#demonisation of men

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

I mean, I have to say that until I started doing this work, I just wasn't dialed into the level of hostility that exists. It's so woven into our fabric and normalised.

I was in a major museum in London the other day, and in their greeting card section, they had a card that says, "I like everyone," and then underneath it in brackets, "even men." And that's like a mainstream London museum. And I thought if I went in there and I saw a card that said, "I like everyone", and then in brackets, "even lesbians", you're just never going to be, you're never going to be allowed to sell that kind of card, in that environment. But we can make those kind of jokes about men.

And it's really interesting to me, I am a gay woman, and I often when people are speaking about men in certain situations, or I am reading posts online, I think if I took out "men" from what's being said, and put in "lesbians", what would I be feeling?

Would that be acceptable? Yeah.

Would I feel safe now if in one hand you were telling me something kind of dismissive and stigmatising and shaming about myself, and then also telling me that I need to speak the things that I'm most vulnerable about, having been probably potentially kept those things to myself all my life.

So, the idea, I think when you've kept things so suppressed, the idea then of being vulnerable about it, about speaking it aloud, is so disorientating.

So of course you're just going to send me further away from feeling the psychological safety that I can actually articulate my pain and have it heard with compassion.

So, I think for me, like one of the most fundamental critical aspects of this, that I think it's incumbent on every single person to sit with, because I know how transformative it has been for myself, sitting with it, so the psychologist I mentioned earlier, Martin Seager and a colleague, John Barry, have come up with these ideas about how our empathy is socialised. So how in our societies, our empathy is socialised to see men as causing harm, more readily than we are to see men as being harmed. So, we're more easy to see men as privileged than to see men as being victims of things.

And when that happens, the landscape is no longer like this in terms of our compassion, it's like this. And that is so dangerous then. That's such a fundamental thing that I think every single human being can start engaging with the work of thinking: how is my empathy being socialised? How am I responding when I'm hearing things about men? How might I be listening to the men in my life differently than I might be listening to the women? And start to reflect on our own kind of behaviors around that.

==

If you're the demographic that can be mocked, belittled and demonized with absolute impunity and no repercussions, you're not "privileged."

[langernameohnebedeutung]

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[ace-and-the-rpg-horrors]

can people be normal about Muslims for two seconds oh my God

tell me why obvious and casual stereotyping is unacceptable until it comes to us

[noirineverysense]

tbh all the 'im scared to go out at night', 'id pick being in a forest with a bear rather than a man', 'id never go to x place alone bc men are there' just shows the irrational fears women have that are meant to keep them at home. Never mind the statistics showing that youre much more likely to be sexually assaulted by a man you know than a stranger, that just bc its gotten dark doesnt mean the men in your neighbourhood in daytime become street rapists at night, bc society has taught you stranger danger, that inside your home is the safest place to be when that is the place you are most likely to be sexually assaulted. Sorry but a random man in the forest isnt the most likely person to sexually assault you, its your partner.

[lockandkeyhyena]

holy shit jessie gender made a video acknowledging trans mens issues? she gets more based every day

[mithliya]

Hey did you see the post on ovarit about middle east men beating up a lesbian couple in Canada? Is the news true? How do you find out if it's true or not? The comments on there are something else...

The article:

https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/middle-eastern-men-beat-lesbian-celebrating-birthday-canada/

The ovarit post:

https://ovarit.com/o/WomensLiberation/573777/mob-of-middle-eastern-men-brutally-beat-lesbian-couple-out-celebrating-a-birthda

yeah the story is true, tho that source i find quite iffy bc i know hate crimes by white men wouldn't start with the headline "white men beat lesbian" for example, it would just say "gang of men" instead bc race isn't considered note-worthy if its a white person

i hope they receive justice. theres some absolutely deranged men out there who don't know how to act normally and get violent when theyre barely provoked

also the fact that in no part of any of the articles was these men's religion mentioned, yet ppl in the comments in ovarit made it about muslims and how dangerous muslims r... this is why i keep saying that ppl just use muslim as a way to disguise their racism. even tho clearly, on ovarit, theres no need to disguise any of it and u can openly talk about how wrong it is to support refugees escaping their countries

[soup-mother]

like it's sorta like ship of theseus-ing patriarchy a lil bit idk. why even call it masculinity at that point you can just be something else? idk how compatible "masculinity" as a concept is with a free world and all the values ppl assign to it are either just regular virtues anyone can have or patriarchal violence so like.... What's left?

[live-love-laugh-lesbian]

Low key hate how these days every time feminists try talk about weaponised incompetence we have to put a disclaimer that we're not talking about disabled people.

It's just incredibly annoying to be in both feminist circles and disability circles and see someone go "ok but can men stop making excuses for not doing cleaning" and immediately see someone go "uh what if he has adhd and forgets to clean".

[deanwax]

wahey kids it's 2024, time to leave the idea of "I hate men" in the shit chute where it belongs. You cannot demonise ANY gender if you want a world where people can freely explore their gender identities. Yes that includes cis genders; cry about it. I don't give a shit about any of your personal experiences with men who were also cruel or also violent or also lazy, it's not an excuse to hold a prejudice against a huge swathe of people like some kind of gender-racist freak. You can grow up and make assessments of individuals instead of disparaging them by default for being a man. How's this for a hot take: if you "hate men", you "hate trans people". No asterisks.

"buh buh buhhh the gender socialisation! It makes ALL men violent!" You took the M&Ms analogy too literally. It's a potential violence, not guaranteed. Stop hating men by default and maybe you can help shape a world of individual accountability instead of careless assumptions. Of the two, which world do you think is more likely to be a breeding ground for bad behaviour?

[mobiused]

Daily reminder that demonising a gender is bioessentialist and anti-progressive 😴😴😴

[obstinatecondolement]

Also buck fucking wild to me if people are calling FWB a cringe straight people thing when hookup culture is like... not traditionally a straight cultural institution, let's say.

[proudfreakmetarusonikku]

tbh i think all trans people experience a lot of the stuff that’s generally labelled under Being A Thing That Happens To This Specific Group Of Trans People- fully intentionally and not mistaking them for another group- just to varying degrees. and i'm obviously not talking about really specific shit bc that can vary but like in general. all trans people experience, to some degree, every sort of dehumanisation. they’re all demonised, sexualised, infantilised, erased, ect. and trying to make a judgement that one group of trans people is never subject to something so broad isn’t helpful. i've seen posts calling for violent sexual assault of every single possible kind of trans person. not assuming they’re something else, but specifically targeting them for their specific identity. i've seen posts erasing and misgendering famous and historical trans people of all genders. i've seen posts treating all possible kinds of trans people as poor mentally ill people being manipulated. this isn’t to say there isn’t transphobia targeted at certain groups- obviously there is, that’d be stupid to deny. but i think claiming such broad categories of dehumanisation only happen to one specific type of trans person is unhelpful, even if they vary in the specifics and that can be helpful to discuss.

[bougiebutchbitch]

I'm barely on tumblr anymore but I'mm very glad to see you have correct opinions on Izzy Hands.

pahahahaaaa it's correct opinions about Izzy Hands ONLY here, because I block his haters very liberally

I just think that post that said 'you all say you want morally grey queer characters, but some of you can't even handle Izzy Hands' was right on the money

and I would extend it to 'some of you can't handle the fact that Ed Teach is a babygirl but ALSO a kinda objectively awful person sometimes' lmaooo

[yuri-for-businesswomen]

Oh okay then I just overreacted and misunderstood the point you wanted to convey. I'm sorry I guess this is a sensitive topic for me.

There are still some things I don't agree with but I do agree with you on the fact that,yes men tend to approach abuse and rape in a different & more violent matter, (that is not to say that women can't be violent of course) therefore we must be precise in our definition to show that this is more prevalent with men.

This reminds me of instances where men bring up the "oh so you think women can't rape/kill/assault..." etc When we advocate for exclusive female spaces. And the issue here is that they're equating 2 different things: relative safety & absolute safety, will I be 100% safe in male or female spaces? No. Bit will I be safer in female spaces compared to the male ones? Absolutely.

I will always choose a female locker room, I will always be more scared of a random man instead of a random woman, I will always pick a female roommate...even though my abuser was a woman.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that yes categorization based on level of violence does matter, and at the same time it doesn't mean the non violent abusive or rapist "instances"

Again I'm sorry for overreacting & for jumping to that false dichotomy, a dichotomy that you didn't even imply, I'll leave you be.

im genuinely glad we understand each other now, and i fully understand this is a sensitive topic, especially considering you have experienced other women not taking what happened to you seriously! our fight against male violence should never leave us blind to female abuse.

i think relative versus absolute violence is actually a really good point. i mean it just makes sense, seeing as we go from statistics and likelihood most of the time: is it more likely i get assaulted, or even „just“ harrassed, in a shared or female-only space? female only spaces does not protect us from all harm and abuse, just reduces the likelihood.

[delusion-of-negation]

1/2 I've been on this earth for more than 20 years, and in all my time knowing about TERFs and RADFEMs, I legit have never understood their point. I see what they're doing, I "get it" but I don't understand. For all their hatred of men, and GNC, trans, NB, aces, bis, gays, whatever, they also seem to hate women, and I don't understand. They don't like women, they think women are disgusting, stupid, helpless, worthless, weak, and the only good woman is a very specific idealised fantasy version of

I've been on this earth a few days (eros split, they're fine afaik, it basically came out of nowhere, I'm thinking of zorua as a name), however my system used to argue with terfs and has been (very painfully) friends with a few, while anything I say just inherently oversimplifies because no group is a monolith, the ones we had success talking to in-depth is a selection bias itself, and putting complicated thought processes into words always does that, I'd probably say I'm egotistical enough to think I have a grasp on an overall trend. type 1: trans men who have trauma from men who were hetero, and they don't want to become hetero men, so the ideology that reassures them that they're not is an alluring way, simply put, of avoiding that. type 2: older women who just don't understand things or have the tech-savvy ability to research the words they've never heard, but another older woman they have respect and admiration for said terf talking points and showed a completely out of context twitter screenshot, and mean internet words aren't something they've ever seen before so it seems so uniquely cruel. type 3: grew up conservative and never let go of gendered stereptypes, but learnt baby's first feminism and now hates men and anything they perceive as male or masculine, by definitions that they can't admit to themself are rigid and totally informed by their upbringing. the first needs women to be some idealised inherent thing to protect themself, the second has not thought through or researched arguments against those things implied by the catchphrases and half-remembered discussions, meanwhile the third just genuinely believes those things and an attempt to get them to process that feels like a personal attack. generally, they're common types - a lot of people think of te/rfs simply as what happens when you do too much feminism, but it really isn't, and that's a belief they want you to have because the narrative that they're the real, pure feminists serves them. what actually separates te/rfs and sw/erfs from regular feminists is a massive dose of ignorance, fear, and hatred. of course, I'm only talking about genuine te/rfs here, there's also pseudo-te/rfs, the conservatives or na/zis or hate groups who adopt catchphrases, pretty often transparently lacking genuine belief once you know those beliefs (like when you hear somebody talk about a book in school, but they clearly read the wiki and didn't read it), because obviously their claims to be standing up for women are straight falsehood, rather than misinformed genuine belief that they are.

[eyeciclez]

Saw a post that implied autistic boys are let off for outbursts, while talking about meltdowns. Bro, no, they aren’t. No one sees autistic meltdowns as socially acceptable, no matter the gender. This only shows you’ve never seen how severely mistreated most autistic people are, especially for their meltdowns. Boys/men and girls/women.

It’s not at all comparable to, say, allistic men having a temper tantrum or choleric outburst. Believe me, people know the difference.