It's been a pet theory of mine for a long time that some of the pushback that happens when talking about these subjects happens because of an understandable, well, lack of understanding of what the terms we throw around actually mean. As an example, Toxic Masculinity sounds both scary and kind of accusatory without proper context: "Your masculinity is toxic! Men are toxic!" instead of the more accurate "Men are victims of social pressures also." It kind of masks that one of the general aims of the movement includes giving male nerds more freedom to be nerds without feeling like they're gonna get the crap beat out of them either physically or emotionally for not being manly enough, which I mean. I expect a lot of male nerds would rather wish to have happen.
It goes deeper than that too, however. During the Gamergate fiasco for instance, the targets of Gamergate were first the neutral and disaffected crowds -- not women, but the men who would later become the smokescreen or become harassers during the height of Gamergate. They used terms like "toxic masculinity" and "male gaze" and the like. But instead of providing proper context to those terms, like anyone in the sphere of influence in industry that would USE those terms and understand what they mean, they explained them in an accusatory manner. Because they FELT accusatory.
So yes, while "Toxic Masculinity" sounded like "Masculinity is toxic, men are toxic," it was doubled down upon by the 'higher-ups' in Gamergate JUST to bring more people, who would otherwise want nothing to do with it, into the fold. "Male gaze" was wrong, they said, because it assumes that a man is playing,
and that in itself was problematic, not that the camera assumed a man was playing, and treated female characters as set pieces, but that
a man was playing the game in the first place. They doubled down on "Toxic masculinity" to claim that
anything quintessentially manly was bad, and should be done away with. When someone claimed something about "the Patriarchy," they calmly explained that they wanted
a Matriarchy only, and to remove men from society altogether. Remove men JUST LIKE YOU. And look, they've succeeded, haven't they? You're sitting here playing video games while they're trying to tear them down. And all you wanted was to be left alone. But they keep coming. They'll keep coming unless we do something about it.
And the response to that was...well, even I responded badly to that. Thankfully, as you know, you saved me from that garbage and explained to me exactly what people like Sarkeesian meant when they used those terms. I had never heard form them outside of 4chan at the time, and my understanding of them was EXACTLY the sentiments outlined above -- the exact opposite of what those terms meant, with few caring quite enough to look them up. They created both content and context, and it was argued a lot at the time that
nobody should have to explain what they mean when they use those terms, even when it was dreadfully obvious that the use of those terms without context opened the door for STEVEN FUCKING BANNON and Milo Yiannopolous to wander in and
give the terms the definition they wanted us to know.
And though I knew I was trans at the time, I felt attacked more from feminist circles because I was in that bubble, casting a blind eye to the very real attacks aimed at my back.
This is how these bubbles and cults thrive.
