Reclaiming Misandry: I Hate Men.

wearstoomucheyeliner · 22時間前

Huh, I was actually thinking today about posting something along these lines, although this woman has put far more thought into it than I have. Thank you for posting.

I have had one of those horrifying lives that was basically just me being abused by one boy/man after another until about the age of 30. I came out as a lesbian at a very young age, so then my parents made sure that I would be forever financially dependent on men. While I never officially made the jump into organized sex work, that was basically what I was doing. I almost feel like it was worse than "official" sex work, because at least I would have had encounters with other women in similar situations, but instead I was on my own for much of my 20s, sometimes sleeping with a stranger just for a meal and a place to stay, with absolutely no one looking after me.

If I'm being honest with myself, I hate men. I feel as though the less interaction with them, the better off I am. Even though the bulk of my life's trauma has (hopefully) passed. I work in a male dominated industry, and every day I suffer the indignity of working my ass off while the men socialize and play games on their phones, and yet I still get talked down to at every chance they get.

I'm sick of it. If you're lucky enough to have a better life, great, but I haven't had that, and it's only rational of me to avoid and hate men. I also hate my parents, another great taboo. (For some reason, even for victims of extreme abuse, "hating your parents" is still considered a childish, and immature thing to do.)

All of these things I see about how "if there were no men then progress would stop" is such narcissistic bullshit. I work in science/tech/engineering, and I know how much work I do compared to the men, and yet the men always come in at the last minute to get all the glory. If anything men are impeding scientific process. If everyone in science and tech worked as hard as women do, we would achieve a lot more.

I can't even share my story because it's considered too risqué or too sexual. I wish I could, in job interviews, answer the question "how do you handle adversity?" by saying, "well, I have gone from being abandoned by my friends and family to the point where I had to sleep with men for food to now having an engineering degree." But I could never say that. Women's struggles are not acceptable to hear.

sea-h0rse · 22時間前

I love everything about this. As a feminist I'm tired of explaining the negative impacts of patriarchy without acknowledging the way it benefits individual men. I'm tired of reassuring men that I love them and love sex even though they are the ones that rape, belittle, and objectify to a degree that disgusts me.

gclurkerer · 14時間前

My Dad is old and divorced and depressed and addicted to support groups and bible studies. He was telling me about a guy he knew from one of the bible studies not being there one week. Apparently his 27 year old daughter made him so angry he strangled her so she called the police and he was arrested and now he's in big trouble. My Dad described the guy as really nice and laid back and doesn't see the big deal about strangling your 27 year old daughter. Women are out of control in this country my Dad says.

I was riding bikes with an old friend who's in my life because he's an old childhood friend and was there for me when family died. He's also a 90IQ and once that dawned on me it was a lot easier to understand/tolerate him. Like having my own Karl Pilkington.

He was saying on this bike ride that he hates HAAAATTTEES feminists because they censor video games for violence and sex. He loves gratuitous violence even if it involves children like when Theon in Game of Thrones reveals the burnt bodies of those two boys because its about no limits of the artists and it shocks smug people. He was enthusiastic about that part, shocking smug people by killing children. Doesn't want to see anything graphic or real in the news though. No dead bodies from war please. Then he trailed on into his pick up artist bullshit about girls at work 10 years younger then him 'testing' him and telling me which girl fit which possible personality profile identified by some PUA online.

He also went on about how sad it is that I'm not friends anymore with another mutual friend we'll call 'Bob.' Bob, who is 33, was dating a chipper and scrappy 24 year old who had just finished 6 years in the military including tours in Afghanistan. They were very loveydovey holding hands, sitting on his lap, pecks on the cheek, very much a couple. When she wasn't in the same room he was very clear to me that it is a fake relationship and that she has moved in to his house (his mom and grandmas house) because he enjoys sleeping with her.

One night Bob and his GF go to a massive party thrown by GF's military friends. They get separated. GF is raped by a superior officer. GF finds Bob. Bob is drunk and enraged, takes GF to the car and tries to chase the rapist but can't so they drive home. There he decides the story is a cover for cheating on him and he goes berserk. She gets out a taser to protect herself. The sight of the taser enrages him so he grabs her and throws her to the ground and then out of the house shouting "YOU CUNT! YOU BITCH! I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU! I'LL FUCKING END YOU!"

His mom comes down and rescues his GF. Takes her to a gas station to report the rape and also intimidates her into not including Bob's actions in the police report. The next day GF's family comes and moves her out of Bob's house. I find out about it and have a flash back of Bob cheerfully admitting to slapping one of his girlfriends after she admitted to cheating.

I also remember playing the latest grand theft auto on a couch with Bob. I said to him at one point 'I think the graphics are too good. They're not cartoony. I can't run around punching people like in the old one. I don't want to hit the women.' He laughed, agreeing the graphics were really good, said that he'd noticed I wasn't punching the women but insisted I should do that anyway. And then got kind of annoyed with me when I didn't.

Sometimes I would spend the day at Bob's house watching his bed ridden grand mother because he had to drive his mother to the dentist for surgery and she needed a driver to bring her home. Its illegal to leave the grandmother alone so I was there. This is a surgery on a tooth that was severely damaged 27 years ago when her drunk husband, Bob's father, punched her across the face. It happened right in front of Bob. Another one of those things he cheerfully told me about.

The old childhood friend doesn't believe Bob's GF. Thinks she made the whole thing up. I reached out to her on FB and told her how sorry I was. A little while ago I was remembering that and was feeling guilty that maybe I was a little clumsy or tactless reaching out to her so I re-read it. In the messages she says that I'm actually being more considerate and kind then any of her friends.

I can actually remember the very first time I heard that word rape used to refer to beating someone in a game. It was paintball and I was about 13. My rural neighborhood had scrapped together a team and some kids in the suburbs had been doing the same thing. When we found out about each other we decided to have a war.

We stood around silent waiting to start each game. They strutted around talking like rappers, calling us the N word, C word, talking about how they were going to rape us and make us suck their dicks. They cheated. Stole.

When someone in my family died I went home. Hadn't spent a significant amount of time with my youngest brother in the past 7 years. He was 19, a 'bro' who partied through highschool and was now partying through jr. college. I had no friends of my own back home so I hung out with him and his friends.

At one night we were all sitting on folding chairs in a circle in a garage. He was drunk and telling stories to all his friends. Told a story about how he was at the dorms at Jr. college having sex with a girl when he pulled out and ejaculated all over her chest and face. Then he pulled up his pants and ran back to his room and got into bed. The punchline of the story is that she got dressed too, followed him back to his room and said, in a mockingly distressed girl voice, 'FULL. NAME. OF. BROTHER. I HAVE NEVER BEEN TREATED THAT WAY. IN. MY. LIFE.'

Everyone laughed but I cringed. My brother's best friend, sitting next to me, nodded at me and said 'C'mon, you have stories like that too.' I didn't deny it but said that I didn't want to hear my little brother's sex stories. I was a virgin at the time.

I told this story of my brother's to my old childhood friend with the intention of showing how my little brother is a misogynistic bro-shite that I struggle to relate to. When I got to the detail of my brother pulling out and doing what he did, in other words the part of the story where my brother humiliated someone horribly, my childhood friend says 'Nice.'

It threw me off balance so I tried to tell the rest of the story. When I got to the part where the girl confronts my brother my friend was confused. I tried to explain that she was upset and humiliated by what my brother did but my friend corrected me and was adamant that women like that because they're afraid of getting pregnant. He told me to trust him because he's watched "A LOOOOOOOT of porn." I, after all, was raised funny and irrationally believe that popular culture is evil and corrupting. He's a fucking idiot and he can steam roll me with his confidence.

I know good men doing the right thing. And my brother has changed a lot over time. But there are things you can't come back from and I believe that for a simple majority of the men on planet earth there is no hope.

kickinhead · 21時間前

I don't like men as a group, but I like certain men. If the weirdos on TRP and that other one that starts with an M that I can't remember can spew their vitriol, why can't I say 'not all men... But the vast majority'?

zpkucn · 22時間前

You know, the only person I've personally known who declared themselves misandrist was a transwoman.

It's always bothered me when people assume being a lesbian means you hate men because I really don't. Men are just irrelevant to my sexual orientation.

I really wonder if part of the reason I don't hate men is because I'm a lesbian. I feel like the straight women I know talk negatively about men far more often than any of the lesbians I know.

It made more sense when I was in a therapy group and a bunch of women started talking about their experience with abusive partners. Except for me and the one guy in the group, they all had horrible stories of things men had done to them and after that I understood a lot better why some women dislike men. Even the one guy in the group leaned over and told me, "I think even I hate men now."

TallBabe · 23時間前

omg. this is great!! I often feel alone even in feminist circles when I want to speak candidly about white men (I'm a white woman). I guess feminism which tries to be palatable to the menz is nothing new. ew.

flapyourwings · 20時間前

This was righteous.

SteppingIn2SayHi · 8時間前

Women who "escape" prostitution, battery, etc, aren't privileged. Author should have used the word evade

Earthmother2015 · 10時間前

I try an approach my actions, life choices, and beliefs with a "can it go on like this forever?" filter. If a sentiment is impossible to maintain permanently, they why bother adopting it at all? I try to immediately move toward the most likely outcome.

I find that Man Hating can not be a part of a healthy/sustainable society; so I can't hate men as a class.

Though it's funny, it seems like society has sustained itself for quite a while as a 'woman hating' organization. So why do I think man-hating is unsustainable?

Edit: spelling and a question mark

party_on_i_guess · 2時間前

There's an overabundance of evil men out there, both individual men and specific categories of men, that I unabashedly hate and will make no apologies for it. There may be varying degrees of or feelings behind the hate, but it's still hate.

As for all men in general, I don't actively hate so much as deeply distrust them. I assume all men are capable of being monsters to some degree, because all men are in the position to act that way should they choose to (and we all know from personal experience that many of them do). Every single one I meet gets profiled and given a risk assessment. Should a man fail that initial test I will take the necessary precautions to avoid him or otherwise establish boundaries. If they pass, they're in the neutral zone. It's up to individual men to earn anything more from me, and even then I expect them to let me down.

I judge the men around me though quiet observation, and I can put on a faux-friendly or civil facade when necessary. Most men lack self-awareness about the things they say and do, sometimes to a delusional degree, which means they almost always volunteer a lot of red flags quickly (like the photographer I met who thought it'd be a funny story to tell a near total stranger about how a preteen child model, spurred on by her fame-hungry mother, "surprised" him with a blowjob.... that he did nothing to stop). And that's because they're usually being restrained compared to how they'd talk if there weren't any women around.

Dudebros, you'd be surprised how the women around you secretly think very little of men. They're not going around fantasizing about castrating you like some kind of paranoid MRA fever dream, though... it's more like an unspoken understanding that we all kind of expect you to be awful people and there's nothing we can do about it so we try to work around your bullshit.

stoptransingkids · 4時間前

This is a great article. And I think that it's completely fair for women to hate men. Even the genuinely good ones are fucking annoying at best, and weak and needy at worst. I think that for any woman to love a man is an act of extreme generosity, given the shit that men put women through. I'm mostly a man-ignorer, rather than a hater - I don't have much to do with men now. But in my younger years I really really hated men, mainly because I was so fucking (justifiably) afraid of them. I still hate how they trade off their size and strength to intimidate and silence and abuse women. I hate how they don't listen and they act so fucking offended if we point out they're not listening. Sex with men (back when I put myself through that) was miserable and made me hate myself. It is hard for me to always tell the difference between sex and rape, when I look back, as the treatment I experienced at men's hands was - without exception - abusive.

Schrodingle · 16時間前

I'm a man and I'm okay with you hating me, especially saying passionately you hate my kind in circles of friends or women's spaces, or whatever. First, it's good and healthy for us to have privacy. Not everything we say needs to be suitable for everyone. You are not public property, neither am I. Secondly, I think the denial of dark emotions we see in contemporary liberal ideology is actually anti-humanist: cutting yourself off from anger is like cutting yourself off from love. It's a cardinal direction on the moral compass, among many other things. Hating, disliking, etc, these are all healthy and normal. What you do because of those emotions matters a lot more. Hate can be extremely productive if it is acknowledged and connected to goals, or expressed and considered, rather than secreted away, only to explode out in real abuse - self abuse, abuse of others, etc.

Twad · 17時間前

How am I meant to take this? Is this just a story about someone being treated horribly by and continually exposed to the worst elements of a sex developing a fairly rational emotional connection?

Is this subreddit not an ok place for me to be as a man?
It's the only place I've found where my thoughts on trans-genderism and gender roles is shared.

endoftheliner · 9時間前

From reading other comments, it doesn't sound like my take is going to be very popular.

I hate what this person went through, even though I don't share her philosophy. Hatred of people, no matter who they are, poisons everything, even yourself. I mean, I can't hate individual men--I have had male children who I love dearly even though I didn't often like their behavior, as I often didn't hate other men.

I can hate patriarchy, however. That is the real enemy, IMHO. And sex work is a product of the patriarchy. No woman should ever have to be in it to survive.

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