songoftheworms #sexist reddit.com

I used to be a part of this community, too. The omnipresence of weird shouty sexist men insisting upon being referred to as "she" totally killed my desire to try to continue to advocate on behalf of actual women there. Also when they felt the need to denote a profile field specifically for pronouns... round the bend. Racism and classism have always been endemic to the site but the only time the userbase gets really riled up these days is when genderspecial commenters aren't given preemptive and limitless deference.

So, yeah. It's 2017, and men calling for the mass shunning of women who dare to affiliate themselves with a specific aspect or 'wave' of feminism are no longer considered incendiary mansplainers. Rather, as long as they take care to type "TERF" instead of "Feminazi" or "harpy" or "bitch," their adamant woman-hating won't just be accepted, but applauded! Observe the dudes who have started referring to themselves as "she" or "they," especially the ones who lived as garden-variety straight white men for 30 or 40 years. Once the ol' pronoun field gets changed over, these men will often feel moved to start issuing righteous declarations about feminism and womanhood.

The only difference between their former self and present is that now, they know they have the social leverage and clout to say whatever they want without fear of rebuke, because everyone who disagrees with them is a terf, and terfs are worse than even the worst genocidal maniac you can think of -- Terfs Janice Raymond, who lives in cave and murders over 10,000 trans people each day.

Misogynist garbage that would be, to put it mildly, very strongly discouraged coming from non-genderspecial men can thus be transformed into an imminently reasonable opinion borne from the suffering of the most oppressed group on the planet, i.e. genderspecial men. A quote I saw online once reminds me of this situation. Something like: "Feminism was too hard, so we got rid of the women." We're just looking down the barrel of another era where men's opinion of what women are has regained top billing.

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Confused?

So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!

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