AMEN!

AMEN!

i am not being needlessly alarmist when i say that popular feminism has become extremely radfem-esque and that the normalisation of negative stereotypes towards men needs to be resisted. like. i clearly remember when feminists were derided as "man-hating feminazis" and the main counter-argument to that went something like "we don't hate men, feminism is for everyone, patriarchy harms men too and our goal is to dismantle that oppressive system, this will benefit everyone including men, men can and should be feminists because feminism is a movement for gender equality"

in fact the major rebuttal to men forming "men's rights" movements was always that the issues these groups identified were the negative impacts of the patriarchy on men. they didn't need a separate group because feminism was for everyone and feminist thought and theorising already accounted for the ways patriarchy harms men. which is true! many of the societal issues faced by men stem from white supremacist patriarchy and restrictive gender roles and traditionally feminism has given thought and time to those issues. feminism is for everyone and it is concerned with men's struggles under patriarchy alongside women's.

but somewhere in the last few decades that attitude fell by the wayside and now popular online feminism is this radfem-flavored "all men are bad forever" thing. now mocking, belittling, or hating men is #feminist #praxis. it's feminist to make jokes about #killallmen. it's feminist to view masculinity as inherently bad and dangerous. it's feminist to talk about the men in your life like they're animals who need to be house trained, or emotionally stunted children who need to be babied and distracted.

it's this idea of flipping patriarchy on its head and saying that actually women are the Superior Gender, women deserve to run the world and make all the decisions, and actually it's men who are the Inferior Gender who can't be trusted or left unsupervised.

these attitudes will always have the most severe negative impact on marginalised men. i don't know how we got here but it's past time we circled back around to "feminism is for everyone".

You know what really sucks?

It sucks when you knew; you knew they were selfish. You knew they were unreliable. You knew they were dismissive of your feelings in favor of their own and you knew they weren't loyal and you knew they would do it again and you knew they were manipulative and you knew they'd always side against you and you knew they'd talk behind your back and you knew they were narcissistic and self obsessed.

And yet there you stood, handing them your heart like a damn idiot because relationships aren't free, you have to pay to play and you paid with all of you because YOU CARED.

Even if they didn't care about you, you cared about them and you hoped that would be enough. God and everyone else told you it wouldn't be... and they were right.

They were right and so were you.

Because you knew.

Mmmmmmmmm yes, the way of the extrovert is truly quite devious.

Yeah I love manipulating my friends for my own gain, the gain is called "hanging out", obtained via such cruel tactics as "showing interest in stuff they like" and "being generally complimentary and charming"

Knowing most people will never care about me as much as I care about them.