Comments on The Boyfriend's Introduction to Feminism

From the article:

Girls have such strong opinions on it — it’s cute when they get all riled up.

Hmm. This sounds like he doesn’t take women seriously. If they get all riled up its just something cute. Why would it be cute? I think it’s because he doesn’t see the thing they’re getting angry about as serious. I think there’s a similar sentiment towards kids/younger people. Not necessarily anger, but when there’s drama in teen (or even younger) relationships, it’s just seen as dumb kid stuff too many. Nothing serious.

I ripped myself open for Myles, detailing my rape and the aftermath… but he kept interrupting me to say ‘allegedly’ and, ‘Um actually, innocent until proven guilty.’”

I think there’s some confusion here? Courts aren’t some ultimate arbiter of truth. They also get things wrong (though I am assuming that’s why he’s using words like “allegedly” and “innocent until proven guilty").

Hmm. Also, something I’ve noticed when it comes to rape is that theres a lot of stuff about being careful about calling someone a rapist. Which is fair I think. I do think its odd though that generally people aren’t as lenient with this stuff for other things. People are quick to assume on a lot of things. It also doesn’t feel genuine when they’re trying to be careful. Idk why but that guy sounds more like he doesn’t believe her, rather than “Oh we need to be careful about who we call rapists.”

Also, while there are troubles identifying rapists (and other criminals generally). If a girl got raped, she knows she got raped (though I think there’s some argument about this in certain cases? im just assuming a blatant really bad case). If so, I don’t think it makes sense to delegitimize the experience (I guess where I see it as delegitimizing is because I read “allegedly” as “you allegedly got raped”, he could’ve said that about numerous other things).

“I thought maybe an emotional plea would help him see us sexual assault victims as humans,” Frye added. “Instead he kept comparing my failed attempts to report my rape to police to his pain of not being ‘allowed’ to watch Louis C.K.’s new special.”

She failed to report the rape attempt. He was not allowed to watch a comedy special. What even is the comparison here? I’m confused.

“I’d go out again,” said Frye. “He was at least paying attention to what I was saying; maybe opened his mind a little.

I’ve heard this sentiment about listening from a few coworkers. I think a lot of them complain about their partners being poor listeners. I also remember hearing a different story, I think from LastWeekTonight(?), where John Oliver talked about scams. He made a joke that women get easily scammed by a dude who just pretended to listen to the women. That was the low bar that needed to be cleared.

“Nah, I’m not interested,” Soto countered privately. “I mean, we had a fun little debate about her basic human rights, but she started openly weeping. Too emotional. Plus she said she’d be down to split the chips and queso, but was in the bathroom when we settled the tab. Lame.”

Uhh. Idk what to even make of the stuff here. He was debating her basic human rights? Going off of how he’s been portrayed, I doubt he was arguing for them.

The bathroom comment doesn’t seem meaningful. Uhh was the bill payed at the table. Wait for her. Idk.

At press time, Soto was talking to a Jewish woman on Tinder and mentally preparing reasons why the Holocaust actually prevented an even worse global tradegy.

Yikes.

One thing comes to mind though: I don’t know how much of this is just messing with women versus just being a contrarian/rage-baiter/whatever.

I know one person in my life who just likes to argue with people for the sake of arguing. He’ll openly admit he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but he’ll argue on any topic. The other day he argued with somebody about Mamdani vs Cuomo. He talked about how great Cuomo is and later admitted that he: knew nothing about politics, knew nothing about these two candidates, and just thought it’d be funny to piss the other person off.

Are you aware the article is satire?

Oh huh. Woops. Now I see.

It did seem odd. But it seemed realistic enough to me. Like the story wasn’t unrealistic to me.

Also I just assumed it was real/serious because you shared it.

It’s about a real thing. It’s exaggerating some and making some things unrealistically explicit. Satire is often a way of doing serious commentary on the world and its problems.

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r/TwoXChromosomes: I feel like men treat me worse since I had a glow up/became more attractive

r/Feminism: Reddit is so horrifying bc you can go to a sub for people with health problems and see tons of people desperate for help, strategizing on how to be taken seriously, and then you go to a doctor sub and it’s full of professionals talking about hysterical women and blue hair. More stories in comments.

Yeah… Ive had a doctor write in my file in the ER that I was “hysterical” and a “hypochondriac” when I had a fecal impaction that was turning into a bowel obstruction.

Is this happening mostly to women? Usually, when i think there’s an issue with how the doctor is treating me, I talk to them again in a different way and they believe me. Like, I become more assertive or something

The doctors not believing the females seems to happen a lot. I wonder how often and why that happens. Like are they just not taken seriously? I think there’s a power dynamic where the male thinks they’re correct and is taking care of the thinking for the female. The problem with that is the male doesnt know the female patient’s body like they do and can miss important information for diagnosing or adressing the problem.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXChromosomes/comments/1o7yt68/i_cant_believe_a_reddit_post_just_made_me_realize/ more in comments as usual

From the orginal reddit post:

He’d make me feel bad for not wanting to have sex as often as he did, and he’d cry and ask if I didn’t think he was attractive anymore.

Is the ex manipulating her? I think the answer is yes but how idk. I think he was manipulating her by making her feel bad so she wants to have sex. If the manipulating was successful does it count as rape?

Im wondering if thinking about this quote is on topic with the op’s title. I’m thinking because she didn’t go into how it worked and how she was coerced, then it’s not on topic. I think the point of the quote was to show how bad the ex was. Idk really.

More from the op’s post:

I can’t remember if I ever explicitly gave him consent to do sex stuff while I was asleep, but I think I kind of agreed to it to keep the peace?

What does “keep the peace mean”? Like stay silent? Or give into one’s demands to keep it peaceful? I think it means to give in to their demands so it doesn’t cause trouble with the other person.

The op’s post and the other comments all make me think there’s a significant percentage of men that rape. Like, if there’s problems in the bedroom about inadequate sex, what does that often lead to?

Yes his crying, whining and insecurity were manipulative.

He didn’t have enthusiastic consent. Using the enthusiastic consent standard would be better than what he did. But I don’t think guys should be criminally charged as rapists just for whining until a woman agrees to sex.

A lot of men whine, cry and manipulate. But I think a lot fewer have sex with sleeping women, which is a separate and more rapey behavior (whether it should or does meet criminal rape standards is open to debate and may depend on the details).

In general, sex in abusive relationships is more complex than “they’re all rapists and should all be in jail” or “she gave some sort of consent or went along with it in some sort of voluntary manner so it’s obviously not rape”. One way these relationships vary is how afraid she is of violence if she says “no” or leaves, and also how afraid she should be given the information she has. Some women are overly afraid but I think more women are inadequately afraid, as you can see by them breaking up in person, often in a private setting like their home, instead of taking their things and leaving while he’s at work.

Comment that came to mind before reading the post:

Idk what kind of worse treatment she’s talking about, but I’ve been guilty of this kind of thing in the past.

My second manager (and the one I worked with the longest so far) was a conventionally attractive blonde girl in her mid 20s. I remember being extra harsh on her about her managerial skills/work (things like scheduling, store layouts, prioritization) because, in my head, I thought of it as pretty girl got the job without trying. A few higher-ups thought she was cute and now here she is.

I do think thought I had a mix of things in my head at the time:

  • In general I was harsh in my opinions of managers because I thought managers would be these smart, put-together, efficient people because of Atlas Shrugged and stuff.
  • Related to the above point, even though I didn’t apply (and couldn’t apply for a while) to be a manager I think I subconsciously thought to myself of how I could do this matter

On a different note, not related to being mean (but I guess is a different type of worse treatment):

Without turning this into a therapy session, I struggled (and still kinda do) to find myself attractive growing up. Most of my communications with women come from work. Whole long story short: I’ve since addressed this (in a sense), but I am able to comfortably talk to my female coworkers at work since they’re (usually) just in simple work uniform and stuff and not wearing make-up or anything. However, if they had the rare occasion where they chose to look nicer for work (happened more often in the past when our uniform policies were lax) or would come in on a day off and looked nicer than usual, I struggled to talk to them. I wasn’t mean per se, but less talkative and interactive. The subconscious thing going on in my head was (and still kinda is) pretty girls don’t want to talk to me, if a girl looks pretty I talk less. I’ve kinda addressed this at work because I realize its the same person regardless of how they look at any given point in time.

The dual class action suits allege that the functions—which followed thousands of sexual harassment and assault lawsuits against Uber and Lyft over the years— have limited the economic opportunities for men and discriminated against them because of their gender.

@anonymous45 want to try analyzing this one?

r/TwoXChromosomes: Trying not to hate myself after my perfect boyfriend just broke up with me

Sure. I am not sure I got much out of it besides that people are often kinda directionless in relationships and aren’t very mindful.


8 year long relationship, so since they were 22/21. Pretty long.

However one night, he decided to end it with me saying we’re just prolonging what’s going to happen. He cited that my inability to regulate my emotions, and the fact that I’ve started to let myself go made it so he was no longer attracted to me and thus so no path to marriage.

People can lose weight, and if there was a path to marriage why didn’t he propose some time in the first 8 years? (Maybe the lack of emotional regulation)

It sounds to me like he was not being entirely honest. Maybe he put up with emotional volatility for access to sex, then when she became less attractive he lost interest.

The use of “prolonging” fits with this IMO, in that he’d already made up his mind that he didn’t see much of a future.

We had been having some issues in our relationship, but were committed to fixing them and had been doing better the past month.

OP doesn’t say exactly what they’d been doing, but it seems like she was mistaken that things were improving. She doesn’t mention a relationship counsellor which makes me think they were just trying things ad-hoc.

He has told me in the past that my emotions affect him too, but sometimes it felt like he only ever wanted to offer me solutions, rather than listening to what would make me happier in that given moment.

I was hormonal and on my period - he basically told me that morning how much he admires me, how intelligent he thinks I am, and how he’s always here for me. So yeah cut like a knife when 8 hours later he ended it.

A few things stand out to me:

  • It sounds like he did sometimes consider what would make her happier. Her earlier statement doesn’t contradict that, but does imply that she wasn’t interested in solutions some of the time.
  • “happier in that given moment”. Some common advice given to men is that women aren’t looking for solutions when they want to be listened to. This seems to bear that out. (Note: this is true of everyone to some degree, sometimes we just need to vent, but commonly it’s held that women are much more emotional, which OP sounds consistent with.)
  • She’s upset that he (apparently) lied, but if she wanted honesty she wasn’t acting like it. This relates to some comments about her ignoring her partner’s communication when he did offer it (that her emotions affect him too).

The comments seem a bit split. Some are saying that she has some unhealthy patterns, others are more supportive. Personally, this sounds like two people who were kind of just floating and not really considering things long term and that there were some deeper issues (which maybe she wasn’t aware of, or isn’t admitting). Communication was an issue.

A lot of the responsibility seems to be being put on her. Maybe that’s because she’s the OP and there’s not a lot of detail, but I wonder if there’s some level of sexism here too. That said, it feels like she wanted sympathy and wasn’t really interested in solving any issues. If the genders were reversed I think there’d be a lot more negativity towards OP in the comments.

r/TwoXChromosomes: I did something incredibly inappropriate at work but it proved my point

Today, my male coworker and male manager were talking about the male loneliness epidemic and I heard them say something about how hard men have it on dating apps. And I jumped in and said “you think women have an easy time on dating apps?” And they both said they thought men were unequivocally oppressed on dating apps.

So, I pulled up my tinder. And I handed it to them and said, you have 10 minutes to scroll through these oppressed men and find me ONE that you think would make a suitable partner.

Some of my favorite quotes included:

“Why is he holding a gun to his head?”

“Why is he naked?”

“Is… he being intimate with another woman in this picture?” (The answer was yes)

“Do you think he showers?” (Answer was probably not)

“There is a moldy Starbucks drink behind him.”

Finally, they did find a man who looked like a nice guy, he looked clean and there were no guns or dick picks, and his bio wasn’t great but it was general and acceptable.

I match with him. His first (and only) message came up about 10 minutes later, and he says “u gon let me fuck?” I also showed them this message.

Anyways, they no longer believe woman are just violently bullying average looking men on dating apps. They accept that men are their biggest enemies when it comes to online dating.

Should I let my manager swipe on tinder for me? No, I absolutely shouldn’t, especially not in the office. Do I think it was worth it? Yes.

In comments:

A handful of years back I decided to run an experiment and copy/paste my (male) personal OkCupid profile into a new female-seeking-male account, partially to see how my (admittedly eccentric) personality tidbits would be perceived in a female form - but mostly out of morbid curiosity.

“Her” existence was only implied, since I wasn’t going to reply to messages or swipe on other people - I wasn’t that curious (or sociopathic). I used some stock footage of what I felt would be an equivalently witchy/attractive female version of myself. I set up the account then planned to leave it untouched until the next morning.

But incoming messages/notifications started flowing immediately, a veritable torrent of garbage. I skimmed through for a mere couple of minutes, and immediately began to feel viscerally nauseated by what I saw - as well as offended, disgusted, confused…

I shut down the experiment a couple of hours later, completely sickened with what I saw. I did at least wait to see if more high quality or purposeful messages would show up later on, but… Nope! Not really, sad as it was. Maybe 5% of those messages even contained a sign they read anything about “her” profile or personality/interests at all. If it wasn’t foul, it was irrelevant. If it wasn’t irrelevant, it was perplexing. If it wasn’t perplexing, it was threatening.

At best, the vast majority of what I heard was about the same level of “sexy” and/or “respectful” as what you’d hear shouted at a petting zoo by a batch of elementary students trying to get the goats to come closer to the fence.

This experience shook me more than I’d have guessed and sticks with me to this day. Unexpectedly, I found myself feeling bad for women because many of them have “no choice” but to deal with men because that’s just what they’re attracted to. All she can do is kiss the frogs and hope for a prince; or get used to constant ribbiting.

Whenever I hear people talk about how hard things are for guys, I feel like laughing now. Me? I now feel incredibly lucky to be a straight man looking for women. When I get messages, even if I only get a few a week, they’re thoughtful and presented with poise - as if I actually might be something more advanced than a weird petting-zoo goat…

and

It may be inappropriate, but I did it. My boss and I are friends, and he was talking to a younger guy at the office we shared with another company last year. Talking about how women don’t give men a chance and it’s creating an epidemic (both are happily married).

I told them both to get off the brocasts because if they actually saw what was out there, they would simply just cry. My standards were too high, they said.

I gave them my phone. I said “seriously, swipe right if you see someone worthy of dating an adult human woman. You can have as long as you need until you find one or the filters run out of potentials.

I even reset my filters to only be based on distance so they could stop with the “I bet your filters are the problem” nonsense. Only two filters: looking for man and distance, which they both agreed was more than fair. I even set it to accept a few miles outside my parameter just to see if that might change anything, and they were sure they wouldn’t need it. They’d find ONE in less than two minutes because women are so demanding.

20 mins later, they were still huddled over my phone. Not ONE right swipe. It wasn’t about matches, it was about finding a single person worth swiping right on.

They accused me of picking a terrible app. I told them that if they both worked for the next hour, I’d Let them do the same on a second app I had. They actually both worked! Same rules. ONE right swipe.

At the end of it, they agreed that men think they have it bad, but even other men think their profiles are bullshit. They then went off about how the fish pictures are baffling, wondering why more men don’t just wear full clothes, and bitching that after the 3rd mirror pic in the gym they couldn’t stand that image anymore. It wasn’t interesting and it was stupid. They were also super shocked that every profile looked so remarkably the same — that there were like five different pictures and everyone had them: fish, car/motorcycle, gym mirror, group with random people and no indication who the guy was in the profile, and some medium distance image that involved someone famous or a sign and definitely sunglasses that obscure half the face. They also found it funny that every person with a pet had one picture with said pet.

They probably went through about 100 profiles give-or-take, and between the two of them, they couldn’t find ONE guy to swipe right on. My personal opinion: it’s good for men women aren’t actually as picky as men!

So, although it’s not altogether appropriate, sometimes it’s worth it just to educate.

We had been having some issues in our relationship, but were committed to fixing them and had been doing better the past month.

I read this as: he verbally agreed to a plan and stated that he thought stuff was fixable and was going to try hard to fix things not give up and at multiple check-ins he said things were improving in his opinion.

However one night, he decided to end it with me saying we’re just prolonging what’s going to happen. He cited that my inability to regulate my emotions, and the fact that I’ve started to let myself go made it so he was no longer attracted to me and thus so no path to marriage.

I read this as he was lying to her. She was trying to fix things. He wasn’t trying and was lying. She wasted a lot of time and effort.

While it’s clear that I was not an easy person to be around sometimes, and would often get down and in my own head and turn to him for advise, I also never knew the extent to which this affected him because he so rarely communicated his true feelings to me.

She is more self-reflective and self-aware, and more interested in improvement, than him. She’s more willing to admit to flaws and weakness, which is an important part of genuinely trying to improve.

Women are socialized to overly blame themselves and be overly focused on the preferences of others.

Even when he treats her poorly, she worries it’s her fault or that she should have done better. This is a major enabler of abusive men.

He has told me in the past that my emotions affect him too, but sometimes it felt like he only ever wanted to offer me solutions, rather than listening to what would make me happier in that given moment.

I think he offered his idea of solutions instead of listening to her preferences and goals in order to figure out solutions that would actually work for her.

He didn’t tell her how serious this was (her emotions affecting him). And it may not have been all that serious and he may have just used it as an excuse at the end.

It sounds like he wanted a woman who would support him while always putting on a happy face and not needing emotional support.

I’ve been spending the past few days blaming myself for letting the best one I’ll ever have get away.

Why on earth does she think he was the best one she’ll ever have, or even that he was above average? What is going on with how women are socialized?

But in the course of our 8 years relationship, we’ve been through so many ups and downs that I never would’ve walked away (neither of us were cheaters, physically or emotionally abusive etc.).

She was much more committed and loyal than him. She believed all the stuff about communicating and working through problems being the key to relationships. He led her on for years then dumped her.

I feel silly because I did lean on him for emotional support and it feels like in the end, that was weaponized against me.

She feels like if only she’d been more of a perfect happy wife with no flaws who 100% fit into his life and accommodated him, never asking for anything, then he would have kept her.

Anyways, he ended things with me and told me we need to be not contact so he can heal.

This no contact request is nasty. He leads her on for years, says he’s committed to her, dumps her, then won’t talk about it and wants to just be left along. He’s being self-centered, avoiding hard conversations, and avoiding taking steps to mitigate the harm he caused by talking through things with her now that he’s shown his true colors more.

EDIT: I forgot to add- the morning of the day he ended things. I was upset about the lack of movement in my career, but also slightly upset at him at the lack of progress (towards engagement) in our relationship. I was hormonal and on my period - he basically told me that morning how much he admires me, how intelligent he thinks I am, and how he’s always here for me. So yeah cut like a knife when 8 hours later he ended it.

So he was lying heavily right up until the last minute. She’s not crazy. I was taking this into account when writing everything above.

r/4bmovement: “My boyfriend/husband cheated on me 23 times but says it’s my fault. Should I dump him?”

The OP is mocking women who ask questions like the one in the title. Complex_Hope_8789 responded:

You underestimate how powerful gaslighting is and how badly it can wreck your judgement. Everyone thinks they’d never fall for abuse until you suddenly wake up and realize you’re years deep into it.

You’re especially not understanding that most times it’s not just the abuser gaslighting. It’s everyone else around you too. - are you sure? - marriage is work - but he’s such a nice guy - he’s trying.

Not to mention if there is a church or other “trusted” men and women in your life telling you that his behaviour is normal, you have to be the bigger person, you have to forgive, you have to get over it.

It’s not just the abuser making you doubt yourself. It’s also often everyone around you.

@anonymous45 Want to give an update on your views? Did I persuade you of more with the additional links I’ve shared? Do you have further questions or doubts? Do you want more of the same or is it enough? I’m not sure what else would or wouldn’t be useful at this point.