Men feeling ennoscriptd to female affection + men suddenly facing sweeping statements about their gender they weren't exposed to previously + the left failing to provide non-toxic masculine role models while the right provides the worst ones possible = The super misogynistic anti-feminism prevalent at the moment.

I do believe that the rise in particularly rancid misogyny right now comes from previously unexamined male privileges/attitudes suddenly being (rightly tbh) called into question and men getting violently defensive about their inherent advantages in society, but I also believe that the left's willingness to criticize without providing meaningful alternatives to toxic masculinity/examples of positive masculinity exacerbated the issue, and it's something the right deliberately capitalized on to create a truly horrific backlash.

Tl;dr, the left needs to make a point about talking about what "good" masculinity looks like

Anyway, on the specific subject of "men are trash" rhetoric, because there's a lot of debate and blame about the election results on it going around rn:

I don't think it's to blame for what happened, and I think people are being weird and reactionary for arguing that point, but I do think it's part of a wider environment of ineffective rhetoric.

Aside from arguably being gender essentialist (failing to distinguish men are inherently trash v. Men are cultured to dismiss, disregard and disrespect women) it also fails to leave room in its argument for men to better themselves, by rhetorically making the issue about manhood as a state of being, rather than the conditions of modern masculinity (which hurt men too!)

Anyway, that's my milquetoast thinkpiece for the day

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