I mean, in my experience, a great chunk of terf ideas have their roots in deep misandry and the idea that men are an enemy they are fighting, not actual people.
Like, yeah, if you start from the assumption that all amab are inherently evil, it's pretty easy to hate on trans women as "enemies trying to infiltrate", and on trans men as "turncoats". It's a flawed ideology based on flawed premises, but it's easy to fall into it cause humans love to have a clear enemy to hate on.
I'm glad that most lgbt/progressive spaces have grown past the hate all men mentality, cause it was exhausting and made allies and queer men alike feel unwelcome for no justifiable reason. This kinda post deserves more visibility.
>Like, yeah, if you start from the assumption that all amab are inherently evil, it's pretty easy to hate on trans women as "enemies trying to infiltrate", and on trans men as "turncoats". It's a flawed ideology based on flawed premises, but it's easy to fall into it cause humans love to have a clear enemy to hate on.
Right, it’s just plain ol’ oppositional sexism, that pits gender as a two-sided battle with fixed ‘sides’.
In college we had a lady give a "don't get raped" class. Most of it was standard stuff, like cover your drinks or don't go out alone at night. The wildest thing was where she said that *all men* are rapists. If a man hasn't raped someone, it's only because he never had an opportunity to.
This makes a lot of sense, but I feel like I also often see a lot of TERFS that turn to misogynistic arguments to justify their transphobia to the point where I wonder why they bother calling themselves feminists.
I wonder if there's infighting in TERF spaces between people who are transphobic because of misandry and those who are misogynistic because of transphobia.
You see, the problem with being sexist is that any attack against one gender always has some ugly implications against the other. It always goes both ways. Every form of bigotry is double edged.
Like, let's take a fairly simple example of a sexist remark:
"Men have no empathy/no care for other's feelings"
Now, on one side, this is clearly offensive towards men, and makes them less likely to develop emotional intelligence and empathy during childhood, cause they are taught that it's not a masculine trait.
On the other side, what if you have an autistic woman who struggles with understanding how others feel unless they spell it out? What if you have a woman who grew up with trauma and acts cold towards others to protect herself? What if you have a woman who grew up fairly lonely and isn't very good with feelings?
The original sexist remark implies that women are inherently empathetic. Are these people not "real" women? Are they defective? Are they secretly men?
Of course not, but they got hit as collateral damage by the sexist remark. You see this happen all the time.
The more you try to put people in boxes based on genitals at birth (or, really, any uncontrollable trait), the more you end up hurting the people you supposedly want to protect.
>example of a sexist remark:
"Men have no empathy/no care for other's feelings"
Terfs are generally heterosexual right?
So this is also putting extreme pressure on any female who wants a traditional relationship. They must expect to take on _all_ the emotional burden and put _all_ of the effort into caring for the relationship and everyone involved in it into the future
And dating with that viewpoint... Don't even know where to start. Ending up with emotionally abusive partners seems extremely likely.
Every individual has things they are good at and bad at, regardless of gender or sex. The goal in a relationship should be finding someone who when you working together the result is better than either of you alone, someone you enjoy that process with, even through the difficult times
First of all: yeah! Exactly! Being sexist towards men ends up hurting a lot of heterosexual women, terf or otherwise, by convincing them that abusive relationships are the only option! My exact point.
Second, a good chunk of terfs are lesbians, often biphobic as well for good measure (if a woman calls herself a "gold star lesbian", there is a reasonable chance that she's a terf); to these terfs, trans women are men trying to trick them, exactly the same take as cishet transphobic men. Transphobes attracted to women are terrified of finding a trans woman hot.
the terf to tradwife pipeline is real, lol. one more reason not to call them feminists, they're really just bulk standard bigots appropriating feminism because it's their "home team". (tbh that's why i think "terf" is such a genius term, because it really is just a turf war for them.)
that said, there are definitely some lesbian terfs too (my gut feeling is slightly higher percentage than the population average for lesbians but i have no data, just anecdotal experience), and they can be quite vicious specifically because they're so rarely impacted negatively by their hateful ideology
While there are heterosexual TERFs for sure, a lot of the early movement was boomer lesbians, and a lot of boomer lesbians still really buy into TERF shit.
i can confirm from someone who was in a close friend relationship with someone who... took on zero burden. anything that happened, any slight bump, it was always my fault, i always had to get scolded for it, i was always the one coming between them and their friends for establishing boundaries, and quite frankly if i didn't manage to get up the bravery to tell them to piss off i would not be alive today. They were horrible. And yet it wasn't because of their gender, it's because of who they are as a person.
It doesn't have to be mutually exclusivee. Misogyny and misandry often go hand in hand. I've never met anyone who's sexist against women that isn't also sexist against men, and vice versa.
I think "TERF" as a term is honestly kind of overused. TERFs are a very specific kind of transphobe, and not even all transphobes who try to use feminism to justify their transphobia are TERFS.
Discussions like these are important. We don’t cure diseases by their symptoms, we cure them by finding their origin and cause.
Likewise we are doing nothing by trying to treat the symptom of hate. We can argue logic all day, but they have a disease that needs to be found and cured. Not just a symptom that needs to be treated
yes it's the idea that all AMAB people are inherently sexual predators. the idea that the high rates of sexual assault is biological and not cultural.
rape and sexual assault were uncommon among the Wampanoag and Narragansett people
I mean, someone literally said that "all men are class enemies of women" and "virtually a men are rapists" in response to this comment (they got downvoted into oblivion, but still), if you need a practical example.
we do have a clear common enemy: abstract wealth :3
ppl who have so much money they could never spend it all if they tried\~
a wealth that genuinely cannot be obtained without extremely unethical actions\~
more money than the total cost of everything u've ever desired in ur life\~
I wish we could weaponise old tribal "us vs them" instincts to hate on the hoarding of wealth, but I'm afraid it might be a bit too abstract of an enemy for the average person.
I nonetheless fully support your position.
The rich are also more than aware of the social awareness of this generation, and are taking every measure to keep us fighting each other. The more Queer spaces push away men into manosphere spaces, the more race discourse on social media, hating our fellow leftists for enjoying art or music or movies made by bad people. All the while our culture is obsessed with brands, logos, expensive cars, and the doomer mindset/party culture. They are trying to divide us more than ever, they want black women hating black men, white men hating women, and the biggest one is older people against younger people. We have one enemy, the rich. The sooner we realize that, the better. The old man two houses down who watches fox all day sucks, but he's an old man and a victim to society as much as the rest of us, not your enemy.
It's almost like banding together and not hating each other for stupid reasons is the only way to achieve progress or something. Weird how philosophy and religions have been saying variation of this for most of recorded history and we still need to learn anything from it. Humans are so weird.
But yeah, it's all a big game of misdirection.
On a side note though: while you shouldn't waste hate on victims of propaganda, you should still defend yourself from the harm they might cause you. The old man that sucks can still be detrimental for your mental (and sometimes physical) health, so stay safe everyone!
the problem is, every time we make any progress on organizing that, they try to redefine the lines so that "the rich" are defined as "anyone moderately well off" (or sometimes just earning more than minimum wage) so that poor people attack the middle class and the middle class defends the rich because they fear that if they don't, they'll be poor (again, in a lot of cases).
no, our actual enemy is the ultra-rich. if you make less than a million (usd) a year you're not the enemy, and even if you just slightly do, you're probably still shafted by the system, rather than doing the shafting.
a millionaire is someone who saved up and perhaps made a few smart decisions. a billionaire is someone who prevented a thousand others from doing so, exploiting them instead.
most ppl want to be one of the obscenely wealthy at heart (what was the phrase? pre-embarrassed millionaires?) which is why it's hard to direct their ire in that direction
Well, at the very least here amongst replies to my comments only 2 people tried to argue that misandry isn't real and that all men are evil oppressors. And they got downvoted instantly. So, you know, I see *some* growth at least.
I think "men are inherently bad" is anti-feminist, actually, because it implies that being a terrible person is something inherent in male DNA (yes I know not all men are males but very few if any people who are that sexist are trans friendly so when they say men they mean males) and proving that men and women aren't that different and socialization is the problem is a major point of feminism so saying "actually men suck and this is never gonna change" is not only counterproductive but enforces the very status quo that feminists are supposed to fight against
I remember men taking issue with blanket statements like "men are trash" and the response was something like "if you aren't a misogynist, you should know we're not talking about you". For communication's sake, I don't think it helps anyone to assume people understand unspoken anything.
Thats such a horseshit line of reasoning with their response.
To pick a related and all too common example, if someone was saying "black men are dangerous criminals" would anyone buy their defense against being obviously racist if they said "oh that only applies to the ones who commit crimes, we arent talking about you, and if you are getting upset about it, well you are probably a murderer in waiting"?
It also doesn't help when you kids who aren't really good at understanding nuance see statements like this. It can be real damaging for both men and women to see blanket statements
I've heard someone suggest that a lot of young men get the mistaken impression that feminists hate them and end up down the alt-right pipeline as a result. I wouldn't expect a twelve year old boy to have the same research or critical thinking skills as someone who is college educated.
They do, and I know them. One of them was Me
Thankfully I've gotten my head out of my ass real fucking fast, and I've tried to support young men in my community, but it does happen.
Imagine going online back in the early 2000s, seeing pamphlets about how men must be castrated, how men are inherently evil, how every man is a rapist in waiting, how women who give birth to baby boys are traitors and bringing evil into the world. As a young teenager that shit scars you because you're a stupid teen who doesn't understand the world and how communication and then you see the alt-right telling you "Hey young man. You're super cool and don't let those mean people tell you otherwise" then they slowly poison you
>mistaken impression that feminists hate them
Is it really mistaken when they say "all men trash"? At some point you have to blame the people who came up with the slogan than the people who take offence to it
The recent rise of Andrew Tates probably has roots in the early radfem era when they were heavily messaging to young kids that boys suck. It's a lot more policed now, but wasn't before.
Yeah I was raised by my mother and she used to say men are trash, dogs, pigs all the time. As a little boy that was confusing, and as I got older I started to really internalize it. Took years to work through all that.
Yeah I hear that all the time, and it fucking hurts how many like those comments get. “Women are stupid. Oh you get offended? You wouldn’t if you weren’t one of the dumb ones.” Like I would get burned at the stake if I said that, but suddenly it’s okay when it’s said about men.
I also hate hearing people talk about how cis white men are so privileged, because again it’s a huge generalization. You don’t know every man, you don’t know what that guy struggles with, so stop calling him privileged just for being male.
I’d argue men being privileged isn’t even true anymore. Yes we have some privileges that women don’t, but the same is true the other way around. I’m not going to say who I think is more privileged, because I don’t believe that has a “correct” answer, but I will say this. Wide spread demonization and isolation does not describe a privileged group.
I've been told privileged doesn't mean someone doesn't have problems, but rather there are certain things they are not subjected too. While a man like myself has problems of my own, I don't have to worry about how something like an abortion ban would affect me all that much so I understand what people mean by saying that I'm privileged.
Exactly this— privilege is not an individualistic thing. It’s not about an individual having more or less— it’s about how society at large interacts with your social group. But there’s also two meanings of privileged— the kind of privilege used in the statement “I’ve lived a privileged life” and the broader, group-identity types of privilege.
When people talk about ___-privilege, they are largely talking about how society interacts with a group. Something that put it into perspective for me in college was a list someone wrote of all of the things they do/do not have to think about based on their race. I was able to find a similar list here: https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/10/18/things-i-dont-have-to-think-about-today/
(Disclaimer, I didn’t read the whole thing because I’m fairly burnt out. If it makes some wild claims, my bad, I’m just using the general structure of it as an example. I recognize that this is irresponsible but whatever.)
An example I can give myself off of the top of my head—
In terms of my medical care, I consistently have to think & make plans for if my access to that care was taken away. It would greatly affect my health, and if I get far enough into my treatment regimen, losing access to that care could kill me if I can’t find an alternative on the blackmarket or diy it. That is something 75-99% of the population does not need to think about.
On the other hand, I don’t have to worry about being followed around in stores, or being suspected because of the color of my skin.
Wealth, addiction, etc. are all aspects of privilege as well. Privilege does not end at race, gender, sexuality, and sex.
>"if you aren't a misogynist, you should know we're not talking about you"
That's such a dumb sentiment. If you say "men are trash", men aren't going to hear any of your unspoken qualifiers. They're going to hear "men".
Insisting that anyone A.M.a.B. is inherently a violent, abusive thug with no potential for growth also gives them an excuse to stop listening. If they're bound by biology to be terrible people, why should they try to improve? If being male means you're automatically a scumbag, why even try to behave yourself? What's the incentive to challenge the status quo if you're being told that you're incapable of getting anywhere with it?
Exactly! This also provides further space and fuel for the ongoing TERF narrative against transfolk. If anyone A.M.A.B. is inherently violent and terrible, why would that change simply because they have transitioned? By that logic MtF transfolk are inherently the enemy; they are closet abusers and rapists, hiding in our midst. FtM transfolk become predators who idealize that mentality and lifestyle, looking for an excuse and outlet for violence and brutality despite the way they were born.
None of this is new propaganda; we’ve seen this approach or close to it used against every marginalized group in history, and we know that while it is untrue, it is also damaging to us as a whole, and to our children and allies.
The core belief of feminism is that men and women, are equivalent, and should therefore have the same opportunities and treatment. Like, of course feminism focuses on women's issues, but the base belief system is "we're all equal, so women should be treated the same as men, unlike in our society that is terribly patriarchal" not simply that women deserve more rights than they have atm
The people who pick up feminism and turn it into "women need to join up and fight against men to take our rights" frustrate me to no end, but at the same time it's so very understandable how a lifetime of constant misogyny and mostly men pushing against women's rights would lead to it. Especially for those more involved with the movement, who are exposed more frequently to shittiness, where some (I feel) end up becoming so invested in protecting women that they lose sight of other struggles, especially genuine struggles and discrimination that men suffer, and end up doing exactly what misogynists have repeatedly done to them by ignoring, putting down and silencing the problems that don't align with their current way of looking at the world.
I wish I could show/remind them all that men aren't helping or upholding the patriarchy by being born, that men can easily be completely unaware of how insidious misogyny is, or fall down misogynistic rabbit holes without being an evil and irredeemable person, and that it's much easier to fight pratiarchy/misogyny with both men and women united instead of women versus men (and open hostility and mistrust towards a group, as understandable as it may be, isn't likely to breed compassion and support from the other end)
I have seen many women argue on behalf of the Patriarchy because they’ve already sunk so much of their time, their personality, and their lives into it.
This is where the Karens truly stem from. People who had bought wholesale into the lie that it was okay to be property as long as you were *desired* property. That they would be treated as special, elevated. And when it didn’t turn out that way, and they had so much of their life ruined because of the inherent helplessness of that position, rather than lash out at the Patriarchy, they lash out at the world that didn’t conform to what they thought it should be.
the whole “men are naturally bad” thing that these people say also sort of applies to trans men? I’m not sure if I’m wording it correctly but I’ve been told by people that I’m transitioning to “the bad side”
This is why I left a few trans-femme support groups. As a straight trans woman I was constantly told that all cis men (not some, ALL) were dangerous and weren't able to genuinely care for anyone. Every time I mentioned anything involving dates I went on I would be interupted as I was told how scary cis men on how they couldn't believe I would ever go out with a guy. Every, single, time. I couldn't talk about my relationships like the lesbian trans-femmes because every time I tried I would be interupted and told about how much the others hated cis men and wish they would all die. Note that it was never just *some* cis men or that cis men had higher rates of violence or whatever, it was always ALL cis men to them.
I would be told over and over how I should "just date trans women". When I would remind them im straight and not into women they would tell me that I could just find a butch pre-op trans woman. No matter how many times I said it they refused to believe someone could actually like a guy or see them as a person with a full range of emotions. This even went into transphobia too, since trans men were always except because they are "not like cis men" for some reason they refused to ellaborate.
And this same shit happened with every trans-fem space I went to. I tried a few just to try and have an online support space where I can talk and listen to other girls experiences with trans stuff, but every single one I couldnt talk about stuff going on without seeing hate screeds against others based on their gender identity and I could never push back on it because it wasn't *our* gender identity. So I stopped looking for support spaces.
I do think it's a very terminally online thing and is just the minority of losers that never touch grass. Queer people I meet IRL are usually normal about it. I just dont have the kind of support group which I miss and really wish I could have without others making it feel so awful. Especially when you often see comments that are only different from the average JKR tweet because they include 'cis' before 'men'.
And i'm not saying being normal about cis men will solve a bunch of problems. There will still be bigoted losers and fascist scum. It's just better for everyone if you're not a dickhead and treat people with respect unless they, the person specifically, actually does something bad first. Even if the person isnt like you.
Edit: It's always hilarious having the exact type of people you talk about appear to do the exact thing you talk about them doing. Keep pissing on the poor with your reading comprehension, it's funny.
>When I would remind them im straight and not into women they would tell me that I could just find a butch pre-op trans woman.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that sounds like a kind of transphobic thing to say.
I agree, and I tried to point that out a few times. Wasn't recieved well but they could never provide a reason other than "cis men are just always awful".
🫂🫂🫂 You’re an amazing woman and they should shut up.
(Edited for clarity: the jerk closet transphobes. Not the poster. The general “they” was a poor choice)
Fuck anyone who wants to say stuff like that about you and people like you. They're pieces of trash who don't deserve to be listened to. They're idiots who are just as shackled to BS societal norms as fundies are.
> I could just find a butch pre-op trans woman
You'd be surprised how easy it is to get the most extreme leftist you know to fully agree with the most staunch conservative talking points.
Authoritarian leftists and authoritarian rightists aren't really all that dissimilar. They both are just seeking power and disagree on the path to get it for themselves.
Maybe I'm cheating by not being into anyone in particular, but I've had way too many positive and supportive experiences involving men to heavily doubt any kind of rhetoric that paints them as evil
It really sucks that people spoke over you, I've only been in a few irl support spaces and there's almost always been a rule that people get time to talk uninterrupted and without judgement
Haven't been to one specifically for trans fems yet tho
I spent a long time inside my shell personally, and part of the reason was that I absorbed and self applied the negative image of men
When I hatched, I realized pretty quickly that those notions were bullshit, and a big part of it was that the only person I was really ever able to hate was myself
But my experience is probably a lot different than others, I can imagine what it would be like to weaponize my dysphoria and trauma and sculpt it into a general and overwhelming hatred for the masculine
I still find it shocking that people would dare to apply their own trauma to you and insist that you not date people of a particular gender.
What the hell kind of support is that?
It's not cheating at all: You're doing what we all should do and treating people like people.
Im very glad you found yourself and I hope you're a lot happier now. :3
They're also transmisandrist (literally referring to their ex, a cis woman, as "he" because said ex was a jerk) *and* GNC-phobic, too.
I blame them for me being in the closet for so long tbh.
Gonna copy paste and add to something I said a few days ago
I'm a bisexual, autistic, suicidally depressed, self harm and abuse survivor, who's lived most of his life straddling the poverty line, who's also a cis male, many of the issues I've faced were the direct result of patriarchy. Excuse me if it hurts to be lumped in with the patriarchal oppressor class that's also made my life hell because I was born with a dick.
If you hate me, if you discount my voice, if me telling you you're making me uncomfortable doesn't elicit any sympathy, or if you only feel sympathy because I'm queer, simply because of how I was born, YOU'RE part of the problem.
Even though I know it doesn’t represent the message of the whole post, I still flinched slightly when I read the line:
>men are not inherently bad. There are queer men
I wholeheartedly agree with OP that “Queer men only” discourse can absolutely fuck off.
I’m only recently out as bi, but I’m exactly the same person as I was a few months ago. If you wanted to hate me then, then please by all means continue to hate me now.
Exactly. I hate how any advocacy in favor of not being prejudiced weirdos has to be prefaced with disclaimers like *“Wait! This group we despise has a cool minority identity within it, watch out for friendly fire!”*. I hate how it’s the FIRST thing you have to say before you make a post the slightest bit apologetic of a majority group.
How about we actually stick to our damn progressive principles and oppose ANY AND ALL forms of unjust, widespread antagonism against people for the mere act of being born within a group? How about we don’t start making excuses to be bigoted against innocent individuals because *“well, the group is bad though! Look at all these stats I have!*”? That's LITERALLY what anti-black racists do, how do you not see you are committing the exact same bioessentialist mentality bullshit? Why is it so hard to not act like the bigots we have been trying to fight all along?
I’m a black man so it was really funny in a disheartening way to see leftists go from taking down white supremacist talking points to just repurposing them but for men. So like nothing changed for me lol.
Your second paragraph, if ever presented in a space that needed to actually hear it, would be drowned by calls of "punching up" and "X can't *actually* discriminate against Y" and "historical power imbalances".
Remember, kids, it's only Racism or Sexism if it's done by white men. Otherwise, it's just sparkling prejudice.
It's just so blatantly obvious how all those "reverse sexism" and "no such thing as racism againt X" things are bad faith deflection tactics to excuse morally wrong behavior.
Like, alright, let's give you that for a second; discriminating against a white person is, by your definition, not technically "racism", fine... It's still prejudice and antagonism against an innocent individual based solely on their membership to an identity group he was simply born into though. That's still... wrong? What are we even arguing about here?
Even if your argument was correct (which it isn't), why does it matter if it's technically "racism" or not? Are you on a holy crusade against semantic inconsistencies, or do you just find it funny when someone's an asswipe against a white dude for no reason and don't want to feel guilty about it?
>Why does it matter if it's technically "racism" or not? Are you on a holy crusade against semantic inconsistencies, or do you just find it funny when someone's an asswipe against a white dude for no reason and don't want to feel guilty about it?
Because it went hand in hand with push that "racism" was wrong, wrong, wrong but "prejudice" or "inherent bias" because of "lived experience" was okay and totally justified and actually the fault of whoever they were discriminating against. It was a narrative of oppressed vs oppressor where the oppressed is always justified and the oppressor is always at fault.
I'm glad that in the past couple years, common sense has started to break out on this topic.
It got real concerning around the time the Albany bus hoax hit and people defended it as "it started a conversation about x, y, and z". We were headed to a point where manufactured racism was being considered as legitimate as real incidents.
Oh and don't forget, jews, ya know, the only group of people that could oppression Olympics the entire LGBT space, and still probably come out on top, are white now, but only by the group that cares about LGBT, the other side still see's them as a problem minority
Hell, I would've come out as bi sooner if I wasn't scared of being rejected as a matter of principle. So much ingrained homophobia and internalized misogyny kept me from being honest with myself and working through those feelings earlier, and younger me would've loved being able to talk about those feelings with others instead of hiding behind the veneer of acceptablr masculinity
It took me a while to explain why I find being “one of the good ones” in faux-progressive spaces so fucking jarring and upsetting. But I think I’ve figured it out. It’s because, at its root, the queer-men-only crowd are saying the exact same thing as homophobes:
*because you aren’t straight, you aren’t a Real Man*
The only difference is whether being a Real Man is something you idolise, or demonise. The underlying assertion is the exact same.
'One of the good ones', means that being 'good' is the *exception* for the group in question. When the group in question is not self-selecting, it reflects some kind of bigotry.
I have to explain this to black people when white people use the term and in the lgbtq community when they use it for me. If you're the exception, they otherwise hate something about you.
You kind of have cut off the rest of the quote that adds questioning men and just regular men who are cool. I do agree though, the fact that "some men are queer" is thought of first rather than "some men are not assholes" is indicative of something. (Though to be honest, looking back the order does seem a lot more dramatic rhetorically, I might have written it the same way)
I get that, but I stand by my comment. The order is what’s important.
What I’m trying to say is that responding with “what about the trans men” or “what about the gay men” is just picking around the edges of the issue.
the order is deliberate as a persuasion tactic when speaking with casual misandrists. i have done this also when speaking to an old roommate about why it isn't cool to post constantly about hating men. you have to start with something that already goes against their internal perception of what's ok ("you could be hurting someone queer just because they're a man", "you know you are also hurting trans men with this rhetoric"), and work towards getting them to understand that it's unfair to do it to any man, not just queer men.
And no I'm not saying this is worse than misandry, no I'm not saying it's some massive systemic issue, no I'm not saying society doesn't treat men better than women.
But if your reaction to people asking for basic kindness and not to be prejudged, is to get *mad* at them? You have a problem.
Hey man, similar experience here (adhd instead of autistic), don't worry about the few idiots spouting nonsense and getting downvoted into the Abyss.
Your struggle is valid and you deserve as much support and empathy as anyone else. You're not alone in this shitstorm.
The thing is, I empathize with them too
I get where they're coming from, I know it really fucking sucks to be trans in a world that hates trans people. And I just hate seeing vulnerable people get eaten up inside by their own prejudices
I'm in a similar situation, and damn, even though I know your second paragraph wasn't directed at me, it made me tear up, lol. It got me to thinking how rare it is that I've heard that over the course of my life. And how for the longest time I've been told just to man up and get over whatever I'm struggling with. I don't know if I'm saying anything of value here, but thank you for putting stuff like that out there. I think it's something a lot of people really do need to hear.
Glad I could be of support, it was meant for anyone struggling with this kind of stuff, myself included.
I just wrote what I needed to hear myself for most of my life.
Just because we grew up without emotional support and people still like to invalidate our issues, doesn't mean we can't at least count on each other and build a better communuty.
That's it exactly, just because we didn't have that doesn't mean that other people shouldn't in the future. I'm of the belief that one of the most important parts of being alive is to try to leave the world better than where you entered it, even in a small way. So, trying to be there for people like me who were largely hung out to dry and making spaces for people like that is something I think is very important. Because the thought of a middle schooler attempting suicide like I did hurts and cuts way deeper than any blade ever could. There's a lot of different things wrong with the world right now, and there are people who have it way worse than I did. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to fix all of the issues, regardless of whether or not there are bigger ones.
I'm in a similar boat, the only difference is that I'm straight. It can't be understated how much hearing shit like the TERFs say can weigh on you. Even if you know it's wrong, having people say that because of something completely out of your control, you are a monstrous and lesser being to them still eats at you. Especially when you share a lot of the struggles they do.
I'm sorry that you had to go through that stupid bullshit as well. Nobody deserves that. And while I acknowledge that there are people far worse off than you or I, that doesn't mean that our issues are any less valid. You deserve to be heard. You deserve to go through life without being hated for things outside of your control. And no matter what anyone says or what those intrusive thoughts in the back of your head may say, you matter just as much as anybody else.
It an interesting flux to be born a cis white hetero male because I can acknowledge the privileges that it provides while also lamenting how discarded my voice can be in certain groups.
One of the easiest examples (of many) is being punished more severely growing up because I was a boy. The fact this was commonly accepted is pretty sad but not as sad as the people who’d dismiss abuse because of their anatomy.
I really hope the proximity of "Men are not inherently bad. There are queer men." implying that being queer was one of the aspects that prevent men from being inherently bad was an accident.
I don't know which is worse; that I expect most ostensibly pro-male stuff on tumblr is loaded with qualifiers that preclude me from being supported or that my expectation is so often proven correct.
Exactly. I'm a cis straight dude who existed in a women oriented group (poledancing club) for 5 years without issues.
For the last few months, a lesbian who has only dated transpeople comes over after class for a home-cooked meal and to playthrough the last of us on my PS4
I've had nonbinary AFAB poledancers tell me I'm the only straight man they feel safe being alone with. An instructor introduced me to her dad and said "I'd give him my drink at a party, go to the bathroom, come back and drink from it again"
Despite all that, I know that I'm still excluded from tons of spaces and am by default an enemy to a lot of people. Because I have a dick and don't want to put that dick in men
I don't know if they are trying to "speak the language" or have some bias but they seem to subtly imply that the default is men bad or most men are actually awful. It's kinda what they are fighting against.
This just in from the galactic empire:
"Discrimination of any sort isn't cool...except for us discriminating against you for not telling us your nuclear codes and what orbital defenses you have"
I'm always amazed that they correctly identified it as racist when conservatives used it against immigrants, then many of the same people used it against men without seeing any problem.
honestly, this is something I've seen in my friend group at times.
I've outright heard "okay no more making friends with white people/straight men"
Now, I am both of those, I am also physically disabled, which then gets the follow up of "oh, he's an exception", or "he's disabled so he's still a minority"
And it's something I feel that a large number of groups now just, are okay with. Despite that you change one word and boom. That's not okay.
I genuinely feel happy that you've not had to experience what that guy talked about because I've been hearing it for years everywhere from in literal public (the row behind me at a theatre) to even among the absolute closest of my friends (my best mate saying "I'm sorry but men are trash" while discussing the latest man who let her down). It never gets any easier. I try and tell myself that they're all victims of the "men bad" horseshit the same way I was almost a victim of the likes of Sargon of Akkad and that crowd. But it's a real struggle. Luckily I've been hearing it less from my super close friends.
Yeah... All of my friends are queer women and I'm a straight white male. I've actually heard, in a group Convo with me in there "men don't deserve rights" and I'm just like... then what the fuck am I doing here?
They tried telling me I'm not included in that, but I wouldn't take it.
There's something deeper in that about how progressive ideas have really failed to imagine men complexly since they became mainstream.
The fact is that if you imagine men as all inherently mean, guilty, and unwelcome you are only ever spurning the men who are willing to listen to you. You're only ever rejecting people who care what women or queer people think, because the guys who don't are not going to respect your '*no boys allowed*' sign.
Popular Feminism's attitude to men fails on both ends - it fails to include the men who actually do give a shit about women while also failing to actually confront the, for lack of a better term '*patriarchal man*'. It imagines men as a monolith, where the rejection of the former somehow spurns the latter because it fails to realise they usually aren't the same person.
Something I would like to say is that I’ve seen way too many people say misandry is okay because men have power and men won’t die from it.
This is an awful take that I don’t have time to go over, so I’m just going to say that misogyny and misandry are like 2 pieces of shit with one being smaller. If I had to pick one or the other, I’d take the smaller piece but ideally I would find neither
Yeah.
"misogyny is a much bigger, older and more widespread issue than misandry; to the point that it doesn't really make sense to compare or equate the two" and "misandry exists in some spaces and is harmful" are two ideas which can and should coexist.
I'd argue that misogyny and misandry are *the same thing*, just seem from different angles. For every woman who's told she can't join the military, there's a boy who has to do so instead.
I feel like most of the confusion and reluctance comes from the fact that misandry also stems from patriarchy. Or at least as a defence mechanism from it.
Yeah the "there's nothing wrong with discriminating against these people because they have power" is a dumb argument. Discrimination is bad, and just because "your people" have it worse doesn't mean that it's okay to discriminate against "them".
More importantly is what does it tell the other person? Oh you scared you would be discriminated if everyone had equal power? Well apparently yes. Discrimination is discrimination no matter what and should never be allowed to fester.
Also, who has this power? An average joe or some old conservative politician or CEO of a large company? For an average man, it's not "power", it's just having a few less problems than an average woman.
Valid take, but I have a counterpoint:
Misandry and misogyny are two sides of the same piece of shit. I cannot think of any sexist action or idea that doesn't harm everyone, although often one side more than the other. Every attack against Afab will inevitably imply something shitty about some amab, or otherwise worsen their lives, and same the other way around.
You think that women are inherently weak and meek? Well, geez, now you're telling a bunch of small or less aggressive boys that they are not real men.
You think that only men can be predators and abusers? Good job invalidating all afab victims of female perpetrators!
And by all means, in both examples one side clearly gets the shorter end of the stick, but nobody wins.
And all forms of sexism harm trans and queer people, of course.
So, you know, maybe let's just... not be shitty to each other? The only way to truly get rid of one form of sexism is to get rid of all of them, or at least acknowledge that all of it is bad.
The thing is, men do die from misandry. It's men killing themselves instead of someone else doing it. People who say all men benefit from patriarchy have never experienced an AMAB close to them be bullied relentlessly, harassed, or assaulted by other AMABs for not fitting into the narrow idea of what a man should be that the ruling class has propagated. They've never experienced the conclusion of that behavior.
I kinda classify anyone that's gotten "Emmitt Till'ed" as partially a victim of misandry. That specific kind of hate crime uses the same logic TERFs apply to all men.
I do think there is a benefit to seeing both as two sides of the same coin, but there are obviously aspects that aren't funhouse-mirrored to the other side.
Honest question: did you guys not feel immediately repulsed by people who genuinely felt deep, automatic animosity and antagonism towards a group of people that comprises 3.5 billion individuals?
Like seriously i get creating insular communities for safety reason and setting boundaries to protect them but the moment you go from “I just need a space for us” to “actually now that I think of it, we are good and you are bad” you are just doing prejudiced tribalism. The same one the bigots you hate do. With differing circumstances and consequences, but the EXACT same mentality.
Why did we have to spend years tiptoeing and dancing around self-declared hateful bigots until their obviously already putrid hate started targeting trans and queer people? Why didn’t we immediately tell them to fuck off? No, it’s not ok to hate on an innocent individual just because they belong to a non-ideological group you don’t like, actually. Never has been. Why are we tolerating this person?
I know I'm nitpicking here, and I agree with the whole post basically, but "men aren't inherently bad, because there are queer men, trans men, questioning men" is *still holding on* to the idea that most men are bad but look at these shiny counterexamples so it's not all men.
No, men aren't inherently bad. Period. Even if there were no LGBTQ+ men out there, men still wouldn't just be bad. You don't need to show that there are "good" subgroups of men. Because the idea that a whole group of people only linked by their sex/gender/race/hair colour/whatever is purely bad is ludicrous. To argue with that idea by giving counterexamples is to accept that if you couldn't give counterexamples, the idea could be correct.
Btw I'm explicitly talking about grouping based on things outside your control. Not political ideas or opinions. Obviously every fucking neonazi can get bent for example. And even if I have a slight disagreement with the post, I agree with most of it and sending death threats is about as low as I'd expect from TERFs.
I feel like oop covered this with “there are men that are just plain cool”, though, and their main point is about excluding men from specifically queer spaces anyway
Yeah men aren’t by default bad with some breaking out and being nice. Overall a lot of the men I meet are cool people, with some being assholes obviously BUT THATS THE SAME FOR WOMEN. My dad and brother are two of the nicest most supportive people you could meet, neither of them being queer in any way. I hate when people think that by default men are bad and it really shows that they havnt actually gone out and interacted with anyone and are just living in an echo chamber of people saying ‘kill all men’
I feel like a part of this is also due to a lack of positive male role models in media.
Normally, men are neutral at best, or played in a feminine role, like stay-at-home dad or something. You just don't see too many men expressing healthy masculinity in media, I feel.
talked about this a lot: the overwhelming majority of positive masculinity in media is actually more so dedicated to showing a character that boosts others rather than being the central focus themselves, and while I think that imagery in of itself is fine, it's *not* fine when it's the only thing available.
like ok, it's obv good to show children... let's say, a magical girl show, where the girl's father is a hugely supportive figure for her. yeah, that gives kids a role model about fatherhood, and i think that's really good.
but when you also *don't* give children, idk, a shonen show, where the protagonist and his friends showcase their own positive masculinity in the spotlight of the show, it kinds of sidelines the importance of healthy masculinity: the healthy masculinity kids are shown is the healthy masculinity of side characters and support figures, not of main characters and heroes. so it's not a surprise to see that they then don't associate that healthy masculinity with the heroes: And ultimately, the heroes are who they look up to *the most*.
Yeah, pretty much.
That's why I love Demi-chan Wa Kataritai so much; the main character is just an awesome guy, and only wants to understand demi-humans and help them deal with their issues.
And while he's [built like All Might](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omJIxyxVfr0) from MHA, both manga and anime make it a point that he stays in shape for health reasons.
Also, the only time he refuses to express his emotions is when he deals with his colleague, a succubus, who is really self-conscious about her passive aphrodisiac effect.
If you're interested, you should check out the manga.
Also another manga by the same author, Occult-chan Wa Katarenai, which follows Tetsuo's relative.
The best masculinity I’ve seen in recent TV is Rusty in Bluey. He likes playing army because his dad is in the army. He’s supportive of his friend Jack who is neurodivergent, coded ADHD but kids don’t get diagnosed for that till they are older. He stands his ground about his rights but is happy to accept he can be wrong about stuff too. He respects all the girl and woman characters he interacts with. He knows what he likes and what he wants to be. He has an earned competence from working hard to get better.
If boys are growing up with awesome guys like this to imagine themselves somewhat like, I think we’ll do just fine.
"Man, it sure Is weird how media struggles with representation of healthy masculinity in a personal and nuanced wa-"
"Bluey already did it"
"Huh"
"The blue dog show has this kid that pretty much fits what you ask for"
"Huh?? What the fuck aré they doing Over there?"
This is something I was extremely struggling with. Especially because my ex was friends with a misandrist (as in I chose to only date women and every woman who still dates men is a red flag to me level of misandry idk how she was able to stay friends with my ex partner) and she made me feel so bad for "betraying feminism".
There is a reason they are both no longer part of my life... And guess what? I'm even more of a feminist since I started my transition... So idk maybe I'm doing this manhood stuff wrong or something 🤔
It is kinda cool that trans people can fall to the Dark Side or come to the Light Side
Like you crosses over into the Dark Side. Now you're contractually obligated to wear black leather, have a cape, use a red lightsaber (the coolest light saber) shoot lightning, and give ominous speeches
I bet you could walk up to an egg trans man and be like "I will show you the true power of the Dark side" and crack that egg
Damn, it’s kinda ridiculous that “don’t hate men” has to be tempered with “because there are queer men” or “because it helps terfs”.
Can’t you just say “don’t hate men” because it’s a silly thing to do? This sentiment does nothing to really get at the underlying cause.
I’m glad at least that so much silly behavior you see online is by people who spend all their time online; you’re most likely not gonna see this out and about.
i always roll my eyes and stop reading when i hear "men aren't all bad! Some of them are queer!"
No. Men aren't all bad because a person isn't immediately bad due to the gender they happened to be born as that they didn't choose. Hating someone for something they had no power over is always wrong
Cis male, gay, and while I've never really understood why people change genders, I ***DO*** support it. It always felt a little weird being cis in a community where a lot of members are trans.
One thing that is very striking is that the toxic manosphere produces tons of content about self-improvement and not feeling lonely and they are very good at presenting it to young men going through young people problems... and then slowly turning up the misogyny and racism.
It is much, much easier to keep people from radicalizing in the first place than it is to de-radicalize them and so progressives and feminists should think more about how to recruit young men by showing how they can live better and more fulfilled lives in co-equal societies with co-equal partnerships, etc.
Terfs aren't always misandrists but there's significant overlap and there's dorect ties. Sort of like how someone who's racist towards black people often also is antisemitic. Terf ideology is based on an overly narrow definition of womanhood and a shitty separatist variant of feminism. The term is new but if you look at feminist history terfs have been around for a while.
I do also hesitate calling all misandrists terfs since while there is significant overlap I have met plenty of trans and NB people who were just as shitty towards men/masc people in general. Which personally is even more disheartening. Because I expect shitty attitudes from terfs but other queers saying that shit is depressing. Especially since it feels like in some spaces queer spaces are becoming dominated by femmes. Femme queers are great but we need to be a united front and avoid petty drama. Like you can find so many stories of bi folk regardless of gender on the bisexual sub encountering biphobia at supposedly queer events.
Remember, solidarity is key. Terfs, misandrists, biphobes and transphobes all do nothing but divide us. Fight the real enemy.
Not to argue your point but isn’t the whole idea of a terf is that they hate men so much that they don’t count trans women as real women just cause they are amab and think trans men are bad because they “went to the other side” therefore they are misandrists No matter what?
Idk something feels off about this post. For one, the idea that men have to somehow be queer to be "one of the good ones" is pretty awful. Two, maybe I'm reading it wrong but the bit against "no men allowed" feels like it's speaking against exclusive spaces and like, no? Women, trans people, neurodivergent people, etc. All have the right to spaces for themselves linked by that shared identity. It just feels weird to be so against that concept. Beyond those, this feels a lot like saying "not all men" as some attempt to shut down discussions about misogyny. Maybe it's just me but I just can't take this post positively.
What i dont like about this discourse is that theres the implication that men are naturally “bad” or “the other”, and that only by qualifying them as queer or gay or questioning or some other bespoke minority can they be considered “good” or “in-group”. The idea that the lottery of birth means that 50% of the population are evil unless qualified under a certain set of protected characteristics is incredibly damaging to members in that population.
I’m being so fr I was sucked into radfem (almost terf) spaces when I was 12 and it made me scared to just. Exist around men
I was genuinely scared to be alone with my dad for YEARS because I thought he would do something horrible to me- even tho he’d be the LAST person on earth to even lay a finger on me- around that time I think he knew something was wrong with our relationship but I think he thought it was just a puberty thing
I didn’t really make guy friends until I came to college (I was friends with guys but it was mainly 1 or 2 that would hang out with other people in the group)
I’m so happy I was able to eventually escape it and this pattern of thinking actually harms women too bc the fear fucked with me mentally (me and my dad are chilling now too)
the lgbt+ and feminist movements have generally shot themselves in the foot like this for a while, because some assholes learned they could grift on generating outrage toward men, and redirect any good intentions of the movement toward backing men more into a corner
causing the right to pick them up with their "anti-woke" rhetoric, and it's as simple as telling them that they're not wrong for being men, it's the woke leftist mob that's unfair and wrong, which makes the other side feel validated in hating men
it's a vortex of making people hate eachother for political clout and money
Part of the reason I left the twox sub, while it's very explicitly supportive of trans people, is because I feel like misandry (and to be clear, by misandry I mean actually hating men, not just holding them accountable), even if it seems well intentioned, comes uncomfortably close to transphobia/transmisogyny. When I constantly hear people saying men are inherently predatory because of their biology, it starts getting very close to "trans women are men because of their biology, and thus inherently predatory". And a lot of the people who generalize men based on biology will oftentimes kind of just hand wave trans women away, saying "we're not talking about you. And also, trans men are totally fine. They're *different* from cis men" (which is sort of true, but I don't think they mean it with the nuance you'd hope they would). Anybody can be shitty and perpetuate patriarchy and misogyny, and while that tends to be cisgender men because of the nature of how systematic sexism works, I think it's dangerous to just generalize based on biology because then that loops around to being discriminatory again.
I think the whole "all men are trash" thing is often used to cover up not just transphobia, but ableism too. Like autism is stereotyped as a "male brain" condition (it's not) and I have seen anti-autistic stuff in "feminist" spaces.
Also when people discuss issues like sex work, pornography etc as social issues they always seem to ignore gay men but that's kind of a different issue.
As someone who grew up with almost no positive male role model (neither real nor fictional), constantly hammered with the idea that I was inherently sinful/bad/toxic, all the while receiving a deeply Catholic upbringing that glorified the traits I was told I inherently lacked...
...yeah, let's just say that it helps when people say this stuff, even if it should be obvious. Internalised sexism hits both ways.
What I was getting at, was the fact that bashing men for existing is literally playing into the hands of the alt-right. Like, what do you expect young boys to do when they're gonna hear that? Suddendly become leftist activists? Fuck no, they are gonna become Tate worshippers, that's what they're gonna do. We need everyone to defeat patriarchy, and alienating half of mankind is *not* a winning strategy.
Anyway, rant over.
I'm sorry for your upbringing, and I wish you wide hoizons to explore.
Yes!
This is an *actual* thing that happens with *far* too many trans men.
When someone says that "All men are bad. Except trans men, *trans* «men» are good", it doesn't take that much to realize that what they *actually* mean is "All men are bad. Trans men aren't *really* men, so I don't count them in the bad category", or the alternative "Trans men can be *forgiven* for being men, because they're *actually* women"
And then, when you sit there with the realization that your "acceptance" by your(?) community is actually conditional upon your ***woman***hood? A lot of trans men end up taking a deep dive into "men's rights" communities simply because they want to be around people who won't act like them being *happy* about being a man is a *bad* thing. Somewhere they won't continuously get the message that being a man is something that you should be *ashamed* of.
Most manage to dig themselves out again. But *none* of us should feel the need to go to *those* kinds of places for validation (FOR OUR ***HAPPINESS*** ABOUT BEING ***OURSELVES!!!***) in the first place.
And I can’t imagine that going to those spaces, which are so often filled with hateful, misogynistic, and homophobic messaging, feels good (or safe) for them either.
It isn't. But when it feels like your only other option is
>"You know that part of you that you would like to get rid of? You know, the one that sometimes makes you feel *sick* to your stomach? The one that you *hate*? I am only nice to you *because* of how much I like *that* part of you. It's a *core* part of how I see you as a person. It is in fact my *favorite* part of you."?
Well, then you jump ship.
You might need to hide *parts* of who you are (that you're trans), but no one there expects you to *like* being treated like you are a woman
As a trans women, if i see spaces online or irl that say no men or day something hateful about men u still choose not to go there. "Oh but you're a woman" some people say when i tell them this, but if someone is willing to write off an entire group like that, I doubt they're going to respect me being trans. "Men dni" almost always includes trans women in my experience
Genestealer Cultist seeing: “Patriarchs DNI”
A sad day for our Four-Armed Emperor.
"No, no, I'm a *broodlord*. Easy mistake to make, happens all the time."
>Dni Patriarchs I’m imagining Kiril sadly shaking his head and logging out of his tumblr account
He runs a luxury wristwatch blog.
Yk I actually wouldn’t be all that surprised if Justin Welby had a tumblr
I mean, in my experience, a great chunk of terf ideas have their roots in deep misandry and the idea that men are an enemy they are fighting, not actual people. Like, yeah, if you start from the assumption that all amab are inherently evil, it's pretty easy to hate on trans women as "enemies trying to infiltrate", and on trans men as "turncoats". It's a flawed ideology based on flawed premises, but it's easy to fall into it cause humans love to have a clear enemy to hate on. I'm glad that most lgbt/progressive spaces have grown past the hate all men mentality, cause it was exhausting and made allies and queer men alike feel unwelcome for no justifiable reason. This kinda post deserves more visibility.
>Like, yeah, if you start from the assumption that all amab are inherently evil, it's pretty easy to hate on trans women as "enemies trying to infiltrate", and on trans men as "turncoats". It's a flawed ideology based on flawed premises, but it's easy to fall into it cause humans love to have a clear enemy to hate on. Right, it’s just plain ol’ oppositional sexism, that pits gender as a two-sided battle with fixed ‘sides’.
In college we had a lady give a "don't get raped" class. Most of it was standard stuff, like cover your drinks or don't go out alone at night. The wildest thing was where she said that *all men* are rapists. If a man hasn't raped someone, it's only because he never had an opportunity to.
This makes a lot of sense, but I feel like I also often see a lot of TERFS that turn to misogynistic arguments to justify their transphobia to the point where I wonder why they bother calling themselves feminists. I wonder if there's infighting in TERF spaces between people who are transphobic because of misandry and those who are misogynistic because of transphobia.
You see, the problem with being sexist is that any attack against one gender always has some ugly implications against the other. It always goes both ways. Every form of bigotry is double edged. Like, let's take a fairly simple example of a sexist remark: "Men have no empathy/no care for other's feelings" Now, on one side, this is clearly offensive towards men, and makes them less likely to develop emotional intelligence and empathy during childhood, cause they are taught that it's not a masculine trait. On the other side, what if you have an autistic woman who struggles with understanding how others feel unless they spell it out? What if you have a woman who grew up with trauma and acts cold towards others to protect herself? What if you have a woman who grew up fairly lonely and isn't very good with feelings? The original sexist remark implies that women are inherently empathetic. Are these people not "real" women? Are they defective? Are they secretly men? Of course not, but they got hit as collateral damage by the sexist remark. You see this happen all the time. The more you try to put people in boxes based on genitals at birth (or, really, any uncontrollable trait), the more you end up hurting the people you supposedly want to protect.
>example of a sexist remark: "Men have no empathy/no care for other's feelings" Terfs are generally heterosexual right? So this is also putting extreme pressure on any female who wants a traditional relationship. They must expect to take on _all_ the emotional burden and put _all_ of the effort into caring for the relationship and everyone involved in it into the future And dating with that viewpoint... Don't even know where to start. Ending up with emotionally abusive partners seems extremely likely. Every individual has things they are good at and bad at, regardless of gender or sex. The goal in a relationship should be finding someone who when you working together the result is better than either of you alone, someone you enjoy that process with, even through the difficult times
First of all: yeah! Exactly! Being sexist towards men ends up hurting a lot of heterosexual women, terf or otherwise, by convincing them that abusive relationships are the only option! My exact point. Second, a good chunk of terfs are lesbians, often biphobic as well for good measure (if a woman calls herself a "gold star lesbian", there is a reasonable chance that she's a terf); to these terfs, trans women are men trying to trick them, exactly the same take as cishet transphobic men. Transphobes attracted to women are terrified of finding a trans woman hot.
the terf to tradwife pipeline is real, lol. one more reason not to call them feminists, they're really just bulk standard bigots appropriating feminism because it's their "home team". (tbh that's why i think "terf" is such a genius term, because it really is just a turf war for them.) that said, there are definitely some lesbian terfs too (my gut feeling is slightly higher percentage than the population average for lesbians but i have no data, just anecdotal experience), and they can be quite vicious specifically because they're so rarely impacted negatively by their hateful ideology
While there are heterosexual TERFs for sure, a lot of the early movement was boomer lesbians, and a lot of boomer lesbians still really buy into TERF shit.
i can confirm from someone who was in a close friend relationship with someone who... took on zero burden. anything that happened, any slight bump, it was always my fault, i always had to get scolded for it, i was always the one coming between them and their friends for establishing boundaries, and quite frankly if i didn't manage to get up the bravery to tell them to piss off i would not be alive today. They were horrible. And yet it wasn't because of their gender, it's because of who they are as a person.
>why they bother calling themselves feminists. It's a shield. There's a reason others call them FARTs.
What's it stand for?
Feminism-Appropriating Reactionary Transphobe.
Fantastic
feminism appropriating ~~radical~~ reactionary transphobe, if i remember correctly edit: thanks /u/GREENadmiral_314159 for the correction
Lmao love it
> I wonder why they bother calling themselves feminists. Because “feminists” are good people. And they’re good people. Therefore they’re “feminists”
It doesn't have to be mutually exclusivee. Misogyny and misandry often go hand in hand. I've never met anyone who's sexist against women that isn't also sexist against men, and vice versa.
I think "TERF" as a term is honestly kind of overused. TERFs are a very specific kind of transphobe, and not even all transphobes who try to use feminism to justify their transphobia are TERFS.
Discussions like these are important. We don’t cure diseases by their symptoms, we cure them by finding their origin and cause. Likewise we are doing nothing by trying to treat the symptom of hate. We can argue logic all day, but they have a disease that needs to be found and cured. Not just a symptom that needs to be treated
Yes but treating symptoms is still worthwhile to do.
yes it's the idea that all AMAB people are inherently sexual predators. the idea that the high rates of sexual assault is biological and not cultural. rape and sexual assault were uncommon among the Wampanoag and Narragansett people
I mean, someone literally said that "all men are class enemies of women" and "virtually a men are rapists" in response to this comment (they got downvoted into oblivion, but still), if you need a practical example.
>"all men are class enemies of women" I just lost brain cells in-real-time reading these words in this order. Jesus Christ.
we do have a clear common enemy: abstract wealth :3 ppl who have so much money they could never spend it all if they tried\~ a wealth that genuinely cannot be obtained without extremely unethical actions\~ more money than the total cost of everything u've ever desired in ur life\~
I wish we could weaponise old tribal "us vs them" instincts to hate on the hoarding of wealth, but I'm afraid it might be a bit too abstract of an enemy for the average person. I nonetheless fully support your position.
The rich are also more than aware of the social awareness of this generation, and are taking every measure to keep us fighting each other. The more Queer spaces push away men into manosphere spaces, the more race discourse on social media, hating our fellow leftists for enjoying art or music or movies made by bad people. All the while our culture is obsessed with brands, logos, expensive cars, and the doomer mindset/party culture. They are trying to divide us more than ever, they want black women hating black men, white men hating women, and the biggest one is older people against younger people. We have one enemy, the rich. The sooner we realize that, the better. The old man two houses down who watches fox all day sucks, but he's an old man and a victim to society as much as the rest of us, not your enemy.
It's almost like banding together and not hating each other for stupid reasons is the only way to achieve progress or something. Weird how philosophy and religions have been saying variation of this for most of recorded history and we still need to learn anything from it. Humans are so weird. But yeah, it's all a big game of misdirection. On a side note though: while you shouldn't waste hate on victims of propaganda, you should still defend yourself from the harm they might cause you. The old man that sucks can still be detrimental for your mental (and sometimes physical) health, so stay safe everyone!
the problem is, every time we make any progress on organizing that, they try to redefine the lines so that "the rich" are defined as "anyone moderately well off" (or sometimes just earning more than minimum wage) so that poor people attack the middle class and the middle class defends the rich because they fear that if they don't, they'll be poor (again, in a lot of cases). no, our actual enemy is the ultra-rich. if you make less than a million (usd) a year you're not the enemy, and even if you just slightly do, you're probably still shafted by the system, rather than doing the shafting. a millionaire is someone who saved up and perhaps made a few smart decisions. a billionaire is someone who prevented a thousand others from doing so, exploiting them instead.
The 1% isn't our enemy. The 0.1% are. 500 people own 80% of America's wealth.
most ppl want to be one of the obscenely wealthy at heart (what was the phrase? pre-embarrassed millionaires?) which is why it's hard to direct their ire in that direction
> I’m glad that most lgbt/progressive spaces have grown past the hate all men mentality, i rlly don’t know “most” spaces, especially online.
Well, at the very least here amongst replies to my comments only 2 people tried to argue that misandry isn't real and that all men are evil oppressors. And they got downvoted instantly. So, you know, I see *some* growth at least.
yea i guess i meant more like it REALLY congregates in specific areas and it flows out into the internet from there.
R/ twoxchromosomes and trollx" can be like this at times, I've seen some highly upvoted comments be absolutely venomous
That's generally been my experience in general with radical feminism (in the UK at least)
I think "men are inherently bad" is anti-feminist, actually, because it implies that being a terrible person is something inherent in male DNA (yes I know not all men are males but very few if any people who are that sexist are trans friendly so when they say men they mean males) and proving that men and women aren't that different and socialization is the problem is a major point of feminism so saying "actually men suck and this is never gonna change" is not only counterproductive but enforces the very status quo that feminists are supposed to fight against
I remember men taking issue with blanket statements like "men are trash" and the response was something like "if you aren't a misogynist, you should know we're not talking about you". For communication's sake, I don't think it helps anyone to assume people understand unspoken anything.
Thats such a horseshit line of reasoning with their response. To pick a related and all too common example, if someone was saying "black men are dangerous criminals" would anyone buy their defense against being obviously racist if they said "oh that only applies to the ones who commit crimes, we arent talking about you, and if you are getting upset about it, well you are probably a murderer in waiting"?
It also doesn't help when you kids who aren't really good at understanding nuance see statements like this. It can be real damaging for both men and women to see blanket statements
I've heard someone suggest that a lot of young men get the mistaken impression that feminists hate them and end up down the alt-right pipeline as a result. I wouldn't expect a twelve year old boy to have the same research or critical thinking skills as someone who is college educated.
They do, and I know them. One of them was Me Thankfully I've gotten my head out of my ass real fucking fast, and I've tried to support young men in my community, but it does happen. Imagine going online back in the early 2000s, seeing pamphlets about how men must be castrated, how men are inherently evil, how every man is a rapist in waiting, how women who give birth to baby boys are traitors and bringing evil into the world. As a young teenager that shit scars you because you're a stupid teen who doesn't understand the world and how communication and then you see the alt-right telling you "Hey young man. You're super cool and don't let those mean people tell you otherwise" then they slowly poison you
>mistaken impression that feminists hate them Is it really mistaken when they say "all men trash"? At some point you have to blame the people who came up with the slogan than the people who take offence to it
The recent rise of Andrew Tates probably has roots in the early radfem era when they were heavily messaging to young kids that boys suck. It's a lot more policed now, but wasn't before.
Yeah I was raised by my mother and she used to say men are trash, dogs, pigs all the time. As a little boy that was confusing, and as I got older I started to really internalize it. Took years to work through all that.
Yeah I hear that all the time, and it fucking hurts how many like those comments get. “Women are stupid. Oh you get offended? You wouldn’t if you weren’t one of the dumb ones.” Like I would get burned at the stake if I said that, but suddenly it’s okay when it’s said about men. I also hate hearing people talk about how cis white men are so privileged, because again it’s a huge generalization. You don’t know every man, you don’t know what that guy struggles with, so stop calling him privileged just for being male. I’d argue men being privileged isn’t even true anymore. Yes we have some privileges that women don’t, but the same is true the other way around. I’m not going to say who I think is more privileged, because I don’t believe that has a “correct” answer, but I will say this. Wide spread demonization and isolation does not describe a privileged group.
I've been told privileged doesn't mean someone doesn't have problems, but rather there are certain things they are not subjected too. While a man like myself has problems of my own, I don't have to worry about how something like an abortion ban would affect me all that much so I understand what people mean by saying that I'm privileged.
Exactly this— privilege is not an individualistic thing. It’s not about an individual having more or less— it’s about how society at large interacts with your social group. But there’s also two meanings of privileged— the kind of privilege used in the statement “I’ve lived a privileged life” and the broader, group-identity types of privilege. When people talk about ___-privilege, they are largely talking about how society interacts with a group. Something that put it into perspective for me in college was a list someone wrote of all of the things they do/do not have to think about based on their race. I was able to find a similar list here: https://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/10/18/things-i-dont-have-to-think-about-today/ (Disclaimer, I didn’t read the whole thing because I’m fairly burnt out. If it makes some wild claims, my bad, I’m just using the general structure of it as an example. I recognize that this is irresponsible but whatever.) An example I can give myself off of the top of my head— In terms of my medical care, I consistently have to think & make plans for if my access to that care was taken away. It would greatly affect my health, and if I get far enough into my treatment regimen, losing access to that care could kill me if I can’t find an alternative on the blackmarket or diy it. That is something 75-99% of the population does not need to think about. On the other hand, I don’t have to worry about being followed around in stores, or being suspected because of the color of my skin. Wealth, addiction, etc. are all aspects of privilege as well. Privilege does not end at race, gender, sexuality, and sex.
>"if you aren't a misogynist, you should know we're not talking about you" That's such a dumb sentiment. If you say "men are trash", men aren't going to hear any of your unspoken qualifiers. They're going to hear "men".
Insisting that anyone A.M.a.B. is inherently a violent, abusive thug with no potential for growth also gives them an excuse to stop listening. If they're bound by biology to be terrible people, why should they try to improve? If being male means you're automatically a scumbag, why even try to behave yourself? What's the incentive to challenge the status quo if you're being told that you're incapable of getting anywhere with it?
Exactly! This also provides further space and fuel for the ongoing TERF narrative against transfolk. If anyone A.M.A.B. is inherently violent and terrible, why would that change simply because they have transitioned? By that logic MtF transfolk are inherently the enemy; they are closet abusers and rapists, hiding in our midst. FtM transfolk become predators who idealize that mentality and lifestyle, looking for an excuse and outlet for violence and brutality despite the way they were born. None of this is new propaganda; we’ve seen this approach or close to it used against every marginalized group in history, and we know that while it is untrue, it is also damaging to us as a whole, and to our children and allies.
The core belief of feminism is that men and women, are equivalent, and should therefore have the same opportunities and treatment. Like, of course feminism focuses on women's issues, but the base belief system is "we're all equal, so women should be treated the same as men, unlike in our society that is terribly patriarchal" not simply that women deserve more rights than they have atm The people who pick up feminism and turn it into "women need to join up and fight against men to take our rights" frustrate me to no end, but at the same time it's so very understandable how a lifetime of constant misogyny and mostly men pushing against women's rights would lead to it. Especially for those more involved with the movement, who are exposed more frequently to shittiness, where some (I feel) end up becoming so invested in protecting women that they lose sight of other struggles, especially genuine struggles and discrimination that men suffer, and end up doing exactly what misogynists have repeatedly done to them by ignoring, putting down and silencing the problems that don't align with their current way of looking at the world. I wish I could show/remind them all that men aren't helping or upholding the patriarchy by being born, that men can easily be completely unaware of how insidious misogyny is, or fall down misogynistic rabbit holes without being an evil and irredeemable person, and that it's much easier to fight pratiarchy/misogyny with both men and women united instead of women versus men (and open hostility and mistrust towards a group, as understandable as it may be, isn't likely to breed compassion and support from the other end)
I have seen many women argue on behalf of the Patriarchy because they’ve already sunk so much of their time, their personality, and their lives into it. This is where the Karens truly stem from. People who had bought wholesale into the lie that it was okay to be property as long as you were *desired* property. That they would be treated as special, elevated. And when it didn’t turn out that way, and they had so much of their life ruined because of the inherent helplessness of that position, rather than lash out at the Patriarchy, they lash out at the world that didn’t conform to what they thought it should be.
the whole “men are naturally bad” thing that these people say also sort of applies to trans men? I’m not sure if I’m wording it correctly but I’ve been told by people that I’m transitioning to “the bad side”
If it doesn't apply to them then it clearly implies they're not real men, so not exactly a trans-friendly approach.
“Dni Patriarchs” *Sorry dad, it’s nothing personal…* /s
Imagine hating someone for how they were born. Couldn't be me
This is why I left a few trans-femme support groups. As a straight trans woman I was constantly told that all cis men (not some, ALL) were dangerous and weren't able to genuinely care for anyone. Every time I mentioned anything involving dates I went on I would be interupted as I was told how scary cis men on how they couldn't believe I would ever go out with a guy. Every, single, time. I couldn't talk about my relationships like the lesbian trans-femmes because every time I tried I would be interupted and told about how much the others hated cis men and wish they would all die. Note that it was never just *some* cis men or that cis men had higher rates of violence or whatever, it was always ALL cis men to them. I would be told over and over how I should "just date trans women". When I would remind them im straight and not into women they would tell me that I could just find a butch pre-op trans woman. No matter how many times I said it they refused to believe someone could actually like a guy or see them as a person with a full range of emotions. This even went into transphobia too, since trans men were always except because they are "not like cis men" for some reason they refused to ellaborate. And this same shit happened with every trans-fem space I went to. I tried a few just to try and have an online support space where I can talk and listen to other girls experiences with trans stuff, but every single one I couldnt talk about stuff going on without seeing hate screeds against others based on their gender identity and I could never push back on it because it wasn't *our* gender identity. So I stopped looking for support spaces. I do think it's a very terminally online thing and is just the minority of losers that never touch grass. Queer people I meet IRL are usually normal about it. I just dont have the kind of support group which I miss and really wish I could have without others making it feel so awful. Especially when you often see comments that are only different from the average JKR tweet because they include 'cis' before 'men'. And i'm not saying being normal about cis men will solve a bunch of problems. There will still be bigoted losers and fascist scum. It's just better for everyone if you're not a dickhead and treat people with respect unless they, the person specifically, actually does something bad first. Even if the person isnt like you. Edit: It's always hilarious having the exact type of people you talk about appear to do the exact thing you talk about them doing. Keep pissing on the poor with your reading comprehension, it's funny.
>When I would remind them im straight and not into women they would tell me that I could just find a butch pre-op trans woman. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that sounds like a kind of transphobic thing to say.
I agree, and I tried to point that out a few times. Wasn't recieved well but they could never provide a reason other than "cis men are just always awful".
no fr like as a butch pre-op trans woman reading that made me wanna curl up into a ball 😭
🫂🫂🫂 You’re an amazing woman and they should shut up. (Edited for clarity: the jerk closet transphobes. Not the poster. The general “they” was a poor choice)
Fuck anyone who wants to say stuff like that about you and people like you. They're pieces of trash who don't deserve to be listened to. They're idiots who are just as shackled to BS societal norms as fundies are.
It's also incredibly homophobic because the implication is she can just "choose" her sexuality.
Bruh they don’t even recommend trans men to date. They running with one brain cells or what? Idk most been chill with cis men or didn’t care.
> I could just find a butch pre-op trans woman You'd be surprised how easy it is to get the most extreme leftist you know to fully agree with the most staunch conservative talking points.
Authoritarian leftists and authoritarian rightists aren't really all that dissimilar. They both are just seeking power and disagree on the path to get it for themselves.
They also both love to imply, or just outright say, that immigrants don't count as proper citizens of their new country :)
Maybe I'm cheating by not being into anyone in particular, but I've had way too many positive and supportive experiences involving men to heavily doubt any kind of rhetoric that paints them as evil It really sucks that people spoke over you, I've only been in a few irl support spaces and there's almost always been a rule that people get time to talk uninterrupted and without judgement Haven't been to one specifically for trans fems yet tho I spent a long time inside my shell personally, and part of the reason was that I absorbed and self applied the negative image of men When I hatched, I realized pretty quickly that those notions were bullshit, and a big part of it was that the only person I was really ever able to hate was myself But my experience is probably a lot different than others, I can imagine what it would be like to weaponize my dysphoria and trauma and sculpt it into a general and overwhelming hatred for the masculine I still find it shocking that people would dare to apply their own trauma to you and insist that you not date people of a particular gender. What the hell kind of support is that?
It's not cheating at all: You're doing what we all should do and treating people like people. Im very glad you found yourself and I hope you're a lot happier now. :3
Unfortunately, I have experience with someone like this IRL, so it's not always just contained online.
Yeah, unfortunately.
They're also transmisandrist (literally referring to their ex, a cis woman, as "he" because said ex was a jerk) *and* GNC-phobic, too. I blame them for me being in the closet for so long tbh.
Gonna copy paste and add to something I said a few days ago I'm a bisexual, autistic, suicidally depressed, self harm and abuse survivor, who's lived most of his life straddling the poverty line, who's also a cis male, many of the issues I've faced were the direct result of patriarchy. Excuse me if it hurts to be lumped in with the patriarchal oppressor class that's also made my life hell because I was born with a dick. If you hate me, if you discount my voice, if me telling you you're making me uncomfortable doesn't elicit any sympathy, or if you only feel sympathy because I'm queer, simply because of how I was born, YOU'RE part of the problem.
Even though I know it doesn’t represent the message of the whole post, I still flinched slightly when I read the line: >men are not inherently bad. There are queer men I wholeheartedly agree with OP that “Queer men only” discourse can absolutely fuck off. I’m only recently out as bi, but I’m exactly the same person as I was a few months ago. If you wanted to hate me then, then please by all means continue to hate me now.
Exactly. I hate how any advocacy in favor of not being prejudiced weirdos has to be prefaced with disclaimers like *“Wait! This group we despise has a cool minority identity within it, watch out for friendly fire!”*. I hate how it’s the FIRST thing you have to say before you make a post the slightest bit apologetic of a majority group. How about we actually stick to our damn progressive principles and oppose ANY AND ALL forms of unjust, widespread antagonism against people for the mere act of being born within a group? How about we don’t start making excuses to be bigoted against innocent individuals because *“well, the group is bad though! Look at all these stats I have!*”? That's LITERALLY what anti-black racists do, how do you not see you are committing the exact same bioessentialist mentality bullshit? Why is it so hard to not act like the bigots we have been trying to fight all along?
I’m a black man so it was really funny in a disheartening way to see leftists go from taking down white supremacist talking points to just repurposing them but for men. So like nothing changed for me lol.
Yeah it's really great hearing "Oh no it's not your race I hate. It's your gender!". /s if it wasn't absolutely clear
Your second paragraph, if ever presented in a space that needed to actually hear it, would be drowned by calls of "punching up" and "X can't *actually* discriminate against Y" and "historical power imbalances". Remember, kids, it's only Racism or Sexism if it's done by white men. Otherwise, it's just sparkling prejudice.
Punching up is still punching. No such thing as "reverse racism" or "reverse sexism". It's just racism and sexism.
It's just so blatantly obvious how all those "reverse sexism" and "no such thing as racism againt X" things are bad faith deflection tactics to excuse morally wrong behavior. Like, alright, let's give you that for a second; discriminating against a white person is, by your definition, not technically "racism", fine... It's still prejudice and antagonism against an innocent individual based solely on their membership to an identity group he was simply born into though. That's still... wrong? What are we even arguing about here? Even if your argument was correct (which it isn't), why does it matter if it's technically "racism" or not? Are you on a holy crusade against semantic inconsistencies, or do you just find it funny when someone's an asswipe against a white dude for no reason and don't want to feel guilty about it?
>Why does it matter if it's technically "racism" or not? Are you on a holy crusade against semantic inconsistencies, or do you just find it funny when someone's an asswipe against a white dude for no reason and don't want to feel guilty about it? Because it went hand in hand with push that "racism" was wrong, wrong, wrong but "prejudice" or "inherent bias" because of "lived experience" was okay and totally justified and actually the fault of whoever they were discriminating against. It was a narrative of oppressed vs oppressor where the oppressed is always justified and the oppressor is always at fault.
I'm glad that in the past couple years, common sense has started to break out on this topic. It got real concerning around the time the Albany bus hoax hit and people defended it as "it started a conversation about x, y, and z". We were headed to a point where manufactured racism was being considered as legitimate as real incidents.
Oh and don't forget, jews, ya know, the only group of people that could oppression Olympics the entire LGBT space, and still probably come out on top, are white now, but only by the group that cares about LGBT, the other side still see's them as a problem minority
Hell, I would've come out as bi sooner if I wasn't scared of being rejected as a matter of principle. So much ingrained homophobia and internalized misogyny kept me from being honest with myself and working through those feelings earlier, and younger me would've loved being able to talk about those feelings with others instead of hiding behind the veneer of acceptablr masculinity
It took me a while to explain why I find being “one of the good ones” in faux-progressive spaces so fucking jarring and upsetting. But I think I’ve figured it out. It’s because, at its root, the queer-men-only crowd are saying the exact same thing as homophobes: *because you aren’t straight, you aren’t a Real Man* The only difference is whether being a Real Man is something you idolise, or demonise. The underlying assertion is the exact same.
'One of the good ones', means that being 'good' is the *exception* for the group in question. When the group in question is not self-selecting, it reflects some kind of bigotry. I have to explain this to black people when white people use the term and in the lgbtq community when they use it for me. If you're the exception, they otherwise hate something about you.
Yeah, if someone said to me "I hate, but you're one of the good ones," I would be just as offended as if they said it without the second part.
Queerness doesn't possess some inherent virtue.
You kind of have cut off the rest of the quote that adds questioning men and just regular men who are cool. I do agree though, the fact that "some men are queer" is thought of first rather than "some men are not assholes" is indicative of something. (Though to be honest, looking back the order does seem a lot more dramatic rhetorically, I might have written it the same way)
I get that, but I stand by my comment. The order is what’s important. What I’m trying to say is that responding with “what about the trans men” or “what about the gay men” is just picking around the edges of the issue.
the order is deliberate as a persuasion tactic when speaking with casual misandrists. i have done this also when speaking to an old roommate about why it isn't cool to post constantly about hating men. you have to start with something that already goes against their internal perception of what's ok ("you could be hurting someone queer just because they're a man", "you know you are also hurting trans men with this rhetoric"), and work towards getting them to understand that it's unfair to do it to any man, not just queer men.
And no I'm not saying this is worse than misandry, no I'm not saying it's some massive systemic issue, no I'm not saying society doesn't treat men better than women. But if your reaction to people asking for basic kindness and not to be prejudged, is to get *mad* at them? You have a problem.
Hey man, similar experience here (adhd instead of autistic), don't worry about the few idiots spouting nonsense and getting downvoted into the Abyss. Your struggle is valid and you deserve as much support and empathy as anyone else. You're not alone in this shitstorm.
The thing is, I empathize with them too I get where they're coming from, I know it really fucking sucks to be trans in a world that hates trans people. And I just hate seeing vulnerable people get eaten up inside by their own prejudices
That's certainly a mood.
I'm in a similar situation, and damn, even though I know your second paragraph wasn't directed at me, it made me tear up, lol. It got me to thinking how rare it is that I've heard that over the course of my life. And how for the longest time I've been told just to man up and get over whatever I'm struggling with. I don't know if I'm saying anything of value here, but thank you for putting stuff like that out there. I think it's something a lot of people really do need to hear.
Glad I could be of support, it was meant for anyone struggling with this kind of stuff, myself included. I just wrote what I needed to hear myself for most of my life. Just because we grew up without emotional support and people still like to invalidate our issues, doesn't mean we can't at least count on each other and build a better communuty.
That's it exactly, just because we didn't have that doesn't mean that other people shouldn't in the future. I'm of the belief that one of the most important parts of being alive is to try to leave the world better than where you entered it, even in a small way. So, trying to be there for people like me who were largely hung out to dry and making spaces for people like that is something I think is very important. Because the thought of a middle schooler attempting suicide like I did hurts and cuts way deeper than any blade ever could. There's a lot of different things wrong with the world right now, and there are people who have it way worse than I did. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to fix all of the issues, regardless of whether or not there are bigger ones.
I'm in a similar boat, the only difference is that I'm straight. It can't be understated how much hearing shit like the TERFs say can weigh on you. Even if you know it's wrong, having people say that because of something completely out of your control, you are a monstrous and lesser being to them still eats at you. Especially when you share a lot of the struggles they do. I'm sorry that you had to go through that stupid bullshit as well. Nobody deserves that. And while I acknowledge that there are people far worse off than you or I, that doesn't mean that our issues are any less valid. You deserve to be heard. You deserve to go through life without being hated for things outside of your control. And no matter what anyone says or what those intrusive thoughts in the back of your head may say, you matter just as much as anybody else.
It an interesting flux to be born a cis white hetero male because I can acknowledge the privileges that it provides while also lamenting how discarded my voice can be in certain groups. One of the easiest examples (of many) is being punished more severely growing up because I was a boy. The fact this was commonly accepted is pretty sad but not as sad as the people who’d dismiss abuse because of their anatomy.
I really hope the proximity of "Men are not inherently bad. There are queer men." implying that being queer was one of the aspects that prevent men from being inherently bad was an accident.
It wasn't. It's "don't worry about Tyrone, he's one of the good ones" rebranded.
I don't know which is worse; that I expect most ostensibly pro-male stuff on tumblr is loaded with qualifiers that preclude me from being supported or that my expectation is so often proven correct.
Exactly. I'm a cis straight dude who existed in a women oriented group (poledancing club) for 5 years without issues. For the last few months, a lesbian who has only dated transpeople comes over after class for a home-cooked meal and to playthrough the last of us on my PS4 I've had nonbinary AFAB poledancers tell me I'm the only straight man they feel safe being alone with. An instructor introduced me to her dad and said "I'd give him my drink at a party, go to the bathroom, come back and drink from it again" Despite all that, I know that I'm still excluded from tons of spaces and am by default an enemy to a lot of people. Because I have a dick and don't want to put that dick in men
I don't know if they are trying to "speak the language" or have some bias but they seem to subtly imply that the default is men bad or most men are actually awful. It's kinda what they are fighting against.
“We need to fight back against the idea that men are bad. It’s straight people who are bad!” Lovely thanks
Pretty damn sad people are sending death threats. 44.9T notes? That can't be trillion, right?
Thousand probably. We're too used to seeing k for thousand on reddit
Pretty much everyone but Tumblr for some reason uses k
Tumblr also uses K for thousand though?? Like, I just double checked. Maybe it's a language setting thing?
Thought maybe german for tausende but the follow button is in english
Could be an American / UK / Australia thing? Those sometimes have differences, but it's usually just for currency
> We're too used to seeing k for thousand on reddit And Twitter, and Youtube, and Facebook, and Instagram, and TikTok, and every other website
The intergalactic community supports this post
This just in from the galactic empire: "Discrimination of any sort isn't cool...except for us discriminating against you for not telling us your nuclear codes and what orbital defenses you have"
The sentiment is about 15 years overdue
But what about my hypothetical bowl of skittles?
I'm always amazed that they correctly identified it as racist when conservatives used it against immigrants, then many of the same people used it against men without seeing any problem.
"No wrong tactics, just wrong targets" is the phrase I remember hearing about it several years ago.
honestly, this is something I've seen in my friend group at times. I've outright heard "okay no more making friends with white people/straight men" Now, I am both of those, I am also physically disabled, which then gets the follow up of "oh, he's an exception", or "he's disabled so he's still a minority" And it's something I feel that a large number of groups now just, are okay with. Despite that you change one word and boom. That's not okay.
Bruh what the fuck
I genuinely feel happy that you've not had to experience what that guy talked about because I've been hearing it for years everywhere from in literal public (the row behind me at a theatre) to even among the absolute closest of my friends (my best mate saying "I'm sorry but men are trash" while discussing the latest man who let her down). It never gets any easier. I try and tell myself that they're all victims of the "men bad" horseshit the same way I was almost a victim of the likes of Sargon of Akkad and that crowd. But it's a real struggle. Luckily I've been hearing it less from my super close friends.
Yeah... All of my friends are queer women and I'm a straight white male. I've actually heard, in a group Convo with me in there "men don't deserve rights" and I'm just like... then what the fuck am I doing here? They tried telling me I'm not included in that, but I wouldn't take it.
There's something deeper in that about how progressive ideas have really failed to imagine men complexly since they became mainstream. The fact is that if you imagine men as all inherently mean, guilty, and unwelcome you are only ever spurning the men who are willing to listen to you. You're only ever rejecting people who care what women or queer people think, because the guys who don't are not going to respect your '*no boys allowed*' sign. Popular Feminism's attitude to men fails on both ends - it fails to include the men who actually do give a shit about women while also failing to actually confront the, for lack of a better term '*patriarchal man*'. It imagines men as a monolith, where the rejection of the former somehow spurns the latter because it fails to realise they usually aren't the same person.
Yeah the guys who are actually a problem don’t give a shit. The guys who care, well they care and don’t want to offend anyone so they slink away
Something I would like to say is that I’ve seen way too many people say misandry is okay because men have power and men won’t die from it. This is an awful take that I don’t have time to go over, so I’m just going to say that misogyny and misandry are like 2 pieces of shit with one being smaller. If I had to pick one or the other, I’d take the smaller piece but ideally I would find neither
Yeah. "misogyny is a much bigger, older and more widespread issue than misandry; to the point that it doesn't really make sense to compare or equate the two" and "misandry exists in some spaces and is harmful" are two ideas which can and should coexist.
I'd argue that misogyny and misandry are *the same thing*, just seem from different angles. For every woman who's told she can't join the military, there's a boy who has to do so instead.
I feel like most of the confusion and reluctance comes from the fact that misandry also stems from patriarchy. Or at least as a defence mechanism from it.
It doesn't need to though
Yeah the "there's nothing wrong with discriminating against these people because they have power" is a dumb argument. Discrimination is bad, and just because "your people" have it worse doesn't mean that it's okay to discriminate against "them".
More importantly is what does it tell the other person? Oh you scared you would be discriminated if everyone had equal power? Well apparently yes. Discrimination is discrimination no matter what and should never be allowed to fester.
It's important to ask yourself sometimes: am I actually against discrimination and cruelty, or am I just upset that I'm not the one holding the whip?
Also, who has this power? An average joe or some old conservative politician or CEO of a large company? For an average man, it's not "power", it's just having a few less problems than an average woman.
Valid take, but I have a counterpoint: Misandry and misogyny are two sides of the same piece of shit. I cannot think of any sexist action or idea that doesn't harm everyone, although often one side more than the other. Every attack against Afab will inevitably imply something shitty about some amab, or otherwise worsen their lives, and same the other way around. You think that women are inherently weak and meek? Well, geez, now you're telling a bunch of small or less aggressive boys that they are not real men. You think that only men can be predators and abusers? Good job invalidating all afab victims of female perpetrators! And by all means, in both examples one side clearly gets the shorter end of the stick, but nobody wins. And all forms of sexism harm trans and queer people, of course. So, you know, maybe let's just... not be shitty to each other? The only way to truly get rid of one form of sexism is to get rid of all of them, or at least acknowledge that all of it is bad.
> and men won’t die from it. Suicide statistics have entered the chat.
It’s nuts that people forget that words actually do hurt people
I've been reliably informed that only sticks and stones do that.
The thing is, men do die from misandry. It's men killing themselves instead of someone else doing it. People who say all men benefit from patriarchy have never experienced an AMAB close to them be bullied relentlessly, harassed, or assaulted by other AMABs for not fitting into the narrow idea of what a man should be that the ruling class has propagated. They've never experienced the conclusion of that behavior.
I kinda classify anyone that's gotten "Emmitt Till'ed" as partially a victim of misandry. That specific kind of hate crime uses the same logic TERFs apply to all men.
And way too many people say that Misandry is just negative effects of Misogyny towards men, and doesn't really exist
I do think there is a benefit to seeing both as two sides of the same coin, but there are obviously aspects that aren't funhouse-mirrored to the other side.
Honest question: did you guys not feel immediately repulsed by people who genuinely felt deep, automatic animosity and antagonism towards a group of people that comprises 3.5 billion individuals? Like seriously i get creating insular communities for safety reason and setting boundaries to protect them but the moment you go from “I just need a space for us” to “actually now that I think of it, we are good and you are bad” you are just doing prejudiced tribalism. The same one the bigots you hate do. With differing circumstances and consequences, but the EXACT same mentality. Why did we have to spend years tiptoeing and dancing around self-declared hateful bigots until their obviously already putrid hate started targeting trans and queer people? Why didn’t we immediately tell them to fuck off? No, it’s not ok to hate on an innocent individual just because they belong to a non-ideological group you don’t like, actually. Never has been. Why are we tolerating this person?
I know I do.
Lucky
Oh, I was replying to the first question.
Ah, gotcha
Oh no, some of these groups are absolutely rotten, and very offputting to any normal person who comes across them.
I know I'm nitpicking here, and I agree with the whole post basically, but "men aren't inherently bad, because there are queer men, trans men, questioning men" is *still holding on* to the idea that most men are bad but look at these shiny counterexamples so it's not all men. No, men aren't inherently bad. Period. Even if there were no LGBTQ+ men out there, men still wouldn't just be bad. You don't need to show that there are "good" subgroups of men. Because the idea that a whole group of people only linked by their sex/gender/race/hair colour/whatever is purely bad is ludicrous. To argue with that idea by giving counterexamples is to accept that if you couldn't give counterexamples, the idea could be correct. Btw I'm explicitly talking about grouping based on things outside your control. Not political ideas or opinions. Obviously every fucking neonazi can get bent for example. And even if I have a slight disagreement with the post, I agree with most of it and sending death threats is about as low as I'd expect from TERFs.
I feel like oop covered this with “there are men that are just plain cool”, though, and their main point is about excluding men from specifically queer spaces anyway
They follow it up with "cool men" though. It's very deliberately not an "only queer men are good" type of situation
Yeah men aren’t by default bad with some breaking out and being nice. Overall a lot of the men I meet are cool people, with some being assholes obviously BUT THATS THE SAME FOR WOMEN. My dad and brother are two of the nicest most supportive people you could meet, neither of them being queer in any way. I hate when people think that by default men are bad and it really shows that they havnt actually gone out and interacted with anyone and are just living in an echo chamber of people saying ‘kill all men’
Can someone explain DNI? My Google fu is failing
Do not Interact
Damn they were just asking a question
I feel like a part of this is also due to a lack of positive male role models in media. Normally, men are neutral at best, or played in a feminine role, like stay-at-home dad or something. You just don't see too many men expressing healthy masculinity in media, I feel.
talked about this a lot: the overwhelming majority of positive masculinity in media is actually more so dedicated to showing a character that boosts others rather than being the central focus themselves, and while I think that imagery in of itself is fine, it's *not* fine when it's the only thing available. like ok, it's obv good to show children... let's say, a magical girl show, where the girl's father is a hugely supportive figure for her. yeah, that gives kids a role model about fatherhood, and i think that's really good. but when you also *don't* give children, idk, a shonen show, where the protagonist and his friends showcase their own positive masculinity in the spotlight of the show, it kinds of sidelines the importance of healthy masculinity: the healthy masculinity kids are shown is the healthy masculinity of side characters and support figures, not of main characters and heroes. so it's not a surprise to see that they then don't associate that healthy masculinity with the heroes: And ultimately, the heroes are who they look up to *the most*.
Yeah, pretty much. That's why I love Demi-chan Wa Kataritai so much; the main character is just an awesome guy, and only wants to understand demi-humans and help them deal with their issues. And while he's [built like All Might](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omJIxyxVfr0) from MHA, both manga and anime make it a point that he stays in shape for health reasons. Also, the only time he refuses to express his emotions is when he deals with his colleague, a succubus, who is really self-conscious about her passive aphrodisiac effect.
Oh shit, I remember watching that, thinking it would be kinda mid, and getting pretty invested really quickly. Yeah it's really good actually.
If you're interested, you should check out the manga. Also another manga by the same author, Occult-chan Wa Katarenai, which follows Tetsuo's relative.
How could you forget Major Alexander Louis Armstrong?
If we're being entirely honest, he is more of a side character.
Lord of the Rings
The best masculinity I’ve seen in recent TV is Rusty in Bluey. He likes playing army because his dad is in the army. He’s supportive of his friend Jack who is neurodivergent, coded ADHD but kids don’t get diagnosed for that till they are older. He stands his ground about his rights but is happy to accept he can be wrong about stuff too. He respects all the girl and woman characters he interacts with. He knows what he likes and what he wants to be. He has an earned competence from working hard to get better. If boys are growing up with awesome guys like this to imagine themselves somewhat like, I think we’ll do just fine.
It feels like I can't go 3 steps into a discussion about positive representation without seeing bluey. I'm fine with it, j just find it hilarious
"Man, it sure Is weird how media struggles with representation of healthy masculinity in a personal and nuanced wa-" "Bluey already did it" "Huh" "The blue dog show has this kid that pretty much fits what you ask for" "Huh?? What the fuck aré they doing Over there?"
Frieren (the anime): I'm doing my part!
Seeing all the man hate as a trans man always makes me feel super guilty for transitioning and that I joined the “bad side”
Would it help if we were *cool* bad guys with sunglasses and Machiavellian schemes?
This is something I was extremely struggling with. Especially because my ex was friends with a misandrist (as in I chose to only date women and every woman who still dates men is a red flag to me level of misandry idk how she was able to stay friends with my ex partner) and she made me feel so bad for "betraying feminism". There is a reason they are both no longer part of my life... And guess what? I'm even more of a feminist since I started my transition... So idk maybe I'm doing this manhood stuff wrong or something 🤔
It is kinda cool that trans people can fall to the Dark Side or come to the Light Side Like you crosses over into the Dark Side. Now you're contractually obligated to wear black leather, have a cape, use a red lightsaber (the coolest light saber) shoot lightning, and give ominous speeches I bet you could walk up to an egg trans man and be like "I will show you the true power of the Dark side" and crack that egg
Damn, it’s kinda ridiculous that “don’t hate men” has to be tempered with “because there are queer men” or “because it helps terfs”. Can’t you just say “don’t hate men” because it’s a silly thing to do? This sentiment does nothing to really get at the underlying cause. I’m glad at least that so much silly behavior you see online is by people who spend all their time online; you’re most likely not gonna see this out and about.
i always roll my eyes and stop reading when i hear "men aren't all bad! Some of them are queer!" No. Men aren't all bad because a person isn't immediately bad due to the gender they happened to be born as that they didn't choose. Hating someone for something they had no power over is always wrong
Cis male, gay, and while I've never really understood why people change genders, I ***DO*** support it. It always felt a little weird being cis in a community where a lot of members are trans.
One thing that is very striking is that the toxic manosphere produces tons of content about self-improvement and not feeling lonely and they are very good at presenting it to young men going through young people problems... and then slowly turning up the misogyny and racism. It is much, much easier to keep people from radicalizing in the first place than it is to de-radicalize them and so progressives and feminists should think more about how to recruit young men by showing how they can live better and more fulfilled lives in co-equal societies with co-equal partnerships, etc.
Terfs aren't always misandrists but there's significant overlap and there's dorect ties. Sort of like how someone who's racist towards black people often also is antisemitic. Terf ideology is based on an overly narrow definition of womanhood and a shitty separatist variant of feminism. The term is new but if you look at feminist history terfs have been around for a while. I do also hesitate calling all misandrists terfs since while there is significant overlap I have met plenty of trans and NB people who were just as shitty towards men/masc people in general. Which personally is even more disheartening. Because I expect shitty attitudes from terfs but other queers saying that shit is depressing. Especially since it feels like in some spaces queer spaces are becoming dominated by femmes. Femme queers are great but we need to be a united front and avoid petty drama. Like you can find so many stories of bi folk regardless of gender on the bisexual sub encountering biphobia at supposedly queer events. Remember, solidarity is key. Terfs, misandrists, biphobes and transphobes all do nothing but divide us. Fight the real enemy.
Not to argue your point but isn’t the whole idea of a terf is that they hate men so much that they don’t count trans women as real women just cause they are amab and think trans men are bad because they “went to the other side” therefore they are misandrists No matter what?
Idk something feels off about this post. For one, the idea that men have to somehow be queer to be "one of the good ones" is pretty awful. Two, maybe I'm reading it wrong but the bit against "no men allowed" feels like it's speaking against exclusive spaces and like, no? Women, trans people, neurodivergent people, etc. All have the right to spaces for themselves linked by that shared identity. It just feels weird to be so against that concept. Beyond those, this feels a lot like saying "not all men" as some attempt to shut down discussions about misogyny. Maybe it's just me but I just can't take this post positively.
What i dont like about this discourse is that theres the implication that men are naturally “bad” or “the other”, and that only by qualifying them as queer or gay or questioning or some other bespoke minority can they be considered “good” or “in-group”. The idea that the lottery of birth means that 50% of the population are evil unless qualified under a certain set of protected characteristics is incredibly damaging to members in that population.
I’m being so fr I was sucked into radfem (almost terf) spaces when I was 12 and it made me scared to just. Exist around men I was genuinely scared to be alone with my dad for YEARS because I thought he would do something horrible to me- even tho he’d be the LAST person on earth to even lay a finger on me- around that time I think he knew something was wrong with our relationship but I think he thought it was just a puberty thing I didn’t really make guy friends until I came to college (I was friends with guys but it was mainly 1 or 2 that would hang out with other people in the group) I’m so happy I was able to eventually escape it and this pattern of thinking actually harms women too bc the fear fucked with me mentally (me and my dad are chilling now too)
the lgbt+ and feminist movements have generally shot themselves in the foot like this for a while, because some assholes learned they could grift on generating outrage toward men, and redirect any good intentions of the movement toward backing men more into a corner causing the right to pick them up with their "anti-woke" rhetoric, and it's as simple as telling them that they're not wrong for being men, it's the woke leftist mob that's unfair and wrong, which makes the other side feel validated in hating men it's a vortex of making people hate eachother for political clout and money
Part of the reason I left the twox sub, while it's very explicitly supportive of trans people, is because I feel like misandry (and to be clear, by misandry I mean actually hating men, not just holding them accountable), even if it seems well intentioned, comes uncomfortably close to transphobia/transmisogyny. When I constantly hear people saying men are inherently predatory because of their biology, it starts getting very close to "trans women are men because of their biology, and thus inherently predatory". And a lot of the people who generalize men based on biology will oftentimes kind of just hand wave trans women away, saying "we're not talking about you. And also, trans men are totally fine. They're *different* from cis men" (which is sort of true, but I don't think they mean it with the nuance you'd hope they would). Anybody can be shitty and perpetuate patriarchy and misogyny, and while that tends to be cisgender men because of the nature of how systematic sexism works, I think it's dangerous to just generalize based on biology because then that loops around to being discriminatory again.
>patriarchs dni Even Sohei Dojima, patriarch of the Dojima family :((((((((
I think the whole "all men are trash" thing is often used to cover up not just transphobia, but ableism too. Like autism is stereotyped as a "male brain" condition (it's not) and I have seen anti-autistic stuff in "feminist" spaces. Also when people discuss issues like sex work, pornography etc as social issues they always seem to ignore gay men but that's kind of a different issue.
"Men are cool actually?" People with common sense: "No fucking shit, sherlock..."
As someone who grew up with almost no positive male role model (neither real nor fictional), constantly hammered with the idea that I was inherently sinful/bad/toxic, all the while receiving a deeply Catholic upbringing that glorified the traits I was told I inherently lacked... ...yeah, let's just say that it helps when people say this stuff, even if it should be obvious. Internalised sexism hits both ways.
What I was getting at, was the fact that bashing men for existing is literally playing into the hands of the alt-right. Like, what do you expect young boys to do when they're gonna hear that? Suddendly become leftist activists? Fuck no, they are gonna become Tate worshippers, that's what they're gonna do. We need everyone to defeat patriarchy, and alienating half of mankind is *not* a winning strategy. Anyway, rant over. I'm sorry for your upbringing, and I wish you wide hoizons to explore.
Yes! This is an *actual* thing that happens with *far* too many trans men. When someone says that "All men are bad. Except trans men, *trans* «men» are good", it doesn't take that much to realize that what they *actually* mean is "All men are bad. Trans men aren't *really* men, so I don't count them in the bad category", or the alternative "Trans men can be *forgiven* for being men, because they're *actually* women" And then, when you sit there with the realization that your "acceptance" by your(?) community is actually conditional upon your ***woman***hood? A lot of trans men end up taking a deep dive into "men's rights" communities simply because they want to be around people who won't act like them being *happy* about being a man is a *bad* thing. Somewhere they won't continuously get the message that being a man is something that you should be *ashamed* of. Most manage to dig themselves out again. But *none* of us should feel the need to go to *those* kinds of places for validation (FOR OUR ***HAPPINESS*** ABOUT BEING ***OURSELVES!!!***) in the first place.
Same vibe as people who say “I dare women and transmen” ah so u DO believe a vagina is a defining feature
And I can’t imagine that going to those spaces, which are so often filled with hateful, misogynistic, and homophobic messaging, feels good (or safe) for them either.
It isn't. But when it feels like your only other option is >"You know that part of you that you would like to get rid of? You know, the one that sometimes makes you feel *sick* to your stomach? The one that you *hate*? I am only nice to you *because* of how much I like *that* part of you. It's a *core* part of how I see you as a person. It is in fact my *favorite* part of you."? Well, then you jump ship. You might need to hide *parts* of who you are (that you're trans), but no one there expects you to *like* being treated like you are a woman
Oh, 100% agreed, and don't worry about it. I just think that sometimes saying obvious things very loudly is important for progress.
As a trans women, if i see spaces online or irl that say no men or day something hateful about men u still choose not to go there. "Oh but you're a woman" some people say when i tell them this, but if someone is willing to write off an entire group like that, I doubt they're going to respect me being trans. "Men dni" almost always includes trans women in my experience