I encountered the men's rights movement during my young adulthood, about the time I developed an addiction to pornography. These two are linked, because both the men's rights activist and the porn addict are discipled into seeing women as objects, explaining the substantial overlap. I don't have a handsome mug or good social skills, and I thought as long as I was broke, I had no way of getting any women's attention. This made me bitter

Regrettably, much of my technical skills comes from finding workarounds to the filters I had put in place. My dad and I were involved in a full arms race, in which I ultimately had a Pyrrhic victory. Through this he patiently informed me on how what I was doing was poisoning my mind in regards to my view of women. He hit the nail on the head. He discussed the entitlement I felt that led me to porn. This was the same entitlement that embittered me into believing, without evidence, that they'd mistreat me and get away with it.

When I got my first job, I was asked what sort of women I was into. Word got around the shop, and a woman of the description I gave came around and began to slap me on my rear. I was taken aback. She repeatedly asked to sleep with me as well. I asked my dad advice and he said he knew this situation was stroking my ego.

And it did. My ego was stroked harder than Randy Travis and Tim Curry put together. He further told me about a situation that occurred a few years after he was married, when a female coworker wanted to go on every business trip with him and even asked to share the same hotel room with him despite the company affording to lodge them separately. He found it in his heart to forgive her, but still sought to be transferred to a different department. His coworker, like mine, was discipled into thinking she had no value besides which and how many men she slept with. However, I was not raised to see women that way. I did, but only after deliberately going against what I had been taught.

It was then I realized what my coworker was doing to me was what I had been doing to countless women through a computer screen. She was guilty of (confirmably) treating one man like a sex object, and I had already lost track of how many women I was guilty of treating like a sex object. What she did was wrong. What I did was worse. She later apologized for what she did. I did one of the hardest things ever in my life to that point. I had shoveled concrete in the middle of summer. I had run mules straight without a breather. I had stood in for managers during lunch rush. I had managed to get good enough scores on my ACT to skip an entire math class at university. What thing was harder than all of this?

I forgave her.

The thought of filing a harassment claim crossed my mind. Think about it: I was one formal complaint away from getting her fired. Any subsequent employer would ask her why she lost her job, and would likely refuse to hire her if they knew. With just one signature, I could have doomed this woman to a lifetime of begging and/or prostitution. My coworker's ability to provide for herself was not worth my personal sense of revenge, and I could not stand in judgement of her when what I had done held no consequences for my career.

Knowing that I was left off the hook for the things I had done, it started to dawn on me that men really have gotten the better end of the stick, and I began to examine the claims I had heard from the men's rights movement. I found that most custody arrangements are decided outside the courts; conscription laws globally are written mostly by men, in order to fight wars that benefit rich men; that no-fault divorce benefits more men than women, and men who don't want to provide for their ex-wives had the option of not marrying them in the first place; and that women don't have an easier time than men making accusations of sexual assault. It was about eight months after my coworker and I reconciled that I fully discarded the movement.

And I am glad I have.