So In My Wandering In The Wilderness Of Reddit For Several Years, I Spent Most Of My Time In R/Menslib,

So in my wandering in the wilderness of Reddit for several years, I spent most of my time in r/Menslib, a feminist subreddit concerned with the challenges of deconstructing patriarchy as a man. It largely sucked. In short, I think that the norms of men's social spaces are foundationally incompatible with the sort of work that you need to do to heal men. It's not failing to materialize because men aren't trying, it's that people are trying to make topiary with flamethrowers.

"You Just Don't Understand" is a pop-psych book by Deborah Tannen about comparing the conversational norms of gendered spaces. It's hardly definitive or universally applicable but I found it mirrored my own experiences pretty well as a queer/neurodivergent guy who's never really fit in in men's spaces. She says that in the case of men, the most basic building blocks of conversation are built around jockeying for independent, individual reputation and heirarchical status. Men focus on topics external to them, rather than sharing personal feelings, because the fundamental structure of conversation is conflict based and being vulnerable would expose you and your most intimate self to that kind of combat.

It's also why men tend to be so competitive about their niche hobbies --they found a pond small enough that they can be the big fish. The problem is when that pond is Feminism.

Putting aside the staggering number of men whose idea of being part of the movement is just publicly dunking on men who they percieve as less feminist than they are (implicitly demonstrating that they are winning feminism by comparison), there's also this rebranding of the basic toxicity of rugged independent stoicism into a new, progressive-tee-em version:

"Struggling under the Patriarchy? Just do your own thing. Systemic issues? What systemic issues? Sounds like someone just doesn't want to do the work. Looking for community and support and role models because you're facing judgment and disdain from others? Are you really though? Maybe you're just making it up as an excuse to not be a Sigma male--I mean, good feminist. I mean, I do what I want, and I'm killing it, so you must just not be as mature as I am yet."

People respond to desires for help, community, and movement with surprisingly bitter disdain. People who open up about how hard it is to face judgment for acting contrary to hegemonic masculine norms tend to get met with calls to just get the fuck over it. A lot of that seems to be that a fair few men have a sort of pride for doing what they consider to be "the best job at being a nontoxic man" without any help, and they look down on men who want to have any sort of larger movement or support system in place to make that easier. It being easy would make them seem less cool for succeeding.

Men don't tend to welcome discussions of the personal, like I said above, but what shocked me going there after tumblr was the degree to which lived experience was considered...I mean, not even lacking in inherent value, it was more thought of as an active detriment. Your personal experience? That's based on your feelings. You've almost definitely warped that with your own perspective, and you shouldn't trust it.

As an extension of that, there's a sort of structural difference in how culturally, men and women's discourse seems to function. With women, it is a collection of narratives, the most common and shared blending together to form a consensus. With men, it is much more a system of gatekeepers and experts holding court above a throng. The ideal relationship is more prophet/disciple. Presuming your idea is good enough to share therefore must mean that you are assuming that level of heirarchical authority. But if your idea was good, then you would have a degree and a book out. If you don't, if you're some random guy from the internet, and you sharing your perspective HAS to be challenged or else people are implicitly granting you that authority. And what follows is the most hellish pedantic bullshit you've ever seen in your whole life. Someone knowing more than you is someone who could look down on you. So there is a major incentive to find even tiny, inconsequential mistakes, to prove that they're a pretender to the throne you see their opinion as claiming.

The result in terms of the actual moderation is a massive focus on external links and articles to spur conversation, with most actual text posts written by users being deleted immediately. I've seen posts about people's history of growing up in the Patriarchy being removed because they're just "personal anecdotes and they don't have any citations", ive seen people being told "hey it's fine if you want to squabble in the comments on an article from a legitimate source but I don't think your personal ideas are really suitable for a full blown POST on the FRONT PAGE of our SUBREDDIT. I could make a whole post about the fact that the existence of Mods with an editorial viewpoint fundamentally changes the power structure of a community, but ultimately it was pretty depressing to see the extent to which instead of camaraderie and community you instead had to deal with a bunch of Redditors cosplaying at being part of an academic journal.

It's not some sort of unique moral failure on the part of men--the other half of Tannen's book makes some excellent points that having a conversational culture built off of the norm of building community doesn't actually prevent there being conflict and hierarchy among women. It's more that that conflict is expressed using the language of community. If you have a visceral response to a post starting with "friendly reminder..." you already know what I mean.

But the structure I encountered on Reddit is so starkly atomized, and I honestly don't see how it is even capable on a basic, structural level of doing the work it wants to do.