This is just an attempt to kinda sort out my thoughts. This seems like a good space to do so.

I'll start with a personal background, then divide this up between two critiques. One of the broader feminist community, and the other of cutting edge intersectional theory.

Personal Background

Growing up I was relatively traumatized by being male. Within the conservative culture of family life, it was kinda unspoken that men are essentially not human. They are too live up to certain expectations, and they are a danger.

This deeply traumatized me.

The way that I'll explain the experience of toxic masculinity, is that you essentially stop viewing yourself and other men as human.

I found queer and feminist literature discussing the social construction of gender, and it took me on a wild ride of self-reflection and discovery.

However that landed me in some radical feminist spaces. Where I ended up feeling incredibly alienated. Being surrounded by people that were constantly confirming that I essentially wasn't human, and just a threat. Deeply hurt me.

This got to the point where I presented as genderless, because of the shame I felt for being male. I would essentially present far more gender queer than I was just as a survival tactic in these spaces.

It's only after that I left those spaces, and embraced my unique (if you know stirner) and it's own, that I fully started breaking free from this mess.

I explored the healthy BDSM spaces which taught me about power and sexuality. I explored healthy relationships, and positive male spaces.

By the end of it all I had learned who I was. I am incredibly hetero-masc, I love being a dom, engaging in strong power play.

And that's what healthy gender and sexuality is - a form of play.

Community

Coming back to much of the feminist communities now, all I can see is toxic misunderstandings of gender and sexuality, likely stemming from trauma. Hatred of bdsm, misandrist fantasies of violence and domination, and the mischaracterization of power play. Some truly christian conservative takes being widely applauded. It's made me deeply uncomfortable and aroused some old pain.

I've come to see much of the feminist community as bitter and toxic and hateful. And while no that hatred obviously doesn't constitute "systemic violence" like some idiots claim. It still alters my relationship with the movement as a whole.

I think that good things have come out of it. Women feeling more comfortable reporting r&%e for instance.

I have still come to see it as a deeply flawed movement.

It seems at a fundamental level - reactionary - to patriarchy.

Instead of, for instance, empowering everyone (queer, male, female, +) to speak out on r&%e.

It stands for only female (and possibly queer) empowerment.

"Go start another movement" someone has said to me.

:[

Feminists fundamentally do not understand masculinity, nor how patriarchy affects men extremely negatively, and existing in those spaces as a man is alienating and uncomfortable.

It honestly feels like a perpetuation of playground boys vs girls bs.

It feels like feminism is held back by the fem, and that totalizing queer liberation - of all genders and non-genders from all hiarchies of domination - has generally a healthier, more liberated, less reactionary one.

Intersectionality

I've layed out a more expansive critique here, however it is a little muddled, and it primarily approaches it from a revolutionary de-colonial lens. Which is outside the scope of this current... vent?

Instead I will lay out this.

Intersectionality does not present a universal lens of analysis, but rather a method of collecting multiple lenses into a single picture.

Within common use: It does not have a lens to understand masculinity internally.

Thus, it's only reference to the male or masculine, is the one defined relative to the female identity. The "other", the dominator, the patriarchy.

This is a fundamentally incomplete view of the masculine - a reductionist alienation which exists at the heart of intersectionality as it is understood today.

Discussion

Masculine Studies is an incredibly small field, and is not included within mainstream intersectionality. Even so, it has a relatively developed view of masculinity that I wish the feminist would understand, and the intersectional would incorporate.

1. Men are not monolithic or undifferentiated.
2. Toxic Masculinity is as much about relation[s among men] as it is about relation[s] to women.
3. Men, although powerful [as a group, often] feel powerless [as individuals].

To men:

Patriarchy is a hierarchical system of domination of men upon other men.

^{-> It sees men as inhuman nexus's of violence}

There is functionally "classes" of men, and the lower class you are, the more misogyny you receive.

^{-> If your not human, and your "not a man", then what are you?}

There are classes of men, such as feminine gay men, which generally experience even more extreme and violent levels mysogony than women.

^{-> And men who have been victims of SA}

Systemically it is a raw tool of violence and coercion.

Because feminism does not understand masculinity, it sees patriarchy as a binary of domination (male vs female) rather than a hierarchy of domination (similar to capitalism). Thus it fails to contextualize the nature of women and queerness within the patriarchy system.

Feminism fails to protect others who are potentially further down the totem pole than they are, because of their surface-level understanding of masculinity.

Conclusion

When I see all these mens rights goobers online, I don't see the winners of masculinity. I see a constituency of extremely oppressed men (under patriarchy) that feminism abandoned to the sharks.

Forming their own reactionary movement and swinging at the wrong thing.

At what point can we end this reactionary tirade and work to dismantle kyriarchy together as a unified collective, hurt under this system? I'm so very tired of this.

Bonus

I forgot to point this out in the analysis. But "women" are essentially locked within a single teir of the patriarchy-class hiarchy. It allows slight movement within the identity, but one must drop the identity if they seek further movement - to cease being a "women" in the system's eyes. As soon as you are seen as a woman within a context, you are dropped back to that lower class.

Women are denied mobility within the patriarchy hiarchy, while men exist up and down it.

*

Non-passing trans women are probably the lowest class within the patriarchial hierarchy.

*

The lower on the hierarchy you are, the more violence you receive.