existential female despair

Equality cannot apply to to sexuality because equality is not sexy and inequality is. Equality cannot apply to sexuality because sexuality occurs in private and nothing is supposed to interfere in the private, however unequal it is. And equality cannot be more important than speech because sexual expression is sex and and unequal sex is something men want to say.❞

With the popularity of booktok and smut there's been men who are absolutely disgusted yes, but only because they think women shouldn't have drives at all, or they're mad as shit about the fact that only good looking sexy men get Abusing Women Privileges. And they're disgruntled about the popularity of the bad boy trope. Like look at this random reddit example which echoes male sentiments I've been seeing absolutely everywhere

A significant other portion of men support this, because if you're a pos misogynist all you have to do is say you support women's choices to like what they want and you'll have both the opportunity to abuse them without consequence and get praised for it. If there is actually somehow a man uncomfortable with it he's gonna get reassured by thousands of feminists on how some women love getting abused!! Consent!! Feminism choice empowerment!! It's crazy out here.

There are a lot of women gloating over how mad men are over romance/smut while not realizing how we're reinventing misogyny in new desirable ways every day. And just how many men are going to take advantage of this recent boom. Misogyny is misogyny is misogyny. At the end of the day It doesn't matter that we can separate reality from fiction and that women can like certain things or that it's more nuanced than we think. The damage is done, for women as a group, it keeps us right in our patriarchal chains.

Why does nobody say this about men when it comes to these discussions? And policing? A Tumblr post in a small non mainstream community, that criticizes broad patterns is not policing. I'm not personally walking up to women and telling them to stop and feminists dont have the power to police womens sexuality the way its policed by patriarchy. And genuinely, very very few people, even feminists, are encouraging women to have 'feminist fantasies'. Even on here the only thing a lot of people bring up is the concern that this is just a another way to police women. But I'm afraid the fantasies many women have now are the accepted and patriatchally correct and expected ones.

And u did acknowledge that its popular because of internalized oppression and internalized misogyny. Should we or should we not do something like encourage better models and narratives for attraction? And encourage questioning and reconditioning? This will involve discomfort because if theres one thing absolutely everyone is resistant to questioning to its sex and fantasy related things. If it was only fantasy, it wouldnt be cause for concern, but because it mirrors oppressive structures so perfectly, and its become more and more encouraged to embrace that, it is something concerning. And yes, sex and related things form a fundamental tenet of womens oppression. If we dont encourage questioning and making healthier baseline sexuality for ourselves, how do we expect to make progress in this regard at all?

Directly degrading women as a team activity. No explanation needed.

An arbitrary aesthetic or consumption pattern that's been assigned value. Finding community around interests like wristwatches and cigars (or comics and video games) is part of it, but not enough for these guys. Including women who share these interests would spoil the idea that men are special, sophisticated, and privy to secret knowledge.

Co-opting virtues as exclusively male. Deciding that courage and self-sacrifice (or empathy and wokeness) are "masculine" allows them to feel like they belong, by virtue of having penises, to a group that's responsible for the very existence of these positive concepts (and of course, each of them can take some personal credit). If a male person is heroic, they attribute this to his gender and use it to validate their imagined superiority. If a male person's actions are reprehensible, then he's "not a real man," even if he committed a harm that's statistically male-dominated.