[epistemic status: just an emotion dump. sorry.]
I dislike men. The entire gender skeeves me out.
I’m not sure what caused this. Maybe it’s because I didn’t get along with my father, and I often saw him hurt my mother (with words, never with violence, but they were deep hurts). Maybe its because during my childhood and adolescence, our hated out-group was “Old White Men.” The bastards who ruined everything, enslaved the rest of the world, grew fat with their wealth, and then rewrote history and hid all their misdeeds, never to pay for them. God how I hated them. Maybe it was because I saw first-hand how awful boys are too each other, especially in the middle-school-age demographic. It’s fuckin’ Lord of The Flies out there.
Regardless, I dislike men. The entire gender is, in my view, a collection of predators. Driven by an animal nature to destroy and defile and consume. It’s not that they’re evil, per se, it’s just that their biology doesn’t permit for anything else.
Half the reason I don’t want to have children is that I run a 50% risk of having a boy for each child-attempt. I do not wish to bring a predator into my home. I don’t want to raise a predator, to set loose upon society. And it’s considered impolite to sex-select your children in our society.
I work in an industry that’s predominantly female (accounting), and glad for it. I tend to seek out female friends. But I’m very aware that I’m an outsider from the only good gender.
Of course, I know plenty of good men. Some of them are very close friends of mine. I know these feelings of dislike aren’t rational, and that attitude is sexist. But knowing it doesn’t make the feeling go away.
I realized a few years back that I’ve been pitching my voice a bit higher my whole life in an attempt to be less threatening. I discovered that when I learned that most people don’t need a day to recover after talking for an extended period, and can often read aloud for a full hour without any pain.
I’m jealous of the trans people I know. I understand that there is a very strong sense of being female-gendered, and stuck in the wrong body, and an awful sense of disphoria. Anyone feeling those things would want to be the correct gender. But a deep, intuitive part of me keeps insisting that it’s a tactic to flee from being part of the oppressor class. And that the non-binary friends I have are doing the same thing. That it’s all to stop being the vile male sex. It feels like cheating. It feels like the thing I should do, if I had enough courage to go through with it. It feels like it’d be betraying the minority decent people left in this gender, and truly abandoning it to the predators. But I don’t want to be too slow about it either, languishing here long after there’s only animals left.
I’m starting to avoid triggers. I now refuse to read anything that headlines how awful men are as a group. Just today I saw “What To Do We Do With The Art Of Monstrous Men?” I don’t know what to do with something like that. I guess I’ll just stay silent, because I sure as hell don’t want to defend any of these rapists or predators. I’m ashamed enough to be associated with them due to my gender.
I don’t know. I don’t know how to be part of this group I can’t stand, and can’t leave.
15 Responses to “Unwanted Attributes”
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Sorry you are feeling this way. I have had similar experiences throughout my life, one thing I have found helpful is acknowledging my feelings don’t have to be rational.
It can put a lot of pressure on you to insist your emotions conform to logic; just accepting how you feel on a topic and that it may be how you will always feel can be a big relief.
Anyway, hope you feel better soon.
Thank you :)
Isn’t that a bit like hating muslims because they have the highest number of religious terrorists nowadays?
Most men I know aren’t like that. And women can be cruel and evil too. I think there’s fewer differences between the genders than people generally think.. it’s like two bell curves, one of the shifted slightly away from the other so they’re mostly overlapping, there’s extremes on both ends, just that man have way more extreme examples on one side and women have way more extreme examples on the other side.
Also, I think you don’t need to feel responsibility for the actions of a group that contains half the human population and that you didn’t chose to join of your own free will. I think you know that’s a bit silly. :-)
I think this response goes in the right direction, but the response to that would be that “religious terrorism” is a category created in hindsight to fit the conclusion, while the relevant category should be something like “harm inflicted on others”. In principle I still agree with it though: I am having a hard time seeing the moral difference to racism, e.g. against blacks, when one uses statistical justifications–the the ratio of violent crime originating from men vs. women is in the same ballpark as the ratio between blacks and whites. I can imagine seeing this blog post in Breitbart, by a black author, with ‘men’ replaced by ‘blacks’, and minor other modifications.
The question is, to what degree are we justified to avoid, exclude, feel hate against, express regret about the existence of etc., individuals of a group that (1) is easily distinguishable by visible attributes and (2) has an on-average negative (by whatever standards) effect on society. I guess having had particularly bad experiences with men justifies this attitude to a degree, as I would see racism somewhat more understandable when expressed by someone who had bad individual experiences with members of that race.
Maybe one can make an argument that race / gender / appearance / whatever is information that shifts your posterior of whether someone is / you yourself are a good person, so even if you have many other pieces of information (e.g. introspection) it will always make at least a little difference. Also, about the question of whether to have kids, you might say that even though you yourself are a decent person, there would probably be some regression to the mean in your children. I don’t think that these effects are great enough to be worth considering when deciding at the individual level. (Note the thing about having kids: you are not going to change the expected M/F ratio on the planet :-) )
The hate against men (genus cis white male) spewed by certain media (as the one you mention) is just outrage porn and Blue-Tribe virtue signalling at the level of a 4chan /pol/ thread, and merits only two responses: eye rolling, and ctrl-w. (Possibly installing an ad-blocker, if you haven’t already. Possibly rethinking your selection of news sources.) I don’t think one should be individually ashamed of being a man, just like one should not be ashamed of being black. Similarly one should feel free to express one’s masculinity by stereotypically male behaviour that is not otherwise morally reprehensible (speaking with a deep voice, doing sports, being excessively nerdy about something), just as one should be free to live black culture with similar standards.
There are attributes of typical men I also don’t like, same with women, but luckily there is a great degree of variation between people.
In distress this is a big part of the world building. Makes sense to me completely. Starting society over is going to be inevitable so it makes sense for it to be a gradual process.
First you tell us that the world hates all men and now you say that you do. I cannot help but wonder if some of your attitudes feed into others in a way which might not be considered particularly rational.
I think you are being unfair to men. Then again I think you are often unfair with how you look at people and that unfairness works in both directions. People as a whole leave a lot to be desired. Blaming problems on x people is of little use.
I’ve argued with you about the tone of an article which I though was ‘somewhat’ factual in its approach to how it talked about men. Now you are putting up posts which are just straight up emotional venting about men. It’s your blog and thats fine but……. I just don’t think it is fair to say that woman is the only good gender. Most of my friends are women both online and off but you wont hear me say all men are predators. Some men are awesome and some women are awesome. Some men suck and some women suck. Some x people suck and some x people are awesome. You know this Eneasz.
Ya of course I know it. I just don’t feel it. It’s one of the reasons I trust principles far more than emotions. It doesn’t stop the feelings from being there, and sucking, tho.
I’m really sorry to hear about your gender-related suffering. Genders are a mix of positive, negative, and neutral, and personally I’ve both suffered and been nurtured by masculinity and femininity in different ways. And yes, in our culture, as in most cultures, masculinity has been weaponized most brutally.
Have you considered that some of your feelings may be a form of gender dysphoria? Not body dysphoria, but social dysphoria perhaps. I can’t say if they are; only you can.
I’m glad you recognize that the gender stereotypes and biases that are associated with these feelings are a form of sexism, and that they’re not true. I hope you know it is possible to work on prejudices and reduce them. Reducing your sexism towards men can also improve your attitudes and behaviors towards people of all genders and those of no gender.
BTW, since your references to trans people are only applicable to those who were assigned male at birth, you should specify that, instead of perpetuating the common assumption that all transgender people are assigned male at birth.
Oh, and I also want to mention that dysphoria is not required to be transgender, in case I gave that impression. And non-binary identities fall under the transgender umbrella.
> Have you considered that some of your feelings may be a form of gender dysphoria? Not body dysphoria, but social dysphoria perhaps. I can’t say if they are; only you can.
I haven’t really considered that, probably because I’ve never heard of such a thing. There is gender dysphoria that is unrelated to body dysphoria? How does that work? I realize I’m showing my ignorance here, but, well… wut?
> I hope you know it is possible to work on prejudices and reduce them.
I try! I know a lot of really great men, I don’t dislike individual men for being men. I just… dislike the gender as a whole.
>BTW, since your references to trans people are only applicable to those who were assigned male at birth, you should specify that, instead of perpetuating the common assumption that all transgender people are assigned male at birth.
I figured it was obvious from context. Are there still people unaware of FTM transition nowadays?
Yes, gender dysphoria can be about many different aspects of sex and gender, not only your body. Social dysphoria is quite common and manifests in many ways. You may feel distress about the ways you’ve been trained to conform to gender expectations, or the way people perceive you and interact with you based on their perception of your gender. It also makes sense that some people who have dysphoria about the gender that’s been assigned to them might develop negative feelings about that gender as a whole, even apart from it being wrongly assigned to them, unfortunately.
I’m sorry that you’re suffering; I wish there were an easy way to fix it.
But TBH, I’m also a little confused about how somebody who has (probably) read this could experience the kind of pain that’s clearly being felt. Forget stuff like dysphoria or even the distinction between gender and sex; the way you’ve constructed the category ‘man’ is both arbitrary and deeply sick. The thing you hate clearly isn’t the material process of human sexual dimorphism; rather, your hatred is pointed at a specific sort of semantic phantom that you’re using.
Certain kinds of evil behavior correlate loosely with people that use male pronouns and wear boxer-briefs, sure. Perhaps it’s even true that people usually called male are also, on average, more evil. But any time you’re reducing a young child to ‘predator’, it’s clear that you’re assigning evilness to the category itself, not treating it as a simple correlate with masculinity. Even though that category is nothing more than a useful fiction that you’ve made up.
Like, I hadn’t previously thought of you as the sort of person who structured their world in such a way that ‘men are evil’ was even an available belief. And I’m very sorry to learn that your willingness to admit that kind of claim has backfired on you so horribly. I know it’s a lot harder than just saying “use categories that don’t actively torture you”, but, like. Use categories that don’t actively torture you.
I realize it’s deeply irrational. I actually linked this to a friend who asked on FB “What are you irrational about?” It’s just an emotion dump, like it says. Sometimes it’s hard to push against ingrained emotions all the time because you know they’re stupid, and you want to say something about their existence just so it’s not so lonely having them.
I’m sorry that this is happening to you. It sounds like a really painful way to feel.
Just because you don’t really endorse what your brain is telling you doesn’t mean you aren’t experiencing it, or that it’s not hurting you.
(Advice related to a small subsection of what you wrote, feel free to disregard if you don’t really want advice right now):
I have heard of some other people, both trans and cis, similarly pitching their voices higher than is natural, and also straining their voices. Some of them have said that it helped them feel better about their own voices to listen to recordings of women with deeper voices, to make low voices feel less masculine to them?
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