u/Outrageous_Pay1322

All this, like my field of f*cks, is now empty.

I can't believe we're still having to fight this fight.

In a recent post, I amplified Rebecca Solnit's post about the long-running pandemic of violence against women perpetrated by men. I suggested it's a feature, not a bug, of patriarchy.

Someone then came to comment on how men also hurt other men, and that we should be understanding of that. He said: "This problem affects everyone, and everyone should be included."

Here's my response to him: Yes, men do brutalize each other. Patriarchy weaponizes boys against boys long before they're old enough to weaponize themselves against women.

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The prison, the locker room, the boardroom, the Scout troop, the schoolyard are training grounds where masculinity gets installed through humiliation, hierarchy, and the constant threat of being cast out as weak, soft, feminine, queer.

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I won't argue any of that. I've experienced it myself and have written about it for decades.

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But here’s what your response does structurally. Rebecca Solnit and I named a specific, ongoing, planetary-scale crisis, which is men's violence against women, and the coercive control that underwrites it. And your reply is to redirect attention toward men's suffering and ask for more understanding of men.

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That move is exactly the mechanism Solnit is pointing at. It's how the conversation gets absorbed back into the gravitational field of male experience every time someone tries to hold it on women's experience for more than a moment.

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Coercive control isn’t a subset of generalized human cruelty. It’s a specific, gendered architecture: surveillance, isolation, financial domination, sexual entitlement, the calibrated dosing of fear, the rewriting of a woman's reality until she no longer trusts her own perception.

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It happens in homes, marriages, dating, workplaces, religious communities, and custody battles. It’s not what men do to each other. It’s different, and it requires its own naming and outrage.

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To fold it into a general lament about how hard masculinity is on everyone is to make it disappear again, which is precisely the trick patriarchy has been performing for 5,000 years.

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You suggest we "join genders for mutual strength." I'm for solidarity, but I'm against solidarity that's bought by softening the indictment.

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The men I trust most on this question are those who can sit inside the discomfort of women's testimony without immediately reaching for the reminder that men suffer too. That reaching is the reflex we have to learn to interrupt in ourselves. It’s counterfeit compassion.

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You're right that how some men treat other men is the prelude to how they treat women. But "prelude" is the operative word. The fully operative atrocity is the domination of women and children. That's the destination of the training.

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The frame has to stay on women and the coercive control they experience: the pandemic Solnit is asking us to acknowledge.

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If we can hold it there long enough to make the brutality visible the way she's calling for, then there will be plenty of room afterward to talk about everything men do to each other on the way to doing it to women.

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I'm a manager at a well known shipping store that also takes in Amazon other returns. Directions on the returns apps all state whether you need a box or not, or a package or not, or if you need to print a label or not. Corporate won't allow signs for the people in line to read to tell them this. A good 95% of them don't read the directions before coming in, so we explain to probably 50 people a day what the directions say. "NO, AMAZON /SHEIN/TEMU SAID IT'S FREE, THIS IS HIGHWAY ROBBERY!" when we tell them it's going to cost them $$ to do their supposedly free return.They do everything from screaming and yelling to being violent. And then they leave this kind of bullshit. We're horrible awful people because we make them follow the rules.

And once our doors are locked, they're locked, no matter what kind of an asshole that makes us. Im not restarting my system because you bought the wrong size granny panties, Karen. Come back tomorrow.

I just got a notice that at the end of May, here in town, Arjun Rampal is going to be DJing an evening of dance and craziness. FYI this is in America, in the Southeast, and where I live is a heavy Indian population. But wait, I thought he was an actor and now he's just a dj? Mukesh! Mukesh, no!

// y'all know I'll go just to see what it's like 😁