WomensStuff

Rule 1. Women only… trans women are women, and transphobic or gender critical talk isn’t allowed. Anyone under the trans umbrella (e.g. non-binary, bigender, agender) is free to decide whether a women's community is a good fit for them.

This is in the interest of avoiding something that happens all the time with women only spaces on the internet and that is being overtaken by men.

This is especially a problem when we discuss our feelings towards men, especially if they are negative, because the discussion will inevitably and very quickly derail to men in the comments being offended and women having to temper their emotions, instead of actually talking about their own feelings on the matter.

It is sadly necessary as this problem is something that has basically killed most women spaces on the Threadiverse.

I feel like I've known a few men who experienced internalised misandry. My late best friend, for example, was a man who was progressive punk who had his blind spots, but was driven by a deep sense of justice that made him keen to keep growing.

Reflecting on my friend's relationship with his own sexuality reminds me of aspects of how Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF) rhetoric makes me deeply uncomfortable. Radical feminism tends to emphasise a pretty bioessentialist way of thinking, and the way they talk makes it sound like penises are some cursed appendage that makes people into predators. There's a sense of maleness and masculinity as being inherently dangerous, especially when it comes to sexual desire. This idea isn't limited to radical feminism.

We can see a similar line of thinking in the kind of homophobia that a lesbian in a women's changing room may face — the idea that lesbian desire is inherently more masculine, and thus more predatory. I consider this to be nonsense. After all, I'm bisexual, and if someone is getting changed in the same room as me, I politely look away, because that's the courteous thing to do.

My friend seemed to struggle with his own sexual attraction to women, in the sense that he seemed to be disgusted with himself for feeling said attraction, and he repressed it somewhat. I found this odd, because I had never seen or heard of him acting inappropriately towards anyone. What's more, he was beloved by many precisely because he was the kind of person who was loud, charismatic, and had zero tolerance for that kind of bullshit, resulting in a sort of aura of "safe" vibes around him.

I was perplexed at the apparent mismatch between his beliefs/actions and the tremendous guilt he seemed to feel, so one night, during drunken deep chats, I basically interrogated him about this to try to understand where this complex came from. I asked him, for example, whether he perhaps had sexual fantasies that involved violence towards women (I once had a girlfriend who had a deep submissive streak that disgusted her, because she felt like being aroused by fantasies on non consensual sex made her a bad feminist). He seemed horrified by the prospect, and said that his aversion towards violence in this context meant that he had struggled in the past when he had a girlfriend who wanted to experiment with rough roleplay — it was such a turn off that he wasn't able to indulge her.

I think the problem he was struggling with was fundamentally one of internalised misandry. He seemed to feel responsible for the sins of all men, even though he understood that misogyny is fundamentally a systemic problem. This seemed to cause him to "overcorrect" when it came to sexual desire towards women — he basically pre-emptively "friend-zoned" any women he was friends with, and basically put them in a mental box that was shielded from any attraction he may feel towards them; I remember that after he got together with a close friend who had been crushing on him for a long time, he walked around looking shell shocked for about a week, because he genuinely didn't see it coming — having to take her out of the "friend" box meant being overwhelmed with a heckton of emotions and physical desires towards her that he'd been walling off. He was a very silly man.

I am glad that I got to know him as well as I did, because I gained a far better understanding of internalised misandry. He's just one person, but through him, I've come to recognise the same motifs of internalised misandry in other progressive, feminist men. Men have far greater power and safety when it comes to challenging instances of sexism in the every day world, but there's not much an individual can do against the rise of disgusting people like Andrew Tate. Even if, as a progressive man, you're able to steer other men in your life away from that stuff, none of us can escape hearing the awfulness that comes from "the Manosphere". No amount of turning up to protests, or helping organise for women's rights will change the fact that many of the people pushing to make the world a more unjust place are men, and I can see how that could easily lead to internalised misandry.

Internalized misogyny held my egg shell together for a few months after I got sober, and had to start addressing the feelings that had kept me from falling asleep at night since I had hit puberty; ie. I had to imagine myself turning into a woman in order to fall asleep every night up until I discovered alcohol...

"Personally I think the worse problem should be worked on before the lesser one. (I mean both can be worked on concurrently, but one of them has a higher priority should there be a conflict in time or energy or whatnot.)"

I agree with most of your comment, but this part I disagree with. To give an analogy, I think this is like someone having an allergic reaction, and they have symptoms such as difficulty breathing, and also their eyes are stinging and streaming. Here, the burning eyes are analogous to misandry, and the breathing is analogous to misogyny. Obviously the latter is the far more serious symptom, and it often requires urgent intervention to mitigate the risk of breathing problems. However, merely treating the symptoms can only go so far: if someone keeps coming into contact with the allergen and needing to have urgent care to treat their symptoms, then it would be wise to zoom out and try to address the root cause of the problem (whether that be through attempting to treat the root allergy, or taking measures to avoid the root).

I don't like the framing of "the worse problem should be worked on before the lesser one" because it distracts from the fact that it's not just that we can work on them concurrently, but that we should do it that way, via tackling the underlying root systems that produce both misogyny and misandry. It's obvious in your comment that you understand that misogyny and misandry are often two sides of the same coin, but not everyone does understand that, and I feel that the either/or framing is unproductive.

Though I will also note though that in my allergy example, it would be utterly absurd if a doctor was trying to discuss long term allergy treatment while a person was actively experiencing an anaphylactic reaction and struggling to breathe. It is reasonable and necessary to do emergency first aid before we're able to have those kinds of long term discussions. Addressing the concrete harms of misogyny is like emergency first aid — it's far harder for a woman to consider her views on feminism and family if she's living somewhere with scary forced-birther laws, for example. But I think we need to keep our eye on the prize so to speak, and work to remember that we are striving to do more than just treat the symptoms of inequality