You get to a point in your life where you realize you’ve heard it all before. Some women get wise earlier in their lives than others, and they are both safer and more heavily burdened for it. Cutting through the crap can save you time and peril at the hands of men, but it can also sand the fuzzy edging off what might be your positive outlook on life.

I’m referring, in this case, to the uber-dangerous Faux Male Feminist. Some feminists will tell you that ‘faux’ is implied and therefore unneeded in the title – that there is no such thing as a male feminist to begin with.

Male Feminists (or perhaps Feminism Supporter might be better) are those men who claim they believe that women are human and deserve to be treated as such. They acknowledge their male privilege and claim they make efforts to fight the Patriarchy!

But if you scratch the shiny surface of most of these male feminists, you’ll quickly realize that the shininess covers a hard turd of misogyny. And what has motivated the joining of the movement is usually just a simple desire to git laid and/or feed off of women’s bottomless capacity to praise men for ordinary things that one should expect from all humans and to give people (especially men) the benefit of the doubt. Simply stated, men often take on the appearance of supporting women because the benefits of doing so are many. Many men have a hard time doing things that don’t have immediate or apparent benefit to them (although feminism actually does benefit everyone). To men, there must always be pay-off. Nothing is for free, goddammit, unless it applies to a woman giving freely of herself (volunteer work, blow jobs, housework, childcare, etc.)

How can you reveal the misogynist turd that is at the heart of the majority of male feminists? It’s quite easy, actually. There are many techniques, but I’ve listed a few that will save you a lot of hurt, verbal attacks/threats, and sometimes even sexual/physical attacks by so-called male feminists. It’s probably best to have back-up around so that you stay safe during the unveiling.

• Don’t give cookies, ever
• Don’t allow mansplaining
• Refuse sex / rebuff the inevitable sexual advances
• Launch a verbal test attack calling out misogyny of the dude in question
• Make a sweeping statement about how shite men are
• Ask men to demonstrate how they help women they’re not sexually attracted to

Faux male feminists will get offended by lack of attention and acknowledgement, rejection of their advances, and the calling out of their personal behaviour or male bullshit in general. The majority of men will get defensive, then angry, and then lash out using the standard slurs (bitch, cunt, feminazi, etc) and then say something like “That’s exactly how you lose male supporters in your cause!” or something equally passive-aggressive, huffy and petulant.

It will hurt. This turn-about. Mostly, the hurt will come from realizing that you gave trust, possibly against your judgment, to someone from the class that traditionally hurts women, and who lied to you about their motivations and used you.

If you fail to unveil the turd, there may be hope. Myself, I still haven’t met a dude who is a feminist and who doesn’t have an underlying agenda for claiming that ‘women are people too, dammit!” I have met one man who claims to put himself in serious harm’s way to help oppressed women escape and recover from really, really evil male shit, but I only met him in passing and can’t confirm whether what he told me is true. The rest of the dudes I know and tolerate claim to be Nice Guys, but don’t actively do anything to help women, educate men, or smash Patriarchy in general. Their accomplishments amount to not being total shitheads. That’s it. Nope, after 43 years, I’ve still not met a male feminist. But I’ve outed several faux male feminists.

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And by the way, real male feminist-supporters don’t spend all their time with women. They’re out there teaching men the errors of their ways and smashing Patriarchy. And when they are with women, they aren’t doing the talking. They’re listening and supporting.

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Oh and as another by the way, I am practically hearing women reading this spouting knee-jerk, “but that’s not fair to the menz” arguments against what I’ve proposed. And I get it. As mentioned above, women are trained from birth to be nice and give everyone the benefit of the doubt, even when their spidey-sense is tingling and they are at the risk of being harmed. It takes years of practice to get over this conditioned response, and to learn to respect yourself and not take shit from those who have been trained from birth to deceive and oppress.