This is a post on a thought I had about why so many feminists see this subreddit as just some kind of anti-female hate group despite the fact that we make countless posts on actual men's rights issues. Now obviously, there are a lot of people who are aware that we have good intentions but are deliberately lying in order to slander us. I don't mean them. I'm talking about any good-natured people coming straight off of a feminist subreddit and trying to take a look at this subreddit with an open mind. What would they see?

Obviously I am doing a little bit of guesswork here, but it seems to me that people on this sub tend to use a slightly different meaning for the word feminism than what most feminists tend to use, and I think that confuses a lot of them who come here. When someone on this sub refers to feminism, they are usually referring to what the feminist movement does in practice (which usually involves policies that benefit women without taking men's needs into account, and can therefore have the effect of running men over in the process). When feminists come to this sub to read the posts here, they are normally taking the word feminism to be equivalent to "equality for women", and they are therefore more likely to interpret all the complaints about feminism on this sub as complaints about "equality for women". Whether or not feminism actually is pushing "equality for women" is its own issue; my point is that if a well-intentioned feminist didn't believe that feminism meant "equality for women", then they would be contradicting themself. Whether or not a good-natured person believes that feminism means "equality for women" is kind of the determining factor in whether or not they consider themself to be a feminist.

If they read enough posts, they will eventually come to see the subtle difference, but what would motivate most of them to want to when it appears on the surface to them that this sub is unreasonable? I think most feminists who talk to more people outside the feminist circle and therefore are more aware of how the rest of the world perceives their movement would pick up on this faster, but with political divisions being the way they are right now, few people these days talk to people outside of their political circle.

I have no idea what the solution to this would be, or if there even is a solution, but I think it's just interesting to have ideas of how it is that so many people can interpret this subreddit in such radically different ways.