Both: What do you hate about your natal sex/gender?

submitted by worried19 from self.GCdebatesQT

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[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

You underestimate your writing.

I'm glad when anyone reads radical feminism; I'm sure it teaches men a lot about the experience of women and peripherally about themselves. But it's just not the same. Do you have books you can pull on to live, page by page with the author, the deconstruction of his psyche? To relive how you learned history, religion, your place in the world through your own body? Books that give words to all the childhood memories, somatic experiences, haunting feelings you thought could never be expressed? Books full of words invented just to name these unspoken things? Books that make you scream or weep with recognition? . . . I have thousands. I will never be able to read them all. How many exist for men?

Of course I'm not in the "patriarchy is just as bad for men as women" camp; simplifications are distractions and it's exhausting how men use women's honest efforts to understand them as an excuse. But the fact is that socialization into patriarchal masculinity is a traumatizing process; I also believe being an oppressor is deeply traumatizing. And until men are engaging with feminism on that level, we cannot get anywhere. You all need the books and lectures and concerts and trauma-sensitive yoga classes and specialized therapy sessions and ancestral healing workshops just as much, but tailored to your wounds. It doesn't matter how enlightened women become if men remain too terrified to say one vulnerable thing, to shift their rigid postures a centimeter.

And I'm frightened with how little men say of anything.

and it doesn't really matter in my experience if a woman or a man is the messenger

Yeah, see above. So what now?

[–]DistantGlimmer 4 insightful - 1 fun4 insightful - 0 fun5 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Thanks for the kind words. I have come to deeply care about these issues so perhaps that at least comes through in my writing. I totally agree with you that I will never be able to understand a woman's experience and I'd never claim that. I do believe I can empathize with women because of shared humanity but I also see my role in spaces like this and feminist spaces in general as being to learn from and support you and amplify the voices of women . I've said before in the old sub that I would like men to have our own movement adjacent to feminism against patriarchy. There is absolutely a need for that but outside of a couple of authors it doesn't really exist that I know of.

Absolutely men and males are not the main victims of patriarchy although especially those of us who are GNC can be marginalized by it. I really would like to see more men actually question the construct of gender the way feminists suggest. Unfortunately, this "intersectional" third wave doctrine which tells men that feminism should center our needs too is going to appeal to more men than forcing us to face hard truths about ourselves and question our role in an oppressive system of patriarchy. I'm really not sure how to get around that.