I am here to educate, debating is a side effect (badsjw: My school showed a documentary on toxic...)

badsjw:

My school showed a documentary on toxic masculinity today. Attendance was mandatory. Here’s a breakdown of what happened.
I was dreading it. Absolutely dreading it. I knew it was coming, and I knew I couldn’t escape it. The first indication that I was going to have a bad time came when an announcement was made, and I shit you not, saying “SENIORS! Report to the auditorium for the documentary or you will notgraduate!” I wish I was kidding.So I “report to the auditorium” and choose my seat, toward the back, surrounded by the only people I knew that could turn this dire situation hilarious. Let’s call the people who are going to show up again in this story Chris, Adam, and Sylvia. Just for reference, Chris frequents KiwiFarms and loves making jokes about being triggered (we met through Sonichu), Adam is a sciencey, no bullshit type of guy, and Sylvia is one of my best friends who finds all this kind of ridiculous. We find out the name of the movie- the Mask You Live In. This whole thing was organized by some tumblr feminist in our grade who just loves putting us through shit like this.The movie begins, and it starts out just okay. It’s what I expected- thinly veiled cherry-picking, but nothing too offensive. Our corner’s quietly making fun of the movie as it’s going on, but there’s nothing too significant to make fun of. Then they start implying that mass shootings are caused solely by masculinity (I’m not kidding- they start showing news footage of Sandy Hook and the Colorado theater shooting while a voice-over talked about how men are told to act like men). We’re all shocked that they would make that connection.In another scene, a female educator relays a story in which she asked a little boy what he wanted to be when he grew up, and his response was “a venture capitalist”. The woman tried to make it sound tragic. I found it inspiring. I looked at Adam, and I started clapping. Adam joined in, and then Chris, and soon nearly half the auditorium was applauding for this little boy who was wise beyond his years and probably has a Nobel Prize now.Now they’ve brought a scientist into the documentary. Adam asks me what her doctorate is in, I say Gender Studies, he laughs. She’s talking about the human brain, and it’s all fine and dandy- until she says the one thing that makes our entire group die laughing. “Some of you may not know this, but gender is a social construct”. I’m laughing, Sylvia’s laughing, Adam’s yelling at the screen, Chris says the headmate that is currently fronting identifies as a gendervacuum. We don’t listen to anything else the doctor has to say.The 1-in-5 women statistic flashes on screen. We all look around each other and begin to question why none of the statistics they present come with sources. Chris then yells “SOURCE?” and I can hear people trying to stifle their laughter. Another statistic comes on screen. Chris yells “SOURCE?!” even louder.
I’ve been relatively quiet the whole movie, barely raising my voice above normal level, but I straight-up shouted “NO” when they did something I didn’t expect- they connected masculinity to the Penn State Jerry Sandusky scandal. I lost it. I fucking lost it. You’re going to say that the sexual abuse of those little boys was caused by being told to “be a man”?? What the fuck? Sylvia has to restrain me from bursting out of my seat.I was so loud that a teacher paused the movie and lectured the auditorium on how we shouldn’t be talking and that we were ruining it for others. We’re all quiet for a little while, until the part about masculinity in video games and movies comes up, and they start showing examples of characters they think are overly masculine. The voice over is saying “blah, blah, blah, harmful to women, blah blah blah, toxic masculinity”, and I’m not listening to a single word because I’m absolutely drooling over all this toxic masculinity, every last muscle of it. Then they start showing those toxic men getting into fights and I’m on cloud nine. Best part of the movie. 10/10.Chris gets particularly rowdy when the movie claims that the military trains soldiers in combat through violent video games. He’s in the military. He’s been through training. He’s never touched a video game in all of his training.We never saw the end of the movie because school ended before we could finish it, but it seemed to be veering in an anti-gun direction. We all complained about the movie afterwards and joked about how terrible it was. I’d debate some of the arguments in the movie, but they were all just so poorly constructed that I can’t tackle them without starting with “What the fuck?”Tumblr: not even once.

— 58 minutes ago with 668 notes