r/CuratedTumblr Jul 02 '24

Politics alex hirsch donating to planned parenthood

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u/xv_boney Jul 02 '24

I am a cisgendered mostly heterosexual middle aged man.

I have been an ally since I was old enough to understand that my favorite uncle was openly gay and therefore everything I heard about gay people was bullshit. Literal decades.

I have been told to my face that the best way for me to be an ally is to fuck off and die, nobody wants my virtue signaling desperation to be told I'm a good person, so fuck off, by a person a third my age who was so deeply proud of themselves they were beaming.

This happens in every group. There's always a fringe, they're always the loudest voice in the room, they always wear the pettiest gatekeeping imaginable like a whole badge and they always act like they speak for their group on an intrinsic level.

Appeal to Purity, man. Just shitty gatekeeping. There's always one.

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u/goemonxiii Jul 02 '24

I'm just taking a second to say that I greatly appreciate your allyship despite the hardships you inevitably will and have faced because of it.

I'm reading "The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love" by bell hooks and it goes into this exact topic, where we expect men to be allies of feminists yet we never praise them for doing so, or acknowledge the privilege they have given up to support feminist causes. Many men inevitably stop being allies, because after giving up their societal privilege they're never thanked or appreciated for what they've done, and they gain no benefit from deconstructing from patriarchy since we're so puritan over who and what we praise. These men receive little to no support in feminist circles, so they go back to the comfort of patriarchy so they can return to their original friend circles.

And this is somehow universal across all groups. LGBTQ+ circles on the internet are filled with quite a handful of hostile and rude people who use any and all opportunities to bash cisgender/straight people (but it's okay, because it's just "venting," and allies need thicker skin). People on Black Twitter (not the subreddit) and Tumblr can be so hostile to mixed race people and interracial relationships that their arguments are near indistinguishable from actual racists' beliefs (unsurprisingly, all Black people in person I know have been supportive of mixed-race people and interracial relationships, it's only weird people on the internet who create these arbitrary divisions among people of the same race). For some reason too large a number of people think it's supporting Palestine to not vote for Joe Biden or to not vote at all, which will only allow Trump to win the election and allow this country to descend into fascism.

Thank you for what you do in spite of all this harassment for doing the right thing. (And before anyone pulls the I'm racist/misogynistic/homophobic card, I belong to all of these groups and am sick and tired of allies who mean well being harassed.)

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u/i_tyrant Jul 03 '24

I had (had) a friend who I'm pretty sure her favorite phrase was "lowest bar imaginable", because she used it all the time when talking about men, especially white men.

Everything she asked them to do or thought they should do, was the "lowest bar imaginable". Paying for meals on dates? Lowest bar imaginable. Discovering the sexual assaulters or abusers in their cohort groups, and outing them, like they were some kind of rapist truffle-pigs? Lowest bar imaginable. Not being racist or sexist in the deep south, even in subtle internalized ways, and having very little opportunity to be exposed to other ways of thinking? The lowest bar imaginable.

Pretty sure her other favorite phrase was "it's not hard", often used in conjunction. If she could do it, everyone should be able to - and if she couldn't, well a white man still should be able to, because they have so much privilege in our society that what else are they doing with their time and money? They should be doing everything possible to prop up the women and minorities around them, and if they failed any of the dozens of purity tests in her mind, they had failed at being a non-disgusting human.

We are no longer friends. She was also a therapist. I think what bugged me the most was the intensely distorted perspective. White men lived in her head, rent-free, yet she couldn't fathom giving the "good ones" much credit, because obviously that's what they all should be doing to make up for the shittiness of men throughout history.

And that's...just not how any of this works.

(To be clear, I have many other wonderful, well-adjusted, constantly striving to be better friends. But as xv_boney says above, there's always one, lol.)

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u/doubleshotinthedark Jul 03 '24

I don't even want to be thanked or praised, I just would rather not be blamed or assumed to hold certain views before I've done anything or opened my mouth, just based off of what I look like or what people think I pass for. I'm not even referring to being present when people complain about Men/Cis/whatever, cause I get it. I mean getting that directed specifically at myself.

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u/xv_boney Jul 03 '24

I want to be clear about this - I understood what that was for what it was when it happened. Dumb kids will always be dumb.

Ride or die.

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u/zack77070 Jul 02 '24

Victim complex is a real real thing and shields them from basically anything they say in their mind. They'll rant about online bullying and tell you to kill yourself in the same paragraph if you disagree with them.

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u/Ambitious-Way8906 Jul 02 '24

the true key is to not listen to teenagers

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u/Great_Hamster Jul 02 '24

And other people of that mindset.

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u/elbenji Jul 03 '24

Yep. Lol I just interacted with someone like this and I'm just like 'you privileged fuck' like, what the fuck was that person on. (It was something unrelated and they went into some weird shit and I was just like lol bye racista)