Discover more from Liberating Motherhood
Hello! You've reached the 'Feminism hurt my feelings' hotline!
Please enjoy this recorded message.
Thank you for contacting the Feminism Hurt My Feelings Hotline. We care about you, your feelings, and your call. You have been directed here because you witnessed one or more women discussing well-documented forms of abuse and violence against women. Rather than express concern about these acts, offer support, or even just stay quiet, you decided to run into the group screaming about something irrelevant. Because your feelings about feminism were more important than the fact of misogyny.
Please continue to hold.
Here at the Hotline, we understand that the notion that violence and abuse are wrong can be threatening when you have normalized both. We care about your feelings. As you wait for one of our friendly representatives, please enjoy this pre-recorded message
“This is man-hating”
Speaking out about men’s abuse of women is only hatred of men if you believe that all men are abusive.
And that’s the real man-hating.
If you feel offended by my work, it’s because it’s about you, or the men in your life. Good men, the people who love them, and the people who actually care about women are unthreatened by my work, and do not identify with the bad men I write about.
“You sure sound bitter and angry!”
I am angry that women across the globe are abused, raped, battered, and murdered, and that their children must witness it.
Aren’t you?
If you’re not angry about injustice, then you’re the irrational one worthy of derision, not me.
We love to dismiss women’s anger as a sign of their hysterical emotions and unreliability. We pretend that anger is not a rational reaction to bad behavior and injustice—or that men never display anger.
And then, when women defend themselves—either by asserting that we’re not angry, or by copping to our righteous indignation—society uses that as further evidence of how unreasonable we are. Men tell us we’re bitter, which implies that we’re unworthy and unattractive.
They’re not really trying to debunk our arguments. This nonsense, instead, seeks to separate us from other women, to deter younger women from listening to mothers, and to stigmatize feminism as undesirable. And in so doing, it helps replicate patriarchy generation after generation.
One of the first steps toward getting free is acknowledging that women’s anger is never a reason to discount them.
“This reeks of fatherlessness!”
I had, and have, a loving and heavily involved father, yet still hear this constantly from men. It’s a way of shaming both me, as unworthy of male love, and my father, for creating me. It’s honor culture bullshit at its very worst.
In patriarchy, women are responsible for their actions. They’re also responsible for men’s actions. And men are responsible for nothing.
If a man abandons his family, it is his fault. Yet incels and other assorted losers want to blame children for their fathers’ choices. When those children grow up into adult women, they stigmatize them, again, for their fathers’ choices. The message is supposed to be that women are so unworthy of men’s love that we chased off our fathers. Or that if we had been worthy of having fathers, we would have grown up into better women.
But what this remark really reveals is that the speaker believes men should abandon certain children. And that the abandonment is the fault of the child.
Really tells you everything you need to know, doesn’t it?
“You’re going to end up alone with your cats”
Don’t threaten me with a good time.
Women who speak out against patriarchy would rather be alone than abused. To assert that it is inevitable that we will be alone is to assert that it is inevitable that we will be abused in a relationship.
This is an assertion that all men are dangerous, unworthy losers.
Not quite the flex the speaker intended.
“Sounds like you women need to pick better men”
Oh, God.
I just roll my eyes every time I hear this.
First of all, all decent men are aware of the problem of misogyny, because it is literally impossible to be a decent man without encountering misogyny. Women in your life will tell you about it, and you’ll witness it firsthand. So if you think misogyny is rare, it’s a strong signal that you’re one of the bad ones.
Second, even if it were true that the problem is that women pick badly, by the time a woman is being abused, it’s too late. This is like telling a person with lung cancer they shouldn’t have smoked.
Perhaps most importantly, though, the problem is that society creates bad men. That’s why women talk about these issues—so we can push back on these social structures and build a world in which good men are abundant, not rare.
“Not my man!”
Yay for you!
Do you also dance at people without legs, breathe aggressively at people with pneumonia, and dance on the graves of people murdered by police while loudly proclaiming, “not me!”?
If you’re spouting this nonsense, though, it almost certainly is your man.
Here’s why: In a patriarchal society, building an equitable relationship takes work. It demands many ongoing conversations. If you’re having those conversations, you understand why women must talk about these issues, and would never gleefully announce that it’s not your man.
If you’re not having the conversations feminists talk about, then you do not actually have a fair relationship, and it definitely is your man.
This behavior is a defensive reaction. Women who do it seek out the appearance of an equal relationship because they know that an actually equal relationship is impossible with the person they have chosen.
Oh and btw, it’s not my man. Like, for real. And that’s why I do this work. Because I don’t want it to be anyone’s man. Because I care about other humans. Because I know that an important measure of character is caring about things that don’t affect you.
“I’ve never seen this”
Then you haven’t looked.
There’s a reason so many women follow me. Do you think all of them—and the majority of women globally—are liars?
Do you think the avalanche of scholarship demonstrating the challenges of patriarchy, and its effects on virtually every aspect of life, is some sort of conspiracy?
Misogyny is everywhere for those with half a brain and an interest in looking.
“I’ve never seen this” is a confession that you’ve remained willfully ignorant.
“Not all men!”
Oh my God, really?! It is literally not every single man ever! What a revelation! None of us have ever been informed of this Earth-shattering fact before, and we definitely have never had one single relationship with a non-abusive man, so thank you so much for educating us.
Our sister project, The Not All Men Hotline may be able to help.
“Your work is heteronormative”
Yes, it is.
So what?
This, to me, is a lot like when white people pretend that being colorblind is the solution to racism, or that talking about race is somehow racist. It’s weaponizing the language of social justice in service of silencing an oppressed community (women).
My work is heteronormative because this is primarily an issue between men and women.
Heteronormativity is harmful when it assumes everyone is heterosexual, and they should be. But talking about the harmful dynamics of heterosexual relationships, and specifically about how those relationships replicate and reinforce patriarchy, is a necessary and vital feminist project. It’s so vital, in fact, that even queer researchers have highlighted its importance to feminism.
Jane Ward, a queer researcher and writer, in The Tragedy of Heterosexuality, talks in great depth about the role of heterosexual relationship norms in women’s oppression.
We cannot pretend this phenomenon has no gender, nor that queer relationships are equally oppressive to heterosexual relationships.
It’s also probably worth noting that it’s not just cishet women affected by this garbage. Queer women can have relationships with men, be victimized by other women’s relationships with men, and be deeply affected by the broken and dysfunctional relationships of heterosexual couples.
Weird how antifeminists only care about queer folks when they can weaponize them against heterosexual women, isn’t it?
“A man like me will never love you!”
Good. No one wants a man like you.
If ever there were evidence that men just can’t listen to women, this sort of retort is it. Men love to threaten us by telling us they’re not attracted to us, we’ll never find someone better, that someone like them will never love us.
It’s as if they can’t hear that women really aren’t interested in low-value misogynistic losers.
If you’re not interested in me because of my feminism, thank God. Go your own fucking way already.
“Women can be abusers, too!”
Yeah, and did you also know that houses can burn down even when you don’t deliberately light them on fire? And people can get HIV from blood transfusions, not jut sex? So I guess maybe we shouldn’t ever talk about arson or safer sex either.
The Not Just Men Hotline can offer you further assistance.
Please continue to hold.
Subscribe to Liberating Motherhood
For mothers who are pissed off about sexism, household chore inequality, and endless misogynistic bullshit, and for the allies who want a better world for all of us.
“I feel bad when you say that. *You’re* hurting *my* feelings. Don’t my feelings matter too?”
Your feelings of being “hurt” by me talking about misogyny are not comparable to my feelings of actually being abused, exploited, raped, almost murdered, invisibilised, belittled, dismissed, gaslit and isolated by men.
If you’re not cognisant of the fact that the whole world is set up to make women fawn over, cater to, coddle, and centre men’s feelings, then you’re not the kind of man whose feelings are worth caring about.
If your response to my expression of personal pain I’ve endured at the hands of men is to seek empathy for your discomfort - rather than offering a space for me to just talk and being empathetic - then you are weaponising the language of “vulnerability” and “shame” to silence me, and demonstrating that you feel entitled to my care while feeling entitled not to care about me. Therefore you are 100% an abusive man, as you’re likely to attempt to get your own needs met with complete disregard for a woman’s needs.
If you feel “abused” by my use of the word “patriarchy” then bro, you have a fragile male ego that shatters at the first sign of accountability, and you should probably not be walking around town much less talking to women - so don’t be surprised if you never hear from me again!
PS bro, I’m working on a comedy skit called THE GREAT WHITE MALE ALLY and thank you very much for your contribution. But I have enough material of dumb ass one liners from dudes like you, and don’t need any more, thank you very much.
[Phone hangs up. Dial tone]
You forgot my favorite (from my STBX): “men get discriminated against, too!” No honey, that’s just people not liking you for you, not discrimination against an entire protected class.