I am going to take a little time out of my day...

[The Good Reverend Roger]

QFT! I've noticed a lot of "activism" seems to fall in to the trap of berating people for being "programmed" to behave a certain way.

I've also noticed that a lot of "programming" factors in a strong resistance to this avenue of attack.

Good luck to those who would solve a problem by banging their heads against an impenetrable wall.

And berating shuts people off.  They simply stop listening.

[Pope Pixie Pickle]

Actually as a pretty strident feminist I totally agree with point 1. Abuse is abuse is abuse. the contents of your pance /gender identity mean FUCK ALL. it's no different. In general societal memes and constructs is is harder for dudes to get support on an official level and some dudes do feel ashamed and non masculine about being on the receiving end, but that's the same bullshit gender roles wearing a different hat, so Roger's main point totally stands.

I know I got pretty heated with Bear, but I've seen too many folks equivocate like motherfuckers about shitty behavior, from the person in my feminist group who basically yelled at me and told me I couldn't tag my housemate in anything ever because of some bullshit argument over a year ago where she was in the fucking wrong and still is but her nice person self image won't actually let her see that she is becoming a bit of an asshole, to the guy who claimed "he wasn't like that" (prev housemate, who incidentally is wanted by the police for assaulting his then GF on a frikkin train) to my dad who physically, financially and emotionally abused my mum for years and hasn't said a damn thing about it for 27 years, so sorry, not sorry. My reaction to this kind of shit isn't something I go looking to get outraged about, but it's fucking personal as fuck and I don't brush shit off.

I backed off for my own reasons (my mental health, and Alty's MH and not provoking more drama than was already going down) and I said my piece, so that's all from me on that particular point.

Bear doesn't mean any harm.  He's stuck in a city where "feminism" is largely a Susan Brownmiller self-parody, so he's operating on bad signal.  He's not the only one there that does this.

As such, and I've said this before, he's not hostile, so he's part of what you might call your recruitment pool.  Expecting people to somehow instinctively know what it's all about when they've received bad signal all their lives is neither reasonable nor productive.

Just saying.

Rant follows.

that wasn't what it was about, actually. Not feminism per se.