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This quote by [email protected] is a good thing to keep in mind. I’m not going to lock it because it genuinely seems to be helping some people. I’m getting reports though, so remember to be excellent to each other please.
this comment section is a memorial of injured experiences.
tread carefully.
Edit: fixed author’s username.
When I got home after being away for a few months my mom said I got a little fatter. Told her the same thing, and she told me I can’t say such things…
this comment section is a memorial of injured experiences.
tread carefully.
A few years ago I was struggling with body image and was starting to feel worthless and invisible in my marriage. When I tried expressing these feelings to my wife (really just trying to make an emotional connection) her response was curt and to the point: “You don’t have body image issues. I’m the one struggling with my weight.”
And that was it. I’ve never felt more alone in my life.
Hey you, you’re attractive. *Hugs
I don’t know if I want to blame the patriarchy or the toxic masculinity that goes with it, but crap. My ex was so not ok when I cried over the discovery of her affair.
She genuinely thought I was trying to manipulate her. I was “too extremely emotional” over it. We were highschool sweethearts, had a kid, and she always talked about how she was disgusted with her own mother for having an affair. Even to the point where she cut off contact with her mother until they ended that relationship.
“No man goes to bed crying because their wife cheated on them or sends nudes to the same guy 4 years later.”
There were red flags earlier than that. “Why are you crying over a movie?” (I always do at emotional bits). “Man up, no one wants to be with someone expresses sadness.”
What’s worse is that it’s pretty much why I don’t bother going out, or have much motivation to get back into the dating game. The patriarchy and toxic masculinity has ruined being human to me. I don’t want to be friends with people who cover up all their emotions. I don’t want to be friends with guys who are clearly over compensating. Then the girls turn around complain about these men being cruel to them, yet state things like this.
Then you have all the men who have this strange belief that they are owed women, and by behaving like that they get the women they are owed. I won’t take part in that. I will not hurt someone else just to satisfy my desires. If that means I don’t date, I’m much more comfortable being a good person and alone.
I also try to bring it up in conversation, and then people turn around and act like my refusal to participate in patriarchal behavior is anti-social. I had one person point out “technically, you aren’t getting any, even though you want it, making you an incel.” I was so shocked. Its not the fault of women I’m not out getting laid. Its men. It’s the patriarchy. It’s this system set up to isolate me because I have an intense emotional awareness.
you know her better obviously but sometimes you’re too close to see some things so here goes my opinion: I think she didn’t genuinely think you were trying to manipulate her.
I think she knew it was the appropriate response and she was the bad person so instead of facing that situation and losing the upper hand she thought she could use toxic masculinity to manipulate you to feel bad about yourself as a way to take the heat off of herself.
“you’re overreacting”, “you’re being too emotional” these are very common tactics that men use on women all the time. it’s just that it has the added toxic masculinity aspect when the roles are reversed.
That… Actually makes more sense and a thought I was trying to avoid. I know she said a lot of things where she said things to avoid feeling like the bad guy. Unfortunately for her, cheating on your marriage doesn’t have a defense.
I went through the worst depression of my life around 2017, tried to express these feelings to my gf at the time and explain why our romance was failing or why I spent half the day in bed.
Basically got told “poor you”, everyone has struggles, snap out of it and be a man. That definitely helped, and didn’t push me even deeper into feelings of worthlessness…
I’m doing ok now, but it was the first time I felt comfortable enough with someone to express those emotions, I was at my wits end. The response was eye opening, never again.
Im sorry that happened, but never again what?
Like, “never again open up about a huge important part of my life to”
a) anyone, or b) someone you don’t know too long
Because only b) is healthy. I don’t think trying to mask your depression can work in a serious relationship.
I’ll add to the trauma dump I suppose
Got married in August 2018, the beginning of the next month my dad died of cancer. Obviously I was mourning him and was in a shitty place, my then wife took that as me not being active enough in our relationship and decided to start cheating on me with multiple guys. Once I found out and called her out on it, and also subsequently kicked her out all of a sudden I was the bad guy. I can’t even imagine the mental gymnastics she was hopping through to think that was justified.
Anyway I’ve moved across the country since then and have met who I believe is my soulmate, and things are amazing with her. Just had to go through sewers to find my green pasture I suppose
“Why are men in general so emotionally constipated? omg stop crying like a pussy; we just asked a question!” - the patriarchy, oppressing us all
feminism is for everyone. patriarchy is both against and enforced by everyone
When i was a kid it was the opposite… but in my adult years it’s been overwhelmingly women that tried to enforce masculinity on me any time I stepped out of the bounds of masculinity and did something feminine (wear feminine clothes, cry, make a comment getting hit on by men to name a few). I was a closeted trans woman in denial which made it extra annoying whenever it happened. Now that I’m out the women in my life have been extremely supportive so there is that. However whenever I go out in full femme with outfit and make-up I noticed it’s women who stare at me, had one lady look me up and down three times pretty deliberately while standing 4ft away from me. I don’t always see it as malicious (not that i would care), more like they’re curious or maybe even liking fit. But it’s an interesting contrast compared to men who seem to give me almost no mind or attention by comparison. It was something I didn’t expect.
My wife makes way more than me, with the potential to be sole provider in less than 5 years. I told her id love to stay home and take care of the house/kids. She got offended, and said itd probably end our marriage because that wouldnt be masculine.
Shes always been a big proponent for gender equality… i guess she always only ever thought of one gender
Take precautions. Seriously. Economic abuse is just as if not even more common than physical abuse. And you already know she’s got emotional abuse locked and loaded.
Yes, and many women are strict enforcers of the patriarchy, too. Boys are raised to deny their feelings by both parents, because both parents were raised that way, too. There’s a focus on hyper masculinity that hurts both men and women, and is perpetuated by both men and women. Society has been leaning away from that, but it’s caused a backlash that’s kinda hurting us right now. And some social media is amplifying it.
We’ll get past it, but it’s going to hurt for a while.
Eh, this is all stuff that was written up in the 70s and 80s, it’s gonna take a while before anyone even attempts to do anything about it.
Yes, it was written up back then. Which is a large reason why many more GenZers were raised without those toxic values, because their GenX parents actually read that shit.
So this upcoming generation are being called woke pussies for being raised with empathy and against the historical gender norms, and that’s causing the normal pendulum of conservative panic to swing society in the other direction right now.
If you’ve watched history happen and really read about it critically, this is all very predictable.
I think the ideology you think of when you say it’s for everyone, is egalitarianism. Feminism can’t be for everyone in the same way that patriarchy can’t mean “womens oppression of men”.
Unless of course, you’re looking to confuse with the terminology.
It’s ironically self-unaware victim-blaming to use the male-based word “patriarchy” to describe a set of societal norms and expectations that both sexes are equally responsible for creating and perpetuating. Puts the blame entirely on men and takes women completely off the hook.
Pure sexism.
I say the same about calling the movement feminism
If men are equally welcome in it, it’s not feminism anymore, it’s egalitarianism, but every woman I’ve ever seen it suggested to flips their shit while every man I’ve seen it suggested to goes “yeah that makes sense”
This has nothing to do with men being in position of power, this has everything to do with people having no empathy. If we lived in a matriarchy and people acted the same way they would still be assholes.
Patriarchy says that men can’t be “soft” because that’s a womanly trait, and women are inferior.
No, patriarchy is men having power, it doesn’t define what they can or can’t do otherwise.
By patriarchy, I mean it in the context of feminism, as in the ideology that attempts to rationalize the idea of that men are better than woman, by using things such as religion, bioessentialism, and more. There are many definitions.
So toxic masculinity, not patriarchy.
Toxic masculinity is an effect of the patriarchy. These are the toxic traits that eminate from masculinity as defined by the patriarchy.
But hey at this point we’re arguing about semantics. There are traits that men and women are taught as being bad to do as men, even though some of those traits are actually necessary, or just part of someone’s personality.
Are people this shitty to women when they express sadness?
Yes
Super socially awkward and anxious in middle school and high school and was also bullied a ton. Girls would ask me out as a joke, and there’s no good response. If you say yes you’re a dumbass for thinking they’re actually interested in you, if you say no you’re gay and should kill yourself. Combined with being an impressionable teen with incredibly negative self esteem on reddit at a time where something along the lines of all men are rapists was a common sentiment, it really honestly fucked me up. I still am not comfortable with romance and intimacy with women to be honest.
Removed by mod
A bit related to this, so many times throughout my life when I’ve mentioned I’d like to be friends with, take up lost contact with or just mention a woman has a currently present woman reacted like “you know she has a boyfriend, right?”, “I don’t think you’re her type” etc.
It makes sense that so many men have very few or no female friends, because they experience exactly that. It’s like many women have decided that all men are incapable of being friendly with women without it being about sex or more than friends. We get scared of trying because it’ll just be misinterpreted as wanting to fuck them.
Fuck, i can’t even cry when I need to.
Then it will come at the worst possible time.
I was watching Arcane on Netflix with wife and her family a couple nights ago. The very beginning, where it deals with loss of family, I just immediately lost it, like I had been shot. I don’t even remember what the show was like, I just cried with my face buried in my hands the whole episode. Totally came out of nowhere, I was fine a moment before.
The room was dark, so nobody saw but my chest was heaving and I couldn’t even try to move to excuse myself because I knew I was about to let out a loud screaming sob. I sat there for a full hour hyperventilating, worried someone was going to turn on a light or hear my breathing.
I have spent a lifetime being “the guy who takes care of everything” and the stoic fighter, always the one encouraging others. I couldn’t deal with the fallout of freaking out everyone, they already know I have anxiety disorder and really, really don’t understand mental health, so if I started acting erratic everyone in the family will start walking on eggshells around me.
So to those browsing down here: “Why do men keep everything inside?”
Because of how you react when we don’t. Your ideas of what it looks like to express emotion as a male is not connected to reality.
I wish I could give you a hug. My husband is similar, he struggles with emotions and has always been “the calm rock.” Everyone compliments him on his patience and temper, he is an extremely chill person to be around. Because of this, he struggles heavily with any time he does not fulfill that role. His self worth is tied to how much he can fix or do for others and in a non-bothersome way. We’ve been together for about 10 years and he’s gotten more comfortable expressing his emotions but still feels immense shame when he cries or breaks down. Your last sentence is such a good point I’ve never really thought about. I should start paying more attention to how he needs and wants to express those emotions earlier. He’s bottled and masked for so long I don’t think he’s ever been able to give different forms of expression a chance.
Always remember that the patriarchy harms everyone
Stop deflecting blame from shitty women. There are shitty women who do shitty things and “the patriarchy” does not excuse their behavior.
Stop worshiping the patriarchy. The patriarchy is not God. The patriarchy is not to blame for every shitty thing a shitty woman does.
Sometimes women are shitty and you make the problem worse by telling everyone it’s not their fault because the patriarchy is God in your idiot doctrine.
Edit: I’m not saying the patriarchy isn’t real, it definitely is and should be dismantled. But you need to interrogate your own righteousness or you’re just spreading neoliberal schlock to make yourself feel better about how women can be shitty to men.
Women thinking men are icky when they express emotions is because they’re taught from a very young age that expressing emotions is feminine and feminine, especially feminine men, is bad. This wasn’t a reach to blame on the patriarchy at all.
The patriarchy isn’t “men are harming people all by themselves.” It’s the gender roles and gender hierarchy that both men and women perpetuate.
I have to push back here and say that I think that the “emotions are feminine” explanation doesn’t give the whole picture. There’s also instrumentalization of men.
We’re all familiar with objectification, the tendency of (some) men to ignore women’s agency, and treat them as objects for their own use. On the flip side, in my experience, (some) women instrumentalize men. That is, treat men as agents to be used as tools to achieve their own goals. As a result, I think that (some) women use men as a bulwark against the stresses and existential terror of human existence, or sometimes even literally, like a bodyguard, or the one who has to deal with the spider in the house.
You want your vacuum cleaner to suck up dirt when you pull it out of the closet, and then disappear quietly back in there once the job is done. You don’t want to have to change the bag, and clean the motor, and replace the belt every time. More metaphorically, you don’t want to find out that your emotional ramparts against a scary world are built on sand, and that’s what kind of happens when (some) women find out that their partner has fears and weaknesses, too.
I’ve heard the same story many, many times from men whose partners begged them to open up emotionally, only to flee once they found out that those emotions included fears and self-doubt. It doesn’t make sense that they’d do the first part, if emotions were unattractive, per se.
(Edit: Missing word.)
If patriarchy is the cause of literally everything in gender interaction, it’s not very useful as a concept.
On the contrary, the term is performing exactly as designed - blame men for men being shitty (toxic masculinity), and blame men for women being shitty too (internalized misogyny).
How is “women are also perpetuating and engaging in the patriarchy, this is a problem” blaming it on men? “The Patriarchy” is not blaming stuff on men, it’s a descriptor of the gender-roles-system we live in and people of all genders can be perpetuators of its toxic aspects.
Because “patriarchy” isn’t just a neutral, ivory-tower descriptor of a system of gender roles. Just look at Twitter, or Reddit - the number of feminists using the word patriarchy on a daily basis to blame men far outnumber the tiny number of academic feminists that (supposedly) use the term without misandrist intent. Words’ meanings are determined by their use, and going by its use, “patriarchy” is a misandrist term that is used to blame men for all of society’s ills, which has resulted in demonstrable negative societal outcomes for men and boys. It’s naive or disingenuous to act otherwise.
And even among more academic feminist circles, it’s naive to think the term “patriarchy” isn’t being used in a misandrist way by a significant percentage of feminists - radical feminism, just to target the low-hanging fruit, is entirely organized around mistaken and harmful ideas of “male supremacy”, and as a result most of feminism’s terminology is also entirely organized around men being the oppressor, and women being the oppressed.
This is where we get the real brilliance of feminist thought: “academic”, “neutral” terms like “toxic masculinity” and “internalized misogyny” ensure that all discourse about society’s ills are entirely framed around oppressor/oppressed language (where, of course, men are always the oppressors and women are always the oppressed), which, as discussed above, ensures that the public at large will blame men for literally anything that goes wrong. And, of course, this is exactly what we see on social media, from both men and women. It’s a brilliantly designed system. Horrible, but brilliant.
The consequences of this inherently misandrist philosophy have been felt throughout society for decades. There are practically no domestic violence shelters or rape resources for men, even though men constitute almost half of rape victims. Men having lower rates of graduation from both high school and college (and of course all of the feminism-funded scholarships are for women, even though they’re currently approaching 60% of graduates - gEnDeR eQuALiTy). Generations of boys having now grown up internalizing this misandry, being told that they’re inherently aggressive rapists and being forced to take re-education classes. The results of this widespread, societal internalized misandry are clearly visible here in this thread.
And, of course, as mentioned above, the incredible brilliance of the system is that all of these failings (and countless, countless others) are conveniently deemed due to the totally neutral academic term “patriarchy”, and not due to feminists pushing misandrist policy for decades that have had demonstrable negative outcomes for men. So, out here in the real world, men get blamed for women’s problems, and they get blamed for their own problems as well.
Feminism doesn’t have a monopoly on gender equality, as much as people claim it does (“If you believe in gender equality, you’re a feminist whether you like it or not!”). Feminism is fundamentally built on decades of misandrist philosophical baggage, and it’s time we threw it all out, burned the system down, and started over with a philosophy that’s actually dedicated to gender equality, from the ground up.
That’s like saying the road is the cause of all car crashes.
The road is the context in which all (mostly all) crashes occur, its contours or grading maybe contributed to the crash, but it almost never would be the sole cause.
Most people who just wave their hands and say “patriarchy” are parrots who just know they get a cracker when they say the line. It’s resulted in trash discourse.
It’s resulted in people just tuning out when they hear the word, too.
Kinda sucks, because it’s a really useful foundation to talk about society through a certain lens. It’d be hard to talk about traffic if I didn’t understand what a road was.
But, I admit, many people who pipe up with “patriarchy” don’t really want to talk any farther, and that does make dealing with those people pretty frustrating. Like if a cop showed up at every crash and excitedly pointed out the existence of a road and then left.
An asshole is an asshole is an asshole, don’t you dare act like it’s not these women’s fault if they have no compassion.
I never claimed it wasn’t. Shitty people are going to be shitty but they feel comfortable being shitty in the way that they are, in public, because the patriarchy has made that normal. I never excused her behavior, I identified it as being connected to a much broader sociological issue.
Hey comrade, I am seriously glad that comment like yours are starting to not be accepted anymore.
I somehow agree with you, the patriarchy harms everyone. But it does not help anyone to slap it in the face of men who are suffering, and also I disagree that a faceless concept has more responsibility than the people pushing it forward.
Men =/= the patriarchy. Tell a friend.
What you’re doing is the mirror of MRAs who pretend feminism means ‘women uber alles.’
You can stop.
Yeah this comment section has not brought me hope. I’ll admit that this may not have been the best place and time for this conversation but it needs to be spoken of, especially to the people who want to hear it least. I need these people to understand that societal issues cannot be solved at an individual level. You cannot simply be angry at a woman for being cold and heartless. This helps no one. The people who perpetuate patriarchal society won’t stop doing it because we get mad at them. They must be confronted about their behavior first and foremost with an understanding of the material conditions that drive them.
Yes, the perpetrators of patriarchy are responsible for its continuity but they do not realize this. They do not recognize the very existence of a patriarchy and this is why the world struggles to fight it. Often the biggest perpetuators of patriarchy are the most harmed by it and they don’t even know. They are as much victims as they are villains. How can we call them responsible on an individual level when patriarchy is the only thing they have ever known?
Where do you draw the line? Where do you stop blaming patriarchy and start blaming the people who have a fucked up sense of right vs wrong?
A man that screams at his wife when he’s angry, that’s patriarchy or that’s on them?
A man that quietly belittles his wife?
A woman that does these things to her husband?
If there’s physical violence I’m sure you won’t repeat your previous message and say that they’re victims as well.
You cannot simply be angry at a woman for being cold and heartless.
Yes, we can. Patriarchy or not, there are some awful people and behaviours being described in these comments. And while the “patriarchy” no doubt plays a role in enabling that, people also need to take ownership of their behaviour.
It’s terrible to see. It’s another feature of the patriarchy and toxic masculinity - blaming the victims. It’s why it has been going on for so long.
In a similar vein: Why do women not report rape? This is why. Because even women have been so oppressed by the system that they will even question “if they were asking for it.”
Saying something is the result of patriarchy doesn’t absolve anybody (including women) of the responsibility for fixing it.
It’s not the result of patriarchy, is the result of them being bad people. They would still exist under a matriarchy or in an equal society.
Probably far worse actually.
Wore nail polish at work this week, because I’m a bloke in his 40s who works in an office so fuck it, why not.
Our HR manager - a man in his 50s who fairly recently sent out an email reminding us to talk about our feelings to help our mental health - asked me (half jokingly) if I was “going through some life changes”
I will be when I find a better company to work for.
