I have some loose thoughts on this I’m afraid to say out loud in case someone comes along and gets furious, which go something like this:
—I don’t think there’s a lot of thought given to the idea of what “men are statistically more likely to be violent to you if you are a human” means, in practice, for men.
A lot of feminist discussion is about the need for women to get away from men who might turn out to be violent, and doing that through creating exclusionary spaces. A man cannot do this, I have found from experience! I did try and be part of a man’s gender discussion group once; it devolved into one particular man saying – trigger warning – “why can’t we just rape everyone we want to?” That was not what I had in mind for the group at all.
This has been a real problem for me: solidarity depends on trust, and there are people who make it clear you should not trust them. If you’re a man who is reluctant to trust men in your body – a dog who is afraid of other dogs – it’s hard to find a space that isn’t just being lonely forever. Men like the one who ruined our group are probably fine because they can band together, and are doing so. But men who don’t actually like those guys end up isolated in a polarising discourse.
I’ve come to think that “Not all men!” is a cursed phrase because it cuts this thought off: if you aren’t a man, anything that reminds you of a man is an object of fear, so there is no space to advocate for yourself as a subject who exists in the world. And there is no way to earn trust, or to end up with an expectation you should be trusted? There’s a lot of feeling miserable for other people’s crimes
Thank you so much for this comment, you're totally right. It feels very frustrating to me to know as many men as I do who are isolated and filled with despair about what they could possibly do about the sociopolitical problems they recognize but don't know how to change (largely because the prevailing advice on how to change them-- tell other men to act normal! listen to women!--is either unactionable for them or just doesn't get the job done).
It feels like that lack of trust leaves all of us floating alone in the void instead of organizing together so that, in instances like you mentioned, we can both de-radicalize the assholes and also minimize the damage they might do to others in the process. That whole inability to recognize men as unique subjects-- whether it's via feminists circling the wagons or that old song of "men are the default type of human being"-- makes it incredibly hard to deal with any of it in any productive way. I think we can do better, though-- if we agree on what the problems are and are energized to help each other, I think we will figure it out, even if it requires some growing pains.
I think a lot about how when I was presenting as a woman, the worst thing that ever happened to me from a stranger was a guy who offered to be my sugar daddy while I was working, but since presenting as a man I've had a man threaten to kill me and I was cornered for 40 minutes by another man who tried to get me to have sex with him until somebody else showed up to help me. My boyfriend commented once about how being a queer man is a very distinctly alienating, disheartening, and violent experience. Your point about the exclusionary spaces rings true in that regard -- he's experienced more sexual violence than most women I know but a lot of spaces don't trust him and push him out purely because he is a man (and a brown one at that, lol). I hope we can continue having conversations about this that don't actually veer into MRA land or some kind of male libfem.
My experience has been that having my own fear of masculinity has also led to be too hair-trigger alert on this - trying to avoid the comically evil like you mention, and ending up intolerant of any deviation from “safe” talking points (which happens to exclude any messy feelings people might have). Made it way harder for me to empathize with other men for a while.
Gonna try to keep these thoughts organized, lol. I am a cis guy, who has always had trouble with gender. The long and short of it is that it is insane to me how deeply this resonates with me.
"We turn ourselves inside-out fretting, how could we possibly exist around women as the traumatized little perverts we are without werewolfing out and becoming the kinds of men we really, really don’t want to be? ... [y]ou try to be very careful not to do toxic masculinity in day-to-day life, even by accident, even in situations where it does not seem like a big deal...” guided by "a 'masochistic epistemology' — whatever hurts is true." Gender Calvinism results.
To me, some combo of childhood experiences served to make 'masculinity' synonymous with what we now call 'toxic masculinity,' which in turn was synonymous for lack of self-awareness, arrogance, and appetites (because ofc these could become urges which could override reason). hooks' passage "Hence the underlying message boys receive about sexual acts is that they will be destroyed if they are not in control, exercising power," hit me like a ton of bricks because it succinctly summarized the driving force behind a lifetime of intropunitive spiraling.
Idk man I'm just choked up and really appreciating this piece. I think the rising prominence of queer men writing is doing magic for the wreckage of the gender war discourse.
The last thing I'll say risks entirely unsolicited moralizing. I recently got out of a long period of alcohol abuse which was driven by social anxiety and self-loathing, and which resulted in all these suppressed feelings leaking out and me really hurting other people. Sobriety has enabled a couple of years of really significant self work which allows me to think through these things in a way that is productive and to start living outside my own head. Obviously, you've got a good perspective, so I won't presume to know what you need to do. I'm just in a sappy place now and hoping the best for you.
A tiny thing I love about your writing— anytime you refer to me as dear reader, it reminds me of wizard people, dear reader. So I read it in Brad Neely’s nasally voice lol.
I am not trans and generally don't engage in conversations about trans or gender issues, but this struck me in a very human way. I have felt so similarly to you but through different means. The details are different but it makes me realize there is so much similarity in all of our stories of being misunderstood, and unseen, and the ways we diminish ourselves to become acceptable to those who matter to us.
We are all oppressors and oppressed, and we each have a responsibility to give and receive grace because of it. There's no other way.
The most coherent thought I have right now is that Transgender Calvinism goes hard as hell and I love that. I have a lot of thoughts and I'm not sure if I 100% agree with everything but also you really spoke to something true deep inside of me and I appreciate it a lot. I'll be returning to this as I continue writing.
I dunno if I 100% agree with everything I wrote either, haha!! It just feels like I have heard far too many oversimplified, motivated explanations for gender dynamics that just don't track with my experience, so I'm sort of feeling around in the dark trying to find something more functional for me. I think the next piece I work on is going to be about radicalization and ingroup/outgroup rhetoric as it gets used by both radical feminists and trans people, I've been doing some interesting reading lately that feels very clarifying.
1. I’m angry at you because this put all of my feelings about modern feminism’s tension with men into one essay, so now I’ll never get the chance to make my own blogpost about it.
2. You give yourself far too little credit when describing yourself as a bad person, almost hypocritically so. Yeah you were probably being sarcastic, but sarcastically joking about how you’re awful is the first step towards believing it. And what about all that talk about how everyone tells you you’re scum? Self-hate is letting them win. You rock!
I wish I had more to say but you knocked this one out of the ballpark and into the stratosphere.
Please please write your own anywayI I'm definitely still developing and changing my thoughts on it all, you'll probably have different ideas than I would. If we know what is wrong, we still have to figure out where to go from here, what better possibilities look like and how to achieve them, etc. There is much to do, and your input is valuable.
i've tried a few times to comment something coherent, but i can't quite work out what it is i want to say, aside from saying thanks. thank you for writing this, and thank you for sharing it.
As someone who isn't a feminist, and generally doesn't think highly of feminist though, I think this represents a perspective that is at least close enough to what I view as reality, that it'd be at least possibly to try and talk about things.
For example, "I think its safe to say that feminism has reached the water supply.", is something that is somehow basically entirely missing from the conversation around "culture" and "society", which is that feminist views aren't obscure, but are rather incredibly mainstream. It is hard to discuss the state of culture in regards to gender with someone who is unwilling to recognize a massive part of that equation in any form.
I also think the Christianity comparison is very apt, and something I've experimented with using to explain to people my perspective outside of feminism how a lot of the rhetoric and ideas come across.
I know I'm not anyone of actual note, but if you ever wanted to talk about these subjects, would always be down to hop on discord / the phone / .etc for some time.
I feel you. It does feel extremely weird to talk to people who think that feminism is somehow unpopular. I had a couple friends express surprise that Barbie got made since it's ~so feminist~ and I was like, huh??? Feminism has been A Brand for like a decade at least, this is still a 2hr toy commercial!!
I think it's given me a lot of peace to delineate a difference between feminist theory and feminist culture. "Cultural feminism" has been criticized by other feminists for ages now, but the mainstream has not managed to hear their critique and respond with a more intersectional approach. I think even the radicals deserve respect so long as you also understand that their intention is to startle & provoke as much as anything else, but obv ymmv.
It's just so incredibly frustrating to be a *fan* of feminist writers and theory and still feel such miserable friction with the culture-- it's like everybody tells you to read The Will To Change, and the second you crack it open you realize nobody who recommended it has bothered to read it themselves. For what it's worth, the response to this essay (and the last) has been very positive, so I am more and more encouraged that conversation and collaboration are absolutely possible so long as we don't bite each other's heads off!!
I think it is less my gut "weirdness" to it, and more that when someone has very strong views on culture, but also seems to be completely off-base and unable to read the temperature of the room. It is a huge gap and means that any conversation has to get pushed way back to fundamentals of how we measure and think about the culture, rather than the subject that most likely was actually brought up. I could try to go into more specific examples, but I think that'd lose the forest for the trees. Indeed, even in your response, I think "a decade at least" is something of an understatement, but that is besides the point.
Personally, I've never felt like I had a clean political "home". Instead I had a bunch of ideas that conflict all over the place with established groups, so on one hand I relate to feeling like a bunch of people "just don't get it", but on the other hand, I try to eschew political labels, so there is usually more distance.
When it comes to radicals, I think "respect" is a word that is ambiguous, so I'll shy away from that, but I generally do not think acting as a provocateur is particularly productive. It doesn't really translate very well to people who disagree with you, and ends up with you being perceived as more radical, because you play into the biases of your opponents.
To give an example, long, long ago, Paul Elam put out an article which was supposed to satirize another article that all-but explicitly endorsed women hitting their boyfriends. It was called "bash a bitch month". If you understood the context or knew much about Paul Elam at the time, it was pretty painfully obvious that Paul Elam didn't sincerely hold this position. It is, from time to time, *still* brought up in a negative way against men's rights and as a way to dismiss them all as hating women.
When we're talking about taking the temperature of the culture, I suggest one of the touch points really ought to be that, if people are justifying you making "radically" suggestions, and are willing to tolerate them, it is because you are pretty close to the cultural center. People who are further away from the cultural center, when they make radical claims, are vilified for them. Paradoxically meaning that the radicals are really testing how un-radical they are, it seems like if being radical doesn't undermine your movement, then your movement is pretty socially accepted in the first place.
From my understanding there have been two "golden forums" for discussion on these topics. Namely feministcritics.org and /r/femradebates. Both of them are pretty dead now, so hopefully a third forum does pop up at some point.
thanks for a peek over the garden fence, I always come away from these posts with much to ponder from the other perspective!
I think your writing on this topic has really come a long way since your "do I hate women" essay a while back!
if you ever do like a solution oriented pt 3, i'd love to know if you've ever found communities online for men who clearly aren't into the utter shite and bile that is the manosphere but also feel ostracised by online feminist spaces that are predominately women?
I really haven't, and not for lack of looking. :( There is a r/menslib subreddit, but it's mostly an effort to do triage and divert boys away from the manosphere, so-- knowing how online comments sections tend to go when boys get to venting-- criticism of feminism is strictly prohibited. (Both of my misandry essays would probably be deleted by moderators if I posted them there, and even criticizing TERFs is iffy unless you make some noises about how they're "not real feminists" etc.) So imo, like the historical men's liberation movement, it's a decent place for men to talk about their feelings and tell each other "be yourself but don't be #toxic!" and not much else.
I know of a couple in-person events but they all have their own issues-- expensive, once-a-year, lack of integration between cis/straight/queer/trans, they skew very white and/or into the mythopoetic men's movement's appropriative new age spirituality stuff, etc etc.
Personally I think my dream home would be a gender-diverse space where men are safe to complain about their problems (including criticism of women & feminism!) but which diverts that energy away from entrenched resentment and towards political empathy and mutual aid. But it seems like there just isn't the will or the resources to maintain such a space, everyone is angry and afraid of each other and there's really no handbook on how to mediate that tension long-term.
Know I am late on this one, but I just found this.
My experience with r/menslib was…let’s just say mixed. They were clearly trying to help men, but they were also trying to turn men into Good Feminists (tm). When those two goals conflicted, the mods (at least to my recollection) pretty consistently valued the latter over the former. Granted, I left Reddit years ago, so perhaps I have exaggerated things in my head (it would not be the first time).
Yeah, same. I ended up ditching it because I got in trouble for sharing a Lily Alexandre video about (her words not mine) "the feminist to far-right pipeline" when someone tried to no-true-scotsman at me about TERFs.
I think there’s some great points to be taken from this essay - ones that I can relate to personally as a man balancing in the non-binary limbo…though at some parts of it the mania is showing, haha. :] The overarching message is fair and worth thinking about - wish I had more time to delve into a reply here, but I’m off to work pretty soon. All the best!
I think I'm sympathetic to the direction of this essay, but I'm not sure? Lots of things about the way society is structured screw over lots of men, absolutely. I totally buy that some people who call themselves feminist ought to be more sympathetic to that. It seems obvious to me that gender is more complex than M > F, yeah (and I don't know how anyone could have a transfeminism without that observation).
But there's so much sarcasm in your writing that I'm often not sure what you're responding to. Obviously nobody is actually literally making a game of shouting from the rooftops that they can't stand you just because you're a dude, right? Obviously you can advocate for your own well-being without being the worst-off person in the world, right? Obviously that Bo Burnham song is not actually an argument that men don't have problems, right? Obviously a large chunk of the garbage transmasc folks face is genuinely misogyny & transmisogyny splash damage, even if that might not account for all of it, right? Obviously you noticed that Doyle does a bunch of qualifying of the first sentence of his you quoted in the 18 paragraphs in your [...] before the second sentence of his you quoted?
I think there are lots of critiques to be made of the positions you're responding to. I just can't tell throughout this essay whether you're intentionally misrepresenting those positions, or just misunderstood them, or are exaggerating your objections for effect? I think there are probably some great points in here, and probably some things that I think are bad takes (like: "hurt people hurt people" is only true because everyone gets hurt; it's not at all true that people hurt more necessarily do more hurting), but the level of snark makes it hard to tell what you actually mean to say.
I'm really sorry anyone told you that you were worthless and no one will ever help you. I'm having a hard time believing that feminists are constantly telling you that (in your communities - I could believe that's the takeaway if you're, like, binge-reading all of Dworkin or something). You're not worthless and you deserve care.
I think I would like to add re: "hurt people hurt people" -- I was thinking of the way that most of the women who have been personally cruel to me in unhinged ways are people who had been through a lot. They had a bad time growing up, they were dealing with long-term depression or untreated bipolar disorder or etc-- they were really understandably angry at the world and men in particular, and biting back at *me* was just a release-valve for the pain they could not contain.
I don't think I can look at those people and be like, "Why don't you just be a good person? Why don't you simply deal with your trauma and change your personality so that you're a Nice Girl?" That is just asking way too much from someone who was not set up to succeed. Her problem isn't a lack of moral fiber, it's that she feels terrible and has to save her emotional bandwidth for keeping her shit together when she's with her kids or at work or otherwise dealing with people who are obviously-inappropriate targets. So of course she snaps at me for things that probably wouldn't be a big deal if she didn't already feel like shit, and of course she exploits me as a way to get her own needs met-- what other options does she have besides repressing, right? And even repression is both self-destructive and a lot harder than it looks.
I think part of the point of feminist communities is to serve as a safe place for women in that position to vent their pain instead of lashing out or self-destructing, and that's a *really really* good thing. But feminists have basically zero tolerance for men who do the same-- when men vocalize their pain by complaining about women, it is usually treated as a failure of their character. Plus, that "safe space" today includes a huge chunk of social media, a public space where random men are caught in the crossfire and internalize the mass of women's venting about men as proof that they themselves are bad people, even when they are not the kind of men she is venting about.
I feel like harping on "toxic masculinity" as much as we do leads people to think patriarchy simply teaches men that cruelty is good and cool and men are just like "sure, okay!" I have seen much less interest in describing how patriarchy uses culture and power imbalances to channel peoples' understandable pain and rage onto whoever they can get away with hurting-- people of low status, people they personally have power over, people they can rationalize treating like punching bags.
So I think that, while obviously not everyone who has experienced trauma is inevitably going to inflict it, it's not a surprise when trauma begets trauma. Fighting the impulse to be controlling or vindictive is hard enough at the best of times, and feeling like shit all the time leaves you with a lot less gas in the tank. We can stop that cycle by giving resources to victims so they can escape and heal, but the gold standard is preventing victimization in the first place, right? If the women who have been cruel to me had better options for healing, or could show actual consequences to the men who hurt them in the first place, I would not have wound up being the target for their vented pain and spent years thinking I just deserved it. I think it would be helpful to apply that empathetic lens to men, too-- framing everyone's bad behavior as a failure of moral character means it's their personal problem to solve it, rather than everyone's job to create a less-impoverished world. We all share the obligation to care for each other, of course, but I prefer not to think of the people who fail that obligation as bad people who simply choose to be bad.
Sorry for the wall of text, but hopefully that makes my intentions a bit clearer! My thinking is very influenced by a zine that I found years and years ago called "We Are All Survivors, We Are All Perpetrators" which was put out by an anarchist distro during the early days of #metoo, to try and discuss how to help victims in ways *other than* simply ostracizing their abusers. ( https://www.sproutdistro.com/catalog/zines/accountability-consent/we-are-all-survivors/ ) bell hooks' writing in The Will To Change and All About Love were pretty influential on me, too.
I wish I had more likes to give this! So there on the “toxic masculinity” observation. And it’s so very true that anger that, in the past, might have been harmless private venting is now out in the open on social media where it can hurt people (and plant ideas that make them blame themselves when people are cruel to them irl), and it still feels like harmless venting to people who have the same anger.
If you think it's obvious, that's great! But hearing that opinion has not been the bulk of the experience for me or like, most of my tguy friends, or apparently the men Doyle references feeling like they cannot transition without becoming traitors to feminism. Most of the trans men I have known did experience and internalize pretty constant criticism from women in a way that winds up making us extremely sad and self-hating. If you don't believe me that the culture is genuinely hurtful or relentless, if you have never seen the way that women talk about men on social media, and if you cannot draw a comparison between the way men are treated with the way women are treated via misogyny, then yeah, it's not gonna land.
Oh, people are incredibly cruel. And of course I've seen (and experienced) people hating men as a class, and the real psychological impacts of that. But the essay is making an argument that this is best understood as a kind of oppression parallel to misogyny, and that it's the fault of feminism, and that every trans community is corrupted by these ideas into a particular cruelty toward trans men - I'm finding the argument hard to follow because of the hyperbole and absolutist language.
Ah. You did go there in the next article. Saying that TERFs hate trans women because of misandry. Despite TERFs allying with men & treating trans women like women who are beneath them in the gender hierarchy.
You LITERALLY made the argument in this same article that saying trans men's struggles are a result of misogyny is basically calling trans men women. So how come you did the exact same thing to trans women?
Hang on. Now closeted trans women have some "inevitable maleness"?
Do you not see how every time you make an assertion like this it's you arguing against your previous point? Because apparently misgendering trans people is fine if you're saying trans women face oppression due to misandry.
You are not the first person I have seen who describes TERFs as turbo-misogynists, who treat trans women as a worse kind of women. But this is clearly not how TERFs operate, it's not how they characterize trans women at all (or trans men, for that matter). They consider trans men through a misogynist lens which paints us as confused little girls who cannot be trusted with agency over our own bodies. I am not saying that *I* think trans women are men; I am describing the way that TERF motivations and rhetoric align with traditional patriarchal attitudes about men & women's "nature."
I criticized Devon Price because I understand why we do this, viewing the world through a lens which gives primacy to people's embodied genders (rather than the genders they were assigned or how they are perceived), and I am frustrated that we selectively refuse to apply this lens to trans men. We wind up more or less concluding that "everything bad that happens to trans women is misogyny, and everything that happens to trans men is also misogyny," and I'm sorry but that just doesn't work for me. The need to frame men as inevitably empowered removes our ability to give primacy to our maleness and understand our problems as male problems, which sucks for the same reasons you think it sucks for me to describe some of trans women's problems as "misandry."
I am mostly asking for consistency in the way trans people describe ourselves and our problems by flipping it the other way around. Either my own experiences of transphobia can be framed as "misandry" because I am somehow metaphysically male, or all sorts of trans people experience variations on both misogyny and "misandry" based on what gender people perceive us to be (even when those perceptions are wrong). Personally I find it kind of absurdist to propose that TERFs are simply lying when they repeatedly say they think trans women are men, but who knows.
I think both lenses have their uses in different applications, my point is just to complicate the way we flip back and forth between them in a way that effectively forces me to frame myself as a woman or a victim of misogyny if I want to understand my problems as gendered at all. More often it becomes a way for people to deny that I have problems at all, or to insist at all times on comparing my problems to that of trans women in order to trivialize my struggle, which I really don't appreciate much! So hopefully you understand where I'm coming from and what I am trying to do.
As I said in my comment on your previous article, TERFs have a long history of joining with cis men in attacking trans people (especially trans women). They don't treat trans women like men, they treat them like women who are beneath them in the hierarchy.
It's a gender hierarchy. When cis women become TERFs they're trying to secure their place by stepping on people below them on the hierarchy. You pointed out suffragettes excluding black women & lesbians from organizing - do you not notice any parallels?
I already explained how the mistreatment of trans women aligns with the mistreatment of men and how this complicates the idea of a strict hierarchy. If all you have to say is "nuh uh" then I guess I can't help you.
Maybe it's best to go for the statistics you found compelling in the past, the gender pay gap. Where trans women make 60¢ for every 1$ a typical worker does. Trans men make 70¢ for every 1$.
The transgender pay gap is wide, but you can also see a gender hierarchy when taken in context with the rest of society.
It doesn't though. You're just saying "trans women are treated like men" to a trans woman who has lived otherwise.
Trans women experience misogyny both in & outside the closet, not for metaphysical reasons but because socialization teaches everyone gender roles - that's required for enforcement. Which means there's already the internal dissonance when a trans woman is not able to express herself.
But trans women also face gendered violence while in the closet because pretending to be something you're not is hard & imperfect, which results in trans women being recognized - maybe not entirely but people can tell something is different. It leads to different treatment.
No matter how you try to dissect my time in the closet, I definitely don't experience misandry at this point, because people aren't treating me like a man. They treat me like a woman they can get away with hurting.
When I was young (not so much closeted as unaware that transition was an option), I personally had bullies pretty explicitly telling me that they thought I was a man pretending to be a woman, that I was using the wrong bathroom, etc. So there are two ways I can narrativize this:
1) They had magic trans-dar, and were abusing me in a uniquely [trans]masculine way
2) They thought I was an inadequate cis woman and treated me exactly the same way they treat other "unfeminine" women
I don't put a lot of stock into the idea that cis people have magic trans-dar, but if they did, they still bullied me on the basis of me being a wrong type of man, which one might call [trans]misandry! If we take option #2, and assume that bigots abuse their targets on the basis of their failure to live up to their assigned gender's obligations, then perhaps paying a little more attention to the way that "unmasculine" cis boys are treated would lead to noticing some similarities between them and trans women.
I'm not telling you what kind of narrative you should have about your own experiences, that's none of my business, but you cannot project that narrative into a universal truth. Jen Coates was pretty clear about how people (particularly women) treat her "like a man," and I really don't see anything wrong with her doing that, since her whole point is solidarity with boys and a refusal to trivialize their mistreatment. https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42
Also I'm not sure what's up with the pay gap comment. I already made it pretty clear that I'm not trying to argue against the idea that we live in a patriarchy, which obviously tends to legally and economically prioritize men. There are just-as-obviously lots of women (both trans and cis) who are economically privileged over me because they are cis, or better-educated, or less mentally ill, or just better at functioning in capitalism than I am. I just am not interested in claiming that patriarchy's selective willingness to prioritize some small number of people, men or women, is proof that everyone in that category shares the same power. There is something more complex going on than a simple "man good woman bad" hierarchy.
I have some loose thoughts on this I’m afraid to say out loud in case someone comes along and gets furious, which go something like this:
—I don’t think there’s a lot of thought given to the idea of what “men are statistically more likely to be violent to you if you are a human” means, in practice, for men.
A lot of feminist discussion is about the need for women to get away from men who might turn out to be violent, and doing that through creating exclusionary spaces. A man cannot do this, I have found from experience! I did try and be part of a man’s gender discussion group once; it devolved into one particular man saying – trigger warning – “why can’t we just rape everyone we want to?” That was not what I had in mind for the group at all.
This has been a real problem for me: solidarity depends on trust, and there are people who make it clear you should not trust them. If you’re a man who is reluctant to trust men in your body – a dog who is afraid of other dogs – it’s hard to find a space that isn’t just being lonely forever. Men like the one who ruined our group are probably fine because they can band together, and are doing so. But men who don’t actually like those guys end up isolated in a polarising discourse.
I’ve come to think that “Not all men!” is a cursed phrase because it cuts this thought off: if you aren’t a man, anything that reminds you of a man is an object of fear, so there is no space to advocate for yourself as a subject who exists in the world. And there is no way to earn trust, or to end up with an expectation you should be trusted? There’s a lot of feeling miserable for other people’s crimes
Thank you so much for this comment, you're totally right. It feels very frustrating to me to know as many men as I do who are isolated and filled with despair about what they could possibly do about the sociopolitical problems they recognize but don't know how to change (largely because the prevailing advice on how to change them-- tell other men to act normal! listen to women!--is either unactionable for them or just doesn't get the job done).
It feels like that lack of trust leaves all of us floating alone in the void instead of organizing together so that, in instances like you mentioned, we can both de-radicalize the assholes and also minimize the damage they might do to others in the process. That whole inability to recognize men as unique subjects-- whether it's via feminists circling the wagons or that old song of "men are the default type of human being"-- makes it incredibly hard to deal with any of it in any productive way. I think we can do better, though-- if we agree on what the problems are and are energized to help each other, I think we will figure it out, even if it requires some growing pains.
I think a lot about how when I was presenting as a woman, the worst thing that ever happened to me from a stranger was a guy who offered to be my sugar daddy while I was working, but since presenting as a man I've had a man threaten to kill me and I was cornered for 40 minutes by another man who tried to get me to have sex with him until somebody else showed up to help me. My boyfriend commented once about how being a queer man is a very distinctly alienating, disheartening, and violent experience. Your point about the exclusionary spaces rings true in that regard -- he's experienced more sexual violence than most women I know but a lot of spaces don't trust him and push him out purely because he is a man (and a brown one at that, lol). I hope we can continue having conversations about this that don't actually veer into MRA land or some kind of male libfem.
My experience has been that having my own fear of masculinity has also led to be too hair-trigger alert on this - trying to avoid the comically evil like you mention, and ending up intolerant of any deviation from “safe” talking points (which happens to exclude any messy feelings people might have). Made it way harder for me to empathize with other men for a while.
Gonna try to keep these thoughts organized, lol. I am a cis guy, who has always had trouble with gender. The long and short of it is that it is insane to me how deeply this resonates with me.
"We turn ourselves inside-out fretting, how could we possibly exist around women as the traumatized little perverts we are without werewolfing out and becoming the kinds of men we really, really don’t want to be? ... [y]ou try to be very careful not to do toxic masculinity in day-to-day life, even by accident, even in situations where it does not seem like a big deal...” guided by "a 'masochistic epistemology' — whatever hurts is true." Gender Calvinism results.
To me, some combo of childhood experiences served to make 'masculinity' synonymous with what we now call 'toxic masculinity,' which in turn was synonymous for lack of self-awareness, arrogance, and appetites (because ofc these could become urges which could override reason). hooks' passage "Hence the underlying message boys receive about sexual acts is that they will be destroyed if they are not in control, exercising power," hit me like a ton of bricks because it succinctly summarized the driving force behind a lifetime of intropunitive spiraling.
Idk man I'm just choked up and really appreciating this piece. I think the rising prominence of queer men writing is doing magic for the wreckage of the gender war discourse.
The last thing I'll say risks entirely unsolicited moralizing. I recently got out of a long period of alcohol abuse which was driven by social anxiety and self-loathing, and which resulted in all these suppressed feelings leaking out and me really hurting other people. Sobriety has enabled a couple of years of really significant self work which allows me to think through these things in a way that is productive and to start living outside my own head. Obviously, you've got a good perspective, so I won't presume to know what you need to do. I'm just in a sappy place now and hoping the best for you.
A tiny thing I love about your writing— anytime you refer to me as dear reader, it reminds me of wizard people, dear reader. So I read it in Brad Neely’s nasally voice lol.
Hahaha!! I would be less mad about the forced AI voice-over thing that substack is doing now if there was a Brad Neely voice option.
I am not trans and generally don't engage in conversations about trans or gender issues, but this struck me in a very human way. I have felt so similarly to you but through different means. The details are different but it makes me realize there is so much similarity in all of our stories of being misunderstood, and unseen, and the ways we diminish ourselves to become acceptable to those who matter to us.
We are all oppressors and oppressed, and we each have a responsibility to give and receive grace because of it. There's no other way.
The most coherent thought I have right now is that Transgender Calvinism goes hard as hell and I love that. I have a lot of thoughts and I'm not sure if I 100% agree with everything but also you really spoke to something true deep inside of me and I appreciate it a lot. I'll be returning to this as I continue writing.
I dunno if I 100% agree with everything I wrote either, haha!! It just feels like I have heard far too many oversimplified, motivated explanations for gender dynamics that just don't track with my experience, so I'm sort of feeling around in the dark trying to find something more functional for me. I think the next piece I work on is going to be about radicalization and ingroup/outgroup rhetoric as it gets used by both radical feminists and trans people, I've been doing some interesting reading lately that feels very clarifying.
Look forward to seeing it. It needs to be said!
Some random thoughts:
1. I’m angry at you because this put all of my feelings about modern feminism’s tension with men into one essay, so now I’ll never get the chance to make my own blogpost about it.
2. You give yourself far too little credit when describing yourself as a bad person, almost hypocritically so. Yeah you were probably being sarcastic, but sarcastically joking about how you’re awful is the first step towards believing it. And what about all that talk about how everyone tells you you’re scum? Self-hate is letting them win. You rock!
I wish I had more to say but you knocked this one out of the ballpark and into the stratosphere.
Please please write your own anywayI I'm definitely still developing and changing my thoughts on it all, you'll probably have different ideas than I would. If we know what is wrong, we still have to figure out where to go from here, what better possibilities look like and how to achieve them, etc. There is much to do, and your input is valuable.
I’m sooo glad I’m not the only one who reacted that way to Devon Price’s writing. I hate to be a gossip but oh my god.
I was so shaken after reading this that I think I replied to a comment instead of the post. Thank you for writing this.
Thank you for reading!! 💝
Hey Jesse, hi from Spain! Just wanted to thank you for writing this, very interesting stuff!
It took me two weeks to read this because I kept having to walk away and sit down somewhere and stare at the wall. This is a compliment.
I hate John Calvin with a blinding fury so the term you created was like a kick to the face. Also a compliment.
i've tried a few times to comment something coherent, but i can't quite work out what it is i want to say, aside from saying thanks. thank you for writing this, and thank you for sharing it.
As someone who isn't a feminist, and generally doesn't think highly of feminist though, I think this represents a perspective that is at least close enough to what I view as reality, that it'd be at least possibly to try and talk about things.
For example, "I think its safe to say that feminism has reached the water supply.", is something that is somehow basically entirely missing from the conversation around "culture" and "society", which is that feminist views aren't obscure, but are rather incredibly mainstream. It is hard to discuss the state of culture in regards to gender with someone who is unwilling to recognize a massive part of that equation in any form.
I also think the Christianity comparison is very apt, and something I've experimented with using to explain to people my perspective outside of feminism how a lot of the rhetoric and ideas come across.
I know I'm not anyone of actual note, but if you ever wanted to talk about these subjects, would always be down to hop on discord / the phone / .etc for some time.
I feel you. It does feel extremely weird to talk to people who think that feminism is somehow unpopular. I had a couple friends express surprise that Barbie got made since it's ~so feminist~ and I was like, huh??? Feminism has been A Brand for like a decade at least, this is still a 2hr toy commercial!!
I think it's given me a lot of peace to delineate a difference between feminist theory and feminist culture. "Cultural feminism" has been criticized by other feminists for ages now, but the mainstream has not managed to hear their critique and respond with a more intersectional approach. I think even the radicals deserve respect so long as you also understand that their intention is to startle & provoke as much as anything else, but obv ymmv.
It's just so incredibly frustrating to be a *fan* of feminist writers and theory and still feel such miserable friction with the culture-- it's like everybody tells you to read The Will To Change, and the second you crack it open you realize nobody who recommended it has bothered to read it themselves. For what it's worth, the response to this essay (and the last) has been very positive, so I am more and more encouraged that conversation and collaboration are absolutely possible so long as we don't bite each other's heads off!!
I think it is less my gut "weirdness" to it, and more that when someone has very strong views on culture, but also seems to be completely off-base and unable to read the temperature of the room. It is a huge gap and means that any conversation has to get pushed way back to fundamentals of how we measure and think about the culture, rather than the subject that most likely was actually brought up. I could try to go into more specific examples, but I think that'd lose the forest for the trees. Indeed, even in your response, I think "a decade at least" is something of an understatement, but that is besides the point.
Personally, I've never felt like I had a clean political "home". Instead I had a bunch of ideas that conflict all over the place with established groups, so on one hand I relate to feeling like a bunch of people "just don't get it", but on the other hand, I try to eschew political labels, so there is usually more distance.
When it comes to radicals, I think "respect" is a word that is ambiguous, so I'll shy away from that, but I generally do not think acting as a provocateur is particularly productive. It doesn't really translate very well to people who disagree with you, and ends up with you being perceived as more radical, because you play into the biases of your opponents.
To give an example, long, long ago, Paul Elam put out an article which was supposed to satirize another article that all-but explicitly endorsed women hitting their boyfriends. It was called "bash a bitch month". If you understood the context or knew much about Paul Elam at the time, it was pretty painfully obvious that Paul Elam didn't sincerely hold this position. It is, from time to time, *still* brought up in a negative way against men's rights and as a way to dismiss them all as hating women.
When we're talking about taking the temperature of the culture, I suggest one of the touch points really ought to be that, if people are justifying you making "radically" suggestions, and are willing to tolerate them, it is because you are pretty close to the cultural center. People who are further away from the cultural center, when they make radical claims, are vilified for them. Paradoxically meaning that the radicals are really testing how un-radical they are, it seems like if being radical doesn't undermine your movement, then your movement is pretty socially accepted in the first place.
From my understanding there have been two "golden forums" for discussion on these topics. Namely feministcritics.org and /r/femradebates. Both of them are pretty dead now, so hopefully a third forum does pop up at some point.
thanks for a peek over the garden fence, I always come away from these posts with much to ponder from the other perspective!
I think your writing on this topic has really come a long way since your "do I hate women" essay a while back!
if you ever do like a solution oriented pt 3, i'd love to know if you've ever found communities online for men who clearly aren't into the utter shite and bile that is the manosphere but also feel ostracised by online feminist spaces that are predominately women?
I really haven't, and not for lack of looking. :( There is a r/menslib subreddit, but it's mostly an effort to do triage and divert boys away from the manosphere, so-- knowing how online comments sections tend to go when boys get to venting-- criticism of feminism is strictly prohibited. (Both of my misandry essays would probably be deleted by moderators if I posted them there, and even criticizing TERFs is iffy unless you make some noises about how they're "not real feminists" etc.) So imo, like the historical men's liberation movement, it's a decent place for men to talk about their feelings and tell each other "be yourself but don't be #toxic!" and not much else.
I know of a couple in-person events but they all have their own issues-- expensive, once-a-year, lack of integration between cis/straight/queer/trans, they skew very white and/or into the mythopoetic men's movement's appropriative new age spirituality stuff, etc etc.
Personally I think my dream home would be a gender-diverse space where men are safe to complain about their problems (including criticism of women & feminism!) but which diverts that energy away from entrenched resentment and towards political empathy and mutual aid. But it seems like there just isn't the will or the resources to maintain such a space, everyone is angry and afraid of each other and there's really no handbook on how to mediate that tension long-term.
Know I am late on this one, but I just found this.
My experience with r/menslib was…let’s just say mixed. They were clearly trying to help men, but they were also trying to turn men into Good Feminists (tm). When those two goals conflicted, the mods (at least to my recollection) pretty consistently valued the latter over the former. Granted, I left Reddit years ago, so perhaps I have exaggerated things in my head (it would not be the first time).
Yeah, same. I ended up ditching it because I got in trouble for sharing a Lily Alexandre video about (her words not mine) "the feminist to far-right pipeline" when someone tried to no-true-scotsman at me about TERFs.
I think there’s some great points to be taken from this essay - ones that I can relate to personally as a man balancing in the non-binary limbo…though at some parts of it the mania is showing, haha. :] The overarching message is fair and worth thinking about - wish I had more time to delve into a reply here, but I’m off to work pretty soon. All the best!
Thank you!! I'd be glad to hear your thoughts in a comment or DM if you feel like it when you've got the time 🌞
I think I'm sympathetic to the direction of this essay, but I'm not sure? Lots of things about the way society is structured screw over lots of men, absolutely. I totally buy that some people who call themselves feminist ought to be more sympathetic to that. It seems obvious to me that gender is more complex than M > F, yeah (and I don't know how anyone could have a transfeminism without that observation).
But there's so much sarcasm in your writing that I'm often not sure what you're responding to. Obviously nobody is actually literally making a game of shouting from the rooftops that they can't stand you just because you're a dude, right? Obviously you can advocate for your own well-being without being the worst-off person in the world, right? Obviously that Bo Burnham song is not actually an argument that men don't have problems, right? Obviously a large chunk of the garbage transmasc folks face is genuinely misogyny & transmisogyny splash damage, even if that might not account for all of it, right? Obviously you noticed that Doyle does a bunch of qualifying of the first sentence of his you quoted in the 18 paragraphs in your [...] before the second sentence of his you quoted?
I think there are lots of critiques to be made of the positions you're responding to. I just can't tell throughout this essay whether you're intentionally misrepresenting those positions, or just misunderstood them, or are exaggerating your objections for effect? I think there are probably some great points in here, and probably some things that I think are bad takes (like: "hurt people hurt people" is only true because everyone gets hurt; it's not at all true that people hurt more necessarily do more hurting), but the level of snark makes it hard to tell what you actually mean to say.
I'm really sorry anyone told you that you were worthless and no one will ever help you. I'm having a hard time believing that feminists are constantly telling you that (in your communities - I could believe that's the takeaway if you're, like, binge-reading all of Dworkin or something). You're not worthless and you deserve care.
I think I would like to add re: "hurt people hurt people" -- I was thinking of the way that most of the women who have been personally cruel to me in unhinged ways are people who had been through a lot. They had a bad time growing up, they were dealing with long-term depression or untreated bipolar disorder or etc-- they were really understandably angry at the world and men in particular, and biting back at *me* was just a release-valve for the pain they could not contain.
I don't think I can look at those people and be like, "Why don't you just be a good person? Why don't you simply deal with your trauma and change your personality so that you're a Nice Girl?" That is just asking way too much from someone who was not set up to succeed. Her problem isn't a lack of moral fiber, it's that she feels terrible and has to save her emotional bandwidth for keeping her shit together when she's with her kids or at work or otherwise dealing with people who are obviously-inappropriate targets. So of course she snaps at me for things that probably wouldn't be a big deal if she didn't already feel like shit, and of course she exploits me as a way to get her own needs met-- what other options does she have besides repressing, right? And even repression is both self-destructive and a lot harder than it looks.
I think part of the point of feminist communities is to serve as a safe place for women in that position to vent their pain instead of lashing out or self-destructing, and that's a *really really* good thing. But feminists have basically zero tolerance for men who do the same-- when men vocalize their pain by complaining about women, it is usually treated as a failure of their character. Plus, that "safe space" today includes a huge chunk of social media, a public space where random men are caught in the crossfire and internalize the mass of women's venting about men as proof that they themselves are bad people, even when they are not the kind of men she is venting about.
I feel like harping on "toxic masculinity" as much as we do leads people to think patriarchy simply teaches men that cruelty is good and cool and men are just like "sure, okay!" I have seen much less interest in describing how patriarchy uses culture and power imbalances to channel peoples' understandable pain and rage onto whoever they can get away with hurting-- people of low status, people they personally have power over, people they can rationalize treating like punching bags.
So I think that, while obviously not everyone who has experienced trauma is inevitably going to inflict it, it's not a surprise when trauma begets trauma. Fighting the impulse to be controlling or vindictive is hard enough at the best of times, and feeling like shit all the time leaves you with a lot less gas in the tank. We can stop that cycle by giving resources to victims so they can escape and heal, but the gold standard is preventing victimization in the first place, right? If the women who have been cruel to me had better options for healing, or could show actual consequences to the men who hurt them in the first place, I would not have wound up being the target for their vented pain and spent years thinking I just deserved it. I think it would be helpful to apply that empathetic lens to men, too-- framing everyone's bad behavior as a failure of moral character means it's their personal problem to solve it, rather than everyone's job to create a less-impoverished world. We all share the obligation to care for each other, of course, but I prefer not to think of the people who fail that obligation as bad people who simply choose to be bad.
Sorry for the wall of text, but hopefully that makes my intentions a bit clearer! My thinking is very influenced by a zine that I found years and years ago called "We Are All Survivors, We Are All Perpetrators" which was put out by an anarchist distro during the early days of #metoo, to try and discuss how to help victims in ways *other than* simply ostracizing their abusers. ( https://www.sproutdistro.com/catalog/zines/accountability-consent/we-are-all-survivors/ ) bell hooks' writing in The Will To Change and All About Love were pretty influential on me, too.
I wish I had more likes to give this! So there on the “toxic masculinity” observation. And it’s so very true that anger that, in the past, might have been harmless private venting is now out in the open on social media where it can hurt people (and plant ideas that make them blame themselves when people are cruel to them irl), and it still feels like harmless venting to people who have the same anger.
Thanks for the link, will read.
If you think it's obvious, that's great! But hearing that opinion has not been the bulk of the experience for me or like, most of my tguy friends, or apparently the men Doyle references feeling like they cannot transition without becoming traitors to feminism. Most of the trans men I have known did experience and internalize pretty constant criticism from women in a way that winds up making us extremely sad and self-hating. If you don't believe me that the culture is genuinely hurtful or relentless, if you have never seen the way that women talk about men on social media, and if you cannot draw a comparison between the way men are treated with the way women are treated via misogyny, then yeah, it's not gonna land.
Oh, people are incredibly cruel. And of course I've seen (and experienced) people hating men as a class, and the real psychological impacts of that. But the essay is making an argument that this is best understood as a kind of oppression parallel to misogyny, and that it's the fault of feminism, and that every trans community is corrupted by these ideas into a particular cruelty toward trans men - I'm finding the argument hard to follow because of the hyperbole and absolutist language.
That's fine. If I was writing to convince skeptical women and not reach out to other boys who go through this, I would have written it differently.
Cool! Thanks for the peek over the fence in that case :)
Ah. You did go there in the next article. Saying that TERFs hate trans women because of misandry. Despite TERFs allying with men & treating trans women like women who are beneath them in the gender hierarchy.
You LITERALLY made the argument in this same article that saying trans men's struggles are a result of misogyny is basically calling trans men women. So how come you did the exact same thing to trans women?
Hang on. Now closeted trans women have some "inevitable maleness"?
Do you not see how every time you make an assertion like this it's you arguing against your previous point? Because apparently misgendering trans people is fine if you're saying trans women face oppression due to misandry.
You are not the first person I have seen who describes TERFs as turbo-misogynists, who treat trans women as a worse kind of women. But this is clearly not how TERFs operate, it's not how they characterize trans women at all (or trans men, for that matter). They consider trans men through a misogynist lens which paints us as confused little girls who cannot be trusted with agency over our own bodies. I am not saying that *I* think trans women are men; I am describing the way that TERF motivations and rhetoric align with traditional patriarchal attitudes about men & women's "nature."
I criticized Devon Price because I understand why we do this, viewing the world through a lens which gives primacy to people's embodied genders (rather than the genders they were assigned or how they are perceived), and I am frustrated that we selectively refuse to apply this lens to trans men. We wind up more or less concluding that "everything bad that happens to trans women is misogyny, and everything that happens to trans men is also misogyny," and I'm sorry but that just doesn't work for me. The need to frame men as inevitably empowered removes our ability to give primacy to our maleness and understand our problems as male problems, which sucks for the same reasons you think it sucks for me to describe some of trans women's problems as "misandry."
I am mostly asking for consistency in the way trans people describe ourselves and our problems by flipping it the other way around. Either my own experiences of transphobia can be framed as "misandry" because I am somehow metaphysically male, or all sorts of trans people experience variations on both misogyny and "misandry" based on what gender people perceive us to be (even when those perceptions are wrong). Personally I find it kind of absurdist to propose that TERFs are simply lying when they repeatedly say they think trans women are men, but who knows.
I think both lenses have their uses in different applications, my point is just to complicate the way we flip back and forth between them in a way that effectively forces me to frame myself as a woman or a victim of misogyny if I want to understand my problems as gendered at all. More often it becomes a way for people to deny that I have problems at all, or to insist at all times on comparing my problems to that of trans women in order to trivialize my struggle, which I really don't appreciate much! So hopefully you understand where I'm coming from and what I am trying to do.
As I said in my comment on your previous article, TERFs have a long history of joining with cis men in attacking trans people (especially trans women). They don't treat trans women like men, they treat them like women who are beneath them in the hierarchy.
It's a gender hierarchy. When cis women become TERFs they're trying to secure their place by stepping on people below them on the hierarchy. You pointed out suffragettes excluding black women & lesbians from organizing - do you not notice any parallels?
I already explained how the mistreatment of trans women aligns with the mistreatment of men and how this complicates the idea of a strict hierarchy. If all you have to say is "nuh uh" then I guess I can't help you.
Maybe it's best to go for the statistics you found compelling in the past, the gender pay gap. Where trans women make 60¢ for every 1$ a typical worker does. Trans men make 70¢ for every 1$.
The transgender pay gap is wide, but you can also see a gender hierarchy when taken in context with the rest of society.
It doesn't though. You're just saying "trans women are treated like men" to a trans woman who has lived otherwise.
Trans women experience misogyny both in & outside the closet, not for metaphysical reasons but because socialization teaches everyone gender roles - that's required for enforcement. Which means there's already the internal dissonance when a trans woman is not able to express herself.
But trans women also face gendered violence while in the closet because pretending to be something you're not is hard & imperfect, which results in trans women being recognized - maybe not entirely but people can tell something is different. It leads to different treatment.
No matter how you try to dissect my time in the closet, I definitely don't experience misandry at this point, because people aren't treating me like a man. They treat me like a woman they can get away with hurting.
When I was young (not so much closeted as unaware that transition was an option), I personally had bullies pretty explicitly telling me that they thought I was a man pretending to be a woman, that I was using the wrong bathroom, etc. So there are two ways I can narrativize this:
1) They had magic trans-dar, and were abusing me in a uniquely [trans]masculine way
2) They thought I was an inadequate cis woman and treated me exactly the same way they treat other "unfeminine" women
I don't put a lot of stock into the idea that cis people have magic trans-dar, but if they did, they still bullied me on the basis of me being a wrong type of man, which one might call [trans]misandry! If we take option #2, and assume that bigots abuse their targets on the basis of their failure to live up to their assigned gender's obligations, then perhaps paying a little more attention to the way that "unmasculine" cis boys are treated would lead to noticing some similarities between them and trans women.
I'm not telling you what kind of narrative you should have about your own experiences, that's none of my business, but you cannot project that narrative into a universal truth. Jen Coates was pretty clear about how people (particularly women) treat her "like a man," and I really don't see anything wrong with her doing that, since her whole point is solidarity with boys and a refusal to trivialize their mistreatment. https://medium.com/@jencoates/i-am-a-transwoman-i-am-in-the-closet-i-am-not-coming-out-4c2dd1907e42
Also I'm not sure what's up with the pay gap comment. I already made it pretty clear that I'm not trying to argue against the idea that we live in a patriarchy, which obviously tends to legally and economically prioritize men. There are just-as-obviously lots of women (both trans and cis) who are economically privileged over me because they are cis, or better-educated, or less mentally ill, or just better at functioning in capitalism than I am. I just am not interested in claiming that patriarchy's selective willingness to prioritize some small number of people, men or women, is proof that everyone in that category shares the same power. There is something more complex going on than a simple "man good woman bad" hierarchy.