Incredibly Relevant Comment I Found

After writing the bulk of this post, I found an excellent comment on this sub that gets at the heart of what I wanted to say. Four years ago, u/SamHanes10 wrote a comment explaining the Buddhist concept of "near enemies". In short, someone can express a bad characteristic in an attempt to express a similar good characteristic. Examples given: love's near enemy is codependency, and compassion's near enemy is pity. My post intends to describe assertiveness's near enemy of antagonism.

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Link to the comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/d7upqi/comment/f26024y/

Assertiveness vs. Antagonism

I understand why feminism has to be assertive towards men. If it wasn't, its aims would be dismissed or forgotten and progress wouldn't be made. If feminists didn't advocate for themselves, they couldn't be certain anyone else would. After all, people make empty promises, so why leave it to chance? The issue is that many feminists cross the line from being assertive towards men to being antagonistic towards men.

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I'm purposefully not saying their problem is aggression because I don't want to make it seem like I'm invoking the, "When a man speaks up, he's assertive. When a woman speaks up, she's aggressive" trope. No, I specifically mean hostility. It's the same way people differentiate between confidence and arrogance. Confidence is good, arrogance is bad. A confident person and an arrogant person can both be right about something, but few people like to listen to the arrogant person. There's a fine line between the two, and we should give grace to people when they're straddling the line. But if someone persists in arrogance, it's not wrong to call them out.

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Two Lines of Feminist Thought

Feminism isn't a monolith though, so for clarity, I will address two different feminist lines of thought I see to make my point:

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  1. The antagonistic approach: men as a monolith. Men are fundamentally oppressors. They can be victims and allies, but they are ultimately oppressors and regardless of any harm they have experienced, their needs aren't as pressing as women's.
  2. The assertive approach: men as a group contains individuals that fall along a spectrum. Men aren't a homogeneous group. Many--even most, depending on where you look--consciously or unconsciously hold misogynistic views, but they are not incapable of change. Men and women are ultimately not enemies, but do need to learn to listen to each other.

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I side with Group 2, but I see where both groups are coming from.

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Group 1

Group 1's anger comes from seeing men who harass, denigrate, and harm women fail to receive pushback or punishment. I don't think that it is a "small minority" of men or confined to just trolls online. The problems exist at both institutional and individual levels, and exist both online and in-person, so Group 1's concerns aren't entirely wrong.

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However, although men are a collective group, they do not all follow a single ideology. "They intentionally or unintentionally uphold the patriarchy" is a rebuttal I've seen, but that brings me to Group 2.

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Group 2

Group 2 has seen the changes men are able to make, and instead of focusing only on the men who aren't doing anything to help women, they consciously take in account the men that do help them and treat them with respect. It's a balanced view. They don't pretend that institutional or individual problems don't exist, they don't pretend that there isn't work to do, but their words and actions don't have overt or implicit hostility towards men who work alongside them.

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Some in Group 1 may see people in Group 2 as naive, pushovers, apologists for bad actors, or fence-sitters, but what Group 2 is is nuanced. Not submissive, not docile, but nuanced. Nuance is a dirty word if you see it as betrayal of the in-group or giving aid and comfort to the out-group, but reality is complex and nuanced, and overly simple models of the world don't account for that. Overly simple models get people riled up and work to get your message boosted on social media, but that doesn't make them right.

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Conclusion

Am I saying that we can't hold men accountable for being misogynistic? No. But it doesn't mean that men should be broadly treated as deeply corrupt and that they must pay continual penance for being a man, even after trying to reform. We should each person accountable for what they have done. If they aren't doing anything except existing, don't automatically assume they're biased against you and your concerns. Healthy skepticism of individuals is fine. Total prejudice against and dismissal of evidence that contradicts your initial negative assumptions about a person is wrong.