Autarkheia wrote:Cekoviu wrote:What the document says is not anything new in the psychological community, and in fact is fairly pro-men (if not pro-gender roles). It doesn't say "traditional masculinity" is pathological, as you claim; the summary in your OP is either intentionally incorrect or you didn't read the paper. There is some shaky science, particularly when it cites the Duluth Model, but I would hardly call the entire paper pseudoscience merely because you dislike the terminology used.
I highly recommend that everybody in this thread actually read the document before posting. It's only 30 pages.
I hadn't read it until now but I have been following the reaction to it in conservative media, which is predictably negative. I just read it and ironically, it says many things that conservatives should be on board with: men have been neglected in gender studies up until now; psychologists should learn to understand military culture; fathers being involved in the lives of their sons is good; the school system is failing boys in many ways. It also brings up many points that are important to MRAs, like male suicide rates and shorter lifespan, and the stereotype of men as violent. And everything is backed up by what looks like hundreds of citations. On the whole I agree it is pro-men and it points out many real problems with our culture's attitudes toward and treatment of men.
But to generate those outrage clicks, we need to ignore that and seize upon random buzzwords like "privilege" and "intersections" that the document uses as proof that the APA is a radfem misandrist conspiracy, and not read what it really says.
See, I didn't hear about it from right wing media, but those buzzwords are red flags that are worth paying attention to.
Intersectionality as an ideology is involved in very little good science. "Masculinities" (plural) is a word that probably has not been used in a single meaningful paper on clinical practice, but is part of the vocabulary of gender studies (i.e., feminist ideology). If the APA's guidelines spent a lot of time talking about the id, ego, superego, and Oedipal complexes, we would reasonably conclude that it was endorsing the likes of Freud.
I've heard about it from psychologists involved with trying to fix psychology's replication crisis, because there's a shit-ton of slipshod research being cited here and a giant load of ideology being broadcast as science. Which, if you read the scribd link I included, which is only
three pages, you should be aware of.
There are things in the guidelines that are not troublesome. There are plenty of things that are agreeable only if you hold values somewhere left of center (i.e., basic trans issue splits), and right wing media will of course be alarmed about that. Then there's a lot of highly ideological garbage that has nothing to do with sound clinical practice and is instead more likely to further isolate men from contact with mental health professionals.
Particularly alarming is the amount of time the document spends on casting men as disproportionate perpetrators of harm. While claiming men to be more violent than women is a non-controversial claim, invoking that claim dozens of times in a document intended to help clinicians
treat male patients is out of place.
The guidelines for women and girls also contain some ideological bullshit, but describing the ways in which one's patients may be victims of others or of life circumstances is not unusual.