The toxicity and misandry of online feminist groups and subs and how feminism has gone from being about equality to something so much more ugly (long, but a must read)

So, this is something I've wanted to get off my chest for a few days now as I feel it's really important and needs to be said. It's about the absolute toxic misandry I have witnessed on feminism subs on reddit and in other places. It is a message to all of those who are still under the illusion that much of feminism these days isn't sadly filled with this quite severe misandry and who still believe that it is instead about the equality that it purports to be.

Here goes.

Recently, I came across a thread on the TrueOffMyChest sub which was posted by a female user saying she had been banned from the Feminism sub for saying something the moderators didn't like. They refused to give her a reason but she then went on to talk about how being a member there means you must talk about men like they're rapists and must have an attitude of wanting men to genuinely hate themselves for who they are.

Well, this struck a chord because I had my own experience of posting there and I'll share it as my first example.

There was a thread there not so long ago which said that any men who say they have any worries of false accusations are rapists themselves. Here's something about me...I once got falsely accused. Not of anything particularly serious, but it was a false accusation in my workplace by a woman (actually a group of women), who decided they didn't like me and wanted to try and bring me down a peg. They reported me to my manager (also female), saying that I'd supposedly been making them feel uncomfortable, been showing them too much interest etc. Now 1) these women weren't of any interest to me 2) I was too busy, and too stressed, with doing my high pressure job to care about them (I didn't even know what some looked like, that's how little interest I paid) and 3) I later found out that they had done this before to other guys. Nevertheless, my manager 'had to take their accusation seriously' and it affected my employment because suddenly these people were talking about me negatively and I was on a temporary contract with very few solid rights. No evidence produced of course...it didn't exist..but when my manager went off sick with stress my contract unfortunately also came to an end. People had made their mind up about me. It was extremely stressful, upsetting and left me unemployed for quite some time.

So, on this feminism thread I mentioned this and basically said "hang on...false accusations do sometimes happen (relaying my story), so I understand why some men say they have worries about it...we're not all rapists because we have those worries". Wow...the abuse I got was just unbelievable. I was downvoted maybe about 50 times for that post and any subsequent ones and one of the top voted replies (ironically), was a woman calling me (and I quote), 'an absolute piece of sh*t'. I asked them why is was apparently ok for me to give me actual verbal abuse merely for telling my story and correcting the quite extreme nature of the original post but they doubled down on the abuse and the pile on continued. As I tried to defend myself I continued to be downvoted and was then permanently banned by the moderators. I note that the most vicious posters were defended by moderators even when I reported their posts. I believe one particularly bad post was deleted but the rest were allowed to remain. The user who came out with the 'you're an absolute piece of sh*t" was certainly protected by the moderators and remains as a user.

So anyway, it really was a case of 'agree with our man hating or you are a 'piece of sh*t'.

https://ibb.co/X2w5QN3

Funnily enough, one member of that sub messaged me later to ask if I was ok. Her words; 'reddit pile ons are the worst'...'I hate that this sub is like that...there's too many man haters, I'm going off it'. That's coming from one of the rare decent feminists on there (I repeat, abusive comments to me were upvoted 20-30+ times so I am not exaggerating here).

So what's going on? Why is reddit allowing its feminism subs to become a place of hate, something which is being allowed by their moderators?

I'll move on to my second example. Personally I think it gets worse.

On the original thread I mentioned here by the woman who got banned from the Feminist sub, there were references to another feminist sub which was apparently very toxic. This one called FemaleDatingStrategy. So I thought I'd take a look. Oh. My. Goodness. This is man hating (extreme sexism for anyone who needs reminding) on another level.

Take the following thread as an example. You know how feminists like to portray the idea that men are bad, superficial, nasty etc and women are good (examples of this narrative exist all throughout that sub by the way)? Well just take a look at screenshots of these replies:

https://ibb.co/gRRN3Z3https://ibb.co/q1wsV3khttps://ibb.co/sRJ4dVQhttps://ibb.co/bRm3XT3

It is about some lady who proposed to her boyfriend with a watch and was seemingly happy enough to post her good news online. Well these 'kind' feminists took that post and not only tore into her for proposing, but decided to tear into the appearance of her now fiance who probably has no idea that he is being ripped to shreds all over the internet. I'll quote some of the lovely comments and who wrote them for good measure:

"Jesus Christ. The election dominated the news cycle so much I never got the memo about a dick shortage" (upvoted 145 times...yes, that's one hundred and forty five times).

"Girl..... THIS is what you lost your self respect for? " (105 upvotes).

"Guys this girl is obviously a queen if she can marry a man with a forehead big enough to land her helicopter on" (upvoted 70 times)

"Just like his hairline her self respect is none existent " by (upvoted 47 times)

"This guy's shoulders... he couldn't protect her from a 14 year old boy. 😒" by (upvoted 64 times)

"Sorry, but if he looks like this and hasn't proposed to you yet, then you aren't the one, sis." by (upvoted 7 times)

That was just a sample. Simply put, toxic, unbelievably nasty and blatant misandrist bullying. These people are literally online bullies and there's no other word for it. There are of course other 'eww' comments but those were just a selection.

You know, you can see just from this example how total the man hating is. This isn't just a small % of users...this is literally hundreds of people upvoting and joining in the bullying, just like I had experienced in my first example. I don't want to make this too long, but anyone is free to see other common examples in this sub.

Now, one thing that hit home with me in this particular thread were the bullying comments about the guys hair loss. This is because, when I was a bit younger I had severe OCD and body dysmorphia and in particular I had it about the fact that my hair had started thinning. Frankly, I was very unwell and it almost killed me. I used to spend a lot of time on 'support forums' for this and so often there were stories of men there who were either suicidal or even from family members of men who had taken their own lives over the issue. I remember distinctly, about ten years ago, a thread on a website called hairlosshelp (it no longer exists - I checked tonight because I wanted to find the thread). It was from the sister of a man who had just taken his own life over his hair loss and the bullying comments he had received from people, including women, about it. He had left a note asking her to thank them for their support while he was alive. You never forget reading things like that. Other similar examples exist on these forums right now.

Having seen those comments I thought, hey, I'll do a search of the FemaleDatingStrategy sub for the term 'bald' and see what else comes up. Well...here's another where you can see the hate for yourself:

This time a thread about coronavirus supposedly killing men who are bald at a higher rate. It has been posted with the flair 'scrotes mad' (scrotes is the derogatory term they frequently use to refer to men there - they actually have a official term for their manhating which they use in flairs!).

Here are a couple of the replies:

https://ibb.co/yPXG9xhhttps://ibb.co/kDqyDcS

One of the main replies (upvoted 45 times) says: " Nature’s trying to fix her mistakes by whipping out those bald genes for us. 😂👌🏻 ".

Now, just a reminder...these 45+ women are laughing about men who have literally died from coronavirus. Men who are also people's fathers, brothers, sons etc. Someone please tell me where else that level of hate goes casually unchallenged? Try telling me these feminist subs are not absolutely full of the very worst kind of toxic man haters.

The creator of the thread then replies to this comment with "I just had some ignorant scrote send me a dm telling me that all women are scum because I created this post about lessening the gene pool and finding it funny. I was like, block, block, I am sure, yes, block." So...not only is this delightful man-hating bully posting this stuff in the first place, she is boasting about how she blocked anyone who called her scum for it and is trying to spin it as 'he said all women are scum' for apparent support. Again, totally unchallenged by the toxic moderators.

Look, I could just go on and on giving really toxic, misandrist examples from both the Feminism and FemaleDatingStrategy subs but I'd be here all day. I was just made aware of the level of toxicity by others and thought I'd check it out myself and was still shocked by just how bad it is.

Now I want to ask 1) why is this level of sexism and hate allowed to go on? Surely reddit must clamp down on these two subs in particular, and specifically on the moderators who have both encouraged and allowed this culture of hate.

and 2) to those reading, do you still feel that there isn't a massive, massive issue within feminism of misandry and what is actually a push for female superiority over equality? Like, these women are quite literally laughing at men who have died who didn't live up to their standards. They're commenting and upvoting in their hundreds on these posts and similar. That's how sick it is. They are dishing out verbal abuse like 'you're a piece of sh*t' (as I experienced) for explaining a situation which had been very distressing (not to mention career impacting) for me, and they are openly bullying people's appearances. Not in small numbers. Overwhelmingly.

One of the things that has struck me about feminism in recent years is this quickness to downplay any men's issues. Take the stats of men taking their own lives at 3-4 times the rate of women. These feminists will say 'yeah well men just need to learn to talk more, this is why we need more feminism'. They will literally spin something so serious as the need for more feminism. They won't look at their own hate, they won't consider the very real issues that men face on a daily basis (the stats of which are all over men's right forums...about homelessness, custody, being left ostracized and left lonely (one of the biggest causes of male suicide) etc etc....nope...they will simply say things like 'this is why we need more feminism so those men don't have to suffer their toxic masculinity'. Quite frankly, they don't give a sh*t. And is that really surprising given everything I've detailed in this thread? I want men reading this to not fall into the trap of pandering to some of these feminists. Yes, there is a place for feminism, particularly in the third world where many women really do get a rough time of things, but a huge part of feminism has become 'equality and beyond', double standards and male hate galore.

I will just start to draw to a close here because this has been really long. But unfortunately it did need to be quite long.

One last point major point...there is a real drive by feminists even in mainstream media to downplay any issues faced by men. I've seen it at the BBC in particular for some time where they have on a regular basis created articles bashing men, ignoring the issues that men face every day, yet perpetuating the narrative of 'men bad, women good'.

I noticed it last year when they effectively tried their best to make it illegal for men to talk to or chat up women in public. Now sure, no doubt a number of men will have been absolute d*cks and not taken no for an answer or been offended by rejection, but these feminists discussing those BBC articles tried to shame ANY man who wanted to try to meet any woman in real life while out and about. I firmly believe that this falls under the category like above of 'don't you undeserving scrotes think you can try it with me, stay in your lane on tinder where i can have my convenient pick of the bunch and ignore you if i don't like you'. It's sad, but I know full well there is a lot of truth to it. It's at least partially about getting an upper hand. The BBC created more than a couple of articles about this topic and it's just another indicator of the level that feminism has gone to.

I will actually end very soon. A couple of days ago, I realised it was 'International Men's Day'. I thought, hey, I'll go on the BBC website and check what they've done for it. There was nothing from them besides a quick mention on a sport article. Instead I found on their main pages an outright sexist article titled "Have female CEO's coped better with Covid than men?". No evidence, nothing to back that question up, just casual discussion and sexism. Can you even imagine the up-raw if it had said 'have male CEO's coped better with covid than women"? They would never even consider running that story. What if you swapped the male for 'white' and 'female for 'black'. Again, hell no (obviously). It's just outright casual sexism and misandry (on international men's day of all days) by an increasingly feminist BBC. Even on international men's day, it was a day to bash men. To ignore all the issues they face in the world and to tell them how sh*t they are.

To any women who read my post today, I hope you absolutely condemn this type of 'feminism' and see just how toxic much of it has become. I hope you see why kindness is so important and why bullying of any sort is wrong. To the men reading, I hope you've picked up a few (perhaps uncomfortable) truths from this. Yes, sadly there is a growing movement which quite literally has hate for you unless you pander to every single thing they say, and if you don't look how they want you to look or act how they want you to act they will hate you too. So just don't pander to it, be strong, and realise that THEY are the problem and that their feminism is largely a discriminatory agenda. Know that many of these people operate by using shaming tactics to gain a sense of power, presumably to satisfy their own hate. Honestly, it is sad. These people have issues. I wouldn't mind betting that deep down some of them are ashamed of some of their words and actions but for whatever reason they have these anger issues and men are their target. I actually hope that they change, for their own benefit too.

TL;DR.... Really, it needs to be read. Take five minutes out of your day and read it. But basically what I'm saying (with examples), is that there is a real toxicity within online feminist groups and a huge amount of misandry. It has permeated into the media and into men's lives, sometimes with dire consequences. It cannot be allowed to continue and men (and the kinder women of society) need to actually come together against this too.

Note...i do expect more than a few downvotes for this thread, probably from members of these feminist groups, but I'm not at all worried about that. The important part was that I got this message out. This sort of hate in the form of misandry has to be called out. At the moment it's just being allowed a free pass under the flag of 'feminism'.

Update:

Funnily enough, just after writing this, a member of parliament had his appearance attacked related to things I have just mentioned. Many of those attacks came from 'feminists' on twitter. This was his response.

https://twitter.com/AndrewC70194501/status/1330455805867528192

And that's why it is so important that this misandry and the double standards are called out.