Know your enemy.

[ADDENDUM - You are all so very smart and thoughtful, thank you so much for taking the time to read and respond to my post! A colleague of mine told me this was a special group of people, I might have to start spending time here.]

Hey, everybody! I'm new to reddit. I was told you'd be just the group to help me with my problem. I'll summarize my problem up here at the top to save time, though I'd prefer if those who offer advice read my full story. Basically, my daughter has fallen in with some pretty extreme feminists on TikTok and message boards, and she has begun to act hateful and unkind towards all of the men. While I think men deserve scrutiny, I don't see how her behavior could benefit anyone. I also think it's making her miserable. Do any of you have children that have gone down one of these internet rabbit holes? How do I both affirm most of her values while also dissuading her from this furious zealotry?

When my daughter (age 21) started echoing the radical feminists she'd begun reading in her coursework at college, I swelled with pride as her mother. I want my children to live unencumbered by all the bullshit I had to grow up with in the 80's and 90's - the creeps, the getting passed over for promotions, the suffocating expectations to be quiet, polite, servile, ignorable. She's a very intelligent and capable young woman, I never want to see her potential denied. I didn't expect this to lead to any problems, but it has.

If growing up in a Christian fundamentalist household in the Reagan era left me with any convictions at all, it is this: highly moral(istic) people are also the cruelest. Once they become convinced they are the arbiters of what is right and wrong, they start to see only right and wrong, and begin sorting those in the wrong into demographics. They develop all sorts of petty stereotypes and generalizations, and soon there's no spectrum and no individuals, there are only those on the righteous path and the damned. Granted, we all do this to some extent, but in this group it becomes a monomania. What's worse, as this goes to its furthest point, there is no redemption, forgiveness, greyscale or compromise for the enemy, only punishment. I saw this first when my mother disowned her sister for being a lesbian - she was convinced not only that her sister/my aunt would burn in hell, but that she deserved it.

I worry my daughter might be capable of a similar fanaticism. She's been out of school since COVID first struck in March and living in my home. I'll regularly take her along on errands, and if in the course of those trips we interact with a man at all (especially a white man), she will spend the entire car ride home inveighing against him. Last week we went to the hardware store and I asked one of the men working there some questions about different varnishes. He gave me a broad overview, explained different brands and techniques for staining and sealing a deck, as well as some referrals for some professionals I could hire. While there was some info in there I already knew, it was exactly the answer that I wanted. The entire reason I went to the store instead of ordering online was to seek out some answers, and this man had been a contractor for 25 years before taking this job as a kind of half-retirement. To my daughter, he was boorishly mansplaining and wasting our time, pathetically trying to show how important he is. She actually called him pretentious! Because he exhibited some expertise about varnish! Yesterday we walked to a neighborhood restaurant to get some curbside pick up. My daughter was blocking the door, looking at her phone, when an older man with a southern accent walked up to her and said, "Excuse me, darlin'." He then stepped around her and walked into the restaurant. It was a two second interaction. My daughter was so incensed she made a TikTok about it. This man did not touch her, he barely looked at her, she is convinced she was sexually harassed.

Today in the car a song by Radiohead came on the radio and I turned it up. Before long my daughter was yelling at me about how Radiohead is "male manipulator music" and all their fans are incels and all their music is misogynistic, and she refused to listen to anything that "endangers women, especially POC." For some reason, this was the battle I picked with her this week. I was in grad school when Radiohead's OK Computer album came out, and EVERYONE was listening to it. They're one of the most beloved and popular rock bands of the last 30 years, I don't know how you could draw any conclusions about who they appeal to, as they have millions of fans across the world. More personally, those songs are special to me, they were so comfortingly miserable and pretty and came at a time when I was at my most unhappy, it was like a plush leather couch I could wallow on at the end of a stressful day. "A heart that's full up like a landfill, a job that slowly kills you, bruises that won't heal." That's how I felt! Also, Radiohead are old lefties like the Clash. They've never issued any kind of statement that could be interpreted as dangerous to women. When I asked her to back up some of these assertions, she said I was gaslighting her (this is more or less her line whenever anyone questions her about anything.) She pulled up some TikTok videos of teenage girls saying listening to Radiohead is a major red flag, and you should never date someone who likes their music, but there was never a rationale, and many of these girls seemed to be joking (I don't get it? These are pretty serious accusations, I don't understand why trying to slander and ruin the career of an artist that has done nothing wrong is so funny?) All my daughter could come up with was the song Creep, which she sees as this grand thesis of toxic masculinity. The booming guitars in the chorus symbolize male rage, and the singer's desire to lash out at his beloved. I tried explaining that it was the early 90's, the grunge era, and all songs had quiet verses and loud choruses, but she wasn't having it. I see Creep as a pretty run of the mill song about unrequited love. There was definitely a night in college where I related to it so much I cried, but I was probably just drunk and tired.

Her father died in 2019. He was a good father and husband, and they were very close. His job as an oncologist meant he wasn't around much in the first five or six years of her life, but after some marriage counseling he made a continuous effort to be as present for her as he could. She attended what was once an all girls' Catholic college in St. Paul, MN (there are now many non-binary afab and trans men there, too, but anyone amab is prohibited from attending.) She's been in therapy for about five years now and both of the psychiatrists she's visited diagnosed her with borderline personality disorder. (She does not accept the validity of that disorder). She has never been sexually assaulted, and has never dated nor been in any way physically intimate with anyone.

I've tried my best to let my children find their own path, and have never wanted to force a belief system onto them the way it was done to me. That said, I hate the way she treats people now, as if they've years of work to do to even be considered salvageable while she is some perfect, blameless being of pure light that's victimized at every turn. The idea that a straight white man could be of any value or have anything meaningful to contribute to her life is laughable to her, and she sees them all only as grotesques worthy of contempt. She's clearly very depressed and angry, and I think white men have become the stand in for all that's wrong in her life. I have no idea how she could work anywhere if she remains this confrontational and abusive to men.

I'm pretty sure this is only tangentially about feminism. I think she's gotten locked into an extremist cell. From how she talks about the other feminists she interacts with online, it's like the last days of Stalin, there are excommunications and erasures of the suddenly disloyal every week, and always the looming threat of being cancelled for more minute and arcane transgressions (someone on one of her message boards wrote a poem that used prison as a metaphor for her eating disorder, and was blocked from the group, as this was seen to trivialize the plight of those wrongfully caught in our prison industrial complex?) Reminds me of Bible Camp circa 1988.

Have you had child go this far extreme? How'd you bring them back?