Thank you so much for the opportunity to publish here again! I'm surprised and excited to have a piece like this published... It seemed like subject matter most would find odd or controversial, but I'm learning through opportunities like this there is interest. I'm glad to get more eyes on my story... I know I'm not the only one seeing these trends now. Maybe some other perspectives will help me sort out what was going on back then.
(I should mention - the first few chapters of IVY are up at my blog, and I'm revising the Hunger-Games-like story I mentioned on the associated Discord. Yes, I did change the cringe-worthy dialogue!)
I hope others enjoy the piece, or at least find some part of it interesting. As usual - I'm open to any feedback or questions! It's a real honor to have my voice be a part of this project. Thanks to the community as well for all of your support. :D
I teach LGBTQ history to college freshmen. I am going to share your essay with them. I lost half the class after the first day when I told them this is a history class and not a consciousness raising workshop or a social justice course.
This oldie is frankly a little shocked. Early feminists thought it funny to dunk on men, but I was always uncomfortable with casual misandry, because I was afraid it would lead to a world like this. But I never really believed it could get this bad. It’s sad girls can’t be friends with boys. For a period in my adolescence I definitely preferred my male friends to the girls I knew. Nowadays I suspect I’d be a candidate for the ‘maybe you’re really a boy deep down’ and be advised to get my chest lopped off. It’s so ironic. It’s good to be a boy if you aren’t, but if you are, maybe you shouldn’t be. It’s sad to think about all those boys out there who must think there’s something wrong with them for just existing.
Here's to ya, Grape Soda. You are unusually prescient: "Early feminists thought it funny to dunk on men, but I was always uncomfortable with casual misandry, because I was afraid it would lead to a world like this."
You shouldn’t paint early feminists as a monolithic group. By early feminists, I think you mean the feminists of the late 1960s and 1970s, and not the 1848 Woman’s Rights Convention feminists. The 60s/70s feminists had a range of voices and opinions about men—NOW to Radicallesbians. There were valid reasons why women spoke up at this time. Some feminists held extreme views and voiced them. NOW feminists wanted to be men, not in a trans way, and have succeeded in making life more difficult for women. I like that old bumper sticker—a feminist believes women are people, too.
Thanks for pointing that out, we definitely should be more careful to acknowledge the range of views among different groups instead of assuming one extremist speaks for everyone on their "side."
I was just as shocked when I first saw something like The Coddling and realized it wasn't just me experiencing these things.
I tend to fall on the side that teasing can be a part of life... but if so, why is it ok for girls to complain about boys but not the other way around? And there is a fine line between people naturally just having imperfect opinions/comments to say about each other and hatefulness that gets endorsed and seen as proper.
I've seen ""sexist"" comments about women and men that never go beyond someone making one remark, but with a system like this, the same things are prone to spiral out of control.
I’ve never realized these stories from my past could strike so powerfully with someone. For a while, it was all I knew, so I figured it was just not that bad and I was being petty.
Yes, It's worse. It is a soul grinder. It takes in happy, innocent, children, and churns out depressed, frightened and permanently enraged individuals subsisting on the verge of total breakdown.
Consider: Whenever a Movement advocates that the existence of one group is “optional,” a logical eventual outcome is the elimination of the offending group.
For a subset of Women to assert that Males are unnecessary is to open the door for violence. In “liberal” parlance, it is also “Hate Speech.”
It is but if anyone were to actually try this on men, a rude awakening would ensue. I like men and many masculine qualities and I suspect that never really goes away. But it seems only ok to embody those qualities if you’re not in fact a man!
As a fiction writer and avid reader, it’s both sad and worrying how an ideology that supposedly promotes diversity has actually limited the creative range of authors. I am a few years older than Margo, so I did not have the same experiences in high school, but I have seen how my peers limit the way they write certain identities, or even avoid certain identities entirely, because of the crushing expectation that the character will “represent” some identity group.
This is one of the most important, yet under appreciated aspects of the great chill: " I have seen how my peers limit the way they write certain identities, or even avoid certain identities entirely, because of the crushing expectation that the character will “represent” some identity group."
Yes, and I still get some bits of that writer's block coming back from time to time - though I'm trying to fight it.
Ironically - I'm actually looking forward to running a tabletop roleplay (well, maybe, fingers crossed!) with what happens to be a mostly LGBT+ cast at a Catholic Church, where certain things might cause issue. I haven't actually been asked to censor myself (I've been advised not go overboard with self-censorship) but, here's the thing...
If I can't make these characters compelling by virtue of personality, where we don't know if they are gay, straight, or whatever, I think I'd have made some pretty shallow characters. And running a live improv game forces me to make calls quick. For a group that won't get angry if I don't portray the "identity" exactly right, that means I'm forced to make decisions based on personality and I don't have time to think about anything else.
It pains me that I STILL instinctively feel guilty about the idea of saying my hero figure in that game world is a whole and complete character even if we don't know who he wants to date. Like I've somehow disgraced something sacred by not mentioning it and implying it's not the core of his personality.
I once took a woke writing course where we were given a spreadsheet in which to list our characters' major identity categories (race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, religion, class, and body type). There was no quota, but it was implied that we should think about our characters through this lens and evaluate why, say, all our major characters were straight and white. This spreadsheet did not include occupation, marital or family status, or education level, which are often much more relevant to a person's identity and the stories they appear in.
At the same time, the overall message of the class and the culture as a whole was that writing characters of other identities is a minefield that you can easily and unintentionally screw up. So you should put all of your storytelling instincts through a political filter and, ideally, pay "sensitivity readers" of the correct identities to vet your creative choices since you can't be trusted to know what is problematic.
If you’re going to use gay men as your artistic canvas. As a gay man, I would like for you to grapple with the gay son and mother relationship. Grapple with what it is for a mother to have a gay son so unlike herself, her expectations, whatever. Be as pessimistic as you like. There’s a lot of untouched ground here in my opinion.
It's not so much what the influencers are telling us, it's that they're telling us anything at all. If there is any class that I am bigoted against, it is the influencer class.
Yes. These kinds of issues can happen from any party, right, left, or everything in-between. The problems come from censorship and forceful propaganda rather than the individual’s particular viewpoint.
What were the years of your high school tenure? I noticed such a change in our girls in the 2015-2020 years as they were both in high school that time frame. I thought at the time it was just a new variant of “youth idealism”. We all went through it. In hindsight now and it has created relationship problems. What I’ve been learning in these past few years since then indicates to me they’ve been programmed. It’s a very rough time for our family right now. Things went far more extreme than we realized at the time. Damage has been done. That is our timeline.
Is no one going to acknowledge the elephant in the room? Anyone who has participated in fan culture for any length of time can tell you that straight women are even more obsessed with reading and writing fictionalized gay men than straight men are with watching fictionalized gay women. It’s a little hard for me to take this piece seriously when it can’t even acknowledge this well-documented phenomenon, which predates the “woke” era by decades…
Thank you, I'm glad there are people among the audience who are willing to point out any errors, and for taking the time to read through as well.
Honestly, I'm shocked so many people DO take this so seriously... I used to run a philosophy discussion forum, and despite the demand for more serious prompts and me delivering, the only thing that garnered engagement was me ranting about fanfiction. Why there is so much fixation is something I'd love to dig into deeper...
My Discord audience is laughing with me, too. Of course there's more to a piece than the name, but we're all impressed I managed to get something with... this title... published.
I am an avid reader of all genres and I moderate a writing group as well as a book club. I do particularly focus on Asian-American authors or works in translation b/c we consist of Asian-American writers and readers. Just this past year, the books have changed. Lately I read a bunch of YA b/c my friend is on submission in getting her YA book sold. Just the other week, I complained to a friend that it was the THIRD book in a row (at that time) with LESBIAN SEX and nonbinary characters. The fact that these small role side-characters were nonbinary had NOTHING to do w/ the storyline. In fact, the "they/them" while reading was distracting b/c I kept getting confused as to thinking who? I thought only ONE person???
The genres were not romance so the sex was not needed. One was coming of age, dealing with alcoholism. This book also pushed a lot of victimhood narratives out.
A second book was SCI-FI/FANTASY. !!!! What does casual lesbian sex have to do with non-humans fighting off an evil villain? Another was a 3rd part book where these types of characters did NOT appear in the first 2 installments. (which shows me how this author is being influenced by MSM to get published or stay relevant?) And then I just read a 4th adult fiction book on Obama's rec reading list, with LESBIAN SEX in it. Where were my trigger warnings? lol.
I told my friend, if I was a teenage girl, OF COURSE I would start thinking that being a lesbian or being romantically involved with a girl is the way to go b/c these books make it seem like it's so great and hot. There were either no male characters, or if there were - the male characters were jerks or racists. Thankfully, I haven't been a teenage girl in 30 years so I'm not switching teams b/c of something I read.
And finally, my most recent book was an adult heterosexual romcom, and of course the sidekick was a GAY MALE, although possibly white, but probably hispanic, he was a co-worker who happen to be a fantastic/genius coder, gym rat, AND could do hair and make up for when the main character had to go on the air. WAIT WHAT? This was too unbelievable - a gay coder/gym rat/ make-up artist? This was the 3rd book of this author that I read, and it was a bit different than her prior work. The "old-boys network, racist misogynist male boss" vibe was just too thick.
I'm honestly getting uninspired from the books that are out lately. I can't even pick up a free Bookpage magazine without wanting to vomit or eyeroll.
Great piece. With the bit about gay men, you could also explore how gay men that don't fit hyper-feminine stereotypes are seen as having "internalized homophobia" and how gay men always seem to act like women in popular culture and media (think RuPaul, Queer Eye, etc.). Some women fetishize this specific type of gay man in a similar way that some straight men fetishize lesbians. Not only that, but some straight women intentionally seek out gay men as friends in order to appear "woke", but will still say grossly homophobic stuff when they think no one's listening.
I find my students relate well to pieces written by "peers" or young people close enough in age for them to trust. I live in Salem, Massachusetts, the Halloween capital, traffic is impossible on the weekends in October. I teach on Friday afternoons and have been trying to come up with alternative assignments so my students don't have to commute through horrendous traffic. I think I will use your essay for an online discussion in October--I'll let you know how that goes.
I worry about young boys and men growing up in such an increasingly misandrist society. It can't be healthy. The one consequence feminists might care about is that it will increase misogyny
Thank you so much for the opportunity to publish here again! I'm surprised and excited to have a piece like this published... It seemed like subject matter most would find odd or controversial, but I'm learning through opportunities like this there is interest. I'm glad to get more eyes on my story... I know I'm not the only one seeing these trends now. Maybe some other perspectives will help me sort out what was going on back then.
(I should mention - the first few chapters of IVY are up at my blog, and I'm revising the Hunger-Games-like story I mentioned on the associated Discord. Yes, I did change the cringe-worthy dialogue!)
I hope others enjoy the piece, or at least find some part of it interesting. As usual - I'm open to any feedback or questions! It's a real honor to have my voice be a part of this project. Thanks to the community as well for all of your support. :D
Thank YOU, Margo. We're so happy to have you aboard!
Thanks Ted! Happy to help anytime! :)
I teach LGBTQ history to college freshmen. I am going to share your essay with them. I lost half the class after the first day when I told them this is a history class and not a consciousness raising workshop or a social justice course.
Thank you! I appreciate you taking the time to read, and I hope this ends up being useful or at least interesting to discuss for your class.
Bloody hell you are brave!
The sheer amount of disdain and outright bias against straight white men is absolutely astonishing.
And then I read articles “Why are young men attracted to the right?”
I am gobsmacked at the lack of self-awareness.
Well said. Not much self awareness these days.
This oldie is frankly a little shocked. Early feminists thought it funny to dunk on men, but I was always uncomfortable with casual misandry, because I was afraid it would lead to a world like this. But I never really believed it could get this bad. It’s sad girls can’t be friends with boys. For a period in my adolescence I definitely preferred my male friends to the girls I knew. Nowadays I suspect I’d be a candidate for the ‘maybe you’re really a boy deep down’ and be advised to get my chest lopped off. It’s so ironic. It’s good to be a boy if you aren’t, but if you are, maybe you shouldn’t be. It’s sad to think about all those boys out there who must think there’s something wrong with them for just existing.
Here's to ya, Grape Soda. You are unusually prescient: "Early feminists thought it funny to dunk on men, but I was always uncomfortable with casual misandry, because I was afraid it would lead to a world like this."
You shouldn’t paint early feminists as a monolithic group. By early feminists, I think you mean the feminists of the late 1960s and 1970s, and not the 1848 Woman’s Rights Convention feminists. The 60s/70s feminists had a range of voices and opinions about men—NOW to Radicallesbians. There were valid reasons why women spoke up at this time. Some feminists held extreme views and voiced them. NOW feminists wanted to be men, not in a trans way, and have succeeded in making life more difficult for women. I like that old bumper sticker—a feminist believes women are people, too.
Thanks for pointing that out, we definitely should be more careful to acknowledge the range of views among different groups instead of assuming one extremist speaks for everyone on their "side."
A feminist believes that women are just as much people as men, but that men aren't people.
I was just as shocked when I first saw something like The Coddling and realized it wasn't just me experiencing these things.
I tend to fall on the side that teasing can be a part of life... but if so, why is it ok for girls to complain about boys but not the other way around? And there is a fine line between people naturally just having imperfect opinions/comments to say about each other and hatefulness that gets endorsed and seen as proper.
I've seen ""sexist"" comments about women and men that never go beyond someone making one remark, but with a system like this, the same things are prone to spiral out of control.
Ted—
One of the saddest, darkest, most depressing pieces I’ve read in recent memory.
The idea that evil-willed individuals are destroying young people in the name of social justice and gender engineering is nauseating in the extreme.
The kicker: The evil people perceive themselves virtuous.
I’m going to need a minute.
I’ve never realized these stories from my past could strike so powerfully with someone. For a while, it was all I knew, so I figured it was just not that bad and I was being petty.
Thank you for taking the time to read.
It's nauseating to read, honestly. A factory of disfigurement that methodically and wholly cripples the very basis of a human being. A meat grinder.
I get “being young.”
It’s worse …
Yes, It's worse. It is a soul grinder. It takes in happy, innocent, children, and churns out depressed, frightened and permanently enraged individuals subsisting on the verge of total breakdown.
Agreed. "One of the saddest, darkest, most depressing pieces I’ve read in recent memory." It's terrible for everyone involved. It's a scandal.
Consider: Whenever a Movement advocates that the existence of one group is “optional,” a logical eventual outcome is the elimination of the offending group.
For a subset of Women to assert that Males are unnecessary is to open the door for violence. In “liberal” parlance, it is also “Hate Speech.”
This is Genocide 101.
It is but if anyone were to actually try this on men, a rude awakening would ensue. I like men and many masculine qualities and I suspect that never really goes away. But it seems only ok to embody those qualities if you’re not in fact a man!
This is why I've historically rejected feminism. It always seemed like misogyny.
By the same token, labeling someone as 'privileged' is essentially calling them a parasite who doesn't deserve to exist.
As a fiction writer and avid reader, it’s both sad and worrying how an ideology that supposedly promotes diversity has actually limited the creative range of authors. I am a few years older than Margo, so I did not have the same experiences in high school, but I have seen how my peers limit the way they write certain identities, or even avoid certain identities entirely, because of the crushing expectation that the character will “represent” some identity group.
This is one of the most important, yet under appreciated aspects of the great chill: " I have seen how my peers limit the way they write certain identities, or even avoid certain identities entirely, because of the crushing expectation that the character will “represent” some identity group."
Yes, and I still get some bits of that writer's block coming back from time to time - though I'm trying to fight it.
Ironically - I'm actually looking forward to running a tabletop roleplay (well, maybe, fingers crossed!) with what happens to be a mostly LGBT+ cast at a Catholic Church, where certain things might cause issue. I haven't actually been asked to censor myself (I've been advised not go overboard with self-censorship) but, here's the thing...
If I can't make these characters compelling by virtue of personality, where we don't know if they are gay, straight, or whatever, I think I'd have made some pretty shallow characters. And running a live improv game forces me to make calls quick. For a group that won't get angry if I don't portray the "identity" exactly right, that means I'm forced to make decisions based on personality and I don't have time to think about anything else.
It pains me that I STILL instinctively feel guilty about the idea of saying my hero figure in that game world is a whole and complete character even if we don't know who he wants to date. Like I've somehow disgraced something sacred by not mentioning it and implying it's not the core of his personality.
That's not how things should be.
I once took a woke writing course where we were given a spreadsheet in which to list our characters' major identity categories (race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, religion, class, and body type). There was no quota, but it was implied that we should think about our characters through this lens and evaluate why, say, all our major characters were straight and white. This spreadsheet did not include occupation, marital or family status, or education level, which are often much more relevant to a person's identity and the stories they appear in.
At the same time, the overall message of the class and the culture as a whole was that writing characters of other identities is a minefield that you can easily and unintentionally screw up. So you should put all of your storytelling instincts through a political filter and, ideally, pay "sensitivity readers" of the correct identities to vet your creative choices since you can't be trusted to know what is problematic.
Diversity divides.
Unity unites.
Very simple.
If you’re going to use gay men as your artistic canvas. As a gay man, I would like for you to grapple with the gay son and mother relationship. Grapple with what it is for a mother to have a gay son so unlike herself, her expectations, whatever. Be as pessimistic as you like. There’s a lot of untouched ground here in my opinion.
There are so many mine fields along the lines of ‘How dare you write a gay character that has flaws.’ But saints are boring.
It's not so much what the influencers are telling us, it's that they're telling us anything at all. If there is any class that I am bigoted against, it is the influencer class.
Yup, usually the class that's the least deserving of influence (or at least tied with the political class)
Yes. These kinds of issues can happen from any party, right, left, or everything in-between. The problems come from censorship and forceful propaganda rather than the individual’s particular viewpoint.
Thank you for taking the time to read!
What were the years of your high school tenure? I noticed such a change in our girls in the 2015-2020 years as they were both in high school that time frame. I thought at the time it was just a new variant of “youth idealism”. We all went through it. In hindsight now and it has created relationship problems. What I’ve been learning in these past few years since then indicates to me they’ve been programmed. It’s a very rough time for our family right now. Things went far more extreme than we realized at the time. Damage has been done. That is our timeline.
Is no one going to acknowledge the elephant in the room? Anyone who has participated in fan culture for any length of time can tell you that straight women are even more obsessed with reading and writing fictionalized gay men than straight men are with watching fictionalized gay women. It’s a little hard for me to take this piece seriously when it can’t even acknowledge this well-documented phenomenon, which predates the “woke” era by decades…
Thank you, I'm glad there are people among the audience who are willing to point out any errors, and for taking the time to read through as well.
Honestly, I'm shocked so many people DO take this so seriously... I used to run a philosophy discussion forum, and despite the demand for more serious prompts and me delivering, the only thing that garnered engagement was me ranting about fanfiction. Why there is so much fixation is something I'd love to dig into deeper...
My Discord audience is laughing with me, too. Of course there's more to a piece than the name, but we're all impressed I managed to get something with... this title... published.
I am an avid reader of all genres and I moderate a writing group as well as a book club. I do particularly focus on Asian-American authors or works in translation b/c we consist of Asian-American writers and readers. Just this past year, the books have changed. Lately I read a bunch of YA b/c my friend is on submission in getting her YA book sold. Just the other week, I complained to a friend that it was the THIRD book in a row (at that time) with LESBIAN SEX and nonbinary characters. The fact that these small role side-characters were nonbinary had NOTHING to do w/ the storyline. In fact, the "they/them" while reading was distracting b/c I kept getting confused as to thinking who? I thought only ONE person???
The genres were not romance so the sex was not needed. One was coming of age, dealing with alcoholism. This book also pushed a lot of victimhood narratives out.
A second book was SCI-FI/FANTASY. !!!! What does casual lesbian sex have to do with non-humans fighting off an evil villain? Another was a 3rd part book where these types of characters did NOT appear in the first 2 installments. (which shows me how this author is being influenced by MSM to get published or stay relevant?) And then I just read a 4th adult fiction book on Obama's rec reading list, with LESBIAN SEX in it. Where were my trigger warnings? lol.
I told my friend, if I was a teenage girl, OF COURSE I would start thinking that being a lesbian or being romantically involved with a girl is the way to go b/c these books make it seem like it's so great and hot. There were either no male characters, or if there were - the male characters were jerks or racists. Thankfully, I haven't been a teenage girl in 30 years so I'm not switching teams b/c of something I read.
And finally, my most recent book was an adult heterosexual romcom, and of course the sidekick was a GAY MALE, although possibly white, but probably hispanic, he was a co-worker who happen to be a fantastic/genius coder, gym rat, AND could do hair and make up for when the main character had to go on the air. WAIT WHAT? This was too unbelievable - a gay coder/gym rat/ make-up artist? This was the 3rd book of this author that I read, and it was a bit different than her prior work. The "old-boys network, racist misogynist male boss" vibe was just too thick.
I'm honestly getting uninspired from the books that are out lately. I can't even pick up a free Bookpage magazine without wanting to vomit or eyeroll.
Great piece. With the bit about gay men, you could also explore how gay men that don't fit hyper-feminine stereotypes are seen as having "internalized homophobia" and how gay men always seem to act like women in popular culture and media (think RuPaul, Queer Eye, etc.). Some women fetishize this specific type of gay man in a similar way that some straight men fetishize lesbians. Not only that, but some straight women intentionally seek out gay men as friends in order to appear "woke", but will still say grossly homophobic stuff when they think no one's listening.
Women are the reason why men climb power poles in storms at night.
I find my students relate well to pieces written by "peers" or young people close enough in age for them to trust. I live in Salem, Massachusetts, the Halloween capital, traffic is impossible on the weekends in October. I teach on Friday afternoons and have been trying to come up with alternative assignments so my students don't have to commute through horrendous traffic. I think I will use your essay for an online discussion in October--I'll let you know how that goes.
Cool idea. Would love to hear how this goes.
I worry about young boys and men growing up in such an increasingly misandrist society. It can't be healthy. The one consequence feminists might care about is that it will increase misogyny
That school sounds like a dystopian hellhole