The Man that Can™(?)

Hard water is different from soft water. Where I live, I have moderately hard water. It's why I filter my water from the intake and have to change the filters consistently.

like, pizzey has a lot of beliefs i disagree with & it seems like she became turned off to feminism & never really tried to interrogate that belief & it lead her down a bad road. but ultimately she is herself a survivor of abuse who clearly has always cared deeply about abuse, and importantly, she was abused worse by her mother than her father. she described how her mother beat her until she was bloody. and i can absolutely understand how frustrating it must be to be a woman survivor of abuse by a woman, in the 1970s, and be trying to add more nuance to the discussion of domestic violence and talk about male victims and cycles of violence, and to be dealing with feminists who viewed DV solely through the lens of "males are sick and want power over women." even today so many radfems are so callous towards women victims of abuse from women, brushing it off as a non-issue, or acting like "its internalized misogyny!" magically makes it better than when a man does it. i can absolutely understand how that experience would lead a person to be turned off from feminism entirely and want to take a stand against it, out of a genuine belief that that is what will help all survivors of abuse more.

when feminism doesn't make men's issues a feminist issue, it falls to anti-feminists. it falls to hurting men and women who have felt burned (rightly and wrongly) by feminism. feminists have been saying "men suffer under patriarchy too!" since the inception of feminism, yet men's issues have never really been a feminist talking point, and so whose talking point does it become? meanwhile we keep waiting around for all abused suffering cis men to one day magically organize and establish men's advocacy groups that are also fully aligned with the goals and ideology of a movement that is unwilling to vocally or materially support those efforts.

and how many women have been abused by women, and then been fucked over by the very people who proclaim to be the defenders of battered women, because of feminists who were unwilling to reflect on their own oppositional sexism?

Today, one hundred percent of DV research is controlled by feminists. All research that shows the objectively true fact that women are just as capable of abuse as men is actively avoided, omitted, distorted, lied about and suppressed.

Feminists have actively done this for half a century at least. Everyone who did it is a feminist and they did it using the power of feminism and feminism has never, ever stopped them. Feminists will confidently repeat these lies at a national level, and other feminists will never ever ever call them on it.

The rot in feminism is soul-deep. It cannot ever be redeemed becaise it is sexism and never was anything but sexism. Feminists hate men and do not care about men. Some of them will say they don't hate men, and then show that they hate men and think it doesn't count.

I'd argue it's okay for feminism to focus on women's issues; it's named after women for a reason. You can care about multiple issues at the same time and still not make all of them fall under your feminist efforts. You don't have to choose between supporting women and being progressive in other ways. You can go to a women's march and volunteer at a soup kitchen on the same day, but that doesn't make them part of the same movement.

What isn't okay is the way feminism tries to explain the (mostly) very real problems it claims to oppose, because bad explanations lead to bad solutions. The issue isn't that the women's rights movement should also care about men's. The issue is that feminism, as a theory that tries to explain why women's issues exist, is based on the assumption that "men, knowingly and wilfully, invented gender so they could rape and oppress women". This assumption isn't just nonsensical (it's like saying "money was created by rich people to oppress and exploit poor people"), it also makes it impossible for feminists to acknowledge or even fathom the possibility that men can be victims of abuse or inequality and women can be perpetrators, especially in situations where both genders are involved (instead of male-on-male or female-on-female abuse). Because of that, any attempt by feminists to acknowledge men's issues with all but the most basic handwaves rings hollow. Or, at best, feminists seem to care more about men's issues as ammunition against their political opponents than out of anything resembling principles. This makes feminism incompatible with any other approach to gendered issues, no matter how many offshoots have tried to come up with their own band-aid solutions, much like how Christian fundamentalism will never lose its homophobic and misogynistic undertones no matter how much it tries to sound progressive.

you should really check out my blog as i talk extensively about men's issues and have for years. i made this post on this topic because i have spent years on this site talking about men's & trans issues and the critiquing feminists and feminism's failures historically and in the present day to properly theorize on men's issues & trans issues and how that affects trans men, intersex men, marginalized men, and and people classed as men across the board. a few years ago i made a set of awareness-raising infographics for social media about the stats on forced-to-penetrate rape and how common it was amongst cis men and boys, especially men of color and youth, how it is often excluded from legal definitions of rape and how children who have been forced-to-penetrate have been mandated to pay child support to their rapist, because i am very passionate about that issue.

i have gotten so much shit from so many people over those years for doing this kind of advocacy on here. the original post was directed primarily at my followers, who follow me specifically for my pro-feminist men's liberation & transfeminist posts, in the context of my well-established criticisms of feminism & how it approaches men's issues.

The issue is that feminism, as a theory that tries to explain why women's issues exist, is based on the assumption that "men, knowingly and wilfully, invented gender so they could rape and oppress women".

That is an extremely specific theoretical perspective that far from represents all feminism, even the dominant strain of feminism today (liberal capitalist feminism). That is a radical feminist theoretical approach which I and so many other feminists have critiqued historically and in the present day. Feminism is not one theory, it is a family of theories, which frequently disagree with and critique each other.

Because of that, any attempt by feminists to acknowledge men's issues with all but the most basic handwaves rings hollow. Or, at best, feminists seem to care more about men's issues as ammunition against their political opponents than out of anything resembling principles. This makes feminism incompatible with any other approach to gendered issues, no matter how many offshoots have tried to come up with their own band-aid solutions.

I am guessing "offshoots trying to come up with their own band-aid solutions" is the handwave move you are doing to discredit any and all feminist self-critique and alternative theories as irrelevant, so y'all can continue painting feminism as homogenous and defined entirely by radical feminist perspectives which, while I do genuinely agree they have had a profoundly negative impact on feminism as a whole (again, I have been talking about this exact issue extensively, for years), is far from the kind of feminism that is actually institutionally rewarded in any way. that form of feminism is the kind of feminism which focuses on simply achieving equality for largely white middle-upper class women in the workforce and in politics without radical systemic change.

i don't think its okay for feminism to only focus on women's issues, because women's issues aren't even just women's issues. a lot of them are trans men and nonbinary people's issues, and trans men and nonbinary people's (and trans women's) issues are also men's issues. there's heavy overlap. additionally, activists within feminism have long critiqued the idea that all women share the exact same issues & the general one-issue approach feminism has historically taken, because it ignores race and class amongst other elements. i would also argue its pointless to try to distinguish between women's lib and feminism given the two terms have historically been synonymous or near-synonymous, and what has labeled itself as "feminism" is the strongest and most well-known movement associated with women's liberation and anti-patriarchal resistance.

the failure to properly theorize men's issues is so far from the only issue with feminism as a whole. the problems are real but men are also not special here. just thinking about gender, i'm a trans nonbinary person, who is both a man and a woman and neither. do all y'all understand how fucked over by feminism we have been since forever? the scourge of trans people trying to adopt radical feminist lenses in order to try to appeal to cis feminists, fucking over other trans people in the process? and trans people at large understand that transness and feminism need each other. that feminism that fails to properly understand trans people's experiences under patriarchy and the role of transphobia is flawed and ineffectual but feminism that doesn't fail at that is far stronger and better equipped to fight for liberation for even more people.

its not that i think the things you have described here are wrong per se. i would agree that a lot of feminists only give lip service to men's issues when briefly relevant, and then fail to actually engage theoretically or materially with those issues in a productive way. but i would say that's true largely in part because feminist resistance, like racial and working class resistance, has been very fragmented and ineffectual and has been made that way on purpose by neoliberal capitalism. the same force has also colonized the concept of intersectionality and turned it into something far, far less threatening to systems of power than actual intersectional feminism should.

and overall, though i'm sure this will annoy you, it is impossible for me not to feel y'all have a very one dimensional view of feminism and any attempts to point out feminist self-critique which makes exactly the kind of nuanced analysis of men's position you want is disregarded. which. okay! but can y'all leave me the fuck alone about it. i promise you i am the last goddamn person on this site who needs a lecture about how much feminism neglects men's issues. i have people on this site who want me dead for talking about this exact topic. i have spent so much time and energy putting this exact topic into feminist terms and talking about feminist theorists who point out these issues and critiquing radical feminist frameworks that contribute to this issue. i have had to confront so much radical feminism within trans and feminist spaces that have been weaponized against trans men, trans women, and nonbinary people.

thanks to @funkylittlebats for making the wheel (and poll options)!! It's better than the sandwich wheel I made honestly

Summer sees both a drop off in donations and, at least for our trauma center, a spike in traumas. Trauma centers across the US are in danger of running out of blood for our trauma patients TODAY, which is very scary but, unlike much of the other scary national news coming across our screens these days, is something you can help fix immediately and directly.

Many things that previously made people ineligible have been rolled back. If you previously thought you were ineligible, please consider checking current guidelines!

While O- is the most dire need as it can be safely given to anyone in an emergency, all types are needed! Our emergent release blood is being pulled for patients who have a high chance of death if they don't get blood within the hour. Once they're stabilized, they can have their type confirmed and get blood of a specific, matching type released to them so that O- can go to the patients who need it most.