Trying to understand why I had these opinions, I recalled how much different being a man felt at 18 versus 28. I had no money which I presumed meant I had no value to the opposite sex. I wanted the company of women and girls, but I also resented them because I lacked experience in dating and my few experiences were rocky. A lot of magazines and headlines focused on the shortcomings of men and boys in the early 2010s, and it was easy for me to get negatively polarized into thinking it was a personal attack. Academic feminism did and does a much better job explaining patriarchy better than blogs and news sites which boiled down systems of sexism to individual behaviors.
My experience as a resentful teen boy wasn’t unique. It’s the same experience that millions of boys are going through, which they’d ordinarily grow out of by the time they hit their twenties. In my case, it was happening during a period of social revolution on gender and during an evolution in mass communications. Many of these early communities on Atheism, which captured me for their sensibility and anti-orthodoxy, evolved into anti-progressivism and eventually evolved into the Redpill and Manosphere which is how millions of young boys today engage with their gender. At least my period in this mindset was short lived: about two years. By the time 2016 rolled around, I had clearly lost interest in online gender wars as tyranny seemed a greater threat. I was now 24 and actively attending college; I had plenty of friendships and dating experiences with women, and that teenage resentment was forgotten.
The big crisis we’re dealing with today is that the resentment is not only not expiring when men get into their twenties, but it’s being weaponized globally by parties against men’s material interests. What young boys like me didn’t realize when we were being lectured about patriarchy and the problems of men, is that being a man is an extremely privileged position over women, we’re just not old enough to benefit from it yet. This presents a problem on how we teach oppression and discrimination to young people who have little autonomy of their own and feel bad when you imply your immutable characteristics harm people you seek validation from.
this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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Yeah, I personally struggle with the concept of 'privilege' because of this, and I'm AFAB. My introduction to privilege was a man telling me that my life had been easy because of my skin tone. He linked to an article about how privilege was 'easy mode' and tried to say that being a rape victim wasn't an excuse for finding his rape jokes in poor taste, I was born more privileged than him and just needed to sit with my discomfort. I quit that particular activist group after that, since it was clearly not as feminist as they wanted people to think.
This was ten years ago, and I still can't help but wonder what definition of 'privilege' people are rolling with when they use the term, because the pop culture version is so fucked up.
It doesn't help that I was raised to have the 'complaining is just insulting people who have it worse' mindset. Thanks to that, even the 'not being set back as far' rhetoric has a big unspoken 'so stop making a big deal out of it' attached that the pop culture definition plays into. Like, I chose to be homeless to escape my abusive family, and I feel like a poseur when I talk about it because I'm alive and housed now, so it clearly wasn't that bad.