“b-but bears are actually dangerous!” Shut the hell up.

  • @Drewelite
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    6 months ago

    You seem incredibly well adjusted for what you’ve been through and clearly you’ve learned a lot from your life experience. Thanks for laying all that out. It was very insightful. I think we agree on 99% of this. So at the risk of splitting hairs, I’m going to put a magnifying glass on that last 1%.

    I think fear absolutely victimizes people. I’ve seen xenophobia and homophobia do plenty of damage. Men are far from a disenfranchised minority and I think the issue of women’s safety is much more pressing than men being treated unfairly in some situations. But it still shouldn’t happen.

    You’re right that in a way it’s the fault of the dangerous men who abuse women. But in a way, hypothetically, it’s really the fault of their parents who sexually assaulted them. But in a way it’s the fault of their parents genetics that made them mentally unstable, etc, etc all the way back to the first multicellular organism. This thinking, however true, isn’t very useful. People need to take responsibility for their own actions.

    We agree fear is not an excuse for misandry. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for women to fear men after having a traumatic experience. However I can still point out the problem here. I think a good example is the trolley problem. If you pull the lever to only kill one person instead of six, I can both: agree with your decision but also point out that you killed someone. You can argue that’s insensitive to your difficult dilemma, but I think it’s worse to pretend like someone isn’t getting hurt. That one person who died still was a life with people who will mourn them.

    I think what’s irking men about this whole bear thing is not that the result is not what they want or even what they expect. It’s that a huge chunk of people seem to not even see it as a problem that most men are being judged for something they have nothing to do with.