Hi everyone, I have seen many people talking about you know who (YKW) and their relationship to this movement. So, I figured that I would share my story of how I went from being a radical YKW to being a masculist. Unfortunately, I need to break this story in two since I don't have time to write the whole thing so bear with me.

Before get into my story I want to be clear that I didn't simply disagree with MRAs, I despised them. I took every opportunity that I could to belittle them and invalidate their ideas.

I'm not proud of myself for doing this, but I legitimately believed that what I was doing was right. But I don't want to make excuses, I should've been more respectful and if I were half as woke as I pretended to be, I would've been more open-minded or at least tolerant.

Maybe you're one of the people who I humiliated or pissed off back in the day. If so, I'm sorry. I was an ass who legitimately thought I was right and if I'm honest, I thought that I was better than you. I obviously was not.

My Story: I was a Marxist for a lot of my adult life and had read up on quite a bit of social theory. Conflict theory appealed the most to me.

Years ago attempting to validate my intersectional feminist proclivities I looked into several major social problems and compared how each gender was effected.

When I looked into the incarceration rates, educational achievement, homelessness and violent crime I didn't find the evidence that I was hoping for.

One thing that I learned about social stratification from a college sociology of race and ethnicity class was that social mobility in modern society is determined by 3 main factors:

1.) Education

2.) Health

3.) Income

All are interdependent and pretty much every social problem (At least in WEIRD nations) can be attributed to a failure in one of these three areas which ultimately leads to issues in the others. In order to have a shot at surviving and ultimately move up in socioeconomic status a person needs to have sufficient quantities of at least two of the three factors. Doesn't matter which (Though I'd recommend health be one), but you need two.

For example, If a guy has sufficient health and education he can generate a liveable income and (potentially) disposable income by which wealth can be accrued.

Can you see where this is going?

Another thing that I learned about is the psychological phenomenon known as 'System Justifying Beliefs' (SJB) and its cousin 'The Just World Hypothesis' (JWH).

For those who aren't familiar with these ideas, essentially it is a finding in psychology that people tend to embrace the belief that the outcomes of a given social system are just.

More accurately, it's the tendency of people to attribute social problems to the poor choices of the people whom they effect while attributing financial success to "Good decisions" and hard work.

One example of this in the context of racial issues is tendency of people to view high incarceration in the African American community entirely as an issue of poor choices or a deficient culture.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that criminality doesn't result in imprisonment. But there are a lot more factors that contribute to the disparities in incarceration rates between different groups. Group based differences in average incomes for instance.

In a nutshell, system justifying beliefs provide simple, self-esteem sparing explanations for why some people are "Winners" and some are "Losers".

I'm sure that by now you can see where this is going but you made it this far, might as well keep reading.

Going back to when I decided to pull up the statistics on various social problems, I was staring at enough evidence to cause me to question all my radical YKW worldview.

So I did what any reasonable millennial YKW would do. I disregarded everything and told myself (This is so embarrassing) that because men were doing the majority of the crime, that made it acceptable for them to be so overrepresented in the prison system.

I told myself that men were being murdered by other men and by some weird logic that meant that I had a right to ignore it and that the education inequalities were ok because the number of men on college campuses was higher than it was in 1815.

Basically, I explained it all away as the patriarchy. Even commenting once that the problems effecting men would be fixed if they would just help YKW to smash the patriarchy.

But my mind would soon be changed. Going to a super progressive (Dare I saw woke?) College was ironically one of the main things that opened my eyes.

I fell in with the super-political crowd of people who I'm sure mostly Antifa today. I was a recruiter into leftist campaigns and even started a couple of groups on campus.

Like a good YKW I went to their club meetings but never commented because "Men take up enough space" I was playing silent ally only speaking when spoken to and staying out of everyone's space.

Despite this the leader hated my guts (Later discovered that she had a serious issue with Black men).

I ended up breaking off from that group and forming another activist org on campus with some of my friends. It was awesome because we got to talk about a lot of left-wing issues and as the leader I tried to be inclusive.

But this group would be the death of my activism...

Pt 2 coming soon. Sorry I have to work in the morning