@DancelikeEmmaGoldman
While there have always been men who were unhappy with the expectations and social roles placed on them, just as there were women who were unhappy with theirs. The idea that they 'were always really the opposite sex on the inside' and should be treated as such seems to be relatively new.
I believe it's a backlash against women's progress.
In Australia we got a women's AFL team and IMMEDIATELY they changed the rules to let a man join it. Because we can't go around pretending that women are REALLY equal or worthy of their own spaces and recognition.
We got a womens weightlifting division in the 2002 commonwealth games and in 2018 (4 games later) a man on the team. No one was fighting to change the rules to include transmen or tranwomen in weightlifting before 2002.
We finally remove restrictions on which roles women are allowed to serve in the military, we immediately change the rules to allow men to serve 'as women'. No one gave a shit how I identified when I was told I couldn't be a combat engineer because it's considered a front line role, and no one asked any of the men who were doing it how they identified. Now that women are treated somewhat fairly (or at least not discriminated against as openly), suddenly identity matters and men are entitled to women's spaces and to be counted as women.
No one gave a shit about identity when women were not allowed to vote. No man in politics identified as a woman when there were almost no women in parliament. But as soon as there's quotas and women making real progress in representation they will try ANYTHING to give some of it back to men, even if those men are 19 year old with squeaky voices and skirts.
Even my very conservative Aunt is seeing this shit happening in her church groups. In the last 5 or 10 years people have started talking about women being silent in church and obeying their husbands. Right around the time groups like the Church of England finally started ordaining women as bishops and so on.
Looking at history, this always happens. When women first got the vote in the UK the mens voting age was set at 21 and the womens voting age was set at 30. Because if the ages were the same women would have outnumbered men, and of course that couldn't be allowed. We make progress towards equality, and suddenly a subgroup of men panic and try to snatch back as much power as they can in the name of 'equality'.
This is just another facet of the exact same knee jerk patriarchal panic we've always seen.
It's more subtle and underground this time, because it has to be. Because we as a society have stopped allowing it openly. This is good. This is progress.
Our grandmothers fought for their rights; to vote, to marry as they chose, to divorce as they chose, to work, to be paid fairly, to be represented in politics, to have their voices heard. It's just our turn to keep going.
If I may digress for a bit, I've recently FINALLY understood that the WHOOOLLE thing, the whole patriarchy, misogyny, trans thing comes from one unfortunate and inescapable truth:
Men don't matter.
On a biological evolutionary scale, men aren't really important.
If you have 100 men and 100 women you get 100 babies in the next generation. If you have 1 man and 100 women you get 100 babies. If you have 100 men and 1 woman you get 1 baby and the tribe goes extinct.
99% of all men on the planet could die right now, and while we would all be very sad, everything would keep on spinning. We've already had nearly that exact thing happen when men went to war and women stepped into their roles. Women already do the majority of work on the planet. And the next generation would most likely have the exact same number of people as if all the men had lived.
Then you have evolutionary sex selection, which can be summarized by the phrase 'dick is cheap' (meaning there's always competition for a female mate, but there ins't really competition for a male mate). You think male peacocks wanted to look like that? Think it helps them? No, the ladies just up and decided they were only going to fuck the shiniest of males, and so all the males became super shiny. Which means in the wild they get killed a lot more often but that doesn't matter because they're not really necessary to the species.
It happens in humans too. They say our population is getting taller because we're evolving or because we're better nourished. Actually ladies just generally want to fuck tall guys and every time they do the genes for both tallness and a preference for tallness get passed on.
Women decide which genes will and will not get in to the next generation. We decide what the future of the species will look like.
If we all decide 'You know what? Humanity has had a good run, you fucked it up, and we're not having any more people'. That's it, end of species.
There are any number of herbs and natural birth control methods that are actually pretty damn effective (we have been taught that they're unreliable and not to use them, hmm I wonder why) so any time a woman has the ability to access the outdoors and view her own body, passing laws about her reproductive right is rather an academic exercise. Men CANNOT prevent women from having abortions or preventing pregnancy, they can only try to punish them afterwards. This is why the very patriarchal religions are so shitty about BC and abortion. They have decreed that god is a male and he gave all the power and authority to men. The fact that women retain to right and ability to give or not give life as they choose shows the lie of that. It reminds everyone that if there was a creator god, as 'a thing which gave life to humans' it would by definition be a woman, and it's unlikely that SHE would have appointed some stuffy men to control her daughters lives. By demanding a semblance of control over birth and life they give the lie an air of truth.
So men and women can do 100% all the same things. Women can run countries as well as men, fix engines as well as men, run businesses and make scientific discoveries as well as men. The only difference between the sexes is this one division of reproductive ability, which makes women godlike - the ability to create life in our own image, to decide who makes it into the next generation and in doing so decide the future of the species.
This is why incel men are so butthurt. It's not just that women won't fuck them, it's that women, en masse, have judged them and ruled them unfit to continue even existing in the gene pool. That's existentially terrifying. And there is no right of appeal.
Poor short guys. There's nothing wrong or bad about being shorter than average. Hell it would be a lot better for the environment if we were all a lot smaller. But women arbitrarily decided that we want to fuck tall men and so many short guys, even if they're sweet and kind and fit and healthy and everything else in the word, are cut out of the gene pool on the collective whim of women who arbitrarily decided that short isn't sexy. That sucks, but that's just how it is.
And what did men get in exchange for that? A slight edge in brute force. Which they are expected to use in sacrificing themselves for the group because their lives don't actually matter (again, talking on an evolutionary level and on a massive time scale, obviously I would be personally crushed if anything happened to any of the men in my life or men as a whole).
Good men have come to terms with this. They understand that the ability to decide birth is for women alone, however fair or unfair that may be. They made peace with their place as the teachers, nurturers and guides for the next generation rather than the architects of it. The ones who can't cope with that become misogynists.
Everything in patriarchy is about men trying futilely to get control of women's reproduction. Putting her an a burka so other men wont try to fuck her and she can only have YOUR children. Banning her from getting an education and a job, so she has to be dependent on you. Arranged marriage. Virginity checks. FGM. Abortion and contraception laws. All of this is just about male jealousy of female reproduction. Other stuff (like limiting voting rights or being shitty to women in politics) is meant to preserve those systems, because if women did suddenly get the majority of political power the first thing we'd do is get rid of all those laws giving men authority over us.
Then we get to trans issues. Some of the transwomen that i know in life and many whose personal stories I've read online are specifically and openly envious of pregnancy, menstruation, and birth. It's the one thing they can never do.
Then you have other men who are using those men who genuinely aspire to femininity to erase women and retake some of the ground women have won. A futile attempt to retain control over what they will never have. This includes the 'non-dysphoric trans' such as Danielle Muscato and politicians and other men who say 'i see transwomen as women in everyway, except of course as a potential sexual partner cause I'm not gay'.
It's allllll the same shit. It's all based in existential terror over the bilogical role of males and a desire to co-opt the female role, either through impersonation (post op trans), or through oppression and colonization.
This is hopeful though, because it means that ultimately we will win. Ultimately women have all the same capabilities as men plus one, and we do hold the power. The patriarchy is a lie. An illusion. And it is slowly unraveling. We will see panic and push back of course. But with every generation we as women craft a new one that is slightly taller and slight more attractive, yes, but also slightly kinder, smarter, more generous and more gentle. We can't actually lose this fight, in the long run.
That was quite a lengthy digression actually. Tag me if you have any thoughts on it. Its my grand unified theory of misogyny (but of course I'm sure other women thought of this before me).