“So YoU’rE sAyInG mEn HaTe OtHeR mEn?”
Yes. Yes I am. And you can ask literally any marginalized man and they will tell you American Patriarchy hates them, too, specifically because they are being men in the “wrong way”.
Like fuck, this is feminism 101.
Edit: it’s non-radfem feminism 101.
Just look at the way that manosphere wierdos talk in reference to other men: they are competitors to be dominated either socially or with explicit violence. The whole grift is built on selling men the idea that they can climb their way to the top of the pile
^^^ This. It’s like a pyramid scheme of abuse. “If you throw fifteen men under the bus and convince five of your friends to throw fifteen other men under the bus, you can Win at Patriarchy, we promise!”
I can’t agree enough with this, and it’s something more and more men are speaking up about, even if our voices aren’t being heard.
Man box culture, as some call it, starts when we’re young. It’s pervasive - the competition to be a real “man” as defined by violence, dominance, and this absolutely fucked up concept of emotional detachment. It’s a raw struggle to not appear weak, and it starts with how adult men treat male children - the toxic values they instill, sometimes with words and sometimes with fists. And even if you grow up in a less toxic and more loving environment, you’re never really free from it. Your male role models, male adults like teachers and such, but especially male friends who are your age, all get caught up in this toxic system of abuse. And “real men” don’t have emotions, right? So you have to bottle all that up rather than understanding any of it because it’s *weakness.* All of that tends to come out in the one emotional state that men allow each other to display: anger. Shit, by the time most boys reach high school, they’ve been struggling against each other for years. All that hate, that anger, that uncontrollable rage? That’s been taught to them long before teenage testosterone hits. And by that time, it’s gotten worse because the patriarchy has defined how “real men” see and treat women. Underneath everything is this deep, deep fear of failing and becoming the weak punching bag. There’s so much shame to it all.
It isn’t always like this for every boy growing up, but no one is left unaware of its existence. And the only true way to stop it begins when we are young.
This is fucking heartbreaking.
One of my friends in law school once opened up to me and a few other people in our mixed-gender friend group that he didn’t really have friends before he knew us, even though he thought he did. We sort of nodded like, yeah man, we’re glad you’re our friend too, sorry people back in your home town were shitty – and he stopped us like, no, you don’t understand. He told us that he thought he had friends, and that those people thought that they were his friends – but that his all-male small-town social circle constantly hurled abuse at each other, and that they all thought that that was normal. He told us that he used to go out partying with them, and whereas when we’d go out, we’d talk each other up – like, man, nice shirt, love what you did with your hair, I bet chicks are gonna dig it, etc. – back in his old circle of friends? All they’d ever do before going out was talk each other down. You’re dressed worse than your friends? You look like trash. You’re dressed better than your friends? Why do you care so much about you’re appearance, are you gay? You’re dressed exactly the same as your friends? Wow, look at this loser copying other people’s look. You could never win, you could never even break even, and you were expected to not only put up with this, but to participate, because that sort of normalized constant stream of verbal abuse was the main way that you and other men your age socialized. He literally did not realize that men could have actual, real friendships – with women, sure, but also with other men – until he met us, because to him, the act of hanging out with people who you weren’t dating was so deeply intertwined with toxic competitive expectations that he flat out didn’t know that there was a different way to be until he moved halfway across the country for law school in his late 20s.
It’s incredibly fucked up, and men should be able to talk about what a patriarchal culture like that does to them without being silenced.
Tough Guise came out before the turn of the millennium for fuck sakes!
This used to be settled feminist theory! I studied it in uni! It wasn’t controversial!
This rad fem bullshit has set us back decades….