When I was around 16 I used to view /r/thebluepill and other social justice subs on Reddit. Despite the fact that these subs existed to make fun of misogynists, the stuff I was reading began to damage my self-esteem as a woman. Looking at these subs turned into looking at extreme misogynist subs out of morbid curiosity. It had dire effects of my self-worth as a woman. Fundamentally, right-wing misogynists hate women. They hate them. Women are lower than garbage to them - inferior in every way emotionally, sexually, physically, and intellectually. The only value women have to them is as maturbatory objects to satiate their sexual desires.

I encountered men on subs like purplepilldebate accusing women of vast intellectual inferiority and pointing out an imagined dearth of women geniuses like composers, musicians, mathematicians, and scientists (because of the male feelings of being biologically superior, the failure to appreciate and recognize women, and the effects of patriarchy). I struggled deeply with math and science, and internalized feelings I must be inferior at these things for having an inferior mind. I had dire emotional issues at this point in life and internalized I must have these for being a female. I really started to view myself as being irrational, mentally inferior, emotional, and less talented than males. It drove me to seek out feminism to understand why women were/are treated so poorly, because in the mind of right-wingers, women are treated as inferior because women are inferior and that's just how society works.

Around the same time of being a young teenager, I had left my family's Christian faith and was trying to find a new religion to belong to. I was exposed to the writings of hatefully misogynist male writers online and in books I found at my library. They turned misogyny and patriarchy into a divine mandate like how right wingers turned it into a biological mandate. Women were simply created by God to be inferior and occupy a subjugated, inferior role in society. You can't debate the will of God. I remember reading on Islamic sites a male writer claiming the Hadith "women are deficient in intelligence" is proved true by citing studies done by, you guessed it, right-wing male misogynists saying women naturally have lower IQs than males. Being a spiritual person or believing in a God became the equivalent to me of accepting myself as an innately inferior human being. Every religion seemed to hate women or subjugate them. It was on every site I visited and every book I read.

It took me to specifically seeking out a more positive vision of spirituality from women feminist writers and progressive males. I still have complicated feelings on religion and feminism and go from acceptance of feminist religious women to rejection and anger at the misogyny in these religious traditions. I stopped visiting SJ subs like thebluepill. I started reading about feminism and developing a feminist consciousness that I'm probably a far more worthwhile talented being than loser hacks online.

I do not believe we should be promoting, defending, or referencing religious conservatives and right-wing misogynist males as sources of feminism. Both of these groups of people caused me enormous emotional harm in life. They are the embodiment of the quote, "Women don't realize just how much men hate them." They don't like transgenderism not because they see the concept of gender as innately harmful to women. They conflate sex and gender as identical, so their anger at trans people is related to the way a male trans person is shirking their biological/divine masculine gender role. Religious conservatives hate porn because women are sex objects who should be covered and hidden, but here's a woman indecently exposing herself and "tainting her purity". Their opposition to transgender politics, pornography, and sex work comes from their vicious hatred of everything female.