And not only without the shame and stigma, but also with the confidence and sense of entitlement. Men are not raised (by the culture as well as parents) to be apologetic or assume their rights are secondary. Women are.
But, of course that couldn’t be allowed.
No, men have not had miscarriages. You need a uterus to miscarry. You need a uterus with a fetus in it to miscarry. Men don’t have those. Women do. Men don’t.
If Evan has had miscarriages then Evan is not a man.
Comments
8 responses to “Things would be different if”
I saw no assumption that men were better at talking about their feelings, only the assumption that society is less condemnatory of men who speak out and say things. And that’s a true assumption.
And Evan is not a man.
Also, no one is debating Evan’s existence. I expect that whoever composed the Labor Project’s tweet wasn’t aware of Evan’s existence, but if they saw her post, I’m sure they’d be willing to concede that yes, Evan does in fact exist.
Evan has probably had miscarriages because she’s dumb enough to take testosterone and not refrain from sexual intercourse with males.
She probably thought that the testosterone would work as a contraceptive.
Looks like Evan (from profile) is “Gay & he|they”.
But … given the pregnancies Evan self-reports … I don’t think that word “gay” means what he/they thinks it means.
In Evan’s ideology, “he” is a man, and having sex with men makes “them” gay. (Hey, don’t look at me; the pronoun game started with “he/him” vs “she/her” and similar; i.e., somehow positing that nominative and accusative pronouns should be grammatically independent. Now many of these are two separate accusative pronouns, because very few native speakers actually understand English grammar so explicitly.)
The seeds of this started with the term “piv sex”, which stands for “penis-in-vagina sex”, initially as an attempt to subcategorise this style of intercourse within a broader range of heterosexual behaviours, all of which except for piv sex were classically considered sodomy with no real distinction based on the sexes of the participants involved. This is why anti-sodomy laws were only subliminally aimed at homosexual men but officially criminalised almost every conceivable sexual act except piv sex.
I suspect this necessary and well-intentioned recategorising is one foundational stone in the modern ideological confusion over sex categories (“sex” here in both common senses, even).
On the face of it, yes, you’re probably right, but that’s because men do not get pregnant, so anybody taken in by your male presentation will, if told that you’ve suffered a miscarriage, wonder what the Hell you’re talking about. As those who see through the beard will instantly question your claim to be a man, then of course your miscarriage will be hard to talk about because people will either not believe you’ve miscarried or not believe you’re a man. Either way, that is certainly a difficult conversation to have, but it doesn’t falsify the point made by The Labor Project that men would speak up far easier about miscarriages than do women if men could miscarry.
This brought to mind a line from a comedian’s routine that I saw years ago (on some cable TV station). She was doing a bit about men vs women or the crap women have to put up with or some such. The line of hers that came to mind was, ” If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a constitutional right.” (might not be exact, it was many years ago)