Ask Lemmy

To be honest, I'm surprised it has 7 upvotes and 0 downvotes.

People will gaslight you about your experience not being real, that all your qualms are really just white supremacist dogwhistles or brainwashed into you by manosphere influencers, but ultimately all your problems are imaginary because you're a privileged white man who's been handed everything in life and has never had to suffer or struggle to get by in life, and the only reason you haven't done more with that privilege to simultaneously be successful and liberate everyone beneath you on the oppression scale (without being a white savior, of course) is because you're a selfish, self-serving, racist, sexist, chauvinist bigot.

The outright dismissal of the challenges you've faced with no option for appeal is just an extension of the same "men don't have feelings" and "be a man, suck it up, pull yourself up by the bootstraps" mentality that's so prevalent and harmful in society. But it comes from both sides: the side that actually believes it and wants you to conform to toxic, patriarchal standards of masculinity; and the side that only wants to weaponize that structural misandry against you because "you're a man so you deserve to be scorned," and they love an easy target to take out their ire on, because someone who was actually born into wealth, status, and privilege is too difficult to tear down so they go for someone more vulnerable like you and me whose maleness and whiteness is undeniable, but whose (lack of) social status, economic class, and the associated privileges get swept under the rug when you're reduced to biological factors beyond your control.

But if you raise a concern about how you're being treated they'll just accuse you of being a white supremacist or a misogynist because they view life as a zero-sum game, and they believe that in order to lift up and liberate/empower marginalized/disenfranchised minorities, they need to tear down individual white men regardless of their actual position on the food chain (starting with the lowest rungs, though, because low-hanging fruit).

And then they'll tell you that you have it wrong because "social justice isn't about that!!!" When yes, it shouldn't be, and it's not supposed to be. But in practice, that's how many people treat it, and your response gets categorically invalidated. It's like you're being beaten up for something that someone else did, and if you even so much as put your hands up to defend yourself everyone watching calls you a violent asshole and says "Nobody is hitting you!!! And if they are, you deserve it!"

There is no chance of class solidarity when everyone is so focused on external factors and campism. But you're not even allowed to respect yourself when someone else wants to treat you like a doormat.