I’m making this post because i’d like to talk about my experiences talking with feminists online.

I frequently like to have my views challenged, it’s how I keep myself away from toxic echo chambers. I will often seek out opposing view points with an open but critical mind in order to see if I am in the wrong. I don’t mind adapting my language if it makes them more willing to have an honest discussion.

A group i have found this the hardest to do it with is feminists. They seem almost allergic to the idea of a good faith discussion, because everything comes from an ideological perspective that is cowardly hiding their true intentions. This isn’t gathered from any attempt at mind reading, rather the natural conclusion from having a conversation longer than a few exchanges.

The most often bad faith reply I often hear to critiques about feminism is that feminists actually do care about men’s rights, and it is simply the evil feminists online who don’t. But if we dig any deeper into this line of questioning and ask if they believe men can be a victim of “patriarchy”, I always end up with the same reply: “welll uhhh technically yes…but women have it worse and we need to focus on them.”

Well then to put it bluntly I disagree, you simply do not care about the rights of a group which stats show are drowning. Take for example the outpacing in education and the mistreatment compared to girls in schools, or the insane imbalance of homelessness, or the much higher suicide rates, or the rates of IPV compared to the amount of shelters that can support male victims. Your actions show you don’t care, because you don’t feel inclined to do anything systematic to solve it.

Which brings me onto my next point: A common rebuttal is often that feminism can not center men’s feelings. Which is always funny to me for a huge reason:

So much feminist discourse over the last 5 years has been running around like headless chicken trying to figure out the decline of feminism in young men. Gen Z grew up in a world where they were instilled so called “toxic masculinity”, or in less contentious terms were told to stop crying and not to show emotion, often by women teachers. They grew up where the girls were pitied when crying, and the boys were scorned. They grew up in a world where at least a quarter of young men were abused and given absolutely 0 support or recognition for it.

Then, the Labour government in the UK has a grand idea to fix this problem: Let’s teach young boys that they are the problem STILL. Let’s teach them about misogyny to make this problem even worse, and they think they’re helping and not making more resentful young men…

To cut this ramble short, you want your cake and to eat it too. You want to only focus on women’s issues, and complain and dodge accountability when men aren’t centering women’s. If you made a real concerted effort to care about men’s issues while pushing for your own, less young men would feel like they’re being gaslighted when the feminist aligned men’s liberation is brought up. To be a male feminist requires a whole bunch of mental gymnastics that a lot of young men don’t bother with.

And yet, stupidly, I keep engaging with these folk over and over, hoping to hear something different. Maybe that’s the mental illness, or maybe that’s the human desire to feel understood and heard. Maybe it’s the desire to understand why so many people identify as feminists despite the glaring cognitive dissonance i can’t seem to shake. Either way, it’s unequivocally a mess, and the declining rates of identification with the label will only show that with time. And either feminists will learn accountability in their rhetoric, or slowly die with it. One can hope.