Everybody needs to Love and Be Loved

The very first was in my freshman year of high school. The guy I was dating at the time kept trying to convince me to drop out and move to this commune with him and I kept telling him I had serious doubts, that it sounded culty, that he was asking me to uproot myself and cancel all my life plans at an extremely young age, etc. and he just kept snapping at me, calling me melodramatic, saying that I was just too attached to video games and my dreams of participating in making them (scoring soundtracks, contributing to storywriting, designing characters) and that the commune's goals were more important than anything I wanted for myself and that if I couldn't understand that, I was just "clinging to childhood". We broke up over this because immediately after 9/11 happened, he became increasingly aggressive about it and I couldn't fucking deal anymore. Now, he never actually did move there (thankfully - from everything I've read, things did not end well for it). He also stopped being a massive douchebag and we eventually became friends again after high school. But the way he treated me over my reservations about it stuck with me. I still sometimes feel a pang of shame or ask myself if I'm being serious enough every time I engage in the aforementioned Things I Like. I would still love to participate in scoring a soundtrack or writing some dialogue for an indie game someday, but I never let myself pursue those goals with the same passion I felt in my teen years because, for one extremely formative year, all of that was treated as "a distraction."

My second experience with such things was the second apartment building I lived in during my college years. The man on the second floor had this network he called Zivilyn. This was not a fully fledged cult by any means. It was a house of cards. He would buy people websites and tell them he would help them monetize some talent or another of theirs and then not do anything of the sort. He claimed to be a businessman but he was actually living off inheritance money. He knew everyone in West Philadelphia. He would buttonhole people for hours and talk about both them and himself in these extremely romantic, spiritualized ways. He was funny and compelling and devastatingly attractive. He had no sense of boundaries and an uncanny ability to command a room. He once got one of my roommates a job by simply walking into a store and telling the manager to hire her. He made me feel like I was Part Of Something, introduced me to some of the sweetest people I've ever known, and then systematically harped on each and every one of us for not being as Spiritually Attuned as him until we either severed contact or broke down. He demanded constant social availability. Meals and social gatherings were on his terms despite him living in a different part of the building, and if anyone questioned this or stepped out of line, he would go on Facebook and "make an example" of us. He abused his girlfriends. He openly enabled my second abusive ex's behavior towards me. He called my roommate a slut and told her that her dancing hobby was a "distraction" and that she needed to stop. He said the same thing about my writing/blogging, which was hilarious because that was originally the thing he said he wanted to help me monetize. He positioned himself as a confidant and when I told him the situation with the man I was dating was toxic, he basically told me to "get comfortable with being uncomfortable." He eventually ran out of money and straight up disappeared off the face of the Earth.

use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.

use firefox instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).

use mega or proton drive instead of google drive.

get rid of bloatware

use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite

use vetted sites on r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH for free movies, books, games, etc.

use trakt or letterboxd instead of imdb.

use storygraph instead of goodreads.

use darkpatterns to find mobile game with no ads or microtransactions

use ground news to read unbiased news and find blind spots in news stories.

use mediahuman or cobalt to download music, or support your favorite artists directly through bandcamp

make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge

use search for a cause or ecosia to support the environment instead of google

use thriftbooks to buy new or used books (they also have manga, textbooks, home goods, CDs, DVDs, and blurays)

use flashpoint to play archived online flash games

find books, movies, games, etc. on the internet archive! for starters, here's a bunch of David Attenborough documentaries and all of the Animorphs books

burn your music onto cds

use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe

use unroll.me to clean your email inboxes

use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, tuta, or proton mail instead of gmail

remove bloatware on windows PC, macOS, and iOS X

remove bloatware on samsung X

use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta

use NCH suite for free software like a file converter, image editor, video editors, pdf editor, etc.

feel free to add more alternatives, resources or advice in the reblogs or replies, and i'll add them to the main post <3

my worst relatives try to sneak meat or meat products into my food despite the fact that I'm a vegetarian

my ex's brother gave his mother an edible without her knowledge and when she got freaked out and paranoid they laughed, and people I've told that go "yeah that's shitty but it's just weed"

when I go to the doctor and ask them to describe what they are going to do before touching me they get frustrated

when I ask a friends of a friend who is a small influencer to keep me out of frame in videos they film for social media in public they look at me like I've pissed in their cereal

when i was a kid, i would have to tiptoe around his anger issues often, sometimes running quietly past his work table until he got his own place completely separate from our family, locked away for days. every so often he would start screaming in the car and trying to hit me or my brother for talking too loud while my mom attempted to calm him down as he swerved on the road. and now he, smiling, helps me with car insurance.

My friend is in a physically abusive marriage. Photos of red marks on their body are saved in my phone. I've thought they were going to be murdered before. The thought has crossed their mind. Their wife constantly accuses them of cheating, among other things, because that's her idea of what a man does. She has stabbed their mattress when she was angry to "see what it feels like." They showed me a tiktok she sent them. It's a woman out in the woods captioned something like "burying him here so nobody will ever find him ♥️♥️". This kind of memetic mean-girl feminist stuff has, as a part of the overall erosion of effective and principled feminist discourse, devolved into truly abusive personalities joking about harming men at its edges. This is rewarded and celebrated. My abusive ex did a lot of the same stuff. Would dig around these quasi-rad or outright radical feminist spaces to essentially find rhetorical ammunition to abuse me over. Then would fall back onto the plucky mean-girl feminist memes when I tried talking to her about the emotional and sexual abuse. I support mens rights to shut the fuck up. Same thing happens to my friend. Doesn't have anything to do with the actual person being hurt. It's just an expression of these gendered resentments. Spending time in communities literally listing off reasons for a woman to be angry at a man, and then taking that out on their partner. Happened to me. Happens to lots of people placed in the social role of "men." It makes a war-like philosophy out of gender. Turns it into an order of violence. Justifies violence.

I recently saw a post going around here about how men suffer abuse so rarely that there's no reason to adjust language about intimate partner abuse to include men. That the suggestion is simply men being big babies and trying to reframe every conversation to be about them. That my experience -- that my abuse on the basis of my perceived manhood, no less -- is literally a marginal experience, an outlier that shouldn't be incorporated in the conversation about other people going through the same things I did. That it just isn't deserving of discussion or concern. And it was being shared by mutuals, long time mutuals, people I respect and enjoy. People who are better than that. This isn't something that makes people irredeemable monsters. I don't want their heads on spikes. But this kind of cruelty is horrifyingly common.

In the end, this is the cost of harshly reifying gender. Resenting men as a class grows into a social infrastructure to justify and even gamify abuse. It becomes fun. It becomes jokes. It becomes blood for blood. There's a perceived justice to the suffering being doled out to the supposed abuser class. And, in doing so, patriarchal masculine standards are recreated and maintained. The abuse is perpetual. Men are belittled for having feelings about the way they're treated, for trying to talk about their emotions, and they are continually expected to simply bear the burden of abuse and not complain. The masculinized body and spirit is a vessel of abuse. This is its purpose.