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
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.
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.
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.
i'm gonna be honest this comment threw me and i'm not sure how to take it, but i will say that i think my problem with TERFs is less that the radical feminist understanding of gender is "wrong" so much as i think everyone should ask themselves more often whether their pet ideology encourages solidarity with people who share their problems or if they simply wield it as a shield when they want to do genuine Evil, like harassing other people to kill themselves or arguing against political protections of their agency over their own lives and inclusion in support systems they badly need to get by. we can bicker about identity and subjectivity til the sun burns out but the conversation's temperature drops significantly if people are actually trying to help each other get their needs met instead of fighting over scraps of support.
I think the primary problem of this whole hierarchy idea is that everybody loves an underdog, but even underdogs can be heels, like how Kenny Omega treated Kota Ibushi during the G1 climax tournament to consolidate power in the Bullet Club (sorry, dorky wrestling reference was what i have off the top of my head, dudes rock etc)
Don't know anything about wrestling but your point is clearly correct.
Yes, there is indeed a (not small) genre of TERF that has all the biblical and apocalyptic condemnation for, say, tgirls and totally no positive vision for what they want these people do besides repent and suffer hell on earth. No desire to acknowledge an underlying human soul.
This sort of thing -- the genuine Evil as you call it -- is both tragic and cringe and yet utterly unmysterious. Surgical and limited and restrained solutions to problems are very taxing for the human psyche. Indiscriminate cleansing fire is more simple and fun to reach for. So why come up with a positive vision that respects the humanity of [insert people you don't like] instead of just driving them to figurative or literal death?
I don't know if either of us would manage to convince the other wholesale of our respective positions here; I imagine we have dozens of divergences in values across a number of domains that bring us to our opposing philosophies. But I don't think you should feel thrown by my remarks here, you should just take it as you wrote arguments whose logic I followed and therefore found persuasive :D
i shake you warmly by the hand, then!! i think deep down pretty much everyone wants to be a good person and leave the world better than it was when they entered it, in one way or another, so as long as we're doing our genuine best in that endeavor i think the differing ways we make meaning to motivate it are less relevant than they often seem. we all have to share this stupid hell world without trying to solve our problems by simply controlling everyone else until they think and act in line with our approval etc etc
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
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 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!! 💝
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.
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 :)
I enjoyed reading this and I’m literally a crypto-reactionary-TERF. Persuasively argued and even-handed.
i'm gonna be honest this comment threw me and i'm not sure how to take it, but i will say that i think my problem with TERFs is less that the radical feminist understanding of gender is "wrong" so much as i think everyone should ask themselves more often whether their pet ideology encourages solidarity with people who share their problems or if they simply wield it as a shield when they want to do genuine Evil, like harassing other people to kill themselves or arguing against political protections of their agency over their own lives and inclusion in support systems they badly need to get by. we can bicker about identity and subjectivity til the sun burns out but the conversation's temperature drops significantly if people are actually trying to help each other get their needs met instead of fighting over scraps of support.
I think the primary problem of this whole hierarchy idea is that everybody loves an underdog, but even underdogs can be heels, like how Kenny Omega treated Kota Ibushi during the G1 climax tournament to consolidate power in the Bullet Club (sorry, dorky wrestling reference was what i have off the top of my head, dudes rock etc)
Don't know anything about wrestling but your point is clearly correct.
Yes, there is indeed a (not small) genre of TERF that has all the biblical and apocalyptic condemnation for, say, tgirls and totally no positive vision for what they want these people do besides repent and suffer hell on earth. No desire to acknowledge an underlying human soul.
This sort of thing -- the genuine Evil as you call it -- is both tragic and cringe and yet utterly unmysterious. Surgical and limited and restrained solutions to problems are very taxing for the human psyche. Indiscriminate cleansing fire is more simple and fun to reach for. So why come up with a positive vision that respects the humanity of [insert people you don't like] instead of just driving them to figurative or literal death?
I don't know if either of us would manage to convince the other wholesale of our respective positions here; I imagine we have dozens of divergences in values across a number of domains that bring us to our opposing philosophies. But I don't think you should feel thrown by my remarks here, you should just take it as you wrote arguments whose logic I followed and therefore found persuasive :D
i shake you warmly by the hand, then!! i think deep down pretty much everyone wants to be a good person and leave the world better than it was when they entered it, in one way or another, so as long as we're doing our genuine best in that endeavor i think the differing ways we make meaning to motivate it are less relevant than they often seem. we all have to share this stupid hell world without trying to solve our problems by simply controlling everyone else until they think and act in line with our approval etc etc