After years of having to have conversations with feminists and understand their perspectives - I have given up.

griii2 · 2022-10-10T08:23:04+00:00

I am very sorry to hear about your health issues. What I will write here will not make you feel better.

1/ In the EU boys are about 70% more likely to die of illness than girls and absolutely nobody gives a fuck.

2/ The Guardian recently reported that 61% of young people who die worldwide are males, blaming the average on "Latin America and the Caribbean" and "Interpersonal violence". In fact an unbelievable 68% of those who died young (10-24) in 2010 in the UK were boys and men.

Source: Eurostat

PricklyGoober · 2022-10-10T10:57:08+00:00

and do not believe women are second-class citizens

Unfortunately in many parts of the world, men are actually the ones treated like second-class citizens. For example, countries with male-only conscription. In my country it is serve for two years or go to jail (or become a wanted refugee, I guess). In fact, you are not allowed to renounce your citizenship and avoid conscription once the country has deemed you have “benefited from the citizenship status”. This is after you have turned 11, an age where you would be too unaware of what is going on, and would be unable to make any decisions by yourself anyways.

There are no equivalent obligations (or ‘privilege’ as some would call it) for females.

Pasolini123 · 2022-10-10T11:37:13+00:00

The most funny thing about feminism is, that it is totally immersed in traditional gender roles. I remember when I was a teenager (now I'm 37), one of the most popular "sexist" ideas was that women love to feel like victims one needs to console and men love to feel like heroes, who don't struggle with anything,even if they do. And that women tend to exaggerate when they talk about their problems, while men tend to play them down.

While there are many facts, which could contradict this simplistic idea, feminism is certainly not one of them. Quite the opposite! It managed to give this tendency totally incredible proportions, so that now young and quite often privileged women feel like notorious victims of all possible aspects of the reality around them, while men are denied any victimhood whatsoever.

In my country this pattern is still used mainly in gender debates. So I think that even in the academic world or in the liberal press, people would still understand that there are certain universal struggles like illness, disability etc. But Britain and Scandinavia are ahead of the continental Europe, when it comes to feminism, so I think it's just a matter of time... Especially since the feminist religion has its inner logic, which makes it work exactly the same way everywhere.

When it comes to conversations with young feminist women,I can very much relate, albeit for different reasons.

Whenever I tell them I'm gay, they immediately react with some kind of "oh, we're on the same boat". In fact there is even a quite popular book recently published in Poland. It's title "Women and queers against patriarchy".

But we're not in the same boat. First of all even in the most progressive countries, gay people still have to worry, whether their family and friends would accept them. Women don't have to "come out" as women. And people who throw their kids out of their houses for being gay are not only men. So the first problem is the way, feminism creates the vision of women as "oppressed minority", which they're not.

Futhermore I'm being perceived as a gay man only by my friends, my familly, my co-workes. In brief: people I came out to. The state and its laws, just like strangers, don't regard me as gay. They regard me as a man.

If Russia invades my country (today the bombs hit Lviv, 100km from Polish border) I'm gonna be forced to kill or die or at least not allowed to leave, while women would be able to continue the debate about their oppression in Czech Republic, Germany or whichever country would still be safe.

Kakatheman · 2022-10-10T15:08:51+00:00

The thing that turns me off about modern day feminism is that it's mostly dominated by these privileged white women who are poisoning the minds of women POC. These people do nothing for poor women worldwide while fostering resentment amongst men, especially working class white men and poor male POC.

This is not gonna turn out well. Did these women forget that working class white men are central to leftist movements in the past?

hshsgdve · 2022-10-10T10:22:06+00:00

“… but are they really so devastating and destructive to people’s lives, is the suffering they need to be permanently at the centre of the public’s consciousness?”

For modern western feminists, mild discomfort is akin to oppression. They’re literally that entitled. Most of them are upper middle class households, and are playing house when it comes to the “fight” against their oppression. They never really handle real issues.

Roe vs Wade seems to be the exception to this…

You can measure the severity of one’s suffering by what they complain about. So when someone complains about micro aggressions, guess how difficult their life actually is…

It’s why most bail on their “values” around 25-28 when they know their feminism will actually cost them real discomfort in the long term.

YesAmAThrowaway · 2022-10-10T13:56:50+00:00

I find this to be a general phenomenon in the political sphere. Most decent people, which is more or less most people (or else we wouldn't have societies nearly as functional as they are), will agree with the basic principles of equality and kindness and try paying a bit of attention to them.

Outspoken people tend to act fanatically, and that fanaticism is ironically exactly what can turn them bigoted towards other subjects, even closely related ones.

RoryTate · 2022-10-11T12:36:32+00:00

Were I to tell them about my health and social struggles they would either (1) not care at all, or (2) laugh, deeming it just punishment for the crime of having a penis. I'm exaggerating, obviously, but I don't think that is too far from the truth.

No, you're not exaggerating. These, and other types of dismissals, are indeed very likely to occur. It's actually quite easy to categorize these reactions into the "Narcissist's Prayer", which I made a post about just recently.

In particular, the (1) not caring would fit into the "it wasn't that bad" section on how narcissists react to other people's suffering. And the (2) just punishment would slot into the "you deserved it" part of the prayer just fine.

You're dealing almost exclusively with full-blown narcissists whenever you interact deeply with feminism. That's the unfortunate reality of the era we live in.

Neveah_Hope_Dreams · 2022-10-11T07:14:22+00:00

This is just everything horrific.

I'm so sorrt you are suffering from health issues.

You where literally bullied and abused by upper class feminists.

You are the kind of person I will be fighting for when I enter the Political side of University.

And I want you to know that you should not be ashamed to be a man and to be white. You can't change those things. And it's the human scum that is making you feel this way. Your race and sex is not responsible for any of the issues of this world and your actions. Don't let bullies shame you for who you are.

Troll4everxdxd · 2022-10-10T13:52:14+00:00

I'm certain that most individual feminists don't think like this, but mainstream corporate feminist nowadays has a very black and white vision of the world:

Women, homosexuals, people of color, trans people, non binary people = good guys by default.
White straight men, and any member of any minority the second they step out of line = evil by default that needs to bow down to and humiliate themselves in front of the "good guys" to "redeem" themselves.

As paradoxical as the following might sound, nowadays being a victim gives you power. Or at least the illusion of power. It makes you think that you are already perfect they way you are, it's society the one that needs to change, to adjust to you. Having the mentality of "Everyone is stupid except for me" can be very addictive. And so is feeling that you are morally superior to other groups of people by no merit other than existing. It happened historically with whites and blacks, men and women, straights and gays, etc, and this is the same shit but with different smell.

InspectorSuitable407 · 2022-10-10T17:32:24+00:00

Paraphrasing what gandhi (supposedly?) said: I’d be a [feminist] if it weren’t for the [feminists] themselves.”

FlexMissile99 · 2022-10-10T07:57:59+00:00

Title should of course read 'Trying to have', not 'Having to have'!

Krausewitz · 2022-10-10T21:34:06+00:00

The Oxbridge comment doesn’t surprise me. The more elite the institution the more uniformly (and incuriously) woke people tend to be.

We can’t win. All we can do is survive. Here’s hoping you survive.

Tedfordshire · 2022-10-10T13:40:20+00:00

I'd like to bring your attention to this video: https://youtu.be/mD9PWDeldng

Now there's a lot of stuff in there that I don't necessarily agree with, and I don't like how the guy talks about women as if they're some weird alien being. However, the main point is really interesting. His argument goes like this:

Women are hard-wired to be more cautious and be wary of danger than men are. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes total sense. In the wild, this is a useful feature that would have kept them alive. However, in the modern world with an absence of any real danger in their lives, women's brains compensate by detecting threats in normal everyday things. Men do this too, obviously, but women are more predisposed to it.

I think this is why fewer lower-class, poor women are into feminism - they have real life problems so they don't need invented ones to keep that part of their brain occupied.

Mirisme · 2022-10-10T12:09:01+00:00

There's no such thing as more objectively serious issue. There's however a grave issue that affects you and a lot of other people in the form of an orphan disease. In your perceived reality, it's obviously much more serious to talk about a life altering/threatening condition than the example you give of feminist discourse. It's however not immediately the case for the people not sharing your experience. As you point out, it's effectively unkind of them not to consider this condition.

It seems to me that the crux of the issue is that you're unrecognised by those around you as deeply suffering and specifically women that you'd consider your peer. You seem to point to feminist and their perspective as something that hold you back from being recognised but from your message, all I got is that you're angry they're self absorbed (which is a little ironic and very understandable as it's a surprisingly very common experience).

Well except my analysis of what you had to say, I'll refrain from giving advice as I doubt it's relevant here but I gotta say: sounds like you've got some serious difficulties that you're suffering through.

ExtremeSea006 · 2022-10-14T14:51:24+00:00

Me giving up on this trivial dispute is what made my life better. It sucks because its not like I have completely "given up" like equality is one of my core values so I legit cant run completely away from it.

BUT all the mental energy I have for other things just makes my life better. Its just not worth the fight anymore at least in a more active sense

Gonalex · 2022-11-23T13:56:45+00:00

I am very sorry to hear about the way you were treated during uni. UK universities treat young white men as the most disposable group of individuals and I've personally experienced this on more than one occasion but I will describe the one that scarred me the most with you all on the one sub that's actually sane enough to discuss male issues proper.

I myself was harassed by girl boss programmers in group project because I spoke over them twice by accident during a 10-person group call where half of us had shitty internet and almost nobody knew each other in real life. In the midst of all that I was trying to figure out how to diagnose my very probable autism which because COVID made things like that incredibly tricky in the UK (and I'm sure everywhere else on the planet as well). At that point it was a little bit over a year I realized I had it after spending close to half a year reading about it and ADHD to come to the conclusion that I most likely do have some form of autism, even my friends who were on the spectrum agreed and helped me compare symptoms. I was having a huge identity crisis because for the biggest part of my life I thought something was wrong with me, some intellectual disability, that I was dumber than the other kids when I failed so much at socializing in groups. I felt lesser for the bigger part of my life but for some odd reasons smart people that had 1 to 1 conversations with me would always stuck around and saw me as an equal, something I never understood because I always thought of myself as dumb.

I told that horrible group project team I most likely have it (autism), and my deadpan tone doesn't always mean I don't like their idea or disagree, I just am like that and don't realize it and they are free to tell me if they spot it. I had issues with this in a previous group project where I was also harassed for it but I was very reactive and had my own faults and issues with teamwork so I tried to correct that. I try harded to be appear pleasant and nice in a convential human maner in this group which made their behavior towards me even more dumbfounding.

I was gradually made fun off with passive aggressive comments by the 2 lead female artists and one of them even cussed me out in a group chat for being lazy even though she had no clue what I was doing because I was presenting my work to somebody else in the group with actual leadership duties. But she saw a white game designer dude who wasn't presenting her with any work so she immidiately thought of me as lazy.

This went on and on, back and forth passive aggressive comments which culminated in a call near the end of the module where I was told I always sound condesending and arrogant by a group of people that had 3 of them actually diagnosted with asperger's. They didn't care about my potential diagnosis, they just told me I should of taken care of it on my own, and proceeded to compare me to someone's autistic uncle who received help since he was a child.
I told them after a few days that what they did was horrible, that they should be ashamed to compare someone's care to somebody else's, especially when they haven't received any help for it yet because they grew up in a backwards balkan european country.

They proceeded to report me immidiately for all this to pair it up with my alleged misogyny into them getting away with their horrid behavior. When they I was almost immidiately called contacted by my lecturer, I found out they reported ME when I talked over them by accident twice for misogyny. I shit you not, my favourite lecturer was told I'm a raging chauvinist cause I accidentally talked over some misandristic nut cases on a discord call! They were immidiately the ones uni staff believed because they were women, I was just told off. And he could not even act like he believed me or take my side in all this. He knew there was no point and just acted like he was telling me off to put an end to the conversation, he knew nothing could come out of this.

Ultimately nothing happened to these 4 men haters, only one of them gave me a forced apology about her have preconceptions of men in a working space like it was some magical excuse that fixed her behavior because *white men who work on video games BAD*.

After this I have had so much more self doubt about my social abilities, I was on my way to recovery from my identity crisis, slowly working towards a diagnosis in the UK health system and accepting that my brain is just different and that's ok but NO. My 2 friends who worked in the same group tell me that I did fine socially and I never gave them the right to act like this and I believe them but the social self doubt is there. This was about 2 years ago and only now I'm starting to feeling more comfortable in groups again. What pains me the most is that I could do nothing to these pisspots, I reported them back and heard nothing. They all graduated and went to work in their corresponding art and programming fields. I myself had have career success as well, nonetheless a bit later than them, but it still stings. That these abusive fake people found a game dev job before me, that they can do this to somebody else in a working enviroment and mentally scar them for life.