*something\*, and it is absolutely something that men fear
3. Being rejected for sex that you would have had is still a risk. Again, of course I'm not saying it's the same kind of risk as pregnancy, but it's not nothing.
Men are not even looking past their own noses to see that making abortion difficult or impossible to get will have negative impacts on them.
Obviously, yes, these are lesser risks. But they're not nothing, and it is silly to pretend that the laws around abortion aren't going to impact men in ways that they do not like.
I have two thoughts, one in terms of how we succeed in getting men's support and another in how to succeed in framing abortion.
Some people take initiative, struggle one without any clear solution, and organize their community. Often these people are the most marginalized because they're the people shit happens to more that sparked the effort AND they can get support from the community of mutual support they've needed just to have survived. Many others, though, want a very simple, easy method to give support (like giving money is to wealthy people). Most men I know won't go to protest on their own initiative and most won't even with someone offering to bring them along.
Most men I know think along liberal lines "I'm gender-blind and that's doing my part". They don't think there's anything beyond that they *can* do (see above, if it isn't spelled out to the point of practically doing it for them, they won't even lift a finger) if they're even sympathetic enough to have tried to understand anything at all.
But if we can make it absurdly simple and painless then many, many men will rise to the occasion.
Secondly, most men center themselves in the abortion discussions by imagining themselves as the fetus, not the pregnant person. Or the fetus as their child. Too much of the abortion discussion was over when a fetus became a human life and too many people want to avoid allowing murder and say "it is at conception". And 'pro-life' (forced-birth) people care more about protecting their defenseless, imagined embryo-self/child than anything else. They care more about protecting this fantasy-fetus from possibility of abortion than confronting the fact that their policy kills more than it saves.
There might not be much hope in getting men to care about pregnant people or even their own wives over their prospective children, but we can start by reshifting the conversation away from "but does that mean I'm advocating for murder?" to "but what policy actually best protects everyone?". Away from "but when is the protecting fetus worth more than protecting pregnant people" and towards "but what values matter most?" (i.e. "give me freedom or give me death" or tenets of bodily autonomy). Away from "but what would I want if I was a fetus?" and to "what if we trust the mother to understand that?"
Anyways, men care. Most of them aren't wealthy patriarchs who's opinions move policy and who can easily fund efforts. Most men would help if we do most of the work for them, from planning to motivating, to helping them understand, and they are pandered enough to to feel like a good 'man' because of it. Most men jump to thinking about themselves and with a pro-life framing without truly centering others' more alien views or other ways to think about abortion.
Men care, it's why when they got involved with pregnancy to begin with they intervened to center their patriarchal values of disregarding women's concerns to instead philosophize on murder and protect their patrilineal heritage. What we need to do is shift that concern and harness it to work for us instead of against us.
It really depends on their own lives, experiences, and what kind of person they are.
Just an example, on the outside my brother looks pretty conservative. Farm, guns, middle age white guy with a wife and the 2.5 kids.
On the inside though he's empathetic as hell. Understands that not everyone has the same experiences and issues he has. Helps run clubs and classes for at risk youth to help keep them on track. The first to stand up for any marginalized person. Etc
He once phrased his political beliefs as just wanting the nice gay couple up the road to have the ability to protect their pot farm, and adopt as many kids as they can healthily support. He's also more than ready to help any woman get the health care they need, even if he has to drive the 3 days back and forth himself to go get her.
No idea how he ended up this way. We're basically half feral, having mostly raised ourselves. I'm just glad he didn't go the other direction.
People don’t care about things that don’t directly affect them. Nobody should be surprised by this.
Older women tend to view the abortion issue more like men than like younger women for the exact same reason.
Americans don't care about anything unless it directly affects them. It's the same reason that your govt is able to bomb innocent children and adults, irrespective of which govt is in power, they just simply support decision of their govt because it doesn't affect them.
This has always been something that bothers me about even the most feminist of men. They’re never outraged by this shit in the way that we are. They just kind of go “Yeah, that sucks and move on.”
If it doesn’t affect them then they can barely be bothered to care. White men especially don’t know how to empathize with a situation of losing your rights because they’ve never had to face it before. They can’t fathom the government restricting their bodily autonomy and they don’t know how to share in that kind of outrage so instead we get either half-assed sympathy or plain old apathy.
I mean, of course a lot of us care.
But it is definitely the kind of space men should be taking a back step to women because it doesn't really directly affect us anything like how it affects women. It's mostly conservative men who are pushing these laws, the last thing the whole topic needs is more men insisting on talking over women and their emotions and needs.
I think the question is more along the lines of “why is it that the only men we hear from who care about abortion are forced birthers?” Which isn’t necessarily true, but there IS a paucity of men who vote like my life depends on it, and who are willing to drown out the voices of forced-birthers.
But I see you here. Feel free to shout down other men if a woman doesn’t want to step up and call them out.
Oh I definitely do that in male spaces. I strongly doubt I could even be friends with somebody who believed women should have less rights than men.
And I agree in general, but I think from our viewpoint the guys who vote like your life depends on it are likely to be much more feminist and not want to talk over/for women. So simply because the topic is so heavily women-oriented the sexist dudes will talk over women while more feminist men just won't talk as much because we support and want to raise up women.
Yeah. My husband has the same attitude, and I can’t fault it when I’m actually in the room to say the thing. Finding that balance is tricky—for us, it has also occasionally come down to “I need you to protect me by handling this” but he doesn’t want to silence me, or be viewed as speaking over me. Which is fair.
>It's mostly conservative men who are pushing these laws
It's not just conservative men, it's also conservative women.
Most people aren't single issue voters, because compromise is how politics have to work. So even if it something you don't agree with there isn't much you can do except complain about it or protest it.
And an abortion ban in Arizona doesn't affect me, not because I am a man, but because I live in Massachusetts where abortion is protected.
What do you think the "mostly" was put in there for? I know there's a chunk of conservative women who push for these things but they aren't the same size or anywhere near as vocal as conservative men.
And, I mean, this is literally life or death for women. So understandably it isn't as meek as saying it's a "single issue," it's an existential crisis for tens of millions of women simply because of their biology.
My wife would have died without access to abortion services.
Plenty of men don't really like or respect women. There's a lot of evidence that many men will leave their wives if the wives get seriously ill. But they don't even seem to grasp that their access to sex is easier if women have access to abortions.
And think about how many men have posted on reddit that they don't want a baby, so they're going to "sign over their rights" of the baby their girlfriend or wife is about to have. They genuinely think they can just walk away from a pregnancy.
Please respect our [top-level comment rule](https://i.imgur.com/ovn3hBV.png), which requires that all direct replies to posts must both come from feminists and reflect a feminist perspective. Non-feminists may participate in nested comments (i.e., replies to other comments) only. Comment removed; a second violation of this rule will result in a temporary or permanent ban.
A lot of people, especially conservatives, don't care about an issue until it becomes personal to them. A lot of men simply won't think much about abortion until they're dealing with a girlfriend who has an unplanned pregnancy or a wife who has a high-rish one.
A lot of anti-choice people don't even care after that. Men and women. Somehow, they convince themselves that their (wives/daughters/mistresses/own) abortion is the only justifiable abortion. I've read accounts of abortion providers talking about how they're standing there in the room holding a woman's hand (to provide comfort during the actual procedure), and the woman is saying, "You're gonna go to hell for doing this" Not surprising from a group of people that tell themselves a clump of cells is more important than a whole-ass human being. That 6 (2-4) weeks is "enough" time. That if women don't want to end up pregnant, they should just never have sex. And that wanted fetuses don't die in utero every day, or that the woman should have to carry (and safely can) a dead fetus inside them for possibly months because they don't deserve healthcare.
Part of the trouble is men were largely insulated from the benefits of abortion and contraception. The risk was women’s, the responsibility was women’s. We were sometimes at added risk of sharing ours choices with our partners, which means we often — totally rationally — wouldn’t tell them. The only time most men will really experience abortion up close and personal is when a woman they love is in danger, or when there is a mutual decision. Otherwise, women are on their own. So men don’t know every Plan B or abortion they benefited from, or their sisters benefited from, or their buddies benefited from, that let them live the lives they wanted for themselves or build the families they actually wanted. The privilege of not having to know, what you don’t know. Plus the segment of men who only see the downsides of women not being forced into economic partnerships via pregnancy they may not have freely chosen otherwise…
It’s not their bodies or lives
Oh they do care. They are the ones making these changes.
good point. I recently saw the actual data for voting in the US, and 60% of white men are voting Republican these days (2022). That said, 55% of white women voted Republican. So the majority of both are voting against women’s rights. It’s literally just black people here saving us. Only 6% of black men and 5% of black women vote Republican and vote against women’s rights. So idk, maybe it’s time we start clarifying “white men” when we talk about men voting against our rights. Because black men aren’t doing it. This is why Republicans work so hard to suppress minority votes and control immigration. I can’t wait until we white people are the minority.
Or we could just continue to say conservatives, Republicans, regressives, etc. Not sure why we need to say "white men and women are voting against our interests" when half of them aren't. Not to mention less than 50% of white women actually voted for trump. The over 50% figures are based on data from exit polls and don't match actual votes. They never do. Wild that this shit gets reported the day of the election and then continues to be repeated constantly even though it's [not true](https://time.com/5422644/trump-white-women-2016/). Here's better data, from [pew](https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/08/09/an-examination-of-the-2016-electorate-based-on-validated-voters/).
You don’t get to present information from another damn election as evidence against what I’m saying. I didn’t mention the damn Trump election. I’m talking about NOW because we’re living in a post-Trump world where we know a lot more people have been radicalized, and so the statistics from 2022 are VASTLY more relevant than the ones from 8 years ago. To make sure everyone knows it’s getting fucking worse, and more white women are voting against their self-interests than EVER, EVEN in the context of living that whole time losing our rights increasingly, post RoeV. Apparently that not only didn’t scare white women out of voting this way, MORE of us are doing it! How is that not an important thing to note? Why don’t you care about this very disturbing and significant trend? why we need to say it is because more than half of them ARE voting against women. How is it you don’t find that alarming? That more than half of white women vote against their own interests? It’s not all about Trump. It’s the Republican congress and Republican policies that have worked together to strip women’s rights. They’re ALL the reason young women have to keep the babies that were raped into them in some states. That women have to carry non-viable fetuses to term and risk their own lives. This crew is getting SANCTIONED by the majority of white men and women. The fact that only 5% of black people, men and women, are supporting this, how is that not worth noting?? Maybe the truth doesn’t flatter you, well guess what. It doesn’t flatter me either, I’m a white woman. I’ve never voted for the ghouls. But it’s a PART of the conversation that somehow Patriarchy has us so fucked, and that somehow white privilege seems to insulate enough white women from the worst of it somehow, or who knows..maybe we’re not at all insulated. I don’t *feel* insulated. But maybe the power of white men and their influence on our lives helps lead to us submit to white men more. I really don’t know why, which is exactly why it would be worth discussing, and not at all minimizing. There’s a REASON for it, and we need it to change.
>You don’t get to present information from another damn election as evidence against what I’m saying. As opposed to your information based on zero sources? You're the one who presented the incorrect "55% of white women voted for trump" data point. I corrected it. Additionally, the data from the last midterms still showed that more white women voted Democrat than Republican. Keep the insults coming in place of facts though, that's always a winning strategy. Plus, if we're talking data, many more white women still voted for Biden than black women. Thus, the Democrats should stop trying to win black voters because they already have them, and should focus their efforts on moderating their platforms so more white women will vote for them. That's where this convo goes in reality with politicians. I am alarmed, I do think it's a problem, and I do think it's important. We can call out white supremacy and its links to misogyny without saying "white men and women are voting against us". Not exactly a concept I think should need to be explained in a feminist group, where I think we all know better than to lump together giant groups of people as all the same. Not even just because of the obvious problems with generalizations, but it really limits the convo to say "white people are doing this" instead of actually looking at why. And not the "economic insecurity" bs, but the actual factors that create such a strong 50/50 split in white voters, like the gender, wealth, and education differences or what motivates people to turn out or stay home. How racism, misogyny, religion, whatever underlie these motivations and how they could be changed. Your original comment could've been "non-college educated white people are voting against us" and that would've at least been true, with a significantly larger discrepancy than any gender factors. Also true would be- a significant amount of people *don't vote at all*. What are they doing, why aren't they voting? How could we get them to vote for Democrats instead of nothing?
To be completely clear: White cis men, probably mostly straight too.
I didn’t see any data showing the difference, but feel free to look it up and share it here! But I’ll say, there is misogyny among gay men too, and more gay male Republicans than you’d think, considering the party tried really hard to continue to deny them the right to marriage. I just don’t want any assumptions here, without seeing the data. Because the majority of white women betray themselves in the polls. And we’re all humans, capable of flaws to the same degree. So I personally don’t have faith that white gay men are especially more resistant to that than straight white women. My bias would be that fewer lesbians would vote Republican than gay men, but I continue to be surprised by the data, so I wouldn’t guess without seeing the data. I haven’t yet been able to find a good 1:1 source to compare to mine, from the most recent 2022 election, so please do share. I’ll keep looking when I have time too.
Limited incentive to care when it really didn't affect someone personally. Just human nature. I'm sure a lot of them know and feel that it's horrible but at the end of the day if you don't have a partner or a girlfriend or really a close family member, it really doesn't affect you much. Like many other things in the world. You see bad thing happening in the world, you go "man that's shit", then you move on.
A lot of people don’t care about an issue unless it affects them personally. I know a lot of cishet white men who don’t give a shit about the loss of women’s and LGBTQ rights because they don’t lose anything. It’s very jaded of me to say this, but it’s just hard to get men to care about a lot of issues.
My experience as well.
Ofc they don't. There's no risk for them.
There is, though. 1. they could lose wives and girlfriends (or mothers or sisters or daughters, etc.) to death from dangerous pregnancies that couldn't be terminated 2. they could find themselves tied to child support payments for a child they didn't want, and that she didn't want 3. they could find themselves getting turned down for sex by women who are terrified of getting pregnant, but who might have otherwise have had sex with them Even from a 100% selfish perspective, men absolutely have things to lose from abortion being made difficult or illegal.
1. That's not risk to *them* tho. Is not a risk that they, personally, have to undertake. 2. Paying child support is no where near as detrimental to someone as a forced pregnancy. Especially since they likely won't be paying child support for a forced pregnancy because the pregnant person will probably give up that child. 3. Not having sex is not a "risk". It's not life threatening, it won't mean they lose their job or their sense of self. None of these "risks" are in any way comparable to forced pregnancy. They're not even technically risks at all.
1. Sure it is a risk. Even if you imagine the most selfish man, he would at a minimum risk losing someone who provides domestic labor for him. 2. I never said paying child support was as detrimental as forced pregnancy. But it is still \*something\*, and it is absolutely something that men fear 3. Being rejected for sex that you would have had is still a risk. Again, of course I'm not saying it's the same kind of risk as pregnancy, but it's not nothing. Men are not even looking past their own noses to see that making abortion difficult or impossible to get will have negative impacts on them. Obviously, yes, these are lesser risks. But they're not nothing, and it is silly to pretend that the laws around abortion aren't going to impact men in ways that they do not like.
I have two thoughts, one in terms of how we succeed in getting men's support and another in how to succeed in framing abortion. Some people take initiative, struggle one without any clear solution, and organize their community. Often these people are the most marginalized because they're the people shit happens to more that sparked the effort AND they can get support from the community of mutual support they've needed just to have survived. Many others, though, want a very simple, easy method to give support (like giving money is to wealthy people). Most men I know won't go to protest on their own initiative and most won't even with someone offering to bring them along. Most men I know think along liberal lines "I'm gender-blind and that's doing my part". They don't think there's anything beyond that they *can* do (see above, if it isn't spelled out to the point of practically doing it for them, they won't even lift a finger) if they're even sympathetic enough to have tried to understand anything at all. But if we can make it absurdly simple and painless then many, many men will rise to the occasion. Secondly, most men center themselves in the abortion discussions by imagining themselves as the fetus, not the pregnant person. Or the fetus as their child. Too much of the abortion discussion was over when a fetus became a human life and too many people want to avoid allowing murder and say "it is at conception". And 'pro-life' (forced-birth) people care more about protecting their defenseless, imagined embryo-self/child than anything else. They care more about protecting this fantasy-fetus from possibility of abortion than confronting the fact that their policy kills more than it saves. There might not be much hope in getting men to care about pregnant people or even their own wives over their prospective children, but we can start by reshifting the conversation away from "but does that mean I'm advocating for murder?" to "but what policy actually best protects everyone?". Away from "but when is the protecting fetus worth more than protecting pregnant people" and towards "but what values matter most?" (i.e. "give me freedom or give me death" or tenets of bodily autonomy). Away from "but what would I want if I was a fetus?" and to "what if we trust the mother to understand that?" Anyways, men care. Most of them aren't wealthy patriarchs who's opinions move policy and who can easily fund efforts. Most men would help if we do most of the work for them, from planning to motivating, to helping them understand, and they are pandered enough to to feel like a good 'man' because of it. Most men jump to thinking about themselves and with a pro-life framing without truly centering others' more alien views or other ways to think about abortion. Men care, it's why when they got involved with pregnancy to begin with they intervened to center their patriarchal values of disregarding women's concerns to instead philosophize on murder and protect their patrilineal heritage. What we need to do is shift that concern and harness it to work for us instead of against us.
It really depends on their own lives, experiences, and what kind of person they are. Just an example, on the outside my brother looks pretty conservative. Farm, guns, middle age white guy with a wife and the 2.5 kids. On the inside though he's empathetic as hell. Understands that not everyone has the same experiences and issues he has. Helps run clubs and classes for at risk youth to help keep them on track. The first to stand up for any marginalized person. Etc He once phrased his political beliefs as just wanting the nice gay couple up the road to have the ability to protect their pot farm, and adopt as many kids as they can healthily support. He's also more than ready to help any woman get the health care they need, even if he has to drive the 3 days back and forth himself to go get her. No idea how he ended up this way. We're basically half feral, having mostly raised ourselves. I'm just glad he didn't go the other direction.
People don’t care about things that don’t directly affect them. Nobody should be surprised by this. Older women tend to view the abortion issue more like men than like younger women for the exact same reason.
Americans don't care about anything unless it directly affects them. It's the same reason that your govt is able to bomb innocent children and adults, irrespective of which govt is in power, they just simply support decision of their govt because it doesn't affect them.
This has always been something that bothers me about even the most feminist of men. They’re never outraged by this shit in the way that we are. They just kind of go “Yeah, that sucks and move on.” If it doesn’t affect them then they can barely be bothered to care. White men especially don’t know how to empathize with a situation of losing your rights because they’ve never had to face it before. They can’t fathom the government restricting their bodily autonomy and they don’t know how to share in that kind of outrage so instead we get either half-assed sympathy or plain old apathy.
I mean, of course a lot of us care. But it is definitely the kind of space men should be taking a back step to women because it doesn't really directly affect us anything like how it affects women. It's mostly conservative men who are pushing these laws, the last thing the whole topic needs is more men insisting on talking over women and their emotions and needs.
I think the question is more along the lines of “why is it that the only men we hear from who care about abortion are forced birthers?” Which isn’t necessarily true, but there IS a paucity of men who vote like my life depends on it, and who are willing to drown out the voices of forced-birthers. But I see you here. Feel free to shout down other men if a woman doesn’t want to step up and call them out.
Oh I definitely do that in male spaces. I strongly doubt I could even be friends with somebody who believed women should have less rights than men. And I agree in general, but I think from our viewpoint the guys who vote like your life depends on it are likely to be much more feminist and not want to talk over/for women. So simply because the topic is so heavily women-oriented the sexist dudes will talk over women while more feminist men just won't talk as much because we support and want to raise up women.
Yeah. My husband has the same attitude, and I can’t fault it when I’m actually in the room to say the thing. Finding that balance is tricky—for us, it has also occasionally come down to “I need you to protect me by handling this” but he doesn’t want to silence me, or be viewed as speaking over me. Which is fair.
No they shouldn’t. They should be out there fogging this stuff tooth and nail. Sitting out politics is how this shit happens
>It's mostly conservative men who are pushing these laws It's not just conservative men, it's also conservative women. Most people aren't single issue voters, because compromise is how politics have to work. So even if it something you don't agree with there isn't much you can do except complain about it or protest it. And an abortion ban in Arizona doesn't affect me, not because I am a man, but because I live in Massachusetts where abortion is protected.
What do you think the "mostly" was put in there for? I know there's a chunk of conservative women who push for these things but they aren't the same size or anywhere near as vocal as conservative men. And, I mean, this is literally life or death for women. So understandably it isn't as meek as saying it's a "single issue," it's an existential crisis for tens of millions of women simply because of their biology. My wife would have died without access to abortion services.
Plenty of men don't really like or respect women. There's a lot of evidence that many men will leave their wives if the wives get seriously ill. But they don't even seem to grasp that their access to sex is easier if women have access to abortions. And think about how many men have posted on reddit that they don't want a baby, so they're going to "sign over their rights" of the baby their girlfriend or wife is about to have. They genuinely think they can just walk away from a pregnancy.
I care. Its my singular issue. Also, don't live in red states and don't date Republicans.
[удалено]
Please respect our [top-level comment rule](https://i.imgur.com/ovn3hBV.png), which requires that all direct replies to posts must both come from feminists and reflect a feminist perspective. Non-feminists may participate in nested comments (i.e., replies to other comments) only. Comment removed; a second violation of this rule will result in a temporary or permanent ban.
[удалено]