by zahlman | 2026-01-16 17:38:21+00:00
> It is super easy to understand. He tells them they are superior and that feels good. He tells them they are entitled to dominate others and that makes them feel powerful. People LOVE to hear they are superior over others.

By the same token, it feels bad to be told that one is inferior and deserves to be subordinate to others. Which is messaging that, as a man in contemporary society, I receive constantly, and have been noticing for decades. Despite knowing on some level that it is BS.

But there was a period (this specific thing seems to have improved) when everyone would have been subjected to this narrative in any advertising break on any TV channel in the US or Canada.

> And all your complains about progressives boils them to them acknowledging that Tate adjacent people exist, that philosophy runs in top levels of the government and the rest of us have to react to it. Like, all your complains about progressives are super mild compared to what conservative people say and think about the rest of us.

First off, feminism vis-a-vis the issues of men has nothing to do with progressivism vs conservatism, except in the minds of American political tribalists.

But my own primary complaint about progressives is of the exact form that you describe (except perhaps substitute "academia" and "bureaucracy" for "government").

And in my own experience, it's not common for "conservatives" to say anything actually objectionable about "progressives" (and it's frankly inappropriate to assert what they think outside of what they say or otherwise overtly indicate), even in the US. On HN for example those comments are quite rare and almost universally flagged and killed. Whereas live, upvoted comments decrying the supposed current "fascist regime" are all over the place and the large majority of political submissions are clearly only there because they could be used as an excuse to fulminate about Trump, Musk, Thiel etc.

> There is no harmony possible when the woman is degraded or subjugated.

But this by and large is not actually happening. People like Tate are ultimately irrelevant grifters. I can't even name any "Tate-adjacent people". In my circles, Warren Farrell has way more name-brand recognition. I would never even know about Tate but for people complaining about him. Even other critics of feminism and progressivism rarely bring him up, and then only because of the specific manner in which he is attacked.

And, again, framing this as a two-party conflict is entirely inappropriate reductionism. "Conservatives" by any reasonable definition have no common cause with someone like Tate. The lifestyle he promotes is utterly opposed to "traditional family values".

> In the context of male gendered violence literally promoted by conservative thinkers, it is women talking about the impact it has on them who is causing the unfair harm to men. This is absurd.

This is a bizarre misrepresentation of what you're quoting.

First, it's unreasonable to present the quote as if it denied harm to women. It does not.

That said, the statistics make it clear that the fear is largely unreasonable; men do not report feeling fear in situations that are objectively much more dangerous to them.

But most importantly: you are repeating the conflation of Tate with "conservative thinkers", and conflating a very specific approach to conduct in sexual relationships (and the attempt to form them) with random assaults (physical and/or sexual) on the street by strangers. That is the absurd thing here.

> This is, frankly, a thing feminists books claim and I did not believed is a real thing. Except here you are, writing exactly those words.

I don't know why you'd have to read feminist literature to find the claim that men are afraid of being falsely perceived as sexual threats just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. You could just ask men.

Women are constantly told that a man in that place at that time would be a sexual threat in ways that men can obviously hear. Men are told it, too. Feminists even resist well-meaning education about personal safety, calling it "victim-blaming" and then turning it around to describe ways that entirely innocent men ought to go out of their way instead.

I have nearly had anxiety attacks when I walked into a nominally unisex bathroom and saw a feminine hygiene disposal unit and no urinal. Or when the men's bathroom was out of order at a shop and the clerk said to use the women's instead.

(And all of this happens against a backdrop of refusal to acknowledge that men can also be raped, including by women. Even the language used to describe female teachers sexually assaulting their male students is different from that used for male teachers and female students. I've heard women say those male students should consider themselves lucky. It's disgusting.)

I'm sorry that people like Andrew Tate still exist, in some number, who will say the kinds of things that validate your narrative. But in my experience, there are way more people who are willing to say the mirror image of it.