technology

This dude sucking aside, yeah, I'll admit I get my hackles up when I see you saying increasingly dehumanizing and now even violent things about a group (men) that is so expansive as to include my dad, who is very sweet, and my brothers, whom I love and am very protective of, and my uncle, who's too kind for his own good and actually shouldn't keep letting women abuse him, and a bunch of my man friends who are softies, for the sin of being men. Last time I was really bothered by something you said it was you talking about going out of your way to be mean to men. Now it's taking them out at a distance. What'll you prescribe for men next, mass graves?(/s, perhaps overly generously)

Last time you ruffled my feathers like this you said something about choosing to be hostile to men in order to create a safe space for women. Bullshit. Hostility toward "men" as a broad category doesn't make me feel like you're safe to engage with because you love women and my pronouns are she/her therefore I'm in the in-group. Unwarranted hostility toward people who are very dear to me (or even to strangers who are no threat) does not make me feel like you're creating a safe space, rather, it makes you seem like a loose canon with no interest in learning how to safely identify targets, someone who should be shunned so you don't blow a hole in someone. How many closeted trans women does your hostility to men harm without you knowing? Are you even serious in your delineations? I've been deliberately abused by someone whose attitude on the matter boiled down to "your transness is real but it doesn't matter if you're trans: if an afab abuses you and you get mad about being abused, then you don't actually care about women". I guess that ends up being transmisogyny by definition but it's still weaponizing this "mEn R eVuL" bullshit. But you know what, it's not just about trans women being misgendered, it's about men too. I've seen multiple women treat men like shit over nothing, then act like terrified victims because the men didn't fawn well enough to make them feel safe, because no amount of fawning could ever be enough. And I bet that toxic behavior comes from systemic oppression, but that doesn't make it not an unfair and unacceptable way to treat someone who didn't do shit to them. I used to think the excuse of "when we say men we don't mean all men, just the bad ones" was meant seriously, but turns out it's way easier to use it as a very convenient excuse to never learn any trigger control and never grapple with their own capacity to be abusive than to actually put those words into practice.

Obligatory the guy in this article is obviously bad news. But the things you say about men are toxic and I hate seeing them get a pass. I really should just block you so I don't have to see you spew poison, but you also do have such fascinating and informative other things to say when you're not banging the death-to-men drum that I don't want to have to. Maybe I flip a coin, maybe I wait til the next time.

Is this just white people brainworms? Is this just white people being idiots about gender and humanity? I don't want to believe so, but I also don't see this toxicity so much in poc discourse. I complained to other poc last time I saw you running your mouth about how it's good to just be proactively mean to men, and other people across the gender spectrum agreed that it's suspicious when white women are out here acting like men are inherently the devil, so it's not just me that's disturbed by this attitude.

Some months ago we had a comrade on here leading a reading group of Mohammad el-Kurd's book, Perfect Victims. In the intro he talked about how he was recentering men in the discussion because all too often men are dehumanized and treated like legitimate targets of war simply because they're men. And so are little boys, because boys are future men. And he brought up that Palestinian women aren't celebrating when the men are murdered, they are instead devastated because their sons are dead, their fathers are dead, their brothers are dead, their uncles are dead, their friends are dead. I think about the history of white women's enthusiastic complicity in colonization and racial hierarchy, about how imperialist wars of aggression are sold by saying men in the target countries oppress women so they're fair game to kill, about how dangerous "white woman tears" are to racialized men in particular, and I have to scoff at this shallow anti-man shit. I I think about how gender is handled in my own family's culture and I just find this indiscriminate hostility toward men that is so popular on what passes for the left to be inferior analysis, a toxic idea that should be grappled with and either reformed into a more useful analysis (the kernel of truth contained therein salvaged from the morass of dreck) or purged altogether.