I couldn't have said it better myself.
As a 30 year old man who escaped the Alt-right pipeline, you're not going to be happy about the answer.
All I hear from leftists is how much they hate me for my immutable traits, how much they blame me for everything wrong with the world, how much they want me and everyone who looks like me dead.
Whereas Alt-right types would call me "brother" and welcome me into their ranks so long as I hated the right ways.
Do you understand the difference?
I'm an ally and support equality because I feel it's the morally correct choice to make, but holy fuck is it difficult to reconcile that with the fact that means fighting for a lot of people who see you as the scum of the earth.
Read this and then read it again and then read some fucking bell hooks because this is a legitimate problem on the left.
"To create loving men, we must love males. Loving maleness is different from praising and rewarding males for living up to sexist-defined notions of male identity. Caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving males for simply being." - bell hooks, The Will to Change https://bellhooksbooks.com/product/the-will-to-change/
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: one of the most successful alt-right psyops 4chan ever pulled was sealioning leftists in general and feminist women in particular to such a degree that, in response, we started reacting to every polite, 101-level question about feminism or leftist politics from men with anger and hostility, thereby driving said men directly towards the sympathetic arms of the alt-right, which was the entire fucking point of conditioning us to do that. I cannot emphasise enough that 4channers did this on purpose, as a concerted strategy, to make the left look unhinged, misandrist and unreasonable, and that we, collectively, took the fucking bait.
which is where the role of radfem/terf shit in furthering the same gender essentialism espoused by the alt-right really needs to be acknowledged: because as necessary and overdue as #metoo was on a cultural level, the framing of so many subsequent discussions as Yes All Men is radfem brainrot, not because patriarchy doesn't exist (it does!), but because patriarchy is an institutional and sociocultural problem rather than some inherent, indelible facet of masculinity, and that distinction matters, because you cannot solve the problem of patriarchy by treating it as fundamentally unsolvable.
this doesn't mean excusing misogyny. it doesn't mean absolving shitty men for their shitty actions. it means acknowledging that, at a basic psychological level, the vast majority of people do not react well to an all stick, no carrot approach to self-improvement, and if your response to that reaction is to say, "well, but they shouldn't need a carrot - they should just know to do right anyway, for its own sake, and the fact that they don't is why they deserve the stick," then I'd invite you to consider exactly how many different groups with individual, often radically self-contradictory definitions of right exist in this context, and how many of them, as opposed to you, are distributing carrots.
like, listen: I know that it sucks that people, universally, are not born with an innate, collective knowledge of The Best Way To Run A Society And Treat Each Other, and it additionally sucks that, even if we somehow figured out the perfect answer, some would still take convincing, others would still be on the fence, and a terrible few would still commit to being assholes. but that's what it means to be human, and there's no shortcut to getting around it! the work is the work. men are always going to exist, which means you can't build a better world without them - and if your better world doesn't acknowledge that, then it's not a better world at all; just a silo away from reality.
