TikTok feminists

[TheresABootOnMyNeck]

Since the SC ruling I’ve been algorithmed into feminist tiktok, many with humongous followings, nearly all with pronouns neatly displayed.

They collectively have some very astute observations on men which, being a masculine looking and dressing lesbian working in a male environment and seeing these men “in the wild” as it were, I wholeheartedly agree with. In this way I truly appreciate their input. There are posts that make me wince due to their accuracy, and MRAs flock like flies to a cowpat to correct them and try to prove how awful women are, which is usually a sign that they’re on the right track and men wade in to defend their behaviour.

Put a man in a dress though, and he is magically a woman, is no risk to women at all, despite evidence to the contrary, all of his misogynistic ways disappear unless they make TW look bad (like Lily Tino) and then they cancel them. Those who question the ideology are literally Nazis and bigots. And views that are not TWAW are right wing and inherently violent towards women (the male kind). This is a hill they would willingly die on.

Why? How can they, in one breath see what so many men are like and speak so eloquently about it, yet at the same time are so blind to what trans stuff does to women?

Please help me to understand.

Agree with all your comments about single sex spaces.

This Substack article is about political conversations in a very divided USA, but it also makes some good points about world views and how intelligent people can end up with total dissonance. It also points to a way out; you can't assemble facts like a courtroom drama to convince them, because the drivers are emotional. They literally won't listen to you.

open.substack.com/pub/karintamerius/p/why-debating-republicans-almost-never?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=615mx

Thanks for that; interesting piece, I thought.

Thank you. Really useful article.

"Why? How can they, in one breath see what so many men are like and speak so eloquently about it, yet at the same time are so blind to what trans stuff does to women?"

Because they are directly concerned by men so they are allowed to have their own opinions about them, while the experience of transwomen is foreign to them so they must follow transwomen's lead about it.

It's a fundamental part of identity politics: you may only have your own opinions on matters that directly concern you - and its corollary: you must always defer to the people concerned to know how you're supposed to think about a topic that isn't directly about you.

I suspect that's one huge reason why GC women are considered to be so evil: not just because they happen to have the wrong opinion about trans people, but because they dare to have their own opinion in the first place on a topic that isn't seen as their concern. That's a major sin in identity politics.

That's one reason why it's so important to TRAs that GC women's arguments be presented as "anti-trans" rather than "pro-women": because GC women would obviously have a right to fight a pro-women battle, but it's nowhere as obvious how so-called "cis women" can have any stake in refusing trans ideology. They count very heavily on people reflexively going, "But it doesn't concern them! How very dare they tell trans people how to live!?"

Yes I agree.
I’ve noticed when with young people there’s an increase in them relying on sexist gender stereotypes to identify who someone is.

I grew up up in a time where it was ok to wear “boys clothes” and men on tv often wore makeup and clothes that didn’t really fit male stereotypes. The very idea that dresses, makeup and long hair denote what a woman is is horrific, but some seem so brainwashed that they almost literally cannot recognise men and women for what they are any more.

I hate this! One woman once said they’d feel safer in a room with 100 TW than with 1 man.
I mean statistically she’s less safe, but facts like this are ignored all the time.

I think it's important to remember their aim, which is views likes and shares. That's the goal. It's why they are on those platforms. When Tiktok first launched, it artificially inflated the numbers in order to get young teens to switch to it. You might get 20 likes on insta but you got 3000 on Tiktok, so over they went.

They are being groomed by deeply manipulative algorithms that teach them what to say by rewarding certain statements with popularity. They see other uses getting popularity by making those statements, and so they make them too. It's how you win the game.

I suspect IRL their feminism would fall apart under a bit of gentle questioning because it doesn't make sense to separate men who describe themselves as women into totally different category to other men on the basis of that statement.

And then there's Karen White, Scarlett Blake, Amy George, Isla Bryson et al.

This is really interesting to me, because years ago I was sexually assaulted in a mixed sex hostel dorm room that I was staying in with a group of young women I knew. One of them bumped into a man she knew, who complained about his room. She invited him to stay in ours. He sexually assaulted me in our room that night after the lights had been turned out, with the other women right there in the room.

The other women turned on me afterwards, and protected him. I was told he had a girlfriend, that I would ruin his life if I made any sort of an official complaint, that it was somehow my fault. I've never forgotten it. I quietly withdrew from the group. They rushed to take his side. Not one of them stood up for me. Not one.

Some women will throw other women under the bus rather than accept certain truths about men, and I think we're seeing that play out in single sex spaces at the moment.

Holy fuck @Cabbageheads thats awful! I’m so sorry!

I cannot get my head round women defending predatory men at all!

That's a great article.

Thank you. Looking back at it now, I can see how young and utterly naive we all were. We think young adults are equipped to deal with this situation but they're not at all.

It was easier to bully me out than deal with his behaviour, TBH. Dealing with him, with the fact that this sort of male behaviour isn't somewhere else far away but right there in the room, being done by a man that they had assumed was safe, who appeared and acted safe right up to the point where he put his hand under my sheets and in my knickers, would have been really messy. I understand why they couldn't do it. Ostracise me, blame me, and it all went away. FWIW he wasn't even asked to leave the room. He stayed there for the rest of the night. This was after they'd all heard me tell him to get his effing hand out of my underwear.

I remember just lying there, unable to sleep, not knowing WTF to do.

Right but the key parts of your comment are "helped me to become very good at seeing both points of view" and you've now changed your mind.

You're coming at it retrospectively but I'm sure when you first started thinking about these topics before you gained the experience and ability to consider both sides you'd have said something similar to "there's nothing there to understand."

Some of the people OP is talking about will never change their minds no matter what, but some are you at the start of your position before you developed those skills.

The difficulties are getting that exposure of the other pov to people and I think that's a lot harder now, one because we seem to be a more polarised society - its not coincidence that this is such a huge debate in the US with their bipartisan politics and where a lot of people define their personality by their political voting record. It seems to be less and less accepted that you can agree with people on some topics and not on others -you can either be conservative or liberal in your social views and then you follow the party line on everything, which is why tiktok feminists just won't accept that many GC women are traditionally left wing.

Similarly the way we get our news now affects the different views we are exposed to - tiktok is particularly bad for this but even news generating sites like MSN do the same and create an echo chamber so you only get exposure to the same things you've already indicated you "like" or agree with.

I dont think people discuss politics and things as much in real life anymore - because they're afraid of getting in trouble if they say the wrong thing, because they just don't see/speak to as many people - e.g. working from home so not having those water cooler discussions with people from different backgrounds, ages and perspectives, meeting places like pubs closing down every day, etc.

It's getting to the point where you have to make a concerted effort to try and expose yourself to different views - and if you don't want to its very easy to avoid.

It's incredibly hard anyway for a lot of people to even think "perhaps I was wrong" and when you're repeatedly getting your views reiterated again and again by (seemingly) everyone you interact with its even harder.

I think the disconnect stems from several things.

1. On this kind of emotive topic, people often think emotionally rather than logically.
2. Women are still generally expected to ‘be kind’, even when it’s not in their own interests. For many, this is deeply ingrained, and they don’t even need to be told to ‘be kind’, but if they are, they feel they must be in the wrong. Never mind that often when people say ‘be kind’ they really mean ‘override your own feelings in the interests of another’s’.
3. I suspect a lot of women who think men should be allowed to ‘be who they say they are’ have never felt truly helpless at the hands of a violent man.

What a dim attention seeker.

I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I wouldn’t be worried about being in a room with 100 men.

Only in the sense that you might be safer with 100 men than six men, say.

Because there are others there that would have a protective effect?

@onceandneveragain I agree very much with the rest of your post but I'm not sure about this part:

You're coming at it retrospectively but I'm sure when you first started thinking about these topics before you gained the experience and ability to consider both sides you'd have said something similar to "there's nothing there to understand."

There was lots of public and private debate about the issues and the alternative viewpoints were available for anyone interested enough to look. Plus I, personally, cannot make my mind up about an important issue in a vacuum. I need to know what the arguments on both sides are first. I could see from the start that there were well-argued objections to my side's view, it was just I thought my side's arguments were better!

@Deafnotdumb 's article is thought-provoking.
Psychologists have found there are two main pathways to persuasion:

• One is rational—based on logic and evidence.
• The other is emotional—based on intuition, identity, and trust

I think that because I had people I trusted on the CND side who were also pro-choice and people I trusted on the anti-abortion side who were opposed to the West unilaterally disarming, that I gradually shifted my viewpoint on both by being able to see the issues 'through their eyes'. This helped me to gain an emotional maturity that I think I was lacking and that I believe is an important part of decision making. A world run purely on logic and evidence would be a frightening place for humans.
I wouldn't say I did a 180 degree on the issues. More a 90 degree to the centre ground.

That's the problem with the 'parcel of good beliefs'. Once a topic gets categorised that way, it can be hard to step back.

Interestingly that was the safety argument for ‘gender neutral’ toilets put to me. Because there’s probably going to be more people using them, there may be some good men that will look out for the bad men and protect the women and children. That was me told!

Of course, this relies on a good man being there, a good man being able and willing to help, and also the good man being able to somehow see through the full height doors to know if there’s a bad man hiding, a person (in reality a woman or child) being assaulted or any person having a medical emergency.

Or we could just design proper single sex public toilets with a floor to door gap. Much more hygienic too. Job done.