witchyroses:

gothschizo:

gothschizo:

i think people think the danger with men lies in stereotypical signifiers of masculinity and not with men themselves and the power they hold. like people’s image of dangerous men is always “big tough guy with hugs muscles who hates books and loves WWE and trucks” but like, those are all harmless things that happen to correlate with our culture’s concepts of masculinity.

the thing that makes men dangerous as a social class is the structural power they hold and their ability and willingness to harm women due to that structural power. that’s something that’s true about men regardless of how much they distance themselves from cultural masculinity.

this is the same type of thinking that lead to the whole “butch privilege” shitshow – people with a tacky liberal buzzfeed 101 grasp on gender politics think that male power is linked to cultural masculinity rather than maleness itself. by this line of thinking, anyone who wears muscle shirts REGARDLESS of if they’re a woman or not has some version of “make privilege”, which is fucking hysterically off the mark.

this type of thinking also leads to letting men off the hook, both in terms of their relationships with themselves and their relationship with others. they can tell themselves they aren’t dangerous because they’re sensitive and read poetry or whatever, and that belief will transfer into their interpersonal relationships because of this pervasive misconstrued idea of what the problem actually is.

it isn’t a stretch once you realize this to understand why so many male predators aren’t “the ones you would expect” – it’s the same reason people who rob banks don’t walk abound with AK-47s and ski masks on in their daily life. abusers will take advantage of anything that helps them get closer to their victims or appear nonthreatening, and that obviously extends to the way they present themselves to others.

wooooooaaaaaaaah i totally didnt realize this distinction till now. society is a hell of a drug