Reverie
2 min readFeb 26, 2021

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Ugh. This attitude is a choice. If you choose to hate men, you will see reasons to hate everywhere. Just like people who "hate" other groups they feel oppress them. Incels who truly believe women oppress men, see "evidence" of it everywhere. For example.

It's selective attention. The things you see, they exist, but it is a warped lens you're using that means everything you see, causes you to feel a feedback loop of negativity, disgust, cynicism.

You're allowed to feel whatever you want but please don't claim to speak for feminism or all women because this kind of attitude is not helpful to a world where people are equal. And I doubt you'll ever see evidence of improvement in the state of affairs if you are constantly looking for evidence of how bad men are. Just like people who are immersed in anti-racism see more and more evidence of how irredeemably racist white people are, and everything gets seen through the lens of racism. Likewise I used to be really involved in feminist activism, and my timelines were filled with articles from all over the world about sexism. Except when I took a step back and thought about how much of this I see *in real life* (barely any), I realised that actually it's not as all-consuming as an algorithm curated by Facebook to deluge my feed with the worst of sexism around the world, would have me believe.

And when I think about the vast majority of men I know IN REAL LIFE (hundreds), I know of a handful of jerks (mostly from high school), one or two creeps, one rapist, one abuser, and a few problematic but well meaning people. Everyone else, are good people. My fiance, my 3 brothers, my father, my best friend, my boss, most of my colleagues (I work in a mainly male industry) -- are all men. And they're great people. I don't side-eye them because they use a urinal rather than a stall to pee. I don't feel unsafe being alone with them. I don't feel as though they don't care about women.

If I was trying to scrutinise everything through the lens of patriarchy maybe I would feel more distant from men, but I don't want to live my life afraid to love, afraid to have friends that are male, afraid to trust, afraid to be myself in this world as an unapologetic female but first and foremost AN INDIVIDUAL.

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Reverie
Reverie

Written by Reverie

“The nature of our immortal lives is in the consequences of our words and deeds” — Cloud Atlas

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