I always disliked boys and avoided them because I noticed they were the cruelest bullies in school. I tried to brush it aside and assumed it was just immaturity and kept a good attitude towards adult men. I was a naive liberal feminist who learned from Tumblr as a teenager that trans people are severely mentally ill people who need compassion and makeup is empowering and other such libfem things.

It started at age 18 with stumbling upon a gender critical video showing examples of TIMs who were arrested for sex crimes and placed in women's prison. Something instantly felt off and I explored further into gender critical theory which also helped me get started on radfem/PPF theory. I also started noticing forums filled with misogyny like 4chan and Reddit, and there was also a now-defunct forum I knew (before r/PPF was made) where women would share their reasons why they hated men and stories of their absolutely horrible experiences with them. After reading all of that I felt like a rug was pulled under my feet in regards my understanding of reality. I falsely assumed as a sheltered teenager that misogyny and rape/pedophilia/other sex crimes were quite rare in the Western world, but I learned that it's all just as prevalent as ever but most of the time men don't show it in your face.

I know that online doesn't always necessarily conform to reality, but in my real life adult men I had known (family friends and teachers, etc.) and former peers from school started showing their cracks with allegations and arrests. Rape, child porn, abuse, etc. Plus, like I said men don't always show it to your face and prefer to spew all their misogyny with their male friends and online. The volume of sheer hatred towards women online is too much for it to be a "small vocal minority" of men as some people would try to have you believe. It's clearly most men. Radical feminism/PPF made sense as the only coherent and actually substantial explanation for reality that tells it like it is unlike liberal feminism which is full of bullshit and tiptoeing around the truth, thus I've stuck with it ever since.

In regards to my life, discovering radical feminism and PPF didn't change a lot about my life. I barely wore makeup and now stopped completely, only dated a scrote once for a few weeks and never will again, mostly had female friends, etc. It mostly gave me a tremendous amount of confidence and motivation to improve myself. Sure I get depressed sometimes about the state of the world for women, but I'm glad I at least know what's going on to help me protect myself and that I still can rely on and look up to so many awesome women.