Male archetypes in fairy tales

That is exactly right. The only reason why we get perspectives as in the article are because the author and people like them are deeply offended and have ritualized their feeling of being offended into their personality so that they can't help but take out their disharmony on everyone else by seeing false falsehoods towards them.

I'm not a man, and I agree with scotty79. We are all different as individuals, and gender is pretty mush meaningless. Knowing that someone is a man, woman, non-binary, etc. might allow me to guess some things about them (if I also know their culture), but it doesn't determine anything and people are way more likely to make incorrect harmful assumptions than correct useful assumptions. It might be slightly more predictive than zodiac signs, but only slightly.

I'd put it differently: the proper response to women's mistreatment in the past and present is not to teach women how to avoid being mistreated but to teach men not to mistreat. Alas, we only teach them not to mistreat but not what mistreatment is and what to do instead.

This has gone so far men will hear "toxic masculinity" and just think they're being condemned for their identity and stop listening because all we have in mainstream media is the negativity of what is bad without the positivity of what to do instead and because it's all left to women (and Buzzfeed) to fill in the gaps, it all ends up being preachy and offputting because it only comes from a place of upset rather than healing. Thus, articles about manspreading.

Men need positive role models. Slowly but surely I'm seeing content creators and public figures actually provide positive representation for men but at the moment they're still drowned out by the likes of Andrew Tate and other dipshits trying to make a buck off insecurities about inadequacy powered by romanticized ideals about bygone modes of masculinity (e.g. yearning for a "tradwife" while at the same time not wanting the unfulfilling responsibility and sacrifice that comes with the model of masculinity that enabled that). Ironically some of the best positive examples I've seen are trans men - possibly because they were forced to think about their ideas of maculinity more than any man afforded their "man card" by assignment at birth.

Speaking of positive examples, here are two YouTube channels worth checking out for that:

https://www.youtube.com/@FinntasticMrFox

https://www.youtube.com/@ThatDangDad

> The endgame of intersectionality is -- gasp -- considering people as individuals.

I'm not sure I read your tone correctly but this is indeed what authors like bell hooks try to get at: being Black is one thing, being a woman is another and being a Black woman can be different from either of those things in isolation; ultimately our experiences are defined not by each attribute individually but the way they interact in combination. Any subset of attributes will always give you an incomplete understanding but they can still be useful lenses.

Charles and Ozzy do have a lot of things in common and they do have many shared experiences because of them and do experience many things similarly because of them. Of course those things are not all there is to them and e.g. being born into the royal family may significantly outweigh most of the attributes they have in common for many such experiences.

Modern feminist critique is intersectional because it recognizes these complexities and recognizes the limitations. But feminist critique explicitly challenges the systems underlying our society. Girlboss pop feminism did the opposite, an infamously inane example argument being that then-state secretary Hillary Clinton is underprivileged compared to a homeless man because she's a woman. Corporate DEI is a step up from this but still falls flat because its ability to critique systems is limited by being beholden to the corporate structures that allow for it to exist: it's essentially the "more female drone pilots" joke but without a hint of irony.

Again, that does not mean DEI can't do good things (e.g. being mindful of inclusivity can reduce artificial or cultural barriers to entry and increase representation) but it can't solve systemic issues because it can't meaningfully challenge the systems it exists within. This is what led to the tensions resulting in stunts like those at Basecamp or Coinbase where the owners of the respective companies decided to expel DEI and claim to create a "politics-free" workplace because the people involved in their DEI projects refused to stay in the comfortable confines of feel-good corporate (literal) virtue signalling and got dangerously close to critiquing the structures around them.

You need to consider people as individuals but if you want to make sense of systems you need to pick subsets (plural!) of the attributes that define each individual. Where DEI falls short is that it usually by design is only allowed to pick a limited number of attributes and is even more limited in what systems it is allowed to look at. Wheelchair-accessible workspaces, yes. Racism towards Black employees by their peers, yes. Sexual misconduct by middle managers, yes. But anything that challenges the leadership or ownership structure of the company is too close to unionization for comfort.

> We demand diversity and inclusivity, but somehow the more "able-bodied neurotypical white heterosexual male" checkboxes you tick, the less your opinion and well-being matters. (And I only tick two of those)

Let's look at this more from a structural view: "Able-bodied neurotypical white heterosexual male" is the assumed default in "Western" society. What do I mean by that? White neurotypical heterosexual men built society for others in their demographic. Rights for women, POC, LGBTQIA people, neurodivergent, and disabled people, etc. have always been secondary.

On a systemic level, I do not agree with you that WNTHSM (I'm not writing that out again) are less valued than other groups. Let's just look at healthcare. Men make up the majority of participants in medical studies[1], black patients are perceived as more able to cope with pain[2]. Let's look at the law: Women could not open bank accounts without their husbands' permission in the US until 1974 under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. Insurance will often cover viagra, but not birth control. Look up anything about redlining and read about how black people couldn't get fair loans to buy homes.

We all have to navigate systems in life: educational, judicial, healthcare, financial systems, etc... I would guess you don't face as much/the same adversity navigating as someone belonging to zero of the five mentioned demographics, likewise it's harder for you than for those belonging to 5/5 demographics. How can you make a system work for more people? By involving them when redesigning the system.

I won't deny your feelings, but would ask you to consider specifically when you've felt your opinions and well-being do not matter.

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8812498/

[2]: https://www.aamc.org/news/how-we-fail-black-patients-pain