#liberal feminists would call this misandry

[burningtheroots]

My dream is finding some like-minded radfems as friends and not feeling as if our patriarchal society has won in my personal life.

And I also dream of finding a woman who strictly practices female separatism so we can be happy and joyful in peace, without ANY kind of male intervention or influence.

Hope dies last. :‘)

[artie5o5]

Hot take but there is absolutely no such thing as a ~male feminist~

A man, by nature, cannot be a feminist. Even the most liberated man, the most self-proclaimed liberal man, benefits from the existence of patriarchy. Being a feminist, and being against patriarchy, goes against every man's self-interest.

These liberal men tend to "stand for women's rights" as a show of virtue signaling, but when it comes to practice, they cannot tolerate any criticism of their gender.

They do not want to acknowledge the atrocities committed by men. They don't want to acknowledge men's tenacity for violence, their moral failures. They equate misandry with misogyny as if they're somehow equal in weight. Misandry is a joke, misogyny is dangerous - misandry does no harm to men, misogyny kills women. To a liberal male feminist though, they are two wrongs of equal gravity. If you ever bring up men's wrongs, they label you a misandrist and tell you you're just as bad as the men killing and raping your sisters. They call you brainwashed and led by propaganda and tell you to get off of twitter.

If you bring up your lived experiences, they'd first deny it - call it hyperbole, then discredit it - say that lived experiences are analogous and not valid talking points since Incels are also operating on lived experiences. Etc etc.

There is no such thing as a male feminist. Feminism, and women's liberation, do not benefit any man. Even the most staunch liberal man wants to benefit from women's labor. They also want a submissive, silent, demure women who would look feminine and beautiful and serve them dinner. But they also want praise for being an enlightened man. They want their cake and they want to eat it too.

Any woman who's been in a relationship with these liberal "feminist" men, romantic or otherwise, could testify to this duality in their nature. Every man benefits from your subjugation. Your father, your brother, your "friend" and most of all your husband. Any woman who thinks otherwise is deluding herself

[agent-44mc]

the phrase "girls girl" is sexism evolved and created in fear of being labeled as misandry and/or the south's fear of being labeled of a leftist, liberal, or feminist.

I am all for being a girls girl, but men aren’t required to like all men. Women now are required to like all women and everything about them. We must like someone’s music just because a woman made it. They can’t be competitive and trash talk like men because that’s not being inclusive for all women. We can’t talk about how we dislike a certain style, god forbid we hate a certain style; god forbid we say we hate something a woman is a part of.

women can take the same amount of criticism a man gets. BUT. Women shouldn’t be criticized just for being a woman. They shouldn’t be harmed, discriminated, hated just for BEING a woman.

I hate this new “girls girl” culture. I hate how people criticize Taylor Swift (womp womp) for being competitive on the charts and calling her “not a girls girl” simply for doing what a man would do with other men.

men don’t have to be a “boys boy” or whatever. Why?

Even in “feminist culture” we see harmful things.

don’t just say you’re a girls girl to gentrify and make yourself less scary to men. Say you’re a feminist. Criticize women. Advocate on your own life that every woman, even the ones you criticize are safe and treated as equal.

We are now held to the same standard we were in 1950 to always be pleasant and never to hate anyone. But it's been re-branded to being a girls girl.

But it's so entertaining when we are, isn't it? That's something we may never escape no matter what we do.

Be someone who fights for women. Be someone who believes all women are equal and all deserve to live life as freely as men. But you do not have to like every woman, just as you come prepared in mind that you may not be liked.

All that is truly important is that we don't put down other women to intentionally HURT them. There is a line between simply not liking a woman and putting them down intentionally.

AND WHILE I'M ON THE SUBJECT, I am also tired of this "pick-me" shit that's been going around. Blatant sexism that comes stems from the expectation of how women should act. You have no cause to call a woman a pick me just for mentioning that she likes video games, or may just get along better with boys- it depends on how she treats about women. That is all that matters!

And yes- you get to not like her. Because? We're human too.

Writing this very essay has made me feel inhuman. We need a guide on how to be morally right because we keep having to put up with how society wants us to be. We should be girls girls, but we also need to entertain by getting pulled into rivalries intentionally for the sake of.

If you skipped everything I said, this is the only thing you need to worry about. TREAT EVERYONE AS EQUAL AND HAVING SUCH EQUALITY TO EXERCISE AN INHERENT LIKE TO OUR OWN FUCKING FEELINGS TOWARD PEOPLE. TREAT EVERYONE AS EQUAL; AS YOU WOULD NOT CARE FOR ONE TO DISLIKE YOU, BUT WOULD CARE VERY MUCH IF THEY ALLOWED YOU TO BE HARMED, EMOTIONALLY OR PHYSICALLY. BUT- HATING OR DISLIKING SOMEONE FOR A QUALITY THEY WERE BORN WITH CANNOT BE JUSTIFIED BY ANY FORM; UNLESS SAID QUALITY HARMS OTHERS.

THAT IS FEMINISM. LIBERATE YOURSELF FROM THE NARRATIVE AND GO FREELY.

[biologusputrifier777-blog]

Many Tumblr users are Arch Conservatives in their mindset

I have frequently encountered Tumblr users who are reactionaries, and this is frankly not uncommon. In general, we live in a reactionary era and many workers are divorced from their movement, but what I have encountered on this site frequently goes beyond the base ignorance that the capitalist class inflicts upon the proletariat. Namely, a mindset that is defined by two factors, One, a single-minded focus on making one's own position in Capital as comfortable as possible at the expense of all else, and two, an overwhelming belief that the inevitable self-emancipation of the working class represents some biblical apocalypse. That last part has two meanings, as those who spew it often hurl it as a slur against the real movement, claiming that Communists are simply religious fanatics who seek some mythical purification of the world. The second meaning is less complex, they imagine the means by which the self-emancipation will occur, class war, as an outright apocalyptically violent event. This feeds into their first delusion, allowing them to further slander the real movement by claiming that the imagined pseudo-christian fanatic communist who has done nothing but trade in the bible for "some leftist book" craves an orgy of violence and murder, allowing them to relive the liberal glory days of the red scare and cold war.

The first one is simple, the activism proposed by the average Tumblr liberal represents not an attack on Capital, but an attempt to carve out a place within Capital. It is often very 1st wave feminist in its approach, focused less on empowering the whole of the working class, and more on allowing members of their group to become part of high society and function more freely within the Capitalist status quo. This manifests on Tumblr in a few ways, feminists who prickle at mentions of misandry (ie mostly just mfers figuring out how the capitalist system exploits masc proletariats), trans femmes who wax poetically of the inherent moral superiority they have gained through their transition and brave fight against the gender binary (Lexi if you see this just know that I am 100% talking about you) and god knows how many liberal feminists whose toxic ideas about the superiority of women over le evil, predatory men have morphed into the outright fascism of Terfism. Of course, while the examples I highlighted are pretty fucked up, in most cases I sympathize with this desire, and this part of the post is not the one where I am calling out everyone who acts like this as arch-reactionaries. Trans people should be able to secure steadier employment, black people should not face hiring discrimination, etc. This is not even in and of itself a bad mindset, it is simply the prereq for a bad mindset, but I will point out some of the flaws with it. The push for Black Capitalism failed to secure liberation for African Americans, and businesses such as "Your Black Muslim Bakery" have proven that you can't just fix the impacts capitalism has on marginalized groups by ensuring the existence of capitalists from within those groups. Secondly, on the more political side, Feminism has shown how even the most historically progressive liberal movement, one aimed at the liberation of women from bondage, can go on to become a reactionary tool of the capitalist state and even complicit in its abuses of women. For more on that, read "In an Abusive State" by K. Bumiller. But on the whole, this mindset alone, while inferior to a revolutionary mindset, which I highly suggest you cultivate (This reading list has worked wonders for me and I would suggest giving it a shot), isn't any more reactionary than the mindset of just wanting a job that lets you buy a house, which is to say barely reactionary at all.

On the other hand, the second thing we will be talking about is so reactionary that if you altered the words a bit you could slot it into Mein Kampf's section about "godless eastern bolshevism" and not change the meaning much. Namely, the idea that revolution serves some function as a biblical apocalypse that vile, bloodthirsty communists want to do out of a sick desire to purify the world with blood. To these truly, staggering titans of intellect, Class war is both impossible and undesirable, and if it were to happen, it would only serve to destroy the world, kill untold millions, and put some imagined dictator on the throne. I'm sure that many of you reading this have seen that godawful post with a pornographic depiction of kids dying because power to a hospital got cut, trying to scare readers into thinking that class war is bad because people might suffer as a result. After all, Capitalism is famous for how rarely it kills sick kids. Regardless, it's rather stupid to engage with this on the terms of the reactionary. I will not attempt to philosophically prove that morally speaking, class war is justified, moralism is counterproductive if material reality itself informs and guides your views about the world. Namely, Class war is not some imagined future, it's actually happened. The Paris Commune and the 1918 World revolutions happened. The desire for and the belief that a successful self-emancipation of the proletariat could exist is not driven by mysticism, it's driven by actual historical evidence at this point, backed up by scientific study, and kept relevant by the fact that the needs of the working class are not being met. The people who spout the "Revolution = Revelations" myth are simply refusing to engage with reality or the needs of the working class, and instead take refuge in an imagined world in which their enemies are simply morally bad and desire the end of the world by virtue of them being morally bad. The fact that dissenters from outside their camp disagree with this is simply proof of their fanaticism. In this sense, these goobers are the very model of an idealist.

Secondly, these people ironically enough, are very much hypocrites, as they often are the ones who most plainly view the revolution in apocalyptic terms. They will hue and cry about the millions of people who will certainly die if the class war is started. Who will feed us (they do not seem to understand that the workers would have seized the farms if the revolution is successful), who will give us power (they seem to not understand that the workers would seize the means of producing power), and etc. The fact that the violence will likely flow from the state trying to suppress the workers (as it already does), is also disregarded, the communist is blamed because they suggested the revolution, as if that alone is what willed violence into the world. No, we must accept the status quo and work within it to create non violent change! The non violence of a status quo in which 9 million people die each year of hunger must be preserved. The status quo under which half the worlds population does not have access to quality healthcare, in which half a million people die a year in imperialist wars, in which almost 2 million die of easily curable diseases, and in which billions are exploited every day until they die in lives made barren and empty by the crushing demands of Capital. But no, we must never think of revolution, it's violent and could kill people!

It's deeply stupid, born of sheer ignorance and comfort. They care only that the deaths that might occur in a class war would happen within their earshot, and it does not matter that it would be to end the system that currently kills over 10 million people a year in the pursuit of profits, if that class war would force them to give up their comfort. That they imagine the turmoil such change would bring as an apocalyptic orgy of violence and project it onto evil communists who clearly must desire it not for legitimate change or a better world, but simply wanting to kill lots of people for no reason other than some abstract lack of morality renders them arch conservatives of the highest order, and a flock which McCarthy himself would be proud to shepherd.

[amazinglissawho]

Radical feminism gives itself a bad name... It's literally about how men are inherently and irredeemably evil. I hope that you reconsider your position on this.

I implore you to look into the history of Radical Feminism. I will give a basic overview. Keep in mind that I’m still in college studying Women Studies currently, so most of this comes from lectures/my textbook, but I will link sources at the bottom.

To understand this, we need to separate feminist theories and thoughts into two camps. One is Liberal Feminism the other is Radical Feminism.

Liberal feminism looks to fix misogynistic structures (and all other oppressive forces for that matter)within the system that already exists. For example, lets say there is a building where it’s almost entirely men in power and there is a misogynistic culture. A liberal feminist might solve this by putting more women in power there.

Radical feminism on the other hand looks to end patriarchal structures by destroying the structures itself and putting new ones in place where bigotry isn’t present. So going back to that company, a radical feminist may solve this by getting rid of that workplace hierarchy in the first place and creating a new system.

Neither of these approaches to feminism are inherently wrong. There’s some very good arguments from both liberal and radical feminists. But there’s also some absolutely awful ones.

TERFs are radical feminists. It really does not take long to find TERFs when you look at contemporary radical feminism resources and articles. I would never argue that they aren’t, but that is only one radical feminist belief. Radical feminism isn’t something where “this is what radical feminism is, it has to be that.” And their version of destroying systems is misandrist and also usually racists, and I feel it goes without saying that it’s also is transphobic.

My belief that some issues can only be fixed by dismantling the systems that already exist, does not mean I think the answer is misandry or transphobia. TERFs do. Some other RadFem groups do. It’s one of the many reasons I absolutely can’t stand them. They have damned what it means to be a radical feminist in the public eye. This is why I don’t call myself a radical feminist, even though I agree with the basic concept of having to destroy the system itself. TERFs and a few other RadFem groups have taken it to be something hateful and harmful to everyone outside of the cis white women umbrella (yes I’m aware there are POC who are TERFs it doesn’t change that a lot TERF and certain RadFem beliefs are racist).

If you would like to read some not transphobic radical feminist works. I highly reccomend “Feminism is for Everybody” by Bell Hooks and “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House” by Audre Lorde. You should be able to find copies of both of those online. I’ve also linked sources below on a lot of what I’ve said.

Sources: https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-radical-feminism-3528997

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/17/radical-feminism-social-justice

[firecrackerhh]

Seeing someone be a fan of helluva boss and also post fucking SWERF and TERF talking points in other posts is like…bitch are you a fucking retard?

Like for fucks sake why tf do fucking weirdo conservatives (cuz frankly if you think that way, you’re a conservative) even like Viv’s stuff to begin with?

Like how can you be ok with messy gays but bitch about inclusive cute comics about non-binary and trans identities or cry about “duh liberals!!!” Or cry that men paying sex workers is “rape culture” as if every sex worker is being forced into it or some fucking horseshit.

I’m not saying I’m against discussions about this shit, I’m not saying there’s no nuance, but assuming every guy is automatically a rapist over consensual sex is fucking bullshit. That’s not nuance, that’s misandry.

You second wave feminist types have some shit to work through or something I stg.

Like for the love of god the cognitive dissonance is astounding, how can you even feed yourself, I’m surprised people like that like anything Viv creates.

Cognitive dissonance is a fascinating phenomenon truly.

For the record, I don’t tolerate that fucking SWERF/TERF shit, if you do that shit and you follow me you can frankly take a nice long walk off a short fucking pier, I don’t care, die mad about it.

If you’re a piece of shit to innocent people for no good fucking reason, you are frankly, vermin to me, I reiterate, you can fucking die mad about it.

And honestly, if you’re a TERF/SWERF, I don’t think you should be watching Viv’s stuff either, people like you just…frankly, you go against everything the show itself stands for, neither of Viv’s shows promote conservative values of any kind, and if you think they do…there’s not enough insults I can throw your way.

And if you’re a fucking “progressive” person who uses conservative talking points to try to make yourself look ‘better’ than the other left leaning people around you, you’re a fucking pick-me and it’s fucking pathetic.

If you think shitting on enby or trans identities or sex work or any other kind of “degenerate” behavior will make you look better in the eyes of conservatives…there’s not enough insults.

Conservatives will never like you, just cuz you’re the last person to die at the gas chamber doesn’t change the fact you’re in the fucking gas chamber!

How can I respect these people when they don’t even have respect for themselves?

I’m just keeping it real here, if left leaning people are “degenerate” because of the gays and sex work or whatever else, then hoo BOY conservatives are no fucking better.

Stg some conservatives practically wanna go back to the days of the Roman Empire, motherfucking Ancient Greece kinda bullshit, (I’m pretty sure going backwards to such an extent is also degeneracy tbh, if we’re going by the actual definition of the word,) and even then, they can’t fucking escape the gays or sex work, motherfucker do you not realize how fucking gay the Greeks and Roman’s were???? (Well, to the Greeks and Romans at the time, it wasn’t gay if you were a top)

Sex work, prostitution, whatever you call it, is considered “the oldest profession” for a reason! As if someone selling their body for sex is in any way different from how every day people sell their fucking bodies to their dead-end jobs or the fucking military, it’s all fucking capitalism baby and we’re the fucking currency!

Who cares about dollars and cents when it’s people that make the system work, monetary value is rather arbitrary to begin with imo, and it’ll be especially worthless if God forbid the nukes drop and kill us all. No people, no money,

Don’t even get me started on that retarded fucking 1950s ad campaign bullshit that conservatives are retarded enough to believe was in any way real and not purely fucking…well, advertising.

All conservatives really want is for everyone to be fucking subjugated under their fucking heel, so convinced they will be at the top of the hierarchy without realizing that, realistically, they would also be eating their fair share of shit, it’s not like every Roman citizen was a part of the Senate, not every white man in the 50s was fucking living it up in suburbia with a happy wife and 2 kids and a dog. (Never mind how many fucking tranqs those poor women probably had to take so they didn’t fucking off themselves or their husbands after they got an ass whooping for forgetting to smile or some retarded ass shit)

And if you’re a woman (or a minority in general tbh) and fucking drinking that Kool-Aid?

I reiterate, how on God’s green earth, heaven, and Lucifer’s infernal hell, could I possibly respect you if it’s obvious you don’t respect yourself?

If you honestly think life would be better for you…frankly I think you should be checked out, your delusions cause you nothing but suffering.

But hey, it ain’t my life, if you wanna be miserable, go ahead, just remember when reality knocks you the fuck out one day, I imagine very few people are going to have sympathy for you.

…I can’t stay on topic for shit can I?

Whatever, not like anything I said wasn’t truthful, I may be harsh, but it isn’t without good reason.

Some people make me wanna just…crawl into their brain so I can study it like an entomologist would study a bug.

Hell, sometimes I wish I could do that for myself just so I could know wtf my problem is Lmao.

🔥🧨~Firecracker out~🔥🧨

Also happy Pride month 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

[someoneintheshadow456]

For real most of y’all are only suddenly and aggressively denouncing Harry Potter because you want to look like a good person. Most of you only care about trans women because it’s “the right thing to do”, and not because you actually care about them as a group.

Y’all didn’t even believe TERFs were an issue until as late as 2018, when egalitarians and anti feminists have been complaining about them for YEARS.

And that too, when you have a problem with them, it’s only because of the way they treat trans women. Everything else, the gender essentialism, the misandry, the transphobia towards trans men, the ableism, blatant girl on girl hate, the racism, and the insistence that gender is a social construct and a choice, you happily agree with. That’s why it took you so long to acknowledge them for the menace they are, and called the women who have been saying they were a problem as “not like other girls” and “male sockpuppets.”

You were comparing Trump to Voldemort and carrying HP signs to the Women’s March in 2016, and now that JKR has become a TERF, you want to pretend as though you the franchise has always been transphobic when if it really was, you would have seen it from the beginning.

You choose to denounce Harry Potter because it’s easy. It’s showy, it’s performative. It’s a way of tricking yourself into thinking you’ve solved transmisogyny everywhere by saying that kids series is bad, and everyone who likes it is bad. And this way, you can be as transphobic as you want and point to your hatred of HP as “proof” that you clearly “care”, because you have the right opinions.

You really want to stop transphobia? Why not acknowledge the horrific abuse of trans men within “liberal” LGBT circles? Why not acknowledge how trans women are expected to 100% pass, and be totally ultra feminine, and aren’t allowed to sympathise with men in any way? Why don’t you stop calling GNC cis people as trans, which causes GNC trans people to doubt themselves? Why don’t you stop calling gender a fake social construct and a costume you can wear, trivialising the struggles of everyone whose gender doesn’t match their sex?

Of course, that would be difficult. It’s much easier to scream at people who know how to separate the art from the artist instead. It’s much easier to denounce the kids book you once held as a sacred cow instead.

[femsolid]

I hate it when people, especially people who call themselves Egalitarians demand feminists prioritize everyone but themselves in their movement. Part of the reason feminism started was BECAUSE people didn't care about women's issues. Most groups aren't putting time and effort to make sure they consider women in their politics and mostly find them irrelevant. So what is this nonsense that women must fight for people who would never fight for them in the first place.

Egalitarians are anti-feminists and men's rights activists. They call themselves egalitarians to point out that feminism is not about equality but about misandry, they believe men are oppressed by women, I would advise not engaging with them at all, they are like a little cult, you can't reason with them, they are not interested in reality or justice, just in "trolling feminazis".

Liberals, who have developped very obvious anti-feminist tendencies these days, also claim that feminism should not focus on women and should be about everybody and everything. As you pointed out, feminism is the only social movement that is not allowed to exist for its own purpose, despite the fact that it was created because women were left out of every other social movement. Radical feminism really is the last movement that focuses entirely on women and refuses to let men derail it, that's why it's being demonized so much. It's a really sad state of things when practicing basic feminism is perceived as "extreme" and "bigoted" isn't it? Oh well, we're still standing.

[idiosyncraticrednebula]

May I ask why a Christian would hate radfems and terfs but not libfems or whatever the opposite is? They're heavily anti p0rn which at least Christians can agree on.

Libfems, radfems, TERF's are all bad, regardless of how they self-identify. I only agree with the radfems when it comed to porn and "sex work", but that's about it. What's unfortunate about it, though, is that much of the criticism doesn't come out of a genuine desire to help the disadvantaged women, but to spite and hate on men, which is not gonna help at all. I understand that most of the vitriol radfems have towards the opposite sex comes from bad/awful pasts, but that is not an excuse to be so spiteful and toxic towards the entire male sex and to attack women who don't share their viewpoint of the world. I'm as critical of them (and feminists in general) as I am of Red Pillers, who are basically the male counterpart of modern feminists. Libfems might not seem as "harsh" and as "spiteful" as their radical counterparts, but they are just as bad if not worse, since they enable and approve a lot of the hateful stuff their radical counterparts say but still wanna claim that "they aren't like them". Feminism, at its core, is radical, so radfems are technically the "actual" feminists, if we wanna get real; the thing is that they tend to separate themselves from their mainstream counterparts because they believe their so-called "liberal" counterparts haven't really "delivered" on doing what feminism was always meant to do, which is to destroy the so-called patriarchy™. Libfems have always been a more tame version of radfems, and even though they may differ on certain topics, at their core, they are two sides of the same coin. TERF's are radfems that pretty much hate on transgender women not because of the transgender identity itself, but because of the fact that they are male (regardless of whether people like this fact or not), though, most people call out TERF's mainly for their "transphobia", not recognizing that a lot of that "transphobia" is rooted in misandry, but I don't expect Tumblr to even care about that in the slightest since this site is notorious for its pseudo-social justice, so having at least some empathy for the male sex is a big no-no. I don't genuinely hate on them, even if I do come off as hateful and spiteful towards them at times, deep down, I do feel sorry for them. I feel sorry that they were done so wrong in life that they came to such self-destructive conclusions that they naively believe is gonna "help" them but it's actually gonna do them more harm in the process, even if they never realize it. This applies to the so-called red pill or manosphere types as well. It's hurt people everywhere, and the more hatred and toxicity they spread, the deeper their wounds get instead of receiving genuine healing.

[mothman-dyke]

How many things do you think are accepted by the social media “leftist” crowd that absolutely would not fly if it was done thru a feminist lens? Thinking about this on a larger scale (people being broadly pro- “safe space” til someone cares about womens spaces, the backlash to “misandry” among those who make the same style of jokes about straight people etc) up to the small things (people on twitter posting callout posts for musicians with wealthy parents, vs women getting dragged for focusing on female musicians writers etc). This is broadly rhetorical btw, mainly because I KNOW how many so-called leftists are offended by feminists and the fight for womens liberation even as they claim the label feminist. Mostly I just wanted to complain about it ig

[bluewavenewwave]

Feminism Masterpost

Feminism - Feminism is about supporting all women

I’m going to preface this by saying that I am a pro-choice liberal feminist. When I say “bad feminists” I mean people who claim to be feminists but have the wrong idea about feminism, hate men and dismiss real issues facing men, and tear other women down and pit women against each other. Yes I am generalizing, but you will get my point. 

Feminism is important. Feminism is about gender equality. Feminism is good but, yes, there are some bad feminists. There are bad chefs, bad singers, bad dancers, bad athletes, and there are definitely bad feminists. (And I’m not even going to talk about TERFs, because TERFs are not feminists, they are just hateful people.)

Feminism is not about fighting men or calling men bigots or misogynists. Some very well are, but men collectively are not. Feminism is not about hating men and bringing men down and threatening men. It is not about dismissing men’s issues or saying that there are no challenges and problems facing men, or saying men’s issues don’t matter.

Feminism is not about taking away from men or ridiculing men or trying to control men. It is not about saying men cannot do what they want (within reason) or stopping men from living their lives peacefully. Feminism is not about women taking over the world or becoming more powerful or superior to men. It is not about oppressing men.

Feminism is not about hating men just because they are men. Think about if that were reversed - hating women just because they are women. That is misogyny and it is wrong and it is what we are trying to abolish. Hating men because they are men is misandry, and it’s just as wrong as misogyny. It’s just mindless bigotry and hate and the world doesn’t need more of that. 

There are feminists who believe feminism is about all those things - all about misandry and oppressing me. Those are the bad feminists. There are also feminists who believe all women should go to college and work and be in STEM majors and be masculine and be athletes and wear pantsuits and have short hair and be outspoken about feminism and be assertive and be a boss. And some women are these things and that’s great. But there are a lot of women who aren’t these things and that’s also great. 

Feminism is not about supporting only one image of a woman, or only one set of beliefs about women; feminism is about supporting all women, in all walks of life, with all different backgrounds and views and beliefs. Feminism is about women supporting other women and fighting for gender equality and dignity and respect. 

Working women and housewives and stay at home moms are equal. No matter what a woman’s job is, whether that’s an IT worker, company CEO, waitress, dancer, hairdresser, veterinarian, stripper, teacher, doctor, nurse, firefighter, cheerleader, or nanny - all are valid and all should be respected. A woman’s choice of career should always be validated and respected, even if it’s not the same career choice you made. 

No matter how a woman chooses to dress and stylize - long hair, short hair, painted nails, makeup, natural, dresses, skirts, pantsuits, jeans, high heels, boots, sneakers, slides, jewelry, no jewelry, dyed hair, natural hair - it’s all valid and should be respected. A woman’s choice of attire and style should be validated and respected, even if it’s not the same attire/style choice you made. 

A woman’s choice is a woman’s choice and it should always be validated and respected even if it’s not the same choice you would have made.

Bottom line, feminism is about supporting all women, and working towards gender equality. 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Feminism - Feminine Validity - Women shouldn’t have to change who they are to feel like they belong

You’ll often hear a woman or a girl say she just feels like “one of the guys”, whether it’s a girl on a little league team or a woman working a STEM or robotics job. And that’s all very well and good in principle, but the issue I have is this: a woman/girl shouldn’t have to feel like a man or a boy to feel like she belongs. It diminishes her validity as a female in whatever situation she is in; it diminishes the validity of a female playing a “male” sport; it diminishes the validity of a female working in a male dominated field. A girl shouldn’t have to feel like a boy to feel like she can play baseball; a woman shouldn’t have to feel like a man to feel like she can work in a male dominated field. A woman should be able to do whatever she wants and feel confident doing so, while also staying true to herself. 

A woman shouldn’t have to feel like she has to be masculine and “manly” and tough to be respected, because that just furthers the idea that only men should be respected, that women aren’t good enough, and if women want to make it in the world, they should act more like men.

Women should be able to be soft and feminine and girly and non-combative and true to themselves and still have their dreams and goals and aspirations and plans and achievements and talents and skills be recognized, validated, and respected. 

And I am in no way saying that all women are, or should be, soft or submissive or girly or feminine. I’m just saying that for those that are, they shouldn’t have to change anything about themselves to feel confident and respected. No woman should have to change who she is, for any reason. As I said, a woman should be able to do whatever she wants and feel confident doing so, while also staying true to herself. A woman should never need to change who she is to fit anyone else’s views of how she should be. 

[rapeculturerealities]

Legitimate civil rights organizations do not seek equality in the form of pulling other people down to a disenfranchised status. True justice efforts work to elevate the conditions of marginalized groups while dismantling the institutions and policies that are causing civic harm. (It's important to note that men's rights groups don't advocate for the benefit of marginalized genders; their entire focus is securing benefits for the most privileged gender—cis men.)

When women are known to make 54 to 87 cents for every dollar earned by a white man—depending on the woman's race—fighting against networking opportunities for women isn't a reasonable attempt to seek justice; it's a move to re-center male entitlement. Opposing affirmative action for women denies the barriers women have faced in attaining an education and ignores the fields in which women are underrepresented. For those two reasons alone, it can't be construed as a justice-seeking effort at all.

White men have long relied on using the language of liberation to entrench their privilege and power. It's similar to the way conservatives say that they fear for their daughters and wives if transgender people are allowed in women's restrooms, or how Hobby Lobby says it would be religious discrimination to require the company to provide insurance that offers birth control for their women employees. These techniques inevitably work to muddy the waters about who is actually facing discrimination in a given situation.

The use of the word "equality" in the efforts to include women in the military draft is a trollish way of obfuscating the NCFM's goal, which is to retaliate against women for their advances in society over the past century. Suggesting that women also be forced to register for the draft and calling it a victory for equality ignores all the other aspects of American life where women and marginalized genders aren't offered the same opportunities as men. At best, fighting to include women in the draft presumes that all genders currently stand on equal footing; at worst, it presumes that men actually suffer the most on the basis of sex.

Men's rights activists have also been lobbying to redefine sexism to include "misandry" as a way to codify their sense of victimhood, knock women down a peg or two, and further secure their elevated place in society (which they are very anxious about losing). While, historically, the idea that cis men are overwhelmingly marginalized has been laughed out of public discourse, the Trump administration's rhetoric affirming the plight of cis men has reinvigorated these efforts.

The NCFM is offering us a false choice: Women don't need to be forced into registering for the Selective Service before they'll be willing to denounce the conscription of men. It's possible and necessary to oppose the Selective Service for men and at the same time oppose it for other genders too. (It's also unlikely that there will be a draft anytime soon.) True justice is served by challenging the institution and policy, not by making a policy equally harmful to all genders. But justice isn't the business of the NCFM. Instead, men's rights groups are toiling to pull women further down by demanding they be drafted. It's a transparent ploy to make feminists regret ever having wanted equal treatment under the law—by forcing them to obey a law that hurts everyone.

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[femnet]

Where I live, you can often hear married women being referred to as Mrs. of “Husband’s Last Name”. Invitations and other circumstances that require talking about the whole family unit address it as The “Husband’s Last Name”. However, where I live women don’t legally change their names to their husbands’.

Joining fandom communities online has been as much fun as a headache and a learning experience for me. One of the things I learned is that wives do actually change their last names once they get married in some parts of the world and that American women, in particular, are very defensive of the tradition. How do these two things relate? In the past years, the creators of two of my f/m OTPs decided that the female character of the pair would keep her last name after marriage. This has caused quite a lot of tension and disagreement amongst fans because, clearly, the wife not taking her husband’s name meant that the people behind these characters were throwing dirt at the ship. The implication was that she was not really committed to him, that they were not going to last, that their fairytale happily ever after was ruined.

What surprised me is that the female characters of these particular ships are generally praised for being feminist icons (Hermione Granger and Princess Leia, no less!), for being strong and badass, for being equals with their male counterparts. The women who are fans of them and the canon ships they’re in tend to consider themselves feminists or at the very least liberal-leaning. And yet, in discussions with those women I have heard statements like these:

- As a woman, it’s my duty to change my last name to my husband’s to keep the family unit. What kind of mother would I be if I didn’t have the same last name as my children?

- My last name isn’t really “my” last name anyway, it’s my father��s, so why shouldn’t I change it to my husband’s?

- You’re not really committed to the relationship if you don’t intend to take your husband’s name.

- Refusing to change your name and/or pointing out that the tradition is patriarchal is misandry.

- I chose to change my name to my husband’s because I love him (implying that other women are free not to, but heads up, maybe they don’t love their husbands as much).

More times than I can remember, I’ve argued against these notions. It’s INSANE to me the level of denial/conditioning/internalized sexism that pervade American women and the resistance to reflect on it! (I know it’s not all American women and that it’s likely other cultures share these beliefs, but this is the demographic I’ve been in closer contact with---or maybe the louder about this topic---which clashes with my own Latin American culture.)

Now, my main and stronger arguments are:

- Legally changing your name to your husband’s is not a universal practice.

- The “tradition” of the wife taking her husband’s name comes from a time when the man owned his wife. She was something that now belonged to him and needed his mark. You know “The Handmaid’s Tale”, Offred, Of Fred? Yeah, that’s not a fantasy. That’s literally what taking your husband’s name means, from a historical standpoint.

- Sure, many women have their father’s last name, because sadly our parents don’t think of making up a new last name that is all our own. And yet for the years you’ve lived as an unmarried woman, let’s say hopefully over 20, it’s been your name. It’s as much of your identity as your first name. Besides... that’s the case for men, too? I mean, they too have their father’s name. If your father’s name isn’t really yours, how is your husband’s father’s name really his and more important preserving?

- Why, exactly, is it the mother’s duty to keep the family united by giving up part of her identity? It’d make more sense that the wife and husband mashed their last names, effectively becoming a unit that is the sum of their parts, if we really cared about being a unit.

- According to a survey from 2015, men think it’d be emasculating to change their last names to that of their wives’, that it’d take away one of the few remaining incentives for men to get legally shackled (blegh, straight men really are something), that it would be like calling attention to themselves and trying to make a statement, that the family is the man’s domain and so it should perpetuate his name, that it’s a tradition that comes with marriage and equal rights shouldn’t upend that. So, women, tell me again how this isn’t about sexism?

To be clear, I’m not saying you’re less feminist if you chose or will choose to take your husband’s name. Feminism is about choice and respecting women’s choices, after all, and traditions are part of one’s culture. But I’m sick of reading opinions like the ones I listed that directly or indirectly disrespect other possible choices and points of view, when they’re actually the norm in many cultures. We need to understand that some if not all of our choices are rooted somewhere, and that somewhere isn’t always comfortable to face but it’s still there. Sometimes, our choices are not as free as we’d like to believe.

If you’re married or hope to be one day, did you ever consider not taking your husband’s name? Would it be a deal-breaker if you didn’t want to and your partner insisted on it? If you’re not from the US, is this a thing where you live? Comment below!

[aetherclaw]

i think society needs to stop pretending that these things are gendered and sweeping female female abusers and rapists under the rug or even idolizing them for their crimes while accusing male victims of being abusers just for being male and drowning everything in anti-male hate speech. believe me, if there where as much anti-female hate speech and these things where reversed women would be just as outraged over being stereotyped and discriminated against in such a way. though according to the CDC in the US 70.1% of non-reciprocal violent abusers are female, not male yet men as a whole are called violent and discriminated against by the support systems for DV victims. i don’t think it’s something inherent in women though that makes them more violent but that systemic misandry encourages and emboldens female violence. nor is it all women who are violent and/or rapists. as far as rape, in most places the legal definition excludes female rapists or excludes forced to penetrate and has a lot of double standards. in Israel they tried to make the legal definition of rape more equal and include female rapists but feminists protested against it and stopped actual equality under the law. but there was one study that held men and women to the same standards that found 49% of men and males where victims of rape by the time they left college with 90% of their rapists being female. yet men are stereotyped as sexual predators while female sexual predators like Cardi B are celebrated as heroes and icons of sexual liberation rather then recognized as sexual predators which has nothing to do with any notions of actual sexual liberation. taking advantage of someone else or doing something to them against their consent is not liberation.

i think men should spend less time emphasising that victims of sexual assault/harassment are their sister/mother/wives/friends etc. and more time thinking about how the perpetrators of these crimes are their brothers/fathers/sons/friends etc.

stop emphasising your relationship to the victim to victimise yourself and instead emphasise your responsibility to hold the men around you accountable.

[alittledropofheaven]

On the internet, where people become data and popularity is conveniently quantified, it’s easy to learn what a community values most. Twitter embraces celebrities and #brands. Reddit stans for Barack Obama and elaborate pop-culture GIFs. Quora is an asylum of techies questioning their morality and their stock options; its second-most-upvoted answer is a “soul-satisfying” account of a sales bro helping a homeless man.

On the Bodybuilding.com forums, the two most popular threads of all time are not about deadlifts, intermittent fasting, or maintaining motivation. They’re about women. Specifically, women Bodybuilding.com members would “love to pound.” While one thread features pictures of “petite/slim girls” and the other of “athletic girls,” both are an endless stream of lightly Photoshopped near-nudity and predictably lecherous comments. Both have been viewed almost 3 million times. And both are on the lone section of the Bodybuilding.com forums that’s explicitly unrelated to fitness: the Misc.

“Participate at your own risk, some content NSFW,” reads the description of the Misc. on the forums’ homepage. “U Aware?”

The number of people who are Aware, it turns out, is over 16 million. As of January 2018, these members of Bodybuilding.com have made more than 137 million posts on the forums, including 90 million on the Misc. The forums first became active in 2000, a time before Wikipedia and when “Skype” was neither app nor verb. Myspace—Myspace!—didn’t exist until three years later. The Misc., as the predominant section of an internet community with such immense popularity and longevity, has cemented its place near the top of Google’s search results for any query imaginable. To appropriate Rule 34, if it exists, there’s a Misc. thread for it. Online, at least, the Misc. is inescapable.

A cursory scroll through the Misc. reveals what it has in common with the still-popular internet communities it predates, Reddit and 4chan. There are the memes, comics, copypastas, acronyms, and slang recycled endlessly in a digital echo chamber largely devoid of moderation. There are the forum members—Miscers, they call themselves—who post, and post in, intentionally incendiary threads about whether tongue rings scream “cum dumpster” and how “Crossfit is gay,” then fan the flames for entertainment’s sake by doubling down on their inanity. There are moments ofuproarious, absurd, gut-busting idiocy. There are ideology-clarifying usernames (RICHSTRONG, MinisterOfLust, weightsb4dates, WishIWasJawBrah, MericaThatsWhy) and statement-making profile pictures (deliberately titillating yet invariably off-putting abdominal shots, monochromatic selfies, strategically underlit bicep closeups). There are trolls surely seething and/or laughing maniacally, their keystrokes like machine-gun fire, as they launch poorly punctuated ad-hominem attacks and, at their most destructive, encourage people to commit suicide. There are sexists, racists, xenophobes, and homophobes. There is the sense of being in a parochial, patriarchal madhouse where decorum has gone to die.

What emerges, when you spend enough time on the Misc., is a ghoulish portrait of a place that embodies the white, male id currently at the helm of S.S. America. The Misc. is a stone-faced Uncle Sam with Popeye’s forearms and a cocked pistol in each hand. It’s a screeching bald eagle with a foreign Bad Thing in its talons. It’s everything that defines America’s bro culture, magnified and weaponized. But it’s deeper than that.

“Bro-merican” culture is largely defined by the stratification of power and status, both real and imagined. So, too, is Bodybuilding.com, where a power imbalance is embedded in the structure and design of the site’s forums. Unlike on 4chan, where all posts are anonymous and ephemeral, or on Reddit, where the grand sum of a user’s upvotes has little value, Bodybuilding.com members’ reputation points, or “reps,” mediate and deeply influence community interactions. While reps are similar to Facebook likes—weighted such that getting either “repped” or “negged” by a user with hundreds of thousands of reps will drastically affect your own rep count—they function as the Misc.’s de facto currency. Your rep count is displayed next to your every post. It’s like your bank account balance flashing on your forehead whenever you speak.

Bullying by those with power (high-rep Miscers) and obsequiousness by those without it (low-rep Miscers) is rampant. Getting negged by a high-rep Miscer means potentially becoming a “red,” a user with negative reputation points, displayed beneath your username as a gradated red bar as jarring as a stop sign. If you’re a red, you’re a second-class citizen. Your posts might as well come with a disclosure: “I’m a worthless idiot. Please listen to absolutely nothing I say.”

The opinions and caprices of high-rep “green” Miscers, then, dictate the forum’s personality. Any Miscer brave enough to post contrarian ideas—including, and especially, those that are liberal and feminist—is often negged into oblivion. Bad joke misses the mark? Negged. Sincere comment comes off as sarcastic? Negged. The Misc. is an echo chamber in which “greens” are given a megaphone and a gun.

But in contrast with Reddit and 4chan, the Misc. has been filtered through and molded by bodybuilding subculture, a set of beliefs and customs rooted in the many manifestations of stereotypical masculinity: egotism, aggression, hypersexuality, über-competitiveness, entitlement. Insecurity, intolerance, misogyny. Bodybuilding, after all, is not about functional strength but about vanity and surface appearances, how masculinity is projected to the world. It fosters narcissism by trading in cosmetic superlatives: the highest bicep peaks, the most vascular calves, the most extreme V-shaped back.

The Misc. applies this dog-eat-dog frame of mind to every topic. Everything is a masculinity- or dick-measuring contest. Including, of course, the actual dick-measuring contests, because Miscers are nothing if not cripplingly aware of their own inadequate manhood. Swears and slurs are censored but their creatively misspelled phonetic workarounds are not, which makes for a forum full of “kunts” talking “chit” and menacingly telling each other to “pepper your angus” (prepare your anus). The most recurrent insults all concern perceived masculinity, or lack thereof. “U mad bro?,” a popular retort, juxtaposes one-of-the-guys slang with the notion that showing emotion means demonstrating debilitating weakness. A real bro doesn’t get mad, he only gets testosterone-fueled revenge.

Near the bottom of the masculinity totem pole are “low-T beta manlets”—that is, short, shy, effeminate guys. Lower down are “phaggots,” a word that gets tossed around the Misc. like salt at a Sichuan restaurant. Lest any Miscer think you’re a “phucking phaggot,” all posts about personal care, fashion, home decoration, or how to look like a certain actor/model/bodybuilder are appended with “no homo.” Yet shaky Misc. logic dictates that even if you’re a gay man, there’s still someone you genetically out-alpha and who is, therefore, below you: a woman.

While the entire internet is teeming with horny men whose dark loneliness and insecurity wears the cloak of misogyny, they seem to be especially vocal, and in especially high numbers, on the Misc. Every other thread is a depressing question (“Think she’s faithful to him?”) or a charged statement (“Drunk Sex > Sober Sex”) about women—their bodies, hitting on them, their innate tendency to cheat—and sex—where to find it, how to go “no contact” after having it, why she is fucking him.

The Misc.’s ties to PUA (pickup artist) forums and Reddit’s /r/TheRedPill, a perniciously misogynist, anti-feminist Reddit community dedicated to “discussing sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men,” are as well documented as they are unsurprising. One of PUA’s most frequent suggestions is to acquire “inner game,” or self-confidence through self-improvement. Miscers, being on what is ultimately a bodybuilding forum, have inverted that mantra—they’re going from the outside in. Look good, feel good.

Other elements of the manosphere, from cries of societal misandry to sexual techniques like kino escalation and shit-testing, permeate the Misc. All women are “thirsty sloots” to be conquered, their emotions and physical well-being to be toyed with for internet strangers’ entertainment. When, to the forum’s delight, a Miscer posts about a sexual conquest in lurid detail—a surefire way to rack up the reps—the verbs employed are barbaric: “took down,” “smashed,” “hit.” To have “oneitis,” or an obsessive and unrequited crush on one woman, is to be afflicted with a masculinity-destroying emotional disease, one that can be cured, naturally, by sexually subjugating another woman. Regardless of whether a Miscer is successful or is rejected in the pursuit of sex, the response is the same: “Sloots gonna sloot.”

Despite the Misc.’s obsession with women, it has the latent homoeroticism you’d expect of a website devoted to a male-dominated sport in which bronzed, muscled competitors get smeared with oil and put on thongs before preening onstage in front of other men. This is no more obvious than when discussing a “Chad.” While there is a 5,000-post thread asking what, exactly, defines a Chad, the consensus is that he’s shorthand for a tall, built, strong-jawed, big-dicked, thick-haired, financially successful, athletic, confident, funny, sociable man who, because of these eminently desirable qualities, has his pick of the XX-chromosome litter. You look at a Chad and say, “This guy fucks.” (The prototypical Miscer might be a “Sheldon,” minus any TV-driven connotations of high-level intelligence.) Rob “Gronk” Gronkowski is a stone-cold Chad. Chad Johnson of The Bachelor is a Chad, and not just in name. It’s no accident that “Chad” is one of the most generically white and straight names imaginable, nor that archetypal Chads are nearly always white and straight. The etymological origin of the name Chad is the Welsh word cad, meaning “battle,” a fact that would surely delight Miscers to no end.

The Misc.’s resident Chad is an Australian bodybuilder known by his Bodybuilding.com handle, Zyzz. In early 2010, Zyzz began regularly detailing his “aesthetic” lifestyle on the Misc. As the so-called and self-proclaimed “king of aesthetics,” and with the zingy catchphrases “U mirin’ brah?” and “U jelly?,” Zyzz became the preeminent demigod of the Misc., where he and his “Aesthetics Crew,” acolytes similarly lacking in shirts, body fat, and social grace, were #bodygoals and #squadgoals come to life. Pictures and videosof Zyzz fist-pumping shirtless in public, wrapping his tanned arms low around the waists of nipple-pastied ravers at festivals, adopting a Herculean pose while standing in a shopping cart—these were the icons of the Misc. religion. When Zyzz died of a heart attack in 2011 at the age of twenty-two, his death became the sixth-most-searched death-related topic in Australia that year. His Facebook page, still regularly updated, has over 400,000 likes.

Zyzz’s masculinity showed itself in vain but harmless demonstrations of grandiosity, but other headline-making Miscers have expressed theirs through violence and morally indefensible acts. Gable Tostee first became a Misc. star by posting screenshots of his Tinder and text conversations with women he “rooted,” or had sex with; he entered Misc. lore after creating an ill-advised thread titled “Regarding the balcony tragedy” in the wake of news that one of his Tinder dates had been found dead from a fall from his apartment balcony. (Tostee was later acquitted of murder and manslaughter.) A Miscer known as YaBoyDave secretly filmed himself having sex with women—“whale-smashing,” in Misc. parlance—and posted the videos on the Misc.; he served 10 months in jail and is now a registered sex offender.

Still worse was Luka Magnotta, a wannabe model whose desperately misguided attempts at fame led him to asphyxiate kittens on camera and, later, live stream the brutal murder and dismemberment of a Chinese student while music from American Psycho played in the background; he was arrested at an internet café in Berlin, alternately surfing for pornography and reading news stories about himself, and it was later revealed that he’d posted on the Misc. Most infamously, Elliot Rodger, the Santa Barbara shooter, was active on the Misc., starting threads like “Why do girls hate me so much?” and “I’m tired of seeing losers with hot chicks.” In the latter thread, he recalled being “disturbed and offended” by seeing a “short, ugly Indian guy driving a Honda Civic” with a “hot blonde girl in his passenger seat.” It’s the bro’s classic sense of entitlement: Why should someone less masculine than me have what I know I deserve?

Miscers reaching toxic masculinity’s most violent nadir are mercifully few and far between. Yet the obvious connection between these people is one shared by the vast majority of the Misc. They’re young, white men whose social and sex lives are marked by absence or humiliating rejection, and their worldviews have likely been shaped by those failures. Rodger, for one, admitted in his autobiographical manifesto to having “never even kissed a girl.” He was an “incel,” or involuntarily celibate. “Not getting any sex,” he wrote, “is what will shape the very foundation of my miserable youth.”

A pervasive negative sense of self, of disappointment about one’s past and simultaneous anxiety and hopelessness for one’s future, is to the Misc. what the iceberg was to the Titanic: visible if you know to look for it, destructive if you don’t, and lurking below the surface all the same

The running joke about Miscers is that they’re all sad, awkward, forever-alone virgins who don’t lift and are on the only non-fitness-oriented section of a bodybuilding website because they can’t get their shit together. It’s revealing that one of the Misc.’s celebrities—there’s a 24,000-word condensed version of his “saga” on a fan-made website dedicated to him—is a weird, often clueless Everyman. He’s neither egregiously out of shape nor conventionally “aesthetic,” and his videos show a distinct lack of social awareness, a trait cultivated, presumably, by a life spent behind a computer screen and under a barbell.

Users of other Bodybuilding.com sections and other internet communities entirely propagate this idea of the Misc. as a cesspool of beta males with hopelessly futile aspirations of being alpha. “They have to be some of the most insecure dudes out there,” a Hypebeast forum user said of Miscers. On another forum, a user wrote that the Misc. is “filled with people [who] make fun of autism, while at the same time they themselves complain about their jobs, women, etc.”

More often, however, the call is coming from inside the house. Miscers reveal their vulnerabilities and problems in earnest with critically self-aware, self-deprecating posts. There are countless threads about “beta” topics like being a virgin (a Google search of site:bodybuilding.com “virgin” yields nearly 70,000 results), undergoing hair loss, not knowing how to normally interact with women, and giving up entirely. The Misc.’sRelationships and Relationships Help sub-forum would be more aptly titled “Sex: Help.” The “Depression Discussion and Support Thread Part III” thread is “stickied” by moderators at the top of the Misc., indicating that it resonates with the community; “Part II,” before it got so long that a new thread had to be created, had 10,000 posts and 1.6 million views. After the two aforementioned pornographic threads of “petite/slim girls” and “athletic girls,” the most-viewed Misc. threads are one about “Beta/cringe” moments of social awkwardness and another that documents the 350-pound weight-loss journey of a Miscer named Wetbreasts. For many Miscers, undoubtedly, browsing those threads is either motivational or like looking in a mirror. Or both.

It might appear counterintuitive that unconfident, sex-deprived, socially awkward young men would congregate—by the millions—on a bodybuilding website. But that paradox is precisely what’s responsible for the Misc.’s enduring allure.

It goes like this: A young guy thinks that improving his body will improve himself, that lifting weights will make him more confident, which will make girls like him more, which will make him happier, which will get him laid. And so on. In search of guidance, he finds Bodybuilding.com, where, after analyzing fat-to-ripped or skinny-to-jacked transformation stories, he ends up on the most popular part of the website: the Misc. But in the Misc. he finds a different kind of self-help: a vibrant, active community of like-minded guys. Guys who’ve felt inadequate and lonely and somehow less than manly, who’ve struggled with women and friends and money and body image, who’ve laughed at internet jokes and self-referential image macros that no one found funny, much less comprehensible, in real life. With a newfound sense of solidarity, this young guy wades deeper into the Misc., a community that gets him, his worldview increasingly shaped by this bodybuilding subculture, his mind warped by the community’s devil-may-care, “LOL, nothing matters” ethos.

It’s this last quality of the Misc. that Miscers themselves most readily use to characterize the forum. They see the stupidity of getting worked up over little green internet squares. They don’t take themselves seriously—it’s a motley crew of dudes on a bodybuilding site, bro—so nor should anyone else. Their attitude, one adopted from the bro culture with which they’re intertwined, is predicated on actions not having consequences. Break shit and someone else will pay for it. Get blind drunk, scream offensive things in public, and your boys will carry you home. Sexually harass or assault a woman, more than one woman, dozens of women, and you’ll still be revered, promoted, elected. You’re just “bro-ing out,” man, be easy, be chill, have a beer, have a protein shake.

“bro that forum is a fucking laugh man, just need a sense of humour,” a Hypebeast forum user wrote, in a thread titled, “The misc section of the bodybuilding forums is full of clowns.” If you’re young, white, and male, with a sense of humor shaped by the internet and a sense of privilege shaped by, well, everything else, the Misc.’s “clowns” can certainly be hilarious. But the further you are from that in-group, the more those clowns start to look like a horde of disturbing, misogynistic Pennywises.

Zyzz was once your standard insecure teenager with bad hair and spaghetti-thin arms. “I remember feeling like a little bitch when I was out with girls, walking next to them and feeling the same size as them,” he said in an interview. Becoming “aesthetic” hid a profound insecurity. His no-fucks-given attitude hid a fierce desire to be wanted.

Miscers see only the mirage. To them, Zyzz was living, walking, flexing proof that an average guy could eventually open the door to the HBB-filled alpha-male kingdom by gaining confidence and an aesthetically pleasing body. But the king is no more. And not every guy in search of personal fulfillment finds the key to that door by picking up a barbell. Not every young, white male who’d otherwise troll Reddit or 4chan becomes, through bodybuilding, the type of bro who doesn’t spend time on internet forums because he’s too busy crushing it, whatever “it” is, in real life. The Misc.—an online fraternity of the average and awkward, a safe space of the resentful and lustful and doubtful—is for the bros still searching.

[lavendrdyke]

There are a lot of people who call radical feminists mysandrists (is that the name?). And i would like to ask you what exactly the difference is. I am a feminist myself but I realised that I have always thought of radical feminism in a negative way.

radical feminism is feminism that focuses on female liberation, and acknowledges that sex is the basis of female oppression (females are oppressed for being females, not for performing femininity or anything else).

misandry is a made up word meant to mean prejudice/oppression of males. it’s supposed to be the parallel of misogyny (prejudice/oppression of females) but it carries literally no weight at all, since misogyny is discrimination carried out worldwide in numerous ways (female genital mutilation, selective abortions, rape culture, wage gaps, etc) and misandry doesn’t exist aside from individual people saying they hate men, and usually with good reason.

radical feminists are considered misandrists because we don’t prioritise men, and a lot of us say things like “i hate men” because we’ve dealt with men in awful scenarios before and are tired of the world being run by men and catering to men.

i don’t believe in misandry as a concept similar to misogyny. it means nothing to me. being called a misandrist is so irrelevant to me. it’s pointless.