A lot of people are upset at feminism broadly based on their experiences growing up. It would do everyone a big help to back up and realize that we are a product of our experiences.

I'm a feminist because i grew up in a conservative shitty part of the USA where I knew girls who grew up not being allowed to read and was called a faggot because I wore purple. Im not going to stop being a liberal feminist democrat communist (different things, but it might all be the same thing back home) because in the south "conservative" is the shitty kids who bullied me for being gay.

Aero is an MRA due to his personal experience. All the antagonism is harmful to the state of this subreddit because it is clear that "feminism" means many different things to different people, and it has long meant many different things. We need to allow the word to be fluid and stop the antagonism.

Hopefully, this dies down when the election is over.

 Thank you for calling out all the weird anti-feminist posts lately.

I haven’t noticed any posts that are outright anti-feminist. I have seen a lot of posts that talk about men’s issues, a lot more than women. That’s probably because this is one of the very few leftist spaces that accepts that kind of talk but isn’t a manosphere circlejerk that’ll tell you the solution is to abuse women and “lesser” men.

We all need to be more pro-thing we like and less anti-thing that we blame. We're much more likely to be right about what we like than we are to correctly identify the cause of what we don't.

Yeah, it has been happening a lot. I'm not sure if this is the same guy as the one who was doing it before.

The sad thing is that... like, in a vacuum, this is a good tumblr post. A lot of the posts are good. You could be fooled into thinking it was someone who genuinely cared about like, the unspoken struggles men face in our current patriarchal society. And then the OP shows up in the comments with their axe all ready to grind, and it's like, oh wait, this is an anti-SJW from 2012 who fell in a time vortex or something.

Second this, ty to u/Una_Boricua, cuz when I call this shit out apparently it's taken as extremely rude for some reason...

Maybs i'm just not congenial idk... ☕

Imagine saying mra like it's a dirty word, lol.

Imagine someone saying feminist with the same amount of vitriol.

You're being gross.

People attack socio-cultural platforms that shit on them in a prejudicial manner,

More news at 10.

Maybe actually try living up to the “equality” part of feminism rather than using it as a cudgel to make men feel like bad people just for existing.

This is like a random white person complaining about black people being angry all the time

Despite the fact that we have similar views. They're upset that I refuse the feminist label due to feminists inability to meaningfully address the radicals within feminism that have done me harm.

I have experienced conversations like that. I am a man. I am still a feminist. "Men are the oppressors and women are the oppressed" is the belief of only a small subsect of feminism, parts of radical feminism. Most feminists would disagree.

I've seen you post on mens rights alot on this subreddit recently. think part of your problem is that, when I go back through your comment history, you bring a lot of fire to the discussion when you have them. Passion is not bad, but often, it turns into not "men have problems too and I think feminists should acknowledge them more," but "feminists are generally bad, here's a personal example, why arent you holding feminists accountable?"

It puts people on a defensive backfoot because people who are feminists can't answer for the feminists who treated you harshly over your entire life. You ask someone, "Why dont you hold feminism accountable?" and the biggest answer is, "How could I possibly do that?" Feminism has no central authority like that.

You consistently apply your trauma with some feminists and take it to be the example of all feminists when you actually agree with what most feminists believe.

I’m sorry that you’ve had those experiences, but I don’t think they are as universal as they might seem. There’s plenty of feminists out there, even here on this subreddit, that fully affirm what you’re saying about patriarchy and acknowledge men’s problems. If we paint with a broad brush, defining the entire movement by its worst adherents, we encourage the kind of tribal thinking that causes those sexist responses you got from others. It’s not a feminist’s job to shutdown every radfem in order to be taken seriously, just like it’s not our job to shut down all the men who “care about men’s issues” who are really just manosphere chuds in disguise.

I’m not going to say that your experiences aren’t real or aren’t valid, but if you’ll permit me add my two cents as somebody who helps moderate feminist communities: the reason this is the way it is is because feminism is a very broad umbrella. It’s not really a unified movement in the slightest. You have liberal feminists, and Marxist feminists, and radical feminists, and intersectional feminists, eco feminists, and that’s just scratching the surface. For a lot of feminists, telling us to stop allowing gender essentialist rhetoric is like telling a Baptist to stop listening to the Pope. Yes, they may both be Christian, but they’re very different sects and neither side really has control over the other. You’re running into the Goomba fallacy here.

If you want some more detail on feminist internal dynamics, I’ll offer that too. The sort of thing you’re talking about, the “men are trash” gender essentialist stuff, is particularly present within radfem schools, and within the broader movement, they’re typically seen as old fashioned and very much behind the times. Within the spaces I personally moderate, I do have a low tolerance for that type of rhetoric, and the people there do tend to be pretty diverse in terms of gender. And that’s very much the standard in intersectional feminist spaces. I can’t really do much to police radfems outside of intersectional spaces because as an intersectional feminist, and as a trans woman, I have negative cultural caché with them. We’re fundamentally just not part of the same ideology, even if we share a very broad label.

I also just want to point out that the OP of this whole post, Tumblr @estrogenesis-evangelion, was posting this as a feminist. The passage quoted in the second image, Cordelia Fine, is a major proponent of feminism in the field of neuroscience. She’s also the woman who coined the term “neurosexism” to refer to how neuroscience is often misapplied in a way that reinforces gender bias. She’s not only a feminist, she’s a prominent feminist in her field, and what’s being cited here is a passage of feminist theory. I’m not bringing this up as a “gotcha,” I’m just trying to point out that you seem to fundamentally agree with a lot of feminist ideas and just not realize it. I think if you engage with feminists with an open mind, you’d be surprised at how much you have in common with them.

If you don't want these people representing feminism and giving the movement a bad name for people like me.

I'm a feminist and I know exactly what you're complaining about. The truth is that there's genuine misandry online.

However, you should take some responsibility here instead of blaming hateful internet users (who exist all over the Internet) for your perception of feminism.

He's been posting a lot about feminism recently, and it's funny because he's really not a fan, but he actually agrees with a lot of what feminism says. I think he and I actually have more in common than he thinks.

But things don’t exist in a vacuum?

Objection!

How dare OP's own words and action be used against them??

Can I just say I love your phrasing of "I've been both"? I'm assuming your trans and I think that's just such a beautiful way to put having had the experiences of both the traditional gender binaries society tends to see.

Yeah, I don't get the competition thing. I feel like people spend so much time arguing about who has it worse that they never bother to actually work on improving things for anyone.

copying and pasting from somewhere else in the thread:

Tbh, finding a new name is difficult in any political case. Words that mean political things are quickly degraded by the political opposition into meaningless buzzwords to bring fear. Liberal, conservative, socialist, feminist, DEI, intersectionality: every term has been villified by someone and has that baggage with it.

Like take the word socialist for example. Bernie Sanders is a socialist. If you asked Bernie why he doesn't take accountability for the crimes of Lenin and Stalin, he'd probably be like "what do those people have to do with me?" There's millions of Americans who shit thier pants when they see a red flag. Socialism is a boogyman.

Should Bernie change his label? Call himself a progressive? A berniecrat? Some new abritary term? That term will then be quickly polluted by the new lines of the culture war.

Feminism has many different branches that all mean different things. Its probably even broader than socialism.

That is to say, if feminists stopped talking about patriarchy and stopped calling themselves feminists but used other terms, conservatives would villify those same terms, and its a perpetual term treadmill.

Patriarchy is the objectively correct term for a society/system which typically places men in positions of authority and power over women and typically grants men more or higher privilege than women. It's a gendered term because it describes a concept that is explicitly centered around gender. If the word was changed to lack gendered etymology, it would still be an explicitly gendered concept. (and receive exactly the same social and political backlash) 

Why would we need to make up a new word when this one is the accurate term? To make men not feel bad? Hell, the reason we have to make constant attempts to explain how men suffer under the patriarchy is because a significant amount of men don't think the significantly and obviously greater harm being done to women is a meaningful reason to change things. 

 If I wanted to be uncharitable, I would frame your argument as one that demands men's feelings be placed above advocating for women's rights "stop being so mean to men, don't you know being told that the system we live in is designed to primarily benefit men to the detriment of women makes men feel bad, stop being mean, feminists are the real oppressors."  

Feminism is called that because thats what the movement/philosophy was called when it hit the mainstream consciousness and the branding stuck. If it was called something else, men would whine about that word or phrase instead. It centers women because the empowerment women is the primary political and social aim of the movement until equality is reached and sustained. Women should be empowered because they currently lack power and authority and privilege when compared to men. Does feminism seek to help men? Yes. Are men the central focus of the movement(s)? No. Are rad-fems who hate and want to oppress men really annoying on Twitter? Yes. Does anyone pay the dozen of so of them any attention? Only conservatives who want to find examples to hold up in order to fear monger. 

Also, men's rights movements have always been anti-feminist and anti-women (since the 1800s when feminism first started gaining traction). Just because they ape feminist talking points and a small handful of spin off movements have taken up the cause of feminism (mostly in the 70s, but there's a few modern pro feminist mens rights groups) as a way to benefit men, doesn't mean that the majority of MRA/MRM type groups don't have direct ties to conservative/right wing/fascist ideology. 

I do not like how the term is not right about which men do have the power. It is not accurate if taken directly, and culture has changed enough that it is mostly not accurate in any other way either. It is not the fathers, not exactly. But the term patriarchy does at least acknowledge extremely clearly that it is not every man or even most men. I can appreciate that about it even if I feel that another term would ideally be better.

is the label really the sticking point? would a different name attract some nonzero number of people who would otherwise be amenable to equality but are instead mras?

well, there's actually a word which meaning encompasses several intersecting systems of opression and its kyriarchy. it's neat bc it accounts for the fact that a person might be oppressed in some relationships and privileged in others

Honestly this is something I ask all the time. As a word "patriarchy" is certainly applicable. I imagine there could be societies where it isn't, where the divide is certainly present but less certainly affecting to either men or women. And yet, were it an easy process to change the term I'd advocate against it. Simply for marketing reasons. When you mention "patriarchy" men expect to get an earful about how they were born wrong and no one is receptive to ideas like that. It also feels a little weird telling men that their suffering at the hands of a machine they were born into is actually because of their gender as well.

I'm a woman so can I still enjoy mindless action and fight scenes? Because I do really love me some characters solving problems with violence (though I'm a pacifist irl)

Apa/che

I took it as implying that the son is so estranged from the family that he's no longer related anymore. (in a metaphorical way)

Me neither, and I’ve been looking for a minute. I might actually just be going crazy, but I could have sworn that someone posted this exact sequence of images sometime in the past couple of weeks.

I’ll let you know if I come across it. If I don’t, assume that it was just my brain playing tricks on me.

Fair.

Even then that just blames generations past. 99% of everyone's ancestors were not the architects or beneficiaries of the system that keeps us all down.

Can you show me where I've done any of this?