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M is for Manvasion

This post is part of the ongoing Alphabet Series. Listen along to my recording on YouTube and/or read the article below ♥♀

In the name of the alphabet and the power that it conveys, I am merging and manipulating a couple of long-ago-written posts into something for the ongoing series. I wrote a single M-post last year – M is for Mother – and it was very nicely read for a YouTube audience by a fellow Canadian a few months ago. And I’ve got a few more M-posts coming over the next few weeks, so stay tuned for that.

Today, I’m talking about war, well, the daily battle that constitutes existing in a world where women-only space, even of the electronic variety, is not allowed.

M is for Manvasion: yes, I know. It’s a made-up word, but it works well here.

I’ve hung out on different online forums at different times, very often as a lurker. I don’t often participate because what’s the point? Most places are run by men and heavily populated by men and their female acolytes. You either get censored, ignored or attacked when you comment as a non-handmaiden. Pointless to waste your energy.

One thing you will find, however, no matter which forum you find yourself on, is that if there is a woman-only space or a woman-pertinent topic, males will come and jizz all over it. And no matter where they are from or what age they are, they are all exactly the same. It is a bit eerie actually, but as a result, they are completely predictable. I’m trying to figure out whether all males share a mind or whether they are all given a handbook at birth: “How to derail a discussion group of women in the most male way possible in 10 easy steps”. I’m going to ignore the Neanderthal infiltrator. He is the guy who just stomps in and announces, with poor grammar and a ton of misspellings, that all women are bitches or that women are destroying men somehow. And then he just waits for women to freak out (which they usually don’t because they’ve encountered this asshole a million times before). No, today, I’m focusing on the guy who saunters in and attempts a dialogue. There are a million of these guys too, but they are often a little more successful at derailing women. Here’s how it always goes:

  1. Male announces himself. “Greetings. I’m Harry Dickman, but you can call me Humble Dude. I’m just a simple, innocent male and an honest to goodness Nice Guy, and I wanted to ask a question to all you amazing, smart woman-goddesses. You can feel free to ignore me, but I would love it if you would educate me on X, Y, Z topic. I’m so confused.” And there is often some bashful or goofy emoji ending this little introduction. But note a few things here: the male must announce himself – unlike any of the women in the group – even if they haven’t posted before. He usually tells everyone he is male and makes some self-deprecating comment to show women that he doesn’t feel superior to them (ahem… that’s coming later). He also invites the women to completely ignore him, while at the same time plowing on with an endless paragraph that demands that they filter through the jizzy mess, unable to ignore him. In the humble paragraph, it is clear that despite what his actual words say, he does, in fact, expect the group to completely shift focus to him, and often the question(s) he has isn’t directly tied to the initial topic of the post.
  2. Reactions. Someone always reacts to the Nice Guy. There is at least one naïve and/or well-trained ‘nice’ liberal feminist who welcomes the penis to the group. He is being so sweet and humble, after all, so he can’t be one of ‘those guys’. (Not all men!) Women are expected to be nice and helpful, and most importantly, not to have boundaries. It is okay to interrupt women and demand their attention. Men don’t see this as being on the same spectrum as sexual assault, unwanted touching, taking up more than one’s share of space on buses or shared seating, etc. But it is all part of the male dominance-female subservience system. Women don’t have boundaries. Men have the right to be everywhere. So you’ll get a nice welcoming lib-fem, thrilled with the opportunity to help a male understand what women are about, who usually asks Humble Dude to clarify something or to spell out his question, if he didn’t already do so upon flouncing into the e-space. You will also often get at least one awesome woman who will address the intruder by his real name, usually something like Scrote or Moid. Welcoming Woman is usually quicker on the draw, though, so by the time the Warrior Woman has responded, Humble Dude has usually written at least 2-3 long paragraphs outlining his confusion or clarifying how fucking amazing he is (Not all men!).
  3. Truth Will Out. So then, the scrote sees the unwelcoming comment, and he shows his real face. Holy shit! He isn’t a Nice Guy. Or rather, he is a Nice Guy, but the bitch who is biting his head off is making him respond like some rapey turd. How can you blame him? How else is he to respond to someone who is clearly a man-hating lesbian, and who likely has emasculating testicle shears hanging just inside the front door of her apartment? Is he supposed to just leave the forum? Hell no! He has every right to be in the women’s space derailing everyone from the interesting topic they had been discussing and demanding that all eyes turn to him as he spins in a testosterific cloud of confusion. Stop talking and just listen and learn by reading? Hell no! He has a right to voice his opinions and ask his questions! How dare these women attack him. He is suddenly a victim and he lashes out like all men know how to do. His initial response is usually along the lines of “What is your problem? / What did I do??? ” Totally eye-blinkingly innocent.
  4. The True Purpose. It becomes quickly apparent that the Scrotal Mess isn’t there to be educated. What he really wanted to do was to remind women that they are not allowed to exist anywhere unpoliced by males. He may point out that feminists are misinterpreting the state of the world. Or most men aren’t what the actual data available publicly say they are. Or most men don’t hate women, and the men who do hate women don’t hate them 100%, maybe just like 25% or something (there is always a statistic in there somewhere). Or women have more power than men these days. Or that women have the vote now, so what the hell are we complaining about? Or, I mean pick something – it almost always has something to do with women being stupid or privileged in some way, and men are innocent victims suffering in this world because of mean feminists who are mean. Ruining everything!
  5. The Gloves Come Off. There may be some response from the ass-kicking forum defenders telling Sir-Masturbates-Alot to fuck off. The initially welcoming woman has either tried to diffuse the situation or has retreated in confusion and fear, wondering why she is associating with violent feminazis. And the man then goes on to do at least one of the following: a) He deposits a man-turd in the form of a warning, e.g.,  “With this attitude, you will quickly find yourself with few allies.” “You’ll never make progress if you don’t include ME (and other Nice Feminist Guys) in your endeavours.” b) He reinforces his victim status, even though he was the one to penetrate the women, I mean the women’s discussion group. “Geez, bite my head off. I was just trying to learn/ask a simple (multi-paragraph, topic-derailing) question.” or c) He’ll make threats and use hate speech. This is self-explanatory. We’ve all seen Nice Guys wish us dead or raped. They’ve all reported US for hate speech and tried to get us censored, often successfully. They’ve all called us cunts and bitches and feminazis and whores and TERFs and Karens and the list is endless.
  6. The Exit. Scrote eventually fucks off. He is often banned if there is a moderator. But he may come back with a different user name. Sometimes it is hard to tell, they all sound the bloody same. But all women are left knowing that no matter where they are, whether it be online or in the meat world, they will always be attacked by men. Women are just not allowed to speak publicly without some man policing the whole damned thing and thinking that his opinion is more important than women’s and that his demands for attention and service are vastly more urgent and important than the need for women to speak freely and without interference about the things that concern their lives most seriously.

And as a close, note that I have lurked on blogs and forums representing other special interest groups, and you don’t see this level of infiltration and sense of entitlement by members that wouldn’t normally be included in that group. This seems only to apply to women as a class, especially feminists, lesbians and other hard-to-control females.

It is up to you to decide why all these guys sound the same. This is not a war that can be won as long as women willingly mix with men. The rules are set by men to benefit men, and in their minds, consenting to one boundary invasion is blanket consent for the erasure of all boundaries. There is only prevention and damage control, and the only thing I know for certain is that unless you are prepared to do serious battle, it is just best not to respond to them. They hate it and will go away faster. They’ll be back, maybe with a different name, but the damage and waste will be less for you.

♀️ If you care to support Story Ending Never, we are appreciative. ⚢

All Along the Watchtower

This post is part of the ongoing Birth of a Feminist series. Listen along to my recording on YouTube and/or read the article below ♀ ♥

Watchtower

I’ve called myself a feminist for a long time. I’ve had ‘crazy’, unspeakable-in-public, totally ‘offensive’ notions since I was quite young. But I’ve never been formally educated in feminism, I had no stable or lasting feminist role models in my life, nor did I seek out specifically feminist writing until not that long ago. And getting to where I am (and where I am still going) has been a process. I’ve made tons of mistakes with regard to men and how to frame my reality in a man-made world. I’ve had realizations that didn’t have complete impact until years later – when I was ready for their full force. This is all part of the development of a radical feminist that I’ve begun writing about in my Birth of a Feminist series.

About a year ago, I realized I was missing and needing something in my life. I was feeling lost, hurt, alone, lonely, chronically and mildly depressed, and unable to come up with at least a short-term plan or desire or motivation for the future (which is unusual for me – the survivor, the Plan/Strategy Queen). Without a lot of thinking about it, I found myself one day googling radical feminism, and a year later, I’m in deep. What had been missing was a philosophical system that spoke to me and how I work and that could help me pull everything together and make sense of the world. No other philosophy has ever done this for me. You see, they’ve all been male-orientated, and I’m not a fucking male. That initial internet search drove me directly to some of the most hard-core radical feminist blogs around (or archived). And I was home. I lamented that had I been able to find such intelligent, outspoken and honest women sooner, life would have looked quite a bit different. I think a lot of the misery could have been avoided. And I might not be stuck in China completely and utterly isolated from the kind of women (especially near’ish my age and older) I really need and want to be around. But better late than never?

Well, yes. Better late than never. Radical feminism saved my life. And that is not a unique sentiment. I’ve read it and heard it countless times by women who, one way or another, found themselves in RF’s comforting arms. Radical feminism gives you a framework in which to understand why you feel so damned angry, why you don’t fit in, and why the majority of people not only don’t understand you, but often react violently to you when you state your opinions and experiences.

~~

As you’re getting your footing among women who’ve been RFing for years, and finding out where you’ve gone right and wrong on your unaided journey prior to that, you encounter a lot of confusing stuff.

Calling yourself a rad-fem doesn’t mean you’re perfect. There is always room to grow. And that is a-okay. Growth comes from dialogue, sharing and learning from those more experienced than you and with different takes on similar situations. But more troubling – and this is where things can be confusing for those entering ‘the scene’ – are RFs who appear to hold all the basic tenets of rad-feminism to be true, but who will engage in behaviours that contradict the main objective. And I’ve noticed two confusing and thought-stopping behaviour camps present in online interaction. Both are actually common among liberal feminists, but I’ve seen purported and community-accepted rad-fems engage in them, as well.

The first one is well-documented: these are the ‘oppression olympians’. These folks are very concerned with making sure everyone understands all the ways in which they are disadvantaged. They often believe they are worse off than anyone else, and they will whip out the relevant oppression to thought-stop/silence any person they disagree with. It also serves as a derail technique. Many an excellent discussion has veered off track once an olympian shows up to remind everyone about how hurt she feels because of her special status. This kind of posing is antithetical to radical feminism as any RF worth her salt sees women as the primary focus of any RF discussion, movement, action, protest. Focusing on ‘intersection’ (and really, intersection can get so crazily defined that we all end up in groups of 1) is a divide and conquer technique that only serves to benefit men and take power and solidarity away from women as a class.

The second group I call the Watchtower snipers. These are most often women who instead of identifying first and most importantly as women – an oppressed class and the very subjects of radical feminism – take whatever privileged group membership(s) they have very, very seriously as a badge of shame. So seriously, in fact, that they will negate their own valid, horrible experiences because they are not as oppressive or legitimate as any other more oppressed woman’s. They also become hyper-vigilant for any sign of offense-giving in others, ‘shoot down’ anyone and everyone for these perceived offenses, and coddle olympians who show up to throw tantrums and to abuse perceived oppressors (their fellow women! ffs!). For some reason, these rad-fem watchtower snipers are also uniquely prone to neurotic grammar policing and will derail a thread by picking apart another woman’s comma or contraction usage. Weird. Snipers shoot wildly and indiscriminately to protect a perceived uber-victim. And sadly, it produces a similar result to olympianism by derailing, silencing and thought terminating.

The first blog I read from cover to cover, so to speak (which I won’t name here as I won’t shit on women who are, for the most part, doing important work and have my utmost respect for speaking dangerous thoughts and moderating comments), was brilliantly, brilliantly written by a woman with deliciously , what I call ‘out there‘ views. But to my great sadness, I found her to be a bit of a sniper, and allowed and supported olympians in her comments section, and wouldn’t tolerate trans-criticism. It really confused me as I quickly got up to speed on current feminist issues. She called herself a radical feminist, but failed on a few crucial points. Nevertheless, this blog was really, very important to me.

Women need to be able to criticize other women on important issues. Women are also allowed to feel and express their righteous anger. Nitpicking grammar (and I say this as an English instructor) is not a serious issue in feminism. Whether trans folk (men) should be allowed to take over the few safe spaces we have left is. And if comments are allowed on blogs, well of course, bloggers can have whatever policy they wish, but coddling trolls (who are probably very damaged women in need of real help/support – not anonymous blog discourse) and shooting supporters in the head doesn’t make for good female solidarity.