I’ve Noticed A Lot Of People Lashing Out In Response To The Posts Celebrating And Being Positive Towards

i’ve noticed a lot of people lashing out in response to the posts celebrating and being positive towards men lately and it’s… not great.

in the past few days alone, i’ve seen lot of “wow men are so weak they can’t take ANY criticism or stand posts not praising them” and “in the real world men don’t see women as humans so i don’t care.”

look. i get it. i’m a queer woman who was abused by men. i used to say “all men,” too. but then i got older and met more people and stepped back from my trauma to realize that viewing all men as a single, malevolent group with inherent traits and equal power over women is a broken mentality.

it’s dangerous to say all men have inherent traits and values. that rhetoric reinforces the gender binary, gender norms, and gender essentialism. it prevents all people from being themselves and pursuing life choices while perpetuating the idea that all men are preprogrammed for things like violence. it also allows misogynistic men to absolve themselves with “well, boys will be boys.” posts saying “men can be soft” and the like are fighting this.

oppression is complex. it is not simply “men bad, women good.” race, class, disability, sexuality, etc. all complicate power dynamics. ex: a white woman can exert power over a black man.

certain groups of men—black men, mentally ill men, etc.—are particularly demonized. they are framed as violent and dangerous, which enables their systematic oppression. they deserve to be assured that this is not the case.

a lot of positivity posts are specifically for trans men and trans masc people. they tell them “your gender is not evil. you are not doing a bad thing by transitioning. you do not have to be like X to be a man.”

a lot of these posts are also to let people attracted to men know that their attraction is not a dirty mistake. for years, i felt i had to apologize for being a bisexual woman attracted to men, like it was a flaw.

some of these posts are for younger users here. boys who need to be told they have the power to defy patriarchal values and determine what their gender means and who they are, that they’re not doomed to be misogynistic abusers.