Trying to understand why I had these opinions, I recalled how much different being a man felt at 18 versus 28. I had no money which I presumed meant I had no value to the opposite sex. I wanted the company of women and girls, but I also resented them because I lacked experience in dating and my few experiences were rocky. A lot of magazines and headlines focused on the shortcomings of men and boys in the early 2010s, and it was easy for me to get negatively polarized into thinking it was a personal attack. Academic feminism did and does a much better job explaining patriarchy better than blogs and news sites which boiled down systems of sexism to individual behaviors.
My experience as a resentful teen boy wasn’t unique. It’s the same experience that millions of boys are going through, which they’d ordinarily grow out of by the time they hit their twenties. In my case, it was happening during a period of social revolution on gender and during an evolution in mass communications. Many of these early communities on Atheism, which captured me for their sensibility and anti-orthodoxy, evolved into anti-progressivism and eventually evolved into the Redpill and Manosphere which is how millions of young boys today engage with their gender. At least my period in this mindset was short lived: about two years. By the time 2016 rolled around, I had clearly lost interest in online gender wars as tyranny seemed a greater threat. I was now 24 and actively attending college; I had plenty of friendships and dating experiences with women, and that teenage resentment was forgotten.
The big crisis we’re dealing with today is that the resentment is not only not expiring when men get into their twenties, but it’s being weaponized globally by parties against men’s material interests. What young boys like me didn’t realize when we were being lectured about patriarchy and the problems of men, is that being a man is an extremely privileged position over women, we’re just not old enough to benefit from it yet. This presents a problem on how we teach oppression and discrimination to young people who have little autonomy of their own and feel bad when you imply your immutable characteristics harm people you seek validation from.
The thing this article touches on, and what I’ve found people really need to understand, is what privilege is and what it represents. It took me to a similar age as the author (early 20s) to recognize it. I find most people don’t even in much later years. They feel attacked for having it, and don’t think they do, so they resent those they feel are attacking and right wing groups feed that resentment.
I know I’m preaching to the choir given this community and server, but anyone else that comes across this statement, please understand you can still be privileged in some ways, even if you’re very much not in others. You can grow up in poverty, in a broken home, or no home, picked on and bullied, and still benefit from an interviewers racism or misogyny. You may even think “fuck that, I was the best qualified” or even “I was the only one that applied” but it’s always possible the company in question already had a reputation amongst disenfranchised groups to encourage exactly that situation. Without trying, you could benefit from a system that holds people back. That’s privilege. It’s not always getting a head start, sometimes it’s just not being set back as far as others.