Postnational Mich
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But changing the minds of young men also means speaking their language, and maybe it's also worth telling them "hey, all that bullshit about women is being peddled to you by lying assholes so it's easier for them to make money and get away with rape. You're being sabotaged and set up to fail so you die alone and angry at the world, and they want you to blame women for this."
Hearing this should make young men mad. Ideally, mad at the right people.
Changing the minds of young men is a worthwhile endeavour, for their own sake. I'd like to offer them grace (alongside a copy of Matthew Fray's This Is How Your Marriage Ends) on their journey to being happy, fulfilled people who recognize the humanity they share with women, and who make the decision to not let rapists hide behind the social cover of the bro code. Everyone will be better off for that, young men included, and I want to tell them that.
Knowing those things would have changed the trajectory of my life and my marriage. Looking back, I can see how women - and girls, starting with my peers in my childhood - were telling me a lot of these things and I wasn't listening. I thought it was okay to dismiss it, because that's what boys do. At least that's what my peers and the guys in movies told me.
I was being sabotaged. I've not forgiven that.
Back to the "male loneliness epidemic" - I was an angry horny young man too. Growing up out of that phase meant coming across a lot of lessons that I wish I'd learned as a boy - lessons like "other people's feelings matter", "you can't argue people into changing their priorities no matter how right you think you are", "sexual partners aren't trophies to collect", "you're not less of a man for being kind and patient", etc.
With the years, I realized I was set up to fail without those lessons.
(For all the talk about the masculine virtues of honour and integrity, the most powerful and wealthy men on Earth benefited from being deceitful as a strategy, and having millions of atomized, isolated, and sabotaged young men to exploit helped them a lot. Vladimir Putin isn't where he is today because of his sincerity and openness.)
The wealthiest man on Earth bought a social media platform just to use it to peddle racist historical revisionism lies. The office of chief executive over the government of the most powerful nation on Earth is currently occupied by a man who has publicly lied tens of thousands of times - so often there's a Wikipedia page for them. Both have been associated by email communication with a sex trafficker who lied to cover up how he trafficked underage sex slaves to other wealthy men.
If you're a deceitful man, the system of patriarchy and the path of domination described in Moxon's essay work really well for you, and they work even better if you can convince stupid young men that women are property they earn by working hard and whose opinions you shouldn't listen to. You can make a lot of money from exploitable employees who extend you the benefit of the doubt because, in their eyes, lying is a woman thing - and working hard to get the woman they want is a normal man thing.
So why mistrust people who don’t choose something (being a woman) that comes with a lot of drawbacks, rather than blaming people who choose to do something bad for everyone else (lying) for their benefit?
The worst misogynists will say all women are liars. Sidestepping how there’s no evidence for this gender essentialism, there’s another question: cui bono? Who benefits when you say all women are liars?
The answer is obvious: non-women liars. AKA deceitful men.
Women are a demographic who didn’t really have a say in their membership. If they’re cisgender, they were born into that demographic. If they’re trans, they are punished for seeking recognition in that demographic and forced to live incomplete lives at best if they don’t. But it’s not really a choice.
Lying is a behaviour. People who lie in pursuit of their own benefit can choose not to.
I’m gonna put aside the statistics on sexual assault - how many go unreported, how many women are affected - even as damning as they are, because I want to focus on a different question that ties into Moxon's original point:
Why were these men blaming women instead of liars?