I just came out of a five year relationship. Yes, five years. Five and a half almost six. The first five years we worked fine, then great, sometimes okay, but always good. We met in a private high school that was very prestigious. He didn't have a scholarship, I did, so imagine the disparity between his life and mine.

In the beginning it wasn't so obvious, he lived with his mom in a decent house, not too ostentatious, so our daily lives were kind of the same. He did his chores, helped his mom cook, cleaned the house or sometimes had someone to help them clean - something surprisingly common here in Mexico. My family also sometimes had someone to help us clean, but most of the time we cleaned our house ourselves. The point is, even if he clearly had money, he didn't flaunt it.

But you know what happened? Slowly, during college, during the pandemic, and when we moved cities to go to college after the pandemic, it started to show. The funny thing about school is that it's still a controlled environment, doesn't matter whether you're in college or already working while in college. We had it relatively easy. We knew our lives were here, right now, gearing towards graduation - towards the void that was being filled up by maybe an assured position thanks to the fact that the colleges were also private.

You can plan an entire life in school, dream about it, even play house. But the reality is harsh, and once you lose the structure, it's not playing anymore. The bubble pops.

That's when things get real. For a long time, my ex and I lived in that bubble. I was working and studying, trying to pay my bills while also keeping afloat my grades and a relationship. I kind of managed, but believed that it was gonna pay off once we finished and my ex and I were finally going to live together and actually start our own lives. That's how you manage to stay sane with a lot of pressure on top of you.

It also helps to see that your ex is more down to Earth than you expect, having been born and raised in a life of privilege. He's also living alone, paying bills, but his family is the one that gives him the money, and it shows. It shows in your meals, in the dates he takes you to that you can't afford. And, honestly, you start sympathizing with those Hallmark/Kdrama girls that get everything from their rich love interest. It sucks.

And before you come for me about privilege, etc. I. Know. But also, what they don't show you and what I had to learn the hard way is the rules. Once that bubble pops, and you're presented with your partner's reality, you see the incredible amount of strings that that money has attached. And it fucking sucks! For a long time, being in college, away from our families, we were able to be ourselves, and in a traditional household, that is gold!

Mexican families are still so misogynistic with many many things. And I had the privilege to have a mom that doesn't take shit from the patriarchy, especially when my dad tries to enforce it, but my ex? The moment he stepped out of that bubble, he had to go back to the traditions. It didn't matter whether I had shown him that women are equals, that he didn't have to be the sole provider, or that I was teaching him that he's allowed to cry, to feel, to get angry, to just be!

The moment he stepped out of his bubble, he fell apart. Since I had moved to the same city as him during college, he was never truly alone. But now, having left the country for a semester, on the brink of graduating, he was truly for the first time ever alone. And he couldn't cope. He asked a lot from me, making me his whole world and expecting me to be there 24/7, and I didn't react kindly to that. We discussed - not fought, discussed - and we tried to reach agreements. For me, he was being too clingy, and I had my own problems and my own life to look after. I also saw the opportunity he was in as something amazing and to be taken advantage of, and that he needed to make friends desperately.

For him, it was the worst time of his life.

Did I know he was having SUCH a bad time? No. Why? Because, as is tradition in his particular socioeconomic circle, men are not allowed to show emotion. He could only be calm. Even when he told me he was tired, it was the same as a robot telling you they're tired.

He could not show anger, he could not show he was sad, hell, whenever we "fought" it was more like a business meeting of what steps we were going to take to not let the discussion happen again. Everything I had tried to show him, that he could express his feelings, of me asking him to show me he was angry instead of just telling me, all gone.

And today, we broke up. He broke up with me, more like, and he did it amicably. Without showing emotion, just telling me what he feels. As usual.

And that's not okay. Can you imagine someone breaking up with you as if you were business partners only? When I asked him one last time to be angry, to show emotion, he said it wasn't appropriate nor polite. And as much as it pisses me off, I can't blame him entirely.

He's 2 meters tall in a country where you are considered tall at 1.80. Of course many people have told him he's scary, especially when he gets mad, even his ex told him that.

There are many things wrong with today's culture here in Mexico, don't even get me started on the way his family started trying to put me into the stereotypical housewife box. But today, I saw something that hurt me more: a man who couldn't express his feelings, not even while breaking up a five year relationship, simply because it was deemed impolite and even scary if he expressed himself.

i hope greta gerwig and the whole team of barbie are having a wonderful day knowing they made men so mad 🩷

people really love to conveniently forget trans men exist when they talk about feminism. or if they dont they make us out as also part of the problem as if we somehow are able to have the same amount of privilege as cis men. absolutely wild

I am genuinely curious how gender critical (and all other ideologies claiming men do not suffer under patriarchy) rationalize global suicide rates being significantly higher for men across almost all countries/cultures

i don't want to put my uninformed foot in my mouth or get involved with the Discourse but i've been seeing the two extremes of reactions to the korean low birth rates issue (on tumblr and twitter both) and i'm just kind of like. look. i feel like "low birth rates (in many countries but especially japan and korea as part of this conversation) are more broadly the result of capitalism/a culture of overwhelming overwork that makes social relationships and having families incredibly inaccessible to young people" and "low birth rates are very much a part of the current conversation about misogyny and social expectations for women in korea especially in the context of reproduction as 'unpaid labor' for women" are statements that can both be true

I think people forget that the oppressed frequently uphold the standards set by oppressors. It almost like we live in a society.

this is why we won't survive if we continue to focus on the oppressed but ignore the oppressor and the oppression because people might acknowledge that more than 1 in 4 women have experienced sexual assault, but doesn’t that bring up concerning questions about how many men have committed it? a lot of you are building a frankly deranged worldview where misogyny is just a natural part of the world that we’re all equally helpless against and apparently the solution is to completely deny it exists and force women to make nice with the people actively benefitting from our subordination. this happens with other forms of oppression frequently too but you seem to have the most difficulty in grasping that the patriarchy is intentionally maintained by people who benefit from it. There is no oppression without oppressors and your activism is far worse than useless if it frightens you to admit that 

Imagine you're trying to talk about the horrors of the meat industry and some dofus goes "I actually know a farmer that got killed by a cow!"

Misogynist 🤢

is this what we’re calling intersectional feminists now

some of yall rly just dislike ftms and are proud of it. not all of us are """"transandrophobia truthers""""" and """"hate trans women and think we're better than them and think misandry is real""""" just bc we talk abt the very specific and REAL issues we face being both trans and men. the trans men who DO do this are not fighting for us and do not deserve to be taken seriously and generalized as the face of "transandrophobia" therefore all of the issues we are fucking begging other lgbt people to pay attention to get swept under the rug bc we're all just whack misogynists. im so done talking abt this. this is why a giant percentage of us go stealth and abandon the community that's supposed to help us. ive literally seen it happen. you people do not care about us and it is so glaringly obvious

That Otto Hightower always has to shit on everybody’s parade my god I am so tired of his sneaky, untrustworthy face

elon should buy tiktok next. kill it. i hate it. i want it dead

its just such a basic view of feminism to me i guess. like we cant talk about how emasculation is an enforcement of toxic masculinity, how it is racialized, how it effects both transmascs and transfems. bc mens rights arent real, of course, feminism is about womens liberation, not destruction of the patriarchy.

we cant talk about how misandry (such as it is) is a dogwhistle for terfs, bc of course they only ever mean transfems when they say "men". we cant talk about the ways white cis women have utilized toxic masculinity and white supremacy to harm black men, specifically. we cant talk about the ways cis women hold privilege over trans men.

its just so... like... you rush to say "misandry isnt real" because you dont want to engage with the more complex dynamics of oppression that arent as clear cut as "cis man oppress cis woman". and like, sure, misandry isnt real. i dont care enough to squabble over what language we use. and i dont care enough about whatever silly jokes you make on your blog. but you have got to realize that by only ever seeing men as inherently oppressive to you by merely existing you are actively aiding radical feminism.

you are lending legitimacy to bioessentialism by refusing to engage w these more complex gendered oppression dynamics. you are lending legitimacy to bioessentialism by treating men as inherently different and inherently oppressive to women.

i need to interact w some other bigender or genderfluid people so bad, i feel like im gonna go crazy

i hope everyone reads that article i reblogged because i just did and it blew my little mind

I don’t care about accusations of ”pedophilia.” I will not give a fuck, I won't investigate your claims, I will just ignore it.

For one thing the accusation of pedophilia is often entirely meaningless. This is because pedophile/pedo etc are words that carry the taint of child rape, of calling up the disgust such an act naturally produces, but are accusations that don’t require such an act or a victim of it. If you call someone a “child rapist” that has weight, but you also have to back it up with a victim this person supposedly raped for the accusation to actually be meaningful. But words like “pedophile” carries no such demands, it literally just means “someone who has an attraction to children.” It doesn’t require an actual victim. It’s an accusation about how someone feels in their head and can thus be liberally applied. Someone criticizes your asinine submarine idea to rescue some children in a cave? Call them a pedo. And even words that once had a more specific meaning, such as “grooming” can be stretched beyond all meaning to mean whatever it wants to. Someone talked to under-18 people about sex and gender in a way you don’t want to? Call them a groomer.

In a culture of pedohysteria, pedojacketing is easy. And it’s especially easy to weaponize it against queer people, the idea that queerness spreads through queers recruiting children by molesting them is one of the oldest queerphobic narrativeness out there. I’m using “queer” here because this is a narrative used both against gay and trans people. But in the present transphobic/transmisogynistic backlash it’s most often used against trans people, especially transfems, as transmasc people are more often infantilized.

But on a more deeper level “pedophilia” is the wrong framing of the real problem of child sex abuse. It’s literally a medical term, a diagnosis. It makes child sex abuse a problem of some sick individuals with a diseased attraction.

This is of course a bad and antifeminist understanding of what rape and sexual violence is. It’s an inevitable and natural expression of power. The widespread rape of women is caused by the patriarchy, of men having power over women. And the misogynist oppression of women with sexual violence naturally extends to young girls. But all children are disempowered in our society. Adults have power over them in the patriarchal family, in the capitalist school system and other institutions of our society. Sexual violence against children flows from the power adults institutionally and systemically have over them. The vast majority of sexual violence towards children comes from the family and schools, not the “stranger danger” of creepy weirdoes hiding in bushes.

This is the reality that the framing of sexual violence as the result of sick individuals with a diseased attraction obscures. And it inevitably calls for a reactionary carceral and psychiatric response, justifying the police, prisons and psychiatric institutions. That’s why “what will we then do with the pedophiles?” is such a popular clichéd response to prison and police abolitionism. This very framing of the problem calls for a carceral response. If the problem of child sex abuse is sick individuals instead of the system, if we constantly root out and punish individuals we will eventually solve the problem.

In reality carceral responses actually make the problem of sexual violence much worse. The police, prisons and involuntary psychiatric hospitals are violent expressions of power and thus create the conditions for rape.

Pedohysteria is constantly used to justify the expansion of state power. Here in European Union we have had a legislative push to ban end-to-end encryption and make all online communication accessible to law enforcement, total online surveillance. And the reasoning is because otherwise pedophiles can use e2e communication to secretly send child porn to each other without the police being able to do anything, which is of course true, that does and will happen, but doesn’t justify killing all online privacy. This “chat control” act is literally called “regulation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse.”

The pedohysteria also justifies vigilantism, which tumblr callout culture is part of and is also a deeply reactionary and even fascist phenomenon. Vigilantism rests on the idea that what the police do is right, but they are not doing it well enough, because they are too reigned in by liberal ideas such as laws and regulations and the courts. So random people should take on the role of police to punish “criminals”, like pedophiles. And this goes through tumblr callout culture. A subtext running through pedojacketing callouts of transfems is the idea that transmisogyny does not exist and does not lead to transfems being disproportionately punished, but instead transfems are using their minority status to get away with sex crimes.

This standard conservative rhetoric about how liberals often literally let minorities get away with murder justifies their reactionary vigilantism. Of course in reality, transfems are far less likely to commit sexual abuse of children than other groups of people, because we are systematically excluded from the very institutions where such abuse happens, such as parenthood/the family or schools, because of the transmisogynist stereotype that we are all perverted child rapists. And the callouts of transfems as sex predators are in themselves abusive and protect actual abusers, just like how police and prisons are.

So no, I will continue to not give a fuck if you call someone a pedophile.