Comics

Kinda hard to have an equal discussion when being a woman entails being sexually harassed and occasionally assaulted by a bunch of men, mostly ones you barely know or don't know at all, on a regular basis before you even hit puberty. Your "sex war" is more like a sex genocide with the effects biting the whole male demographic in the ass, even the ones who didn't cause it.

It's also hard when most of the men that participate in this discussion (despite often not wanting to admit it at first) subconsciously think that women should listen to their venting 5 seconds after meeting them and be in a relationship with them and hug them and bang them and stuff. Seriously, interacting with guys just feels like gambling, with most of them forming some sort of unhealthy obsession with you and taking your kindness as a sign of weakness or inability to see their red flags; to a lot of guys, interaction with them is basically a green light to move on you. It sometimes feels like life is a "don't unintentionally upset or engage with a random man too much or else he might find your phone number on the dark web and send you texts threatening to rape, torture, and murder you". We live in a society where it's relatively common for high school girls to have a guy classmate they occasionally talk to tell/text them that they wanna rape her, just unfiltered and out there because she decided to have a conversation.

Their problems are caused by patriarchy too, but that doesn't mean I'm willing to subject myself to sexism from them. They, whether they realize it or not, feel like they deserve what they want from a woman, the unfairness of women not wanting them makes them frustrated and they see gender equality as a means to an end, they see it as a way to have women finally love them.

It's not so much of "women and men are equally fucking up and need to make up" as it is "women are extremely scared by men, and negotiating with the likely emotionally unstable potentially violent people with nothing to lose who probably thought about you and them dating immediately after seeing you never seems like the good option". It's like encouraging kids to interact with people who they think are violent and might shoot up a school in order to convince them not to shoot up the school... Even talking to someone out of pity is endangering yourself.

Most guys want to get in your pants or eventually get to that point, whether you're apathetic to them or nice to them or mean to them. How am I supposed to talk to guys about sexism when usually their main concern is the lack of action with women and my main concern is interacting with men is inherently extremely risky and I fear I'm about to get raped or murdered when a man raises his voice at me?

It has to be at least 95% of straight men who are the danger women have to do conversational twister with to be relatively safe and comfortable around, and the remaining portion of men usually take an "insult" about the majority of men as an "insult" to them.

Men and women are both negatively affected by our sexist system but the playing field is not level. The solution is getting a majority of men to realize exactly what women deal with from men, and getting them to actively work against their subconscious sexism to promote a safer environment for women and remove the high risk of interacting with men, including by halting the rampant objectification of women and their bodies, so women and men can actually be humans with each other for real. The widespread outrage things like the bear meme gets show that this probably isn't going to work out any time soon. Men usually immediately think of it as a challenge to "prove" that women are worse by saying a lot of them are bitchy and hard to read and gold diggers or something, rather than a way to understand why women can't feel safe around men the same way they can around women. But instead men think of it as how women feel about any single man, including them.

At least there are communities like !mensliberation@lemmy.ca that are on the right path though. Sigh.