Quick caveat: sorry, I know that I said that this was only 2 parts, but I need to make a third one. Tried to edit out the unimportant stuff but there was just too much. Anyways back to the story.

To really understand how my ideas changed, it's important that you have some context.

I spent all of my childhood in poverty. I'm not going to sugar coat it. We were dirt poor, rarely able to stay in any place for too long. My dad was a Black Panther and his folks were communist organizers.

By contrast my mom was a political agnostic who refused to simp for any political party. She is the closest thing to an egalitarian that a person can get.

She refused to have me and my brothers circumcised. She grew up in a home where bidirectional domestic violence was the norm so she refused to ignore female on male violence and taught me that it was wrong for anyone to abuse their partner regardless of gender (Which was the opposite of what my dad taught us).

My folks made an effort to ensure that me and my siblings learned about racism and classism. More importantly, they taught us to value human life and try our best to treat people fairly.

So where did I go wrong?

As far as I can see, there were three main factors that contributed to me becoming a YKW.

First factor The first one had to do with my relationship with my father. He had a lot of mental issues from previous trauma that happened in his life and he never really got the mental help that he needed early enough.

He gradually became less functional and more abusive to me and my siblings. As time went on, holding down a job became impossible for him. This meant that the majority of the breadwinning fell on my mom.

I don't fault him for his brokenness. He did a lot for us and I am thankful that he taught me to stand against bullshit even if it makes you the odd man out.

That being said, our relationship wasn't healthy. It may have been early on but his mental health decayed right before our eyes and none of us could see it.

He frequently targeted the males in my family for a lot of his aggression. As we got older, it got worse. He would accuse us of thinking that we could take him in a fight at random.

If we looked at him the wrong way, he would just snap and either turn physically violent or psychologically beat us down.

We couldn't hold eye contact for too long or he would take it as a threat, but if he felt like we didn't hold his gaze long enough he would interpret it as disrespect. We were danged if we do and danged if we don't.

Towards the end, there was very little that he hadn't said or done to us.

He had escalated to having "private meetings" with me and my brother where he would talk to us for hours about how he "wasn't going to put up with disrespect just because we thought we were men."

That if we ever thought that we could fight him he would "stump us and/or that he would put a bullet in our heads." Mind you, this started when I was a scraggly 13 year old and my kid brother was 7.

He accused us of trash talking him behind his back.. How did he know? Apparently "God told him" [This deserves a separate story altogether]. We weren't allowed to tell anyone because that was undermining his authority.

In retrospect, I can see how much stuff that he did to make sure that my mom never knew what was happening.

An extended family member saw some of the bruising on my sisters and confronted him and my mom about it, but somehow he managed to convince her that they were up to no good and we broke contact with them for years.

He told us that my mom and him were "one" that any attempts to subvert this by complaining about how he disciplined us wasn't allowed.

This went on for years until the rubber finally met the road. He was being a jerk for no reason to me and my sisters and I finally confronted him and things escalated quickly

My mom was there and managed to de-escalate things, but we stopped speaking with each other after that. Shortly after that, she left him and that was the end of that.

Second Factor We didn't stay in ghetto for life. My mom got a good job so we moved from the city to the burbs.

It was awesome out there... Until it wasn't. There was constant classism and racism. Things got really horrid once we started going to church out there. At first it was great, the people were kind and caring. But we had some major changes in leadership and stuff hit the fan pretty quickly.

The new pastor would would use sermons to promote his own (Right-wing) political ideas. Worse still was the fact that the church leadership refused to hold him accountable.

For me it wasn't just the fact that some of his ideas were horrible. It's the fact that politics and the church were synced. I was raised to believe in the importance of the separation between church and state. But he was teaching that it was our obligation to become political and promote "Good policies"... 😒

He and I had some major disagreements about classism, racism, sexism, homophobia, immigration, militarism and just about anything else that two people from different ends of the political spectrum could.

He had a system justifying response to everything that I said. Whatever happened to people who weren't doing so well must've been the result of their own doing in his mind. It wasn't just him either, most of the people out there seemed to think that way.

Needless to say it wasn't long before I stopped being allowed to serve in the church. Yep, because we didn't agree, I wasn't good enough to serve.

But he didn't stop there, during sermons he literally talked about the stuff we had argued about. Several times, it seemed like he was responding to the political posts I made on Facebook. It was a soul-crushing abuse of power. Who even does that?

I know that I sound paranoid and believe me I still question it. But I wasn't the only person who noticed that he seemingly had an axe to grind from the pulpit.

People would be furious at him, but when he was confronted he would immediately become the victim and act like he didn't understand what the fuss was about.

At first we had no idea why people would storm out of the church, but once I got a target on my back for disagreeing with him, it was open season on me.

He would be super polite in front of other people but in private, he would say the worst shit. Horrible misogyny, homophobia and classism. Then he went full on Manifest Destiny on us after my mom after my mom confronted him about his right-wing sermons.

This man said that America was God's chosen nation, that slavery was God's will to help Black people to stop being devil worshippers and basically called Indigenous people primitives. 😩

But when we brought in other parties from the church, he would act like we were overreacting and deny the whole thing. The gaslighting was real ya'll.

Eventually, he had ran every left leaning person out of the church... And eventually I left. My mistrust of male authority was solidified from him and of masculinity in general.

The third factor Someone close to me was accused of rape. I really respected him. And the person who he'd hurt was very dear to me. So it hurt all the more that he would do something so disgusting.

There were a lot of other crappy experiences that I had with other men (As we've all have). But I think these three things pushed me into the YKW honey traps 🍯 more than anything else.

After all, if all of the people in authority were men then the source of my problems was men.

YKW ideology provided me with a socially convenient way to collectively hold men as a group accountable for the toxicity (A word that I hate) of the men in my life. It helped me differentiate myself from them. I'm not saying that this is every YKWs motivation. But it was definitely mine.

When it came time to leave for college, I chose the most Left-leaning place I could find. Not a good idea.

Pt III coming soon.