: Reddit gender vs. Tumblr gender
You can read a lot about the "gender experience" of people in my microgeneration who grew up reading Reddit vs. those who grew up on Tumblr. The general gist is that Tumblr was/is this super feminist and inclusive space, potentially to a fault due to their rampant cancel culture and random TERF offshoots, whereas Reddit was a genuine cesspool full of MRAs and (whichever was the wrong side of) Gamergate activists and so on.
I suspect that there are more people out there who are like me, who grew up using both sites, reading the heated arguments about gender politics, and genuinely taking both sides seriously.
I think I was in middle school when I first read the MensRights subreddit. It was not as garbage of a movement then as men's rights has become that. At the time, it was an explicitly feminist movement (some preferred the term "equalist" but you have to forgive them) grounded in the idea that patriarchal expectations of masculinity put men in a "man box" that didn't allow them to express emotion, form meaningful connections, learn empathy, etc. There was a TED talk. It was kind of cool.
Over time, the focus drifted and started to focus more on instances of "reverse discrimination" against men. Predictably, family/divorce court and parental rights were a big focus, as were concerns about false accusations from women during the beginnings of the MeToo movement (though that term didn't exist yet). This is when you saw culture at large start to reframe men's rights as a problematic thing--I remember reading a Newsweek article, an actual printed article, about how MensRights on Reddit was part of a broader sphere that included genuine racists and tradcons and what have you. It was starting to look and feel that way to me too: you had to explicitly disclaim men's rights if you wanted anyone to believe you when you said you cared about women's rights/feminism.
As all this was shaking out, I was also super active on Tumblr; this was in the heydey of cancellation wars over who shipped what and "your fave is problematic," but there was serious political discourse (or as much as that crowd of, in retrospect, probably high schoolers at best could muster) bubbling beneath the surface. This is when the phrase "believe women" came about, as did that meme saying "not all men are problematic, but would you still eat M&Ms if only the green ones were poison" or something.
I'm going to be genuine here--this was a frankly really shitty time to be coming of age as someone who cared about all of the issues. I didn't want to be an apologist for the patriarchy and all the historical wrongs done against women, minorities, etc. But the statistical arguments about how patriarchy "mostly" harms women, so we should disregard all the ways in which it harms men (the original spirit of men's rights, as I remember it) never seemed very compelling to me.
Frustratingly (it is considered bad writing to begin a sentence with an adverb then a comma), I was hoping these issues would get better as I got older, but I haven't seen much improvement. Nobody cares about nuance, they just want to project their preconceived narrative onto the facts, you've heard all this before. Anyway, I think that's why Trump won: there are a bunch of young white men who might have been open to progressivism at one point, but just got exhausted by all the crossfire and thought, fuck it, I'd like to burn the whole world down. I think that's a pretty braindead way of thinking, and I understand that perhaps people who can be so easily won over to the other side did not have particularly strong convictions toward feminism and the rest to begin with. But the point of political strategy is not to impose moral purity tests on voters, it's to win elections, and it seems like the Democrats really stopped caring about that in the macro.
You've heard all this shit before and are tired of it. I'm sorry.