#MenAreTrash - A discourse

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The place is German Twitter. One of the trending hashtags is #MenAreTrash. It started with a brown feminist trying to explain that sexism is a structural problem and can't be solved by individuals only - no matter how nice and cool individual men are, men as a social group and masculinity as a social construct are a problem. We can't sustain on the few individual men that are reflecting their behaviour when they stay exceptions to a norm that stays sexist. I'd say that is a pretty simple thing to understand. Now you might say "but you haven't been called trash, you're a woman, you are not adressed by this" - true! But as a white cis woman I do get adressed when trans people call cis people trash, or when people of colour call white people trash. And I accept that. I accept that there is things going wrong between different social groups here, and that no one actually means that I am trash because of the colour of my skin or for agreeing with the gender I was assigned at birth. What they mean is: White people, cis people and, yes, men hold the privilege and the power to actually change something, and yet they don't most of the time - either they actively work against the change, or they refuse to reflect on themselves to start change from within their own behaviour, or they don't actively citicize their peers when they show problematic behaviour. And I recognize that I am by far not an exception and could do more when people tell me that cis people are trash or white people are trash for not speaking out for their fellow human beings who are not as privileged.

Now the first reaction to hashtags like #MenAreTrash are defensive ones. That is just natural - no one wants to be insulted, that's normal. The problem is that this defense very quickly turns into aggression - "I am not trash because I am a man, you deserve to be raped and killed" is a thing I have read way too often in the past few hours. Let me make one thing clear: When you're trying to proof that you are not an asshole, behaving like one and threatening others is propably not the best approach unless you really, really want to confirm the original statement. Now if that was only the reaction of very few people, that would be almost ok. Would be bearable. But it isn't. It's so so many.

Another reaction that is incredibly common is people arguing that aggressive hashtags like #MenAreTrash are a not helping the cause and only paint feminism in a bad light (and provoking reactions like the one above). That it would be the better approach to discuss peacefully and friendly. While I agree that this would be the ideal way: It doesn't really matter anymore how you talk about feminism. Ninetynine percent of the time, you won't be taken seriously anyway. You will be laughed at, belittled at best, insulted and threatened, at the worst you will actively experience physical and sexual violence or even be killed. These are all things that happen at a shockingly high rate when women speak out for equal rights, no matter how calm and friendly they are being. No matter what a fucking ray of sunshine we are being while trying to discuss this, we will get the same reactions. So why should we always take the high road? Why not yell out all the anger and frustration that sticks to our hearts all the time, each and every day, if it makes no difference anyway? To me, #MenAreTrash is an outlet for all the things we usually don't say, all the anger we bottled up over the years, everything we usually swallow in the naive hope that we could somehow be understood and be taken seriously, that we somehow could induce reconsideration and change if we just stayed calm while our counterparts give us shit. That's the thing: No one tries to police the tone of the ones we are talking to. But everyone asks us to be nice and polite while being harrassed and threatened, additionally to all the micro-aggressions we endure on a daily basis when feminism/sexism isn't even the topic. It's frustrating. And this is what is exploding right now with this hashtag. This is a telling-off.
Basically, #MenAreTrash is like when two people fight face to face and one calls the other one an asshole. Not necessarily because the other one is definitely and irreversibly an asshole, but because you are so incredibly angry about the actual reason for the fight. And when the other person just says: "Sure, you have absolutely legit criticism here with all the arguments and stuff but you called me an asshole so I won't listen to anything you just said no matter how reasonable it is!" - well, they can't be helped then.

So the overall insight of this is: Feminism is angry. Feminism is uncomfortable. Because it sometimes has to be - at least, it got people talking. Maybe, some day, they'll also start to listen. And then, only then, we can start to work on the problem all together.