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Bonobo

(29,257 posts)
5. I'm sorry that you have been made to feel that way, Libodem.
Sun Mar 2, 2014, 10:31 PM
Mar 2014

I think the whole culture has become a lot meaner. I'm almost 50 now, so I'm just a youngster compared to you, but I remember a different and much more gentle culture. It has become coarser and crueler as the nation of America has become so.

I am certain that no one who knows you in real life would mistake you for anything other than a strong advocate for women and equal rights, but unless you viciously attack men here, I don't think you can really get the creds.

Similarly, no one that knows me would ever say I was anything but an advocate for equal rights. I live a life of equal rights in every way. But having been labeled by a certain clique, my online identity has been fixed.

I always assumed that speaking from my own perspective as a man and about the struggles that we feel personally were entirely consistent with the idea that men and women are both humans deserving of equal consideration. I never coddled women, I never patronized women nor did I offer my "help" -thinking that that it was condescending to do so. A form of sexism, in fact.

Anyway, love is really the best way to get a message across, to build allies and a coalition. Spreading anger and hate may give the illusion of victory, but it is a Pyrrhic one, a short-lived one that may assuage the ego but does not make real change.

Stay the way you are. I think you're great.

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