r/RadicalEgalitarianism

Title. Before I start, I want to clarify two things. I would call myself a feminist and I'm a woman, politically speaking I believe feminism is egalitarianism and should extend to other areas of fighting against inequality and oppression. I align myself more with left libertarian and anarchist ideology.

I've been using reddit for nearly a decade and been a part of a variety of different subreddits that revolve around discussion of gender, sexism, patriarchy, feminism and male advocacy.

I'm truly coming to a conclusion that reddit simply lacks spaces that allow and encourage discussion from a perspective of true anti-hierarchy, anti-discrimination and true feminism / egalitarianism and intersectionalism.

My main issue with a lot of these "feminist" spaces over the years have been that it's either consisted of users and space curation that doesn't aim to revolutionize anything but just reform and rearrange existing power structures, hierarchies and systematic inequality. Choice feminism is rampant. The idea that anything you want personally can be feminist even when it complies to support the patriarchy.

Another issue I've found explicitly in "feminist" spaces is the blatant acceptance of Trans exclusionary ideas and blatant hatred against men.

I'm really truly tired of it and it makes me feel like I'm the only sane person left on earth. It should not be a radical idea to promote and advocate for the importance of including men in feminist discussions and recognizing how patriarchy hurts all genders.

The core idea of feminism, or at least what it means to me is to recognize patriarchy and how it systematically oppresses BOTH men and women (or people of all genders) while advocating for a total systematic revolution and the liberation from patriarchy.

People in my experience in these spaces are not actually open to discussion. They aren't open to sharing ideas, challenging their own and developing their world view. They want to make empty statements with little to no nuance and don't want anyone to question or challenge them.

The most popular subreddits have serious moderator issues. Where discussion is highly curated and censored and where their own political agenda clearly overtakes the messages that are allowed to be displayed. Such as banning users that support radical revolution of the system. Or users that call out the oppression of ethnic groups in war times.

Other subreddits are either completely dead or filled with traumatized people who think it's OK to bring these personal problems into their ideology and call it a day.

Feminism is egalitarianism. I don't think its point should still be to focus on prioritizing women only. Men and people of different genders suffer the same under a system that's built on patriarchy, exploitation and hierarchy. If you want people to hear you out and make progress, you cannot start excluding people out of your own interest with statements like "I'm done thinking about men".

Just my frustrated thoughts.

I think we are living in a time where misogyny is on the rise because the idea and importance of the nuclear family is falling apart. Young men are left with no traditional roles to take, which results in the resurrection of women's oppression. This also hurts men and you can clearly see it with the rise of male loneliness, violence against women and inceldom. I think if you want to think of yourself as a feminist you need to be ready to recognize that as well as the other kinds of systematic inequality before you can start talking about reform or revolution.

So I'm a socially conservative fiscally progressive individual. Most likely the person that DM'd me saw my more progressive viewpoints.

My General Viewpoints I'm willing to defend.

• Pro-life
• Anti-Sex work
• Anti Trans affirmative healthcare for minors
• Pro Universal healthcare
• Pro Vaccine Mandate
• Pro Immigration.

The harshest comments I have heard about overweight people have not come from athletes. They have come from overweight men.

If weight were purely about discipline, you would expect the disciplined to be the most contemptuous. Instead, you often see men who are visibly struggling with it framing excess weight as a moral failure in others. Laziness. Weakness. Lack of standards. Owning a moral failing is safer than admitting difficulty.

If it is laziness, then it is a choice. If it is a choice, then competence remains intact. I could fix this if I wanted to. I just do not want to badly enough. Agency is preserved.

Admitting “I find this hard” is different. That concedes limitation. And for men in particular, limitation sits badly with how masculinity is framed.

Men are culturally presented as agents. Actors. Choosers. Responsible. Capable. Women, by contrast, are more often framed as experiencers. Things happen to them. They cope. They endure. They are contextualised.

This imbalance is unhealthy in both directions.

If you are over ascribed agency, your suffering is moralised. If you are in pain, it must be your fault. If you are struggling, you must not be trying. That does not leave much room to admit weakness. So you deny effort. You downplay struggle. You sneer at the domain instead.

If you are under ascribed agency, your suffering is contextualised. You are protected from blame, but also quietly stripped of responsibility. Over time, that can slide into passivity. Psychology has been clear for decades that perceived lack of control correlates with depressive symptoms. Learned helplessness is not a metaphor, it is a documented pattern.

Both distortions harm.

I caught myself perpetuating this nonsense. At work I mentioned that I had had a lazy weekend. In reality I had done voluntary work on Saturday morning, did some food prep for the coming week, cleaned out the back of cupboards and done the full weekend clean. It was not idle.

A female colleague said she had been busy with housework all weekend. It may well be that she had done about the same as me. Possibly less. Possibly more. That is not the point.

The point is that we both instinctively told gender confirming stories.

I minimised my effort and leaned into the relaxed, unbothered man narrative. She foregrounded domestic labour and aligned with the industrious, burdened woman narrative. Neither of us lied. I was probably too vain to say I had been cleaning out the back of my cupboards. We selected what to emphasise and what to quietly omit.

And we were not challenged. Because mildly pathological behaviour is tolerated when it fits the script.

An emotionally shut down man is stoic.
A chronically overwhelmed woman is caring.

A man who refuses to seek therapy is strong and self reliant.
A woman who does seek therapy is responsible and emotionally intelligent.

Invert those behaviours and the judgement shifts. A man openly admitting he is struggling can be seen as weak. A woman refusing help can be seen as stubborn or cold. Our sympathy moves depending on whether we see the person as primarily agent or primarily experiencer.

There is research behind this. Attribution theory shows that we extend less sympathy when we see outcomes as internally caused. Work on precarious manhood shows that masculine status is treated as earned and easily lost. Studies on help seeking consistently find that men who strongly endorse self reliance norms are less likely to seek professional support, even when distressed. This is not an accusation. It is a structure.

When masculinity becomes tied to the illusion of effortless competence, admitting that something requires effort feels like a status threat. So we say it does not matter. Or that we do not care. Or that we could fix it if we wanted.

My refusal to acknowledge that I actually have to try is the seed of toxic masculinity.

And it is also why “positive masculinity” is largely BS. Gendering these traits at all is part of the problem. Responsibility, resilience, honesty about effort, the ability to seek help when needed. None of these are masculine virtues. They are adult ones. Calling them masculine just rebrands the same narrow frame.

Not because effort is shameful, but because denying effort locks you in place. You cannot improve at what you refuse to admit is difficult. You cannot seek help if doing so feels like surrendering agency.

The same structure, inverted, can leave others narrating life primarily in terms of burden and overwhelm, which carries its own risks.

Agency and vulnerability are not opposites. You can be responsible and still suffer. You can try and still struggle. You can seek help without giving up autonomy.

As long as we are more comfortable with gender confirming distortions than with integrated adults, we will keep performing these small fictions. The lazy man. The burdened woman. The disciplined critic who could, if he really wanted to.