(no subject)

[nerdflighter]

I've seen a lot of bad discourse lately, from people I generally respect and admire, about how misandry isn't a real thing and doesn't affect people's lives and so on. This is especially frustrating because we were speaking about a trans man, and I am just...so tired. And so depressed by the way feminism is so resistant to the idea that it can and does cause harm, and that the harm feminism causes in its own name is not justified no matter how, I don't know. Worthy our goals are. It makes me feel bad about calling myself a feminist (queerist, post-feminist). It makes me feel bad about everything. 

I have a tag for talking about the "privileges" trans men have. What I desperately need is validation and people - men and women and NBs - talking about their experiences with misandry. If you have links to such things, or would like to share your own, I would love to hear it. 

Comments

[queermermaids]

oh gosh I feel that exhaustion, I'm sorry you gotta deal with it too :(

I've learned a lot of things about misandry from lurking on people's blogs, so here's some stuff I've found to be really helpful

hellofriendsiminthedark ’s tumblr has a really good tag that has some posts about maleness and masculinity, but mostly about the dichotomization of privilege and oppression which leads to the oppression of men to be pushed to the wayside

Another two page tag is theunitofcaring’s tag on misandry

multiheaded1793 has a really good tag to scroll through about men and the problems men face Its more than 2 pages lol, and her anger on the behalf of men is really significant to me very cathartic when the rest of the world just ignores men’s problems.

oh and here are two medium articles, one about cisnormative ideas of gendered oppression , and a last one about a trans woman who is staying closeted.

from me, I wrote this medium article which I really haven’t edited since I posted it about why trans men should have language to describe their oppression (ie: transmisandry) and the alienation caused by not having a language to describe one's experiences can lead to anger, radicalization, and weaponization of strife by radfems and TWERFS. The article is definitely a hot mess of bad, slightly offensive comparisons, but thats kinda what I feel as a partial man, just people not allowing me to have my own voice and the isolation that causes giving me an intense amount of envy (of just having words) and then guilt for feeling envy in the first place. I'm not even at the level where I can definitively say that misandry is a real thing, I'd rather read someone else say it instead because I've internalized the whole "ha ha misandry isn't real grow a pair and stop complaining" type shiz and its pretty hard to move on from.

That’s kinda all I got, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I hope it was useful in some way :)

[stardust_rifle]

Oh my god, I feel that so hard.

It mostly affects me in the demonization of liking certain sexy anime things, like ecchi.

Everyone starts talking about how only men would get off to that stuff and how gross it is and I just go: "But it's demonstratable that I'm not a man, and I like that stuff, so what gives?"

I just also feel on edge in feminist spaces just for not being a woman. Like, I'm not a man, so I'm not pure evil, but I "rejected womanhood" so clearly there must be something wrong with me. /s

I feel so hard for trans women and AMAB NBs, because I know they're getting it much worse.

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

I would disagree that non-binary folks are necessarily placed into a "non-men" category, because some afab non-binary folks are viewed as gender traitors when they succeed in "escaping" some of the "confines" or oppressions of womanhood, as inflicted by others.

My example would be how a (in their words) "lowkey non-binary" person living as a cis woman and her cis woman friend told me I had male privilege, despite knowing I was explicitely non-binary and an afab non-man. I think this is because I take the masculine in Spanish and constantly presented as masc/neutral and my classmates couldn't conceptualize using masculine language in Spanish but neutral language in English, so they always treated me like a man all the time.

I would like to note that telling an afab non-man non-binary person that they have male privilege is... literally not misogyny. And yet it's a gendered discrimination based on gender. But "misogyny" is the only allowable word other than sexism, which is also only allowed to be about women and misogyny. And yet those two people were explicitely pointing out my "male privilege" as a way to justify their disdain towards me, which means their disdain for me was rooted in perceived manhood. So what should I call it if the very premise for manhood itself is used to justify unfounded class-wide disdain for men, and it was misdirected at me? It's not misdirected misogyny and it sure isn't misdirected transmisogyny; it's misdirected misandry, and I experienced it when I was denied personhood on the basis of "being a man" (which I wasn't!). (And no, it isn't enough to say it was exorsexism, because the disdain wasn't about being non-binary, it was about being perceived as a man.)

[staranise]

I'm just back in my own salt mine about how progressive movements like feminism are so focused on structural power, they lose sight of clarity about how being an asshole is also a bad thing, regardless of what the social dynamics are.

[fred_mouse]

This is going to come out rambling, because I'm tired and hand-wavy.

I work with a number of people who hold to much more conservative binary gender roles than I'm comfortable hearing discussed, especially when it is cis het women dissing their husbands. Too often I hear these and other women making sweeping statements about men, about their social competence, their emotional range, their laziness. So often, the response to me talking about a particular behaviour from a male coded offspring is 'well, he's a boy, isn't he'. As if that excuses it. As if it is normal for boys to be slap-dash, half-arsed, late. It isn't, and I can point to a lot of counter examples (possible more examples).

And I'm guilty of it. I make nasty comments about 'old white men in academia'. I have a strong unwillingness to engage in certain events because of the number or proportion of men is going to be too high. I will avoid groups of young males being loud in public. More so if they are well dressed white males. Because I'm middle class, middle aged, and white. And thus if I'm hassled, it is almost always by white males with behaviour that codes them as ex private school cockwombles.

And oh, the weird responses when male coded offspring decided to dress as Alice in Wonderland. And as Death of the Endless. But more so the first, because I bought them a dress. Which reminds me of a particularly weird experience - at a party, a group were discussing frocks. And I don't remember how we got to it, but one bloke said something (possibly about one of the women wearing a dress?), to which I said 'well everyone needs a nice frock, just in case'. There was a bit of derision then directed at one or more of the blokes at the idea that they might have a dress, until one of the other blokes quite pointedly mentioned that he has a nice skirt. I get so frustrated that men are still policing each other in this way. Which, now I've got through this, I'm trying to work out whether I'm describing misandry or misogyny or both. At the time, it definitely felt anti-men.

[amberite]

I feel like maybe what you're running into is that the word "misandry" itself is almost entirely used as a dogwhistle by people who think misogyny isn't real, so it's hard to talk about the actual problem without running into people who've gotten sick to hell of the dogwhistle.

I think this relates to my discorks post from the other day about using the 'ageism' tag because it refers to the entire system of oppression.

The last ten years have seen a shift from talking about "sexism" to talking about "misogyny" that is a microcosm of a larger shift towards preferentially using microlabels for social problems.

And there were and are reasons why sometimes those microlabels are helpful, but the trend towards always using them whenever possible has, I think, reinforced fracturing and limited solidarity, because it ends up linguistically obscuring when a social problem is everyone's problem.

So one of my goals right now is to zoom out a bit. To speak inclusively, draw connections, relate parts to a whole, start comparing things to each other again.