sigh

I can't believe I have to make a post about this.

It's such a ridiculous and false narrative, but I feel like I have to respond, because this narrative is being used to radicalize people into believing that women who use FDS deserve to be abused and harassed off of this platform.

We are the last female-only sub on a male-dominated platform and that has made us into the lightning rod for allll the misogynists on reddit who feel in need of a punching bag.

I was disappointed but not surprised by the amount of abusive, misogynistic, and frankly downright cruel harassment I received after my last post, almost exclusively from men and AMAB members of the LGBT community. (Example)

The recurring theme in all of them, is that they seem to believe that FDS promotes the (ridiculous) idea that homosexuality is the cause of all misogyny.

What they are referring to is the "radfem circular theory of homosexuality" which is the bread and butter of our #1 Stalker Subreddit, and it is why they feel morally justified inciting targeted harassment campaigns against a subreddit full of abused and traumatized women.

They write, "radfems believe that men are gay because they are misogynists, and men are misogynists because they are gay"

That statement is COMPLETELY false. No FDS user has ever actually said that or anything close.

Their "evidence" consists of a handful of (mostly deleted or removed) comments, most from over a year ago, most with very few upvotes, taken out of context, twisted to mean something completely different, and then with an entirely new narrative written around it using passages from radical feminists we never even mentioned. Similar logic as "you know who else drank water? HITLER! Therefore water is fascist" except somehow even more far removed from reality.

FYI, the context of the OP on FDS is always something like "gay men can be misogynistic sometimes" which is a well-documented fact. Gay men CAN be misogynistic sometimes. Being LGBT doesn't give you a pass for being a misogynist.

It's very common for abusive and/or narcissistic people to do the whole, "if I can't control you, I will try to control how others see you" tactic.

In light of these false accusations, I'd like to set the record straight and communicate what we actually believe:

Misogynistic men are misogynistic because 1) they are male, and raised in a culture that is male supremacist, and 2) they benefit from the oppression of women. Regardless of one's gender identity or sexual orientation, all persons born and raised male are socialized to enjoy male privilege and are raised to feel entitled to female subordination. They feel entitled to use misogyny and even abuse to maintain their position of relative power over women.

To be fair, I'm sure that there may be some among our stalker subs who genuinely believe that they are fighting hatred and bigotry. And to give credit where credit is due, some of these stalker subreddits do occasionally pay lip service to misogyny on reddit.

Nevertheless, their tactics are unethical because 1) they are relying on deceit and misrepresentation, and 2) they are capitalizing on the pre-existing culture of misogyny on reddit. Anti-FDS posts get waaay more upvotes and engagement than anti-misogyny posts, so they are incentivized to keep making them. Because reddit is mostly male, and because misogynist trolls also browse their subs, every time they make an anti-FDS post, they are inviting misogynists to dogpile us with the abusive modmail/DMs/comments and malicious mass reporting. The end result is that an anti-FDS post has a greater potential to incite a greater volume of harassment against a smaller and more marginalized group, whereas an anti-misogyny post incites hardly any harassment, and even if it does, it's against a much larger and more dominant group.

I'd like to point out that as women who moderate the only female-only sub on a misogynistic platform such as reddit, we unfortunately have to work way harder than moderators of any other subreddit just to keep our subreddit afloat. So much of our time is spent JUST on anti-harassment, keeping this sub female-only, and preventing our sub from getting overrun by trolls (flairing users, manually approving every post, combing through an avalanche of abusive modmail just to find the 0.01% of legitimate users who accidentally got caught up in autoban, etc.) and that shit is fucking time consuming!

I'd also like to point out that our moderator team are all either women of color, working class women, and/or survivors of childhood abuse, sexual assault, and intimate partner violence. For people who seem to all be hopping on the "anti hate" bandwagon; from our perspective, all we see are a large group of people who are mostly white and mostly male spewing vitriolic hatred towards a much smaller group of marginalized women, and creating tons of extra work for us.

Like... we don't get paid to moderate on reddit. We have to work actual jobs to keep a roof over our head. We've got maybe, what? Less than a dozen active mods? Trying to stand up to millions of pissed off redditors, some of whom apparently don't have jobs and instead have the privilege of working the equivalent of a full-time job harassing women on reddit? Wow.

I'm sure many of you have these massive delusions of grandeur and see yourselves as brave social justice warriors, noble soldiers fighting for a righteous cause, but the reality is that you're part of the problem. We don't see you as anything other than just another loser desperately clinging to patriarchy because you have nothing going for you in life other than having a white penis. You are a member of the oppressor class, so stop playing the victim.

Lastly, I'm sure the smoothbrains feeling particularly defensive right now are gonna go and crosspost this to all our other stalker subs and cry "FDS mod does personalized harassment campaign at me!! Waaah!" and I just want to point out that I have not ONCE directly mentioned any specific usernames or subreddits, in this post or any other. Unlike what you do, FDS has a strict antibrigading policy. Unlike you, we don't allow anything that would allow our users here to know who you are or have any way to contact you. Unlike you, we don't encourage our users to obsessively stalk and mass report everything you write. Unlike you, we actually have integrity and we try to protect your privacy, even if you do not show us the same courtesy. If you choose to out yourself by saying "I wrote that!" then that's a you problem, not us. Stop lying, projecting, and derailing. You speak exactly like a narcissistic abuser. You don't get to systematically stalk and harass our moderator team and our community for over a year and then play the victim when we call you out for it.