I don’t think misandrist feminist rhetoric actually existed in any significant amount. It was a tiny obnoxious subculture of femcels, trolls, and “drop the t” holdover second wave feminists (who, ironically, turned around and made common cause with the misogynistic right once they got the opportunity).
There were far more right wing misogynists complaining about evil man hating feminists than there were actual man hating feminists.
What created the misogynistic counterculture was a. aggressive campaign of anti-feminist propaganda aimed at convincing young men that all feminists hated them, aided and abetted by a social media algorithm that hunted down the worst and stupidest takes and repeated them everywhere.
And when young men started repeating this misogynistic male influencer propaganda in real life, women in real life started treating them like misogynists. Which only confirmed their belief that feminists hated them.
But rather than blaming individual women for not interacting with individual men repeating misogynistic propaganda, I put more blame on social media and the atomization of Western society. Good male role models, good female authority figures, some trusted friend or family member to actually talk to in real life, could probably have interrupted this cycle for a lot of young men. But a lot of young people don’t really have role models anymore.
I’ll pop a little observation in here, as I’ve generally had a woman for my manager for most of my professional career (doesn’t bother me, they’ve all been good managers).
It’s socially acceptable to make a joke about men (you know what men are like lol), it’s a visit to HR if you make the same joke about women (you know what women are like lol). This isn’t a false perception, or over exaggerated bit of right wing propaganda, it’s just working life being a man.
I’ll NEVER forget an inaugural lecture where a professor stated she’d always hire women over men for her research team, and people cheered. She’d have been stripped of her title as a man, possibly sacked.
To be quite frank, there are hundreds of little “adjustments” men live with today. I’m sorry to say that the iniquity men face today is real, and while older men can see how it balances past iniquities (or are indifferent) - younger men just see the iniquity levelled against them and rightly question it because their only crime is being a man.
It isn’t just “a few” - it’s the normality we’ve created. It’s a sad situation, because in the pursuit of justice we’ve created injustice and the predators that shape the manosphere have monopolised it for their own selfish ends.
I get it. It’s like the quote goes, “when you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression”. And that’s an important quote when spoken with empathy, because people shouldn’t feel oppressed, and if we’re making people feel oppressed by our efforts to attain equality, we are failing somewhere in our project, and need to think about why we’re making people feel oppressed and how we can do better.
(I mean, you wrote that men face inequities today to balance past inequities. But that isn’t quite right. Explicit inequities - for example, making open efforts to hire more women - are meant to balance current, more subtle inequities - like every HR department using AI tools to screen resumes, and those AI tools being biased in favor of men because they were trained on biased training data. But men don’t generally see the implicit and structural biases that still exist in their favor. The do see the explicit way companies try to hire more women. And they, reasonably, feel it’s unfair. If I didn’t know how biased AI resume screening tools were against female candidates, and just saw the DEI hiring policies companies put in place to counter that bias, I’d think male candidates were being oppressed too 😆)
But conversations are hard. And the solution to this specific problem - which includes better education, more historical literacy among young people, and, yeah, discouraging people from saying things that sound bigoted against men - is especially hard.
So we decided we’d already won the debate and our critics were already consigned to the dustbin of history, and anybody who feels oppressed is obviously wrong and needs to man up and get over it.
I don’t think misandrist feminist rhetoric actually existed in any significant amount. It was a tiny obnoxious subculture of femcels, trolls, and “drop the t” holdover second wave feminists (who, ironically, turned around and made common cause with the misogynistic right once they got the opportunity).
There were far more right wing misogynists complaining about evil man hating feminists than there were actual man hating feminists.
What created the misogynistic counterculture was a. aggressive campaign of anti-feminist propaganda aimed at convincing young men that all feminists hated them, aided and abetted by a social media algorithm that hunted down the worst and stupidest takes and repeated them everywhere.
And when young men started repeating this misogynistic male influencer propaganda in real life, women in real life started treating them like misogynists. Which only confirmed their belief that feminists hated them.
But rather than blaming individual women for not interacting with individual men repeating misogynistic propaganda, I put more blame on social media and the atomization of Western society. Good male role models, good female authority figures, some trusted friend or family member to actually talk to in real life, could probably have interrupted this cycle for a lot of young men. But a lot of young people don’t really have role models anymore.
I agree the played victim like a soccer player.
I’ll pop a little observation in here, as I’ve generally had a woman for my manager for most of my professional career (doesn’t bother me, they’ve all been good managers).
It’s socially acceptable to make a joke about men (you know what men are like lol), it’s a visit to HR if you make the same joke about women (you know what women are like lol). This isn’t a false perception, or over exaggerated bit of right wing propaganda, it’s just working life being a man.
I’ll NEVER forget an inaugural lecture where a professor stated she’d always hire women over men for her research team, and people cheered. She’d have been stripped of her title as a man, possibly sacked.
To be quite frank, there are hundreds of little “adjustments” men live with today. I’m sorry to say that the iniquity men face today is real, and while older men can see how it balances past iniquities (or are indifferent) - younger men just see the iniquity levelled against them and rightly question it because their only crime is being a man.
It isn’t just “a few” - it’s the normality we’ve created. It’s a sad situation, because in the pursuit of justice we’ve created injustice and the predators that shape the manosphere have monopolised it for their own selfish ends.
I get it. It’s like the quote goes, “when you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression”. And that’s an important quote when spoken with empathy, because people shouldn’t feel oppressed, and if we’re making people feel oppressed by our efforts to attain equality, we are failing somewhere in our project, and need to think about why we’re making people feel oppressed and how we can do better.
(I mean, you wrote that men face inequities today to balance past inequities. But that isn’t quite right. Explicit inequities - for example, making open efforts to hire more women - are meant to balance current, more subtle inequities - like every HR department using AI tools to screen resumes, and those AI tools being biased in favor of men because they were trained on biased training data. But men don’t generally see the implicit and structural biases that still exist in their favor. The do see the explicit way companies try to hire more women. And they, reasonably, feel it’s unfair. If I didn’t know how biased AI resume screening tools were against female candidates, and just saw the DEI hiring policies companies put in place to counter that bias, I’d think male candidates were being oppressed too 😆)
But conversations are hard. And the solution to this specific problem - which includes better education, more historical literacy among young people, and, yeah, discouraging people from saying things that sound bigoted against men - is especially hard.
So we decided we’d already won the debate and our critics were already consigned to the dustbin of history, and anybody who feels oppressed is obviously wrong and needs to man up and get over it.
Whoops.