3 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Am I losing my mind??
It's worth noting that people are often hyperbolic online and exaggerate. I'm not in anyway saying that women don't face a lot of hardship, but please don't take online comments as truth. These are often people venting.
The best thing you can do is focus on being aware of your own biases, encourage positive behavior in the men in your life (especially young men who are still figuring things out), and most of all understand that this is a systematic problem that is not your fault.
You cannot change the world by yourself and you're only responsible for what you bring into this world. Men feeling guilty won't make things better, but a lot of men and women making small changes and improvements over time will. Do your best to make positive change. Ignore the people that are preventing change, both those who reinforce bad, misogynistic ideas and those who use the bad behavior of some men to paint all men as evil.
When you something you read makes you angry or frustrated, ask yourself if the people who wrote it are trying to create positive change and engage accordingly.
Comment by thatpotatogirl9 at 30/12/2024 at 16:13 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
It's worth noting that people are often hyperbolic online and exaggerate. I'm not in anyway saying that women don't face a lot of hardship, but please don't take online comments as truth. These are often people venting.
Something to add is that on top of this, often social media highlights only the extremes because people don't tend to share the mundane. Posts and comments that have more dramatic details don't blow up nearly as much so the way social media functions creates a false narrative that affects what people perceive as reality. You'll see threads where tons of women come through with horrifying stories but it's deceptive not in what they're saying but in what women who don't have something meaningful to add don't say. I don't chime into threads about crappy partners because my husband is pretty great but unfortunately that means that men who are also pretty great don't get to see their behaviors discussed much and don't get the constructive feedback we all need. Instead they endlessly just hear about the horrors that some men commit.
It makes me super sad so I try and share my mundane any time it's appropriate to offset the awful and remind people that no matter how bad society gets and how much power men have given to them by their culture, there are always good men. Y'all persist and never seem to die out. There's something really special about that resistance to the corrupting nature of being given disproportionate power and privilege that needs to be talked about more.