Imagine any of this rhetoric was used for issues like black women and their sky high mortality rate during childbirth, lack of attention towards Asian hate crimes, ignoring of natives women murders, or police brutality towards black men. That we have other things to deal with so it’s all on them to fix it.

Historically speaking, it is.

I think ideally, waiting around for The Correct Group to fix a known problem is insane and pointless as fuck. And you're right, both on paper and with a morality any non-sociopathic 2nd grader should be able to manage.

I also think there's a substantial bitterness among women that does deserve to be there. We've been left to fix every problem we have more or less by ourselves, and had to pay dearly for every inch of it. I say, as we visibly stand here losing ground again.

Women weren't allowed to vote? Couldn't serve in the army? Hold jobs? We protested til we could.

We had no public bathrooms, forcibly leasing us to a set vicinity from our own home? We made two associations about it, men destroyed a model bathroom by driving a cab through it, and the idea only finally took hold because of cholera.

Couldn't divorce? We murdered abusive husbands we couldn't escape and continued lobbying. Same with controlling our own money.

Couldn't wear pants? We wore them anyway, often in the face of sustained verbal and physical abuse, until men just got used to us wearing different clothing.

Every women's scholarship was left behind by a woman who didn't get a scholarship, found success anyway, and left a ladder for others who needed it. Men aren't doing this nearly as often for reasons I don't understand.

The first battered women's shelters in Japan? Started by women. Australia, Germany, Italy? The UK and the US? All women. The first in the US was a random storefront with an apartment in the back that a handful of women repurposed. It was initially run entirely on donations they got from selling crafts. The police didn't appreciate it and rarely if ever lifted a hand except to show a dangerous amount of indifference to threats.

On its face, it's venomous to see a problem and tell someone to just deal with it themselves. In reality, we have done all of this ourselves, always with significant pushback.

This is where we are when the other half of the planet swears up and down they can't do exactly the thing that we did. Yes, you can. If you need shelters, so did we and we opened them. We were forced to stand up for ourselves if we wanted anything fixed, and we did so.

Now, whenever this comes up, men want us to fix their problems for them too. Especially egregious since a lot of times, they're the ones society takes at all seriously. They're the ones with the funding, not that that was ever a valid excuse for us. We can barely get y'all to treat us like fellow humans if we stick y'all in prison for it and even that isn't helping, but your work is still being laid at our feet.

Every time we so much as suggest men compliment and support each other, they snap straight to whining and explaining it would really feel better if it came from women and what if someone thinks they're gay. THEN BE GAY.

I don't think I can begin to describe how frustrating that is, and the kind of bitter anger that it breeds. Nothing is stopping you.

I'll admit, as dismissive as it looks, part of me was reading the head comment and going, "so why don't you just....start a group? There's clearly a niche, surely they aren't the only one in that entire state going through this."

We care. Sometimes brutally. It's not like we can't relate to what that's like, you know? But you're not, as a class, less capable than we were. It isn't whether we morally should, it's the constant allegation that men's problems MUST belong to us and no one else. Along with also our problems, also usually courtesy of the same men.

This was never the kind of thread to be writing shit like this. Certainly not suicide, I have a military buddy who's the last one standing out of his entire squad, that all committed suicide, and he won't goddamn go to therapy.

But the experience, as always, of begging men to do anything at all to fix any issue they are having is. Maddening.