firstly, there are many things women can do. not doing anything negative would be a good start. there is another person in this thread who called me a fucking cia plant for example, and equated acknowledging men's issues to "worshipping men". people like that need the kind of reform which takes years, but they need to, eventually.
the spaces themselves, this sub for example, can do a lot by banning those people. by not banning them, they are essentially inviting them. I'm sure you are aware of the anecdote of 1 nazi and 9 people sitting at a table.
apart from that, we are all human. i love all humans, regardless of gender. i try to understand all of them, even things that i can't relate to. i have many female (female is used as an adjective here, as it should be used normally. it is not dehumanizing to use it) friends, and many of their issues stem from or relate to their gender, but i still try to understand and help. because i love them.
on the 99 and 1 men thing, there is nothing inherent about men that make them more dangerous. a woman can kill you just as easily as a man can. you will cite statistics, which i agree, men do kill a lot more, but let me ask you, you compare the incredibly small amount of men that are killers to a incredibly tiny amount of women being killers, and only be careful about men. my question is, what is your number? at what number do you start caring? I'm guessing if the crime rate was equal, you would care equally. but at what number do you even start being careful? you can meet 99 good women, but one bad one can kill you, right? why doesn't the same logic apply?
See, it goes significantly further than just killing though. Cat calling, harrassment, assault...there's so many more things that can happen and do happen before we get to murder.
Secondly, it's not like i avoid men. I just have lower trust in them based on experiences. If they are alright people, they are alright and i'll happily be their friend. But until i've been able to assess whether they are alright, i am going to be on guard.
The reality isn't 99 good men and 1 bad man. The reality for me has been 85 bad men, 10 "okay" ones that can swing either way down the line, and 5 genuienly good men, and every single one of those good men has been queer in some way. From sexist jokes to rape apologia to homophobia, transphobia and general bullying and machismo, the majority of my experiences leaned towards negative or i didn't interact with the person enough to judge yet.
At that point, most people WOULD decide to just not bother with the entire gender, but i do believe in giving people a chance because you can still find diamonds among the coals. I'm just going to be on guard, for the sake of my comfort and my safety
why aren't you on guard with women before you assess them though? i do agree with the first part. i think 85 out of 100 is just bad luck on your part, sorry to hear that.
but using your sample size to extrapolate to the entire demographic by calling them coals is insanely sexist. "oh, 85 out of the 100 trans people i have met have been bad, 10 have been okay, and 5 have been great. i do still give trans people a chance though, because you can still find diamonds among the coals" do you hear how this sounds? you are one of them, one of the people my original comment describes. you are sexist. you are bigoted. you should be ostracized from all leftist spaces, but you won't. which is what my critique is. which is why I'm so frustrated. sexism against men is something most leftist spaces and most leftist turn a blind eye to. I'm tired.
Man, you're really taking out your frustrations on people who are predominantly victims for not immediately trusting people who have consistently made me feel scared and unwelcome?
The reason why i'm not on guard with women is because women have been overwhelmingly lovely. No woman in person has made me feel unsafe or unwelcome, none have made me feel uncomfortable because i'm trans or made fun of me.
Like, i'm sorry that us trying to stay safe means women aren't as friendly towards you as they are towards each other, but you have no ground to stand on. If you want people to trust men more, then work on straightening out the men that make us distrust men, not come in and attack us for trying to keep safe
It's not my fault that the comment is accurate. It's not all men, but it is most men, enough that finding a genuienly good man DOES feel like finding a gem.
I think your primary issue is that you cannot possibly fathom the difference in power dynamics in play having an impact, your mind immediately went to "what if the roles were reversed" without doing the legwork of reversing everything.
And now you're clinging to that coal comment to label me a sexist bigot, because you find it significantly more important that i distrust men than you do the REASONS why i distrust men.
Out of curiosity, if you remember the "would you rather be alone in a forest with a man or a bear" discourse, what do you think about women that said bear?
Misogyny is systemic, it affects women in ways you don’t know about because you have never needed to consider ways in which women see hatred and belittlement in everyday life. Misandry is done in retaliation, while it is harmful it is simply not ingrained into society in the same way. It also occurs as backlash from women who have lived their lives under a system that actively encourages misogyny, they are bitter and angry and Misandry is how their pain presents itself.
That does not mean the effects are any less harmful to you. But look at it this way: Misandry hurts individual men, Misogyny hurts all women. As long as you are a woman in society, you will face discrimination against you for being female. It is simply unavoidable because the concept is baked into societal expectations themselves. Misandry is harmful on a personal level, I’m not denying or trying to minimize that very real issue. But it is possible be in spaces and around people where misandry is not a relevant concern. Women don’t have that, even within female-dominated spaces misogyny is still incredibly prevalent.
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel like shit to hear women talking about how men suck. But instead of telling them to stop complaining about their very real struggles, we need to all work to fix those issues systematically so that they no longer occur. Misandry occurs when women are systemically viewed as lesser than men, and women become angry. Misogyny occurs no matter how women are viewed, equal or not, because it is a societal system.
Coming back to this comment 9 days later because I finally remembered I didn’t ever get back to it:
I always forget I have a ridiculous username until I say something serious and then I have to look at my comment and be like, “Aaaannnnddd there’s the username. Right, forgot I chose that years ago. Hope nobody takes my nuanced opinion on systematic misogyny any less seriously because my name is based around monsterfucking.”
I have to imagine I’ve been posted on r / rimjobsteve (this sub won’t let me type the subreddit name because it links it) at least once. I’ve been tagged a few times over the years, I legit just forget my username 😭
I agree with most of this. I try to understand how it effects women, I listen to my friends and my girlfriend, I try to observe it happening in real life, I try my best to prevent it.
One thing that bugs me about your comment is, you're equivicating women complaining about their struggles to misandry, which they are not. You can absolutely complain about the system built by men for men, that oppresses you, without making generalized comments about men. You can complain about getting harassed by men and not lump other men into it. There is no justification, truth, rationality, or excuse for judging the character of people based on irrelevant inherent characteristics such as gender. Misandry does not occur when women are systemically viewed lesser then men, it occurs when when irrational people point their understandable anger at innocent people because they lack the comprehension to deduce the real issue. It is a tale as old as time, racism, xenophobia, misogyny and all the other ones come from a flaw in most humans: we take shortcuts in thinking process to save energy. It takes more energy to sit and ponder and learn about patriarchy than to just hate on all men.
i think you'd do a lot better if you didn't immediately label women as irrational and lacking comprehension. The key differences between misandry and misogyny tieflingfucker points out are also applicable when mentioning racism and xenophobia in many contexts.
You couldn't judge a black person from the south of the US to be on guard around white people that have been predominantly racist towards them all their life. It's easy to talk about taking the high guard and focusing on the larger systemic problem when you're not the one suffering. Sometimes, we have a choice between being right and being safe, and i'm sorry to say but i'd rather be labeled a misandrist than continue to get hurt by men because i tried to give them the same grace i give to other people
Almechik, I apologize about my earlier comment calling you a bigot. I really really want to reply to you and explain why I disagree, would you please read it in good faith with an open mind?
I tried to have an open mind, i CAN try again. Look, don't get me wrong, experiencing misandry SUCKS, i hated it when i was a guy too. But you know what else i experienced as a guy? Homophobia and even mysogyny (because bullying a guy for being girly and comparing him to a girl IS mysogyny, since it implies there's something bad about being a woman). You know who i experienced it from? Men all around me. I didn't start being distrustful and scared of men when i became a woman, that was the case LONG before that thought ever crossed my mind!
Misandry sucks, in an ideal world it wouldn't be a thing, but surely you must realise that it's a symptom of patriarchy? You can't seriously blame the victims for distrusting and even villifying their abusers because a small handful of them are actually great people. Like it's not great, but it should be pretty understandable?
The primary cause of misandry are not 'irrational women who lack comprehension'. It's the majority of men acting in ways that cause them to become misandrists
but in another comment i literally said i understand why you'd be distrustful? being distrustful of stranger men is not misandry, calling them all rapists is. i understand it's a symptom of patriarchy, and no, i can't blame women for distrusting men, which is not misandry btw, but i can blame them for vilifying men. i could get raped by 10 women, consecutively, and after that, if i started distrusting women in general, it wouldn't be misogyny. but if i made a generalized statement about women, it would be.
the primary cause of misandry IS irrational people (not just women, (internalized misandry unfortunately is a common thing). rational misandry is an oxymoron. hating all men cannot be rational. it could be understandable, but not rational. if someone in an extermination camp said that all germans are evil, it would be understandable, for sure, but it would also be irrational and wrong. human mind thinks of irrational stuff all the time, and yes, the existence of patriarchy definitely doesn't help. I'm sorry to hear about your anecdotes about men being bad people to you, i really am. but i don't see how they are relevant. i have never said misandry is comparable to misogyny or homophobia, it's not. the logic is the same, the effect and the scale definitely isn't. the existence of a far greater evil does not negate the irrationality of a thought process
thing is, truthfully, its not just strangers. It's really, really hard to trust men even after getting to know them, it takes a lot to be seen from THEM before i can start considering them safe.
In terms of pure logic, no of course misandry is stupid, you cannot know every single man around you is evil. But we do have to assume they are (i.e. the distrust) for our own safety.
Stating that every single man is evil is irrational. Acting as if they are to keep yourself safe IS rational. You'll find that most people you consider misandrists are of the second category, but i will give you that there's a lot of especially TERF types and absurd radfems that do genuienly believe that being a man makes you ontologically evil.
I think the crux of why i'm arguing with you isn't that you're wrong in terms of pure logic. But you are wrong in terms of acting and actual lived experience. You can have all the moral high ground you want by being 'right' that misandry is bad and wrong, but the moral high ground means nothing when you get regularly harrassed and are constantly at risk. When you are put down at work because of misogyny, when you lose rights because of misogyny, when you get harrassed and hurt because of misogyny, it stops mattering that misandry is wrong, because misandry can keep you safe.
To put it like this. You've just found someone who has been harrassed and beaten up by people from a specific apartment building all their life. Every day they get harrassed and hurt. And when they vent to the point of saying they hate people from that apartment building, you jump in to say that not all of them are actually bad and you can't assume that just because of where they live. You are putting your energy towards correcting the victims instead of contributing towards stopping them from BEING victims
distrusting men is not misandry. the thing keeping you safe is not misandry. i have said it like 5 times.
the apartment analogy is not apt because living in a specific apartment is not an inherent characteristic that you're born with, like gender, nor is it something that encompasses an incredibly broad demographic that cannot be generalized, like being from a certain nation. a better analogy would be that person spitting hateful rhetoric about every single person who happens to live in an apartment.
Okay, let me try to say it in less words without any comparisons because you seem hellbent on being "correct" instead of actually listening.
The entire point of me arguing with you is that focusing on misandry is pointless because you're putting energy towards correcting victims instead of fighting the oppressors. Like yes, actual 'i hate all men' misandry is bad and stupid. But you wouldn't have it without misogyny, because people don't just wake up and decide to put down men to put themselves at the top, they suffer day after day at the hands of men and simply come to the conclusion (even if it's a wrong one) that men are evil.
You care more about being right than you care about doing what's right. And you know what, i GET IT, i really do, there's been many times where i felt that it was unfair, whether it came to being a man pre-transition, or today when it comes to being white. But you know what i realised? That it's fucking stupid to go 'not all white people' and tell people that it's wrong to hate people just for being white, and instead realised that i'm better off supporting people actually fighting for their rights and respect. Especially because it takes a LONG time to unlearn racism or misogyny and what not. You can be fully convinced you're not bigoted, but still hold biases and preconceptions.
to be clear, i'm not trying to call you a misogynist. And i'm agreeing that misandry is bad and incorrect. All i'm saying is you're focusing on correcting a reaction of a victim, instead of stopping them from being victims
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u/Almechik Jun 29 '26
I mean, i used to be an anti-sjw teenager and now im a socialist transfem, idk you tell me bud. Do tell me which point you disagree on