Men aren't trash: a (former) feminist call to self-examination

The height of MeToo being in the rearview has not erased a reflexive need to blame men for individual problems which is psychologically harmful for everyone.

tl;dr Feminism encourages the cognitive distortion that others are responsible for our problems and feelings. This is an unhealthy frame for the world and should be questioned. Also, here are some tips for men to question it without sparking a fight.

i. Cognitive distortions in the cultural waters

Are we living in a political paradigm built on disempowering ideas? I was. Everything I write about here was something I carried around as Truth. From roughly thirteen to thirty, I was known as a woman who hated men.

I have been thinking a lot about how cognitive distortions shaped my behavior for over a decade. Now that they don’t, I see a culture that encourages using them as a framework to mediate and understand individual experiences of the world.¹ My very first political identity was feminist, so perhaps that’s why the trends and behaviors I observe bother me more than the average person, so much so that I get catharsis from writing this.

There are compelling arguments out there about how th…