I have a friend who is constantly racked with guilt about being attracted to women since he started transitioning because posts like this have taught him that men’s attention to women is always predatory. I have friends who are cis dudes who feel the same way. I have a transfemme friend who constantly questions whether they are actually just fetishizing women because being “socialized male” means they can never unlearn the predatory nature of their AGAB.
This sort of thinking also trains straight and bi women to expect to get treated like shit by their partners instead of believing that men are compassionate, kind, generous people who should be expected to treat their partners well.
And, not to get all “what about cis people” on this but there are young teen boys on this blogging platform who are learning that they are “trash” simply for looking at or being attracted to women and there are adult men on this platform who are trying to turn themselves inside out to try to “make up” for their maleness and framing men as terrible, unsafe, selfish, bad people is the exact kind of gender essentialist bullshit that says all women are compassionate and good communicators and naturally maternal caregivers.
You can write off all cops as bad because they all looked at an abusive, corrupt system and went “I want to be a part of that.”
If you write off “men,” the type category, fifty fucking percentish of the goddamned species, as trash you’re looking at a little boy or a black father or an autistic teen or a gay pensioner or even just a totally run of the mill cis straight white dude and saying “you were born wrong.”
And you know what, for fucking YEARS I’ve been saying “feminism benefits men too” and “feminism helps everyone” and there has been this loud minority of utter fucking assholes saying that men are trash and there’s no such thing as misandry and I’ve been trying to say “yeah, okay, those people are assholes but they’re not really a huge part of the movement” and but now it seems like their shitty ideas about purity culture have crossed over to the mainstream and their shitty sex negativity has crossed over to the mainstream, and radical feminism in general and TERFs in particular are brimming with misandry that is an exact fucking mirror to the misogyny of blackpilled incels and we are very calmly letting it infect our discourse and discredit our philosophy.
ALSO all of this bullshit broadcasts and spreads the idea that women must always be protected from men (which is exactly how JK Rowling justifies her transmisogyny) which does NOTHING to accomplish the equality that feminism is nominally about.
“Men are trash” and “kill all men lol” is a memeified, gender-swapped version of Mike Fucking Pence refusing to meet with women unsupervised because they might contaminate or tempt him.
And it *also* paves over the shitty, rapey, abusive, power imbalanced, oppressive things that women do. “If men are trash and women aren’t then clearly the abuse or sexual assault I’m suffering from my female partner must be *different* in some way because she’s not harming me through patriarchy or oppression.”
