I’m not gonna start the fight with them on their post but. Women’s bodies are constantly for sale in myriad ways that women want and have chosen for themself.
Sex work. Pornography. Surrogacy. Athletes. Selling your blood. Selling your plasma. Selling your hair. Modeling. Acting. Wrestlers. Medical testing. Stunt performers. Acrobats. Dancers. Carpenters. Movers. Newscasters. Cleaners. Farm hands.
Scarlet Johansen has made bank selling her body as a sexual commodity. Every ballerina sells their body until their body gives out and it no longer has value. Athletes often sell their body for both sex appeal and its ability to be superlative in some way.
You sell your body when you work as a painter and are exposed to chemicals and ruining your spine. You sell your body at a desk job giving yourself carpal tunnel. At the grocery store restocking shelves. I can’t even handle videos of people picking strawberries without wanting a heating pad on my back.
I’d also say your brain is part of your body, but I’ll leave that for now.
Across age, across gender, across wealth, across any metric you choose, we trade on our bodies and what they can get us.
If your body is sold against your will? Bad. Having a version of a body sold to you as a requirement for you to achieve? Bad. Obviously.
But this is how humans function now. We choose the part of our body we’re willing to sell, and we sell it. If one piece of us has more value due to genetic luck or training or education, we’ll make more selling it.
Sex work and pornography and pro football and backup dancing and singers and waitresses are all selling their body in some way. And to be perfectly honest, the average american football players sells their body at a higher cost to risk ratio than the average sex worker.
As entertaining as it is to watch I feel like you might be wasting your breath arguing with a terf
If I was actually trying to convince them of anything, it is absolutely a waste of breath. They're not going to move. They're going to think they're winning, eventually block me, and drag the corpse of my post around to brag. That's a given.
But I am trying to reengage with politics in this hell hole of an American reality, and do it in real life, so I am practicing my arguing again. I'd do this with the gun nuts, but I think I ran out of ones I haven't blocked. And Terfs use the same argument structure, and have the same reaction patterns as guns and maga.
I am stretching out stiff muscles, that's all.
and yes, I also know that you waste your breath arguing with 2a zealots and maga just as much if you think you're going to move them. But my goal is not them, its the guy who hasn't fully bought in yet. That one will still hear you.
The philosophy in this post is directly damaging any chance of repairing rifts in society:
They are, in fact, as labelled in their username, a terf. (alt text added)
Shortest refutation: If you reinforce their idea that everyone hates them, you're pushing them further down that road.
Now lets use more words and tell a story. This is quite long
Most people that join the alt-right are groomed into it. As much, and as intentionally, as grooming someone into an abusive relationship.
I'm going to use a hypothetical white, american, teenage boy as the example as I talk here because that's the stereotype, but ooh boy does the alt right pull from a wide swatch of society. It's not just men. For example, tradwives or black gays for Trump.
Our boy, lets call him Jake, is fourteen, not very popular at school, but has friends. He sees other boys in his class ask out girls and go on dates. He thinks that Emma is really cute, so he nervously asks her out. She says no. Maybe she was rude about it, maybe she wasn't.
Bummed out, maybe teased about it, Jake goes home and googles "girls don't like me" or "how to get girls to date me" He's 14, he does not have the scale for the fact that one girl saying no is not the same as all women hating him.
Because of aggressive SEO, the first things he gets back are from the manosphere. These ones are talking about how women will never date 'nice guys' But hey, Jake is a smart kid, he rolls his eyes at those, they're too extreme. He scrolls further, and he finds something that is closer to center, and isn't untrue. He reads or watches videos, and a successful, conventionally attractive, adult man who is intentionally targeting his content towards teenage boys, tells him that girls like confidence, so he needs to build up his confidence. He's told to find the things he likes, and get good at them to help figure out who he is and what he wants in life. It's not terrible advice.
So Jake does. He already likes video games, so he gets further into them, makes it part of his identity. He's a gamer, like a whole lot of other boys his age. They all game together, and it becomes their Thing. They're not embarrassed about playing video games, and they're actually good at it. Some of those games are MMO, and they talk to other, older gamers, who sometimes mention real life stuff, and recommend youtube channels, etc.
Jake is now 16, has maybe had a girlfriend for a few weeks, maybe gone on a few dates. It always ended fast - because they're teenagers - and it didn't get very far sexually - because they're teenagers - and Jake is confused because he IS more confident now! He started working out! Less baby fat! You could almost count it as a mustache! He's good at gaming! He's got a part time job! This is everything girls are supposed to want, isn't it?
That youtuber/blogger guy he's been following must be wrong. He listens to some of his other friends, who send a link to someone deeper in the manosphere to follow. Someone who's more blunt about how girls really are. A little more honest. Yeah, they always put caveats about good girls existing, but these new guys Jake found are being real about how hard it is for guys these days.
In dogwhistles and jokes-that-aren't-jokes, Jake starts hearing about how feminism is the reason its so hard. Kinda brushes it off at first. Jake's got a sister and a mom, and he respects them both enough that some of the misogyny sounds like bs.
The blogger he likes does live streams and reads out stories from his followers about being rejected by every girl they ask out, even though they do 'everything right.' The streamer tells them it was girl's problem, not theirs. It echoes with Jake's life. He has done everything that he was told he's supposed to do, and he's been told by every level and corner of society that only losers can't get a girlfriend.
Eventually, maybe after getting rejected by someone really harshly, Jake mentions in a not-manosphere venue, that he feels like girls all just hate him, and he doesn't understand why.
And in that forum or subreddit or comment section or whatever, he gets snapped at and dogpiled by someone who is mad about broad scale misogyny.
Someone comes at Jake, and tells him off for hating women, and how yeah, no one is going to date him, because he's garbage because he's a guy, and men have ruined everything. They tell him that if he can't understand that, he needs to go learn about feminism. They give some links to rads. He reads them. After all, they told him to go learn more, and he did.
Now, his primary understanding is that Feminism = Men Bad.
Jake is soon to be a man, and he doesn't think he's bad, or that his friends are bad, or that the adult men he knows are bad, so there must be a problem with feminism. But come on, Jake isn't insane.
Back he goes to learn more from the internet at large. "Why does feminism hate men?"
He gets two types of results. More rad screeds about how men are inherently evil predators. And. Manosphere blogs telling him its okay, he's not bad, its the feminists who are crazy. Don't pay attention to them because the good girls don't believe that stuff. Those blogs give him more advice. He's learning how to be a Man's Man, because that's who girl's really want. More muscles, too tough to talk about vulnerability.
He's 17. Nuance is not any teenager's forte. He goes deeper into the manosphere. He's now at the Jordan Peterson level. He hasn't quite stepped over the line to Andrew Tait or Charlie Kirk, but he's hearing those messages filtered down. That kind of language and thinking still seems extreme to him, but some parts of it make sense. I mean come on, not all men are evil. If nothing else, some of the phrasing seeps into his vocabulary.
Next time he asks a girl out and she rejects him, and talks about how he sounds like a misogynist, and how no one is ever going to say yes because he's 'like that'. She was well intentioned, cause Jake now does sound a bit like a misogynist. But she closed the metaphoric door on him and left him with no where to turn but the men who warned him about girls like her.
Next time the algorithm sends him to Andrew Tait, he lets the video play.
There's still a trace of doubt in him, though. Jake's a good guy at his core. He tries to find some of these women that Tait claim hate him so he can see if it's true.
He finds someone like TerfJawn.
She tag lurks so she can yell at and harass anyone she considers alt-right or misogynistic. Her anger is valid, but she's a raging bitch about it, and tells him he's as bad as the KKK. She tells him that all men are evil, and we'd be better off without them. That all men are predators, that there is no redeeming them. That there is no redeeming him, simply because he's a man. She even tells him that because he hasn't been an immaculate feminist from the start, he never will be a feminist, and never be forgiven.
She kills the last of his doubt. Feminists hate him. Feminism teaches girls to hate men. When he tries to talk to his sister or mom, they get angry that he's saying things this stuff because to them, this came out of nowhere.
He only has one group that welcomes him and tells him he's allowed to feel like this. That he's allowed to be upset that he doesn't have a girlfriend. He tried to go through the other doors. He took steps down other paths. He got closed out and shut down enough times that he believes he's got no place there. After all, there's no redeeming him, right?
He's an adult now, working, scared that the life he thought he'd have when he was 14 is never going to happen because feminists and the left are stealing it from him. He's been fed that message for years. He's had his view of women slowly encouraged and clipped and trimmed and groomed until he's that kind of person.
Feminists should be nicer to men, or they will join the alt right.
And they'll do it because the feminists they met confirmed what Jake was told. The men who told him so could trust that the first feminists Jake found would probably be hateful.
I am not saying girls have to date boys to prevent this. I am not saying that boys or men are owed dates, or sex, or jobs, or privilege, or love.
They are owed compassion, and the chance to be heard without condemnation, and the opportunity to change. At any point in this hypothetical downfall for Jake, less anger might have stopped it. Hearing more women and girls be kind to him might have stopped it. Fuck. If he'd searched the internet with a slightly different keyword combination or recognized a dogwhistle early, it might have stopped it.
The fact that kindness isn't the only way to keep people from radicalizing doesn't mean you shouldn't be kind.
The fact that they're being groomed for something other than sexual abuse doesn't mean it isn't grooming.
You would never catch a feminist saying it is the girl's fault for being groomed by a priest or a family member or a cult.
There are people who are consciously grooming these kids for money or power or clout. Be mad at them if you can't see that it's a bigger problem than one person, and that it feeds into itself.
And last? the overwhelming majority of people of any age or gender in the alt right are there because the world is scary. One side welcomed them in, said their fear was reasonable, and told them they could blame Those People. Told them that if we just took care of This Issue or Those People, it would all be better and nothing would be scary anymore.
The other side closed the door in their face.
You don't have to like what they're saying. You don't have like them as a person. But if you lock the door on them, and leave them in the cold, they're going to go to the only people that let them in. And those people are going to lead them farther from where you are.
Which is better, cheddar or mozzarella? (It's mozzarella, fight me >:3 )
Okay, dinner tonight was Bread, Raos, and Fresh mozz, so you're not gonna catch me insulting a cheese as wonderful as it is. It's an excellent food, and I have eaten slabs of it on their own before.
But.
Good mozz is fresh mozz. And fresh mozz goes bad at a speed that matches raspberries.
Cheddar is sturdier, easier to transport, and has a deeper umami flavor that makes it the superior ingredient.
So because I value ingredients more - i love versatility - I gotta give the win to Cheddar.
