On "Men suck!"

I can understand how hurtful could be, but it never personally bothered me. Oppressed people let off steam in all sorts of ways and some of those ways are unfair. But compare "Men suck" to "Billionaires suck", "Cops suck", "White people suck" etc. Do all of those bother you equally? The fact is that waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too many men do suck in so many ways while being perfectly lovely in so many other ways. Rapey, dominating, violent, criminal, oligarchic, etc. People who have been harmed by such men have an absolute right to vent. I've got friends who regularly bitch about White people in front of me. It does not bother me. White people do suck in so many ways. And even though I don't have an "All Lives Matter" sticker on my truck, I know that even I exhibit some racist thinking and behavior my self and that I benefit from a racist system.

My only recommendation is to seek understand the hurt behind the speaker's statements. Empathy with their suffering may help explain why they are acting out.

On Popular Feminism

I would never suggest that popular feminism isn't feminism. We are what we do. And yet, not all who identify as feminists are particularly good at it. WitchesvsPatriarchy, for example, strikes me as a rather immature expression for young women who are just beginning to work out their relationship to the world. This is valuable for them and us. People need a playpen where they can develop. Just as we expect college students to express the dumbest, most strident, and self-defeating version of whatever political philosophy they have adopted, we must recognize that newbies are stupid in every discipline.

There are, of course, terrible people who are feminists. There are those who simply use feminism as a cudgel to gain status.

And there is a Imperial shit ton of anti-feminists who parody feminist positions in memes. I am ogen accused of supporting a "feminism" which I do not recognize.

One of the rules for good debate is to argue against the best possible version of your opponent's argument. This is hard to do in the context of a well that has been poisoned by those who spew falsehood so hard and fast that it's difficult to sort the true from the false. And yet, there are plenty of coherent and internally-consistent feminisms to be found for those who can put the effort in to find them. I wish we were doing a better job to make things easier for those trying to make sense of things.

On Negative Stereotypes

The stereotypes are too often true. I have never raped or abducted a child, but when a parent gets nervous around me for being too close to a child, I just have to swallow my indignation and realize that the actions of others have ruined things for me.

The men loudest about "Not all men!" are those who never made an effort to understand the critiques in the first place.

And yet, these stereotypes are hurtful. Especially to men already struggling. The only advice I have is to do your part to build a world where these stereotypes have no basis in reality. In the mean time, thicken your skin. If you're not the creepy type, then realize that such unfair statements do not apply to you.

On Navigating Relationships

I'm gay and can't imagine how hard this must be. Straight people have such overwhelming and conflicting social expectations laid on them, that I don't know how they even function. We queers are used to making things up as we go along. There's a freedom to being a hated outsider.

So I guess my advice would be to make things up as you go along. Ignore all the advice you've ever heard about what women want. And listen to the specific individual that you are interested in. The are few interpersonal problems that can't be resolved by prompt, honest, and empathetic communication, and there are few problems between people that can't be made MUCH worse by the lack thereof. Listen. Express. Compromise. Repeat.

As a Christian, my faith tells me that we are each divine beings made in God's image. This informs how I treat my partner. Even when they are acting badly I try to remember that they have infinite Godlike potential within them and that my love for them can help them reconnect with their deeper nature. Indeed this is the point of a relationship. In bell hook's book "All About Love" (highly recommended} she suggest that romantic love is not about the pleasure of fucking or feelings of infatuation, but about a desire to see your partner realize their highest potential. When you start from that perspective, the specifics of the relationship become much easier to work out. The problem is when we see our partner as a fuck toy built for our pleasure and service. That is not a loving frame for a relationship, and only exploitation is possible from that position.

Under patriarchy, women are seen as servants who clean, nurture, and cook for men. This attitude is the root of so much suffering for both genders. I knew a guy who never learned to cook, ate ramen and canned spaghetti daily, and was way too desperate and lame to find a woman to serve him. Patriarchal expectation left him unable to even care for himself. His only solution was to try to trick some poor soul into being his servant.

Men and Feminism

Feminism started with women and has been primarily focused on their needs and the harms to them under sexism. It took quite a while for people to realize that men also suffer from the system. But women who have been harmed are focused on their own resolution and are under no obligation to develop feminisms focused on men's needs. That's our job and we simply have not done enough of the work to present a comprehensive, well documented, easy-to-understand feminism that addresses men's needs.

So if you feel like feminism isn't focused on you, you are absolutely correct. In an emergency, you put on your own mask first, even before your own child. The version of feminism we need isn't written yet. That's why it is important for men to introspect deeply over these issues, to take up the tools and clues previous feminists have left us, and to build what we need.

Think of the project of creating a men-focused feminism in terms of programming. You've found a project on Github that looks close to what you needed, but whole chunks are missing for your use case. No logging, no authentication, no input sanitization, random open ports everywhere. These you will have to write yourself. But that is still much easier than starting from scratch.

I hope this unpolished rant addresses the issues at least some of the issues you raised.

It's true that some men are rapey, dominating, etc. Those men have deeply hurt many people. This is a real problem. The victims of those men have a right to vent about those things, and society needs to listen and hold the those bad men accountable.

But the vast majority of men are decent people who aren't rapey, dominating, violent, criminal, or oligarchic. (Many men aren't even particularly sexist! Every man internalizes some amount of sexism, but that's true of every woman too.) So the victims of bad men don't have a right to make generalizations like "men suck". In fact, that's misandrist hate speech.

Analogy: Many socially awkward nerds have been deeply hurt in their lives. They have a right to vent about the pain they've experienced, and society should listen, and should hold accountable the people who are hurting them. But that doesn't give the victims a right to become hateful incels who make generalizations like "women suck".

The key is to distinguish the good men from the bad men: treat the good men with respect and decency, while holding the bad men accountable.

And society does hold many of the bad men accountable. Every single day, society sends men to prison for rape, violence, and crime. And men regularly get censured or fired for sexism. It's true that society doesn't always hold bad men accountable, and this is a real problem; but society really does hold many of the bad men accountable.

> One of the rules for good debate is to argue against the best possible version of your opponent's argument. ... And yet, there are plenty of coherent and internally-consistent feminisms

I agree there are many good feminists out there, and I support them. But there are also many bad feminists out there, and they've hurt me deeply.

By analogy to above: Some feminists are misandrists. Those misandrists have deeply hurt many men (including me). Men like me have a right to vent about those misandrists, and society needs to listen and hold the misandrists accountable. At the same time, I know that most feminists are decent people, which is why I'm careful not to make generalizations like "feminists suck".

The key is to distinguish the good feminists from the bad feminists: support the good feminists, while holding the bad feminists accountable.

Unfortunately, what I've seen is that most feminists make excuses for the bad feminists, rather than holding them accountable. For example, you just now made excuses for the feminists who say "men suck"! Throughout your post, you put the onus on me to tolerate being hurt, instead of putting the onus on the bad feminists to stop hurting me! And this is a pattern throughout the feminist movement: Most feminists, even otherwise-good feminists, are unwilling to acknowledge that the bad feminists are causing real harm, and that men have a right to be upset that the bad feminists are hurting them.

> So if you feel like feminism isn't focused on you, you are absolutely correct.

It's fine that feminism isn't focused on me. The problem is that bad feminists are actively hurting people like me; and the broader feminist movement is enabling that behavior.

Did you read the link I posted above? https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2091#comment-326664 Scott Aaronson wrote a very thoughtful and introspective post about the issues facing socially awkward men, while also being careful to respect women. His post resonated with me deeply; he put into words many of the things I had been struggling with. This is exactly the kind of thing we need more men to do. And yet, he received some extremely toxic responses from feminists -- e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20150113081455/http://www.rawsto.... And in the end, the harassment was too much, so he stopped talking publicly about these issues, and nothing got better for me or other socially awkward men.

This kind of misandry needs to stop happening. I know most feminists aren't personally saying horrible misandrist things. I'm not saying "feminism sucks". Yet, the misandry needs to stop. Do you agree the misandry needs to stop? Will you stop making excuses for misandry?

(P.S. I know you touched on a lot of other issues, but this post was getting pretty long, so I wanted to focus on the core issue and leave the other issues for some other time.)

I do not see the misandry you suggest is here. Penny's response is remarkably compassionate to Aaronson. ["Hi there, shy, nerdy boys. Your suffering was and is real."] Marcotte's, while brutal and snarky, makes some insightful points. It is not misandry to be unkindly criticized for your ideas, even when you're being honest and confessional about a traumatic time in your life.

Like Aaronson and Penny, I was also a nerd who took refuge in nerdy pursuits as a way to deal with social and sexual awkwardness. I too grew up terrified that someone might find out I might be attracted to them. But this wasn't because I was afraid to be called a "creep" but because I was afraid they might become physically violent. This isn't an idle fear, since I've been gay bashed a few times, once that required hospitalization, each time contributed to my crippling PTSD.

Laurie Penny suffered nerd sexual anxiety like me and Aaronson did. But her fear was being called "crazy" and "slut". She says, "we were terrified, just like you, and ashamed, just like you, and waiting for someone to take pity on our lonely abject pubescence, hungry to be touched. But you did not see us there."

On top of nerd sexual anxiety, Penny had to deal with misogyny, while I had to deal with murderous homophobia. And yet Aaronson claims, without a hint of irony, "But I suspect the thought that being a nerdy [straight] male might not make me “privileged”—that it might even have put me into one of society’s least privileged classes..." LOL, Wut!? Hello Scott, we're right here. He doesn't see that we're dealing with the same shit PLUS an Imperial Fuckload that is SO extra. But unlike Aaronson, I do not blame my problems on feminism. I'm as shocked as Marcotte that this dude literally thinks he's at the bottom of society's totem pole because he has to figure out how to talk to women in a time of changing social mores.

Aaronson states that his nerdy anxiety was so severe that, "My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, completely asexual..." This statement is mindblowing in it's failure of solidarity and imagination. He so fervently craves the empathy he denies to people like me and Penny. He acts like it's only straight male nerds who have ever feared rejection. WTHF!? It must have been nice ONLY to have feared being rejected or being called a creep and not say, rape, gay bashing, or racially-motivated violence. Aaronson suffered a common experience of fear of rejection, and since the objects of his affection were women, he twisted his anxiety into an indictment of feminism as a way to protect his privileged-as-fuck male ego. This would never have occurred to me to do, since the targets of my affection were men. I never had any problem figuring out what feminists meant by consent. It was the same as my own. I never had any trouble figuring out that Dworkin was a dismissable reactionary. I get the feeling that Aaronson read feminist writers with the intent of cherry picking whatever confirmed his fears.

It's hard to imagine anyone labeling Penny's piece as misandrist, so I assume you're referring to Marcotte. But while uncompromising and uncharitable, her critique of Aaronson's letter matches my own. She writes:

"There are many women out there who are also crippled by social anxieties who would prefer to hide in their hobbies and interests. The difference is a) they can’t blame the entire opposite sex instead of themselves for their mental health issues and b) when they actually try to turn those interests and hobbies into professions, they are told by various social forces, both explicitly and implicitly, that their femaleness means they will always be second-rate at best. Being able to hide in mathematics is, in fact, a privilege, because it is one that has long been and continues in many ways, denied to women."

Aaronson loudly decries the notion that he has male privilege, but both he and I were able to take refuge in our nerdiness, while women nerds are constantly getting tossed out of the tree fort. This notion that only dumb alpha males are sexist and that enlightened nerds are somehow sexism-free is absurd. It's like the straight geeks don't even realize we gay geeks have been in the same rooms. We see you. Yes, you're very often being creepy and sexist. Do you see us? We have had to negotiate the same fraught terrain as you have. We managed to do so without resort to blaming feminism for our suffering. Maybe learn from us?

If the extent of the misandry you've suffered is hearing that "men suck" from people who are unreasonable or deeply wounded or both, then that sounds remarkably tame to me. Perhaps my experience isn't typical, but problems for me are things like homelessness, poverty, trauma, queer bashing, and incipient fascism. I'm a man too. Hearing "men suck" doesn't even move the needle.

I was ready to accept that you've suffered misandry, but I'm absolutely not seeing it from what you've posted. What was your reaction to Penny's writing? Were you not impressed with her empathy and nerd solidarity?

You're right that when people say "men suck", that's not as bad as homelessness, poverty, trauma, gay-bashing, etc. But, compare: when people say "women suck" or "gay people suck", that's not as bad as homelessness, poverty, trauma, gay-bashing, etc. either! That doesn't make it OK to say "women suck" or "gay people suck". Hateful words like "men suck" and "women suck" and "gay people suck" are still bad even though they're not as bad as the problems you experienced.

Also, I don't think your experience is typical for someone in my generation (born in the 90s). Women and gay man in my generation certainly faces disadvantages, but nowhere near what you did on average.

And social awkwardness is a real disadvantage too. Historically, nerds were even the target of physical violence. You were unfortunate enough to be both gay and socially awkward, which must have been doubly difficult. But straight socially awkward people are still disadvantaged even though they're straight; just like gay people with normal social skills are still disadvantaged even though they have normal social skills.

The net effect is that even though I'm a straight man, I've still been significantly hurt, to the point of developing depression. I certainly haven't been hurt as badly as you were, but my pain is still real. (Imagine a gay man who never experiences gay-bashing, homelessness, or poverty. But suppose they're regularly exposed to homophobia, causing them to develop depression. They haven't been hurt as badly as you were, but their pain is still real!)

Everyone deserves to be treated with respect and dignity: man, woman, straight, gay, nerdy or not. Your pain is worse than mine or Aaronson's, but that doesn't invalidate our pain, nor does it excuse the people who are causing our pain. It's not OK to use the existence of misogyny or homophobia as an excuse for misandry or nerdphobia.