I recently read You Don’t Hate Women and Feminism, You Hate Capitalism by Jeremy Mohler. Some of it resonated with me. I agree that classism is a major issue and that many men lack class consciousness. But parts of the article didn’t sit right with me, particularly its stance on society becoming increasingly “man-hating.”
During the height of #MeToo, the conversation about sexual misconduct was necessary and overdue. But as it grew, I saw messaging that boiled down to men are the problem. At the time, I thought, Well, I guess I’m the bad guy just for being a man. I didn’t know what to do with that feeling, so I stepped back.
I deleted Facebook, cut my time on Twitter, and retreated to quieter spaces like the Fediverse. My thinking was simple: If my presence is part of the problem, I’ll remove myself.
And so I did.
But then something strange happened.
Even as I withdrew, people still sought me out—colleagues, acquaintances, even strangers. At work, I got emails asking for my input on projects I wasn’t involved in. Online, people tagged me in discussions I wasn’t engaging with. When I went out less, friends reached out, asking where I’d been.
I started wondering: If I were a woman, would this still be happening?
I don’t think so.
I asked the women in my life—my wife, my sister, my mother. They all said the same thing: people rarely asked for their opinions. They had valuable things to say but were only heard when they actively pushed their way in. My wife has built a successful career, but not because opportunities came to her. She had to fight for them. She had to make herself impossible to ignore.
Yet, when I deliberately faded into the background, the world wouldn’t let me. My presence still carried weight, even when I wasn’t asking for it. Society still valued me, prioritized my voice, and kept me engaged—even when I actively tried to disengage.
That realization unsettled me. Because it made something painfully clear: It’s not just about who gets a seat at the table. It’s about whose seat is considered valuable in the first place.
This ties into something else I read—an argument about the devaluation of higher education. The claim was that college degrees are losing value because fewer men are enrolling. You’d think that as women became more educated, their wages would rise—but instead, the opposite happens. When women dominate a field, its perceived value drops.
Take teaching. When men were the majority of schoolteachers, it was a well-paying job. But as women took over the profession, wages stagnated. Today, teachers barely make a livable salary. On the flip side, look at programming. In the 1940s-60s, women dominated the field. Three of the four main creators of COBOL were women. The language itself was based on Flow-Matic, developed by Grace Hopper, once called the “Queen of Computers.” But when men started entering the field in the 1970s and ’80s, wages skyrocketed.
So yes, capitalism plays a role in oppression, but we can’t ignore patriarchy. The two are deeply intertwined.
This brings me to another issue I had with Mohler’s article: the idea that men don’t have a “story.” That white, heterosexual men in particular lack a narrative, an overarching struggle. But do we really need one? Do we need some grand justification for our existence? Society already allows men—especially straight white men—to be the authors of their own stories in ways others don’t have the privilege to be.
Personally, I don’t feel deeply invested in my identity as a man. Not because I don’t feel like a man, but because it’s just not central to my sense of self. And yet, the people closest to me—my wife, my mother, even my daughter—see it as significant. To them, the fact that I am a man matters.
So is society truly “man-hating”? I don’t think so. People might say they hate men, but what does society actually do? It pays us more. It seeks out our opinions even when we’re not offering them. It assigns value to our presence, even when we actively try to remove ourselves.
That’s not to say that all men hold power—far from it. But the system we live under isn’t just about men ruling over women. It’s about certain men, those deemed “fathers” in the patriarchal sense, holding authority. That’s why it’s called patriarchy—not androarchy. It’s not just about men vs. women, but about the intersections of power.
And that, I think, is why society feels so broken right now. We’ve swung from one extreme to another. Fifteen years ago, the dominant narrative was that men had no real grievances. Now, we have men so full of resentment that they’re willing to burn everything down just to feel like they matter.
And maybe that’s what we need to start asking ourselves—not just what we are, but who we are beyond these predefined roles.
https://makemenemotionalagain.substack.com/p/you-dont-hate-women-and-feminism
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread | More toots from atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org
=> View metoo tag This content has been proxied by September (3851b).Proxy Information
text/gemini