Odds are, this is going to be a longer post. Needed a place to vent and discuss. It's kinda hard to talk about without a throw-away, but I think it's important.

Tonight I got in to an interesting conversation with my sister and mom. My sister was in town and so we went to my mom's for dinner and to catch up. Overall, was a decent night. But I think more than anything, it helped me identify why I'm an MRA.

We had dinner and were watching TV. We saw something that prompted my sister to start talking about her gender studies class and how much she was learning. We ended up having a discussion about some of it. Like the claim that 1 in 4 women are raped. The conversation ended with her telling me that I should be mindful who I was talking to, because I knew she was raped when she was young and my words were hurtful. I had just brought up BJS statistics and attempted to show that rape isn't as epidemic of a problem as it's made out to be, and that we should attempt to find the true numbers and cause so we could come up with a solution that addresses the issue rather than fearmongering so large organizations could continue getting funding. But the "being mindful" comment stuck out.

My sisters and I didn't have a good childhood. My biological mom had gotten in to a relationship with an abusive guy, and it was a bad number of years. All of us were young, I was the only one old enough to have memory of it. Physical, sexual, and emotional abuse was horrible. Being the big brother, I found ways to take a lot of it. I knew when he came home drunk he was going to beat one of us, so I figured out ways to make sure it was me. "Accidentally" breaking a glass, "forgetting" to clean up, etc... I was hospitalized a number of times for various things. Took a choke-slam in to bricks around a wood-stove resulting a nasty concussion, for example. But of course it wasn't a choke slam. I was delirious. I had fallen down the stairs into the bricks. Clumsy me. Every time there was just enough of an excuse to prevent any SCF (now DHS) or police intervention. This isn't supposed to be a sob story, so the point is, I took a majority of the abuse.

After a few years, when I was 6, a teacher had talked to me about a black eye I came to school with. After a long while, county police decided to investigate and forwarded the case to SCF. SCF got involved and after a year or so, ended up removing us from home. The DA decided not to prosecute. We were too young, we didn't know what we were saying. Plus, who had heard of a man sexually abusing a boy? That's not how the world works.

And that's the story I heard throughout my life. I was a man. I couldn't have been a victim. That stuff didn't happen to guys! The real victims were my sisters.

Look, I don't want to diminish their experiences. It was bad all around. Yet my experiences didn't matter, because I was a man. That stuff doesn't happen to men.

And after thinking about it, I'm pretty sure that's why I'm an MRA now instead of egalitarian or feminist. Because I've seen what happens to boys and men in those situations. Because I see how society views us. Because I can recognize the disconnect between how society sees men, and how they see women.

So, that's my story. What's yours?