This thread literally has a person claiming that misandry is real and another saying that the problem with “feminism” (scare quotes put there by them) is that it doesn’t center men enough and when I called that out, that person wrote an unhinged diatribe about how I should “go yell at bisexual women not to bring their boyfriend” which is extra funny because every bi woman or enbie in my friend group has just given up on dating men because they’re not worth the hassle.

they’re damaged by patriarchy

do you mean they take advantage of patriarchy to subjugate women

you weren’t answering anything OP was asking about, you were going into a thread about how men treat women, brought that “everyone sucks” thought-terminating mentality, then started talking about an anecdote irrelevant to the post that centers men. that is what’s actually reductive here, and the rest of your unhinged insults toward both myself and others in this thread even more so.

i don’t feel particularly compelled to have a conversation with someone who was already telling someone shit like “i hope you get banned you absolute wretch” before i even showed up here. i don’t owe you anything more than that “passive-aggressive subtweeting bullshit” because i don’t want to talk to you, and the way you’re responding to me here only reaffirms that decision.

now leave me alone.

“Eat shit and live.”

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alcohol + expectations of sexual promiscuity + less social consequences for predatory behaviour + general anonymity

I think snakes are a lot less harmful than men or white people. No snake ever owned slaves or bombed the middle east or ended up in the Epstein files or said that Israel has a right to defend itself or that misandry is real.

First of all, “man” is by definition a privileged category, just as being white, cis, heterosexual, able-bodied, neurotypical etc. It is generally assumed in non-reactionary circles today that these are not protected classes, that they cannot be structurally discriminated against and that it is an alarmingly chuddy thing to believe in concepts such as anti-white racism. If somebody tells you about white genocide, you would be correct in assuming that they are a fascist harping on about a conspiratorial piece of disinfo. The same goes for treating cis as a slur, believing in heterophobia etc.

“Misandry”, the belief that there is a systemic opression of men, falls into the same category. It is a thought-terminating cliché used by anti-feminist hate groups to silence women and defend male privilege. The belief that “patriarchy harms everybody equally” is the laundered, more palatable version of this, what men decided to take away when we made the grave error of letting them read bell hooks because we mistakenly thought it would better them. Unlike “white genocide”, claiming that “feminism is for everybody” and meaning “feminism is for nobody, but if it was for anybody it should first and foremost be for men because men are so emotionally scarred from being violently abusive to people” is still commonly accepted in liberal and even leftist circles, including the very liberal lemmy instance hexbear. That acceptance needs to be ended. I am here to help with that.

Secondly, it’s a bit of a contentious issue how “immutable” being a man is, so let me clarify that i am referring to manhood as the ruling gender class position under patriarchy, which can be argued to be highly mutable - for example, i have lost the privileges associated with that position during my lifetime simply by not trying to perform masculinity any longer, and my ability to utilize these privileges was always highly precarious because given that i am not and have never been a man, i was never good at performing the materially important rotes associated with it, such as being socially dominant, integrating into men’s networks in school or work settings, making a show out of performative misogyny and homophobia, policing adherence to toxic masculinity etc. Nevertheless, i did lose a good amount of privilege simply by transitioning, i am confronted with that almost every day. For example, people now constantly jump down my throat on social media while i could argue in a much more aggressive way and get away with it when i still went by he / him pronouns and called myself Mr. Marxism the Communism Dude at heaxbear dot net.

Some people, especially terfs, would obviously argue otherwise and say that being a man is immutably linked to XY chromosomes or the potential ability to ever have produced large gametes or some other arbitrary nonsense like that, and i also do not believe it to be linked to very mutable characteristics like genitals, hormones, phenotype etc., but let’s not go down that road, this is not a position i am assuming of anybody here, not even the many lowkey misogynist people. It is particularly not a position i have ever seen among any feminists on this site, maybe because most of these are trans women and other transmisogyny affected people who have zero reason to do bioessentialism. So no, i do not think that “man” is a category that can be reduced to anything immutable short of something like gender identity, which means that “man” as i use it here is by definition a constructed social caste people can and do transition into or out of.

In short, hating men is cool and good. Men who are not loathsome should understand that, just as i as a white woman understand it when comrades of color do not trust white people and call us things like cracker or no purpose flour or paper impersonator. These terms are terms i can laugh about, because they attack my privilege, not my vulnerabilities, and i have no problem with my relative privileges being questioned. I cannot laugh that way about the many, many actual slurs i get called for being a trans woman. Shouldn’t be hard to wrap your head around this.

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Lol look at this misogynist loser who thinks misandry is real.

FYI, “male socialization” has a very problematic history of being used to exclude trans women from feminist and lesbian spaces, it has basically been turned into a terf dogwhistle by now but unfortunately is still used carelessly in many other contexts. I see it all the time being used especially in progressive circles by people who are not aware of the implications, and these implications do not go away. When you think there is such a thing as male socialization, you are implicitly making the claim that it applies to trans women, and you are also implying a behavorial determinism that mirrors the biodeterminism of classic terf arguments.

I am by no means saying any of this is your intention, but i do not think that the functioning of men under patriarchy can be adequately explained by “people made these childhood experiences as boys and now they are just programmed to be emotionally walled-off, domineering and violent people who objectify women.” As a trans woman, people tried to do that to me and it just didn’t stick. Whatever did get internalized largely crumbled the moment i realized that i never wanted to be seen as a man again. Here’s a primer on the critique of the concept from a transfeminist lens.

From both my own lived experience that includes performing several starkly different gender roles over my lifetime and from extensively studying feminist theory from Butler to Feinberg, i can firmly say that we need to regard the behavior of men not as a biographical artifact, but as a continuous act of constructing gender. When Butler says that gender is performative, they do not just mean that we run a script we learned as kids, the performativity of gender and its social construction are constant and ongoing. This means you have to actively perform masculinity to be seen as a man.

A part of that performance is to use every opportunity to demonstrate heterosexuality, mainly by objectifying women, by being callous and pushy in regards to women’s boundaries and by being extremely persistent in pursuing us. The behavior that OOP vents about is a direct result of men having to constantly prove their masculinity by being shitty to women.

Men are also not emotionally stunted because they did not learn to have feelings as kids. Nobody grows up in a silo where they only learn the gender performance of their AGAB. In fact, we have to know both binary, patriarchal gender roles for the system to function, as patriarchy requires that we police each others’ genders constantly.

Men do not struggle with emotional availability because they never learned it, they struggle because they are constantly punished for showing softness and vulnerability, and they are constantly denied the trust and closeness that women receive from each other because being too nice to a man you do not see in a sexual way carries an extreme risk of that man getting the wrong ideas, and then being extremely shitty about being turned down because our society also very actively punishes women for asserting boundaries too firmly. All of this is part of an ongoing process of constructing and maintaining gender. Once you stop engaging in that and start engaging in constructing and being perceived as another gender, that becomes super fucking obvious.

And this performance is obviously harmful for the men engaging in it, but it also enables them to integrate into existing power structures that require that type of guy. Networking as a man requires that you are dominant in such ways. The better you are at it, the easier it is to socialize with powerful men and to advance in professional settings. You need to be able to engage in and handle the banter, and you can’t come off as a buzzkill when your boss is being a misogynist again. Emphasizing how hard this all is for men is kind of like saying that the Vietnam war was bad because it traumatized or killed so many American G.I.s. Yes, it did, but that does not mean the US and Vietnam were harmed by it equally.

Most guys are desperate for affection.

That’s part of it. The other part is that guys think they are entitled to affection, and that women are responsible for men’s emotional well-being. This is something that is ingrained since childhood, both from the way mothers are centered in how our society raises children, how we frame the emotional wants of men and from the way kindness and closeness are discouraged in interactions between boys. I get that people living in a male gender role are frequently alienated, and get shamed for behaviors that would be necessary to form deep emotional connections, and these are real and valid problems. But you can’t stop at that point and say “well, men just need more affection”. Because this centers the man’s demands and wants without looking at who fulfills them and what that entails. So then you have the classic situation where a guy can only be emotionally open with his partner, and then she has to constantly be his entire support system. This is what perpetuates the problem. Because other men are unavailable and because women are supposed to be caretakers, you end up depending on one woman shouldering a man’s entire needs for affection and validation and emotional stabilizing.

Operational terms here being one and woman. When i look at women and nonbinary people in my life, we have our entire friend groups as support networks. When i need to vent or need somebody to show me affection, i can write to several friends if they have the time and energy to do that, or i can go to a server a friend runs and post in a vent channel and see who replies. It’s usually the same people, but it’s more than one person. This is important. Doing emotional support for others and showing them affection is draining, even for somebody like me who absolutely needs to take care of others to feel fulfilled. Also, none of them are partners of mine.

And men need to work on building something like that as well. You can’t rely on women to do that for you. Men need to learn how friendships work, and that is no easy task in a society that does not allow homosocial behavior among men. But it is needed, as more and more women are past the point were they are willing to put up with men as they are right now.

We are are often deeply alienated by society as a population

How so lol? Men run the patriarchy, we’re given everything we want and get excuses made for our bad behaviours. The only alienation that occurs is because of capitalism, and of our own making.

I’ve accepted this about myself and now just try to offer people quick relief from the fear with a smile and good vibes, and by not making sudden movements until they know I’m a clown

I think we agree on everything you’ve written here, apart from whether men are more or just as creepy as women. Because all the other stuff is the same as I’ve said, unless I gravely misunderstand you.

I dont know if there are any good studies about the frequency of creepyness, and I do have the copout of “women aren’t taken seriously, which is why we do not notice their creepyness” so it is kind of hard to talk about. It doesn’t matter all that much in the context of OPs post either, I suppose.

Nevertheless this type of gender war is not really constructive and I find it very juvenile, a lot of men do get really defensive about it too especially if they consider themselves sensitive to feminist issues which is not right way to discuss it.

:yea: getting ahead of juvenile actions was sort of part of why rule 8 was made, but it hasnt been enforced in a long time.

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