A more general response to what I’ve read so far:

I was surprised how much criticism bell hooks has for the feminist movement of the time, and how some of that criticism still applies despite all the time since then. Feminism is a lot less “man-hating” than it has been in the past. While I have no standing to criticize fem comrades victimized by men for vilifying men in general, I hope that we can keep moving towards men can being considered potential allies in the fight against patriarchy rather than an immovable stumbling block that should all fuck off and die. Destroying the patriarchy has benefits for men as well as women; we have to include that in our case for feminism because the idea that men currently have a leg up they need to relinquish is a tough pill to swallow on its own.

My experience with domestic patriarchal domination in my childhood aligns with hooks’ description. The main emotions my father displayed were a) nothing or b) a full blown meltdown in which I was accused of purposely failing at school just to make my father angry, “thwarting” him in all things, and when anybody questioned this narrative, claiming that the family was actually ganging up on him. Some of this was undiagnosed adhd, but I have no doubt that my father couldn’t find something else to scapegoat me for; he needed a receptacle for his rage in his emotionally stunted state and I was the most defenseless emotional trash bin available.

My father was constricted in his emotional range to the point that he could never express that something bothered him until he overcame that barrier and dumped all his frustration (including his workplace stress) onto me, the only person who couldn’t defend themselves. The only way for me to get him to stop was to start crying, which thankfully wasn’t punished in my house. I was never hit with the classic “I’ll give you something to cry about” move.

However, I eventually decided that the way to combat this was to cover up my emotions and not let him see me cry, and cramming my emotions down where they couldn’t be accessed led to me developing depression later on. By high school, I felt emotionally deadened almost all the time, and my dominant emotional state was rage and shame directed inwards because I had too much empathy to ever direct it outwards at another person.

So far, it feels good to feel seen by a revolutionary feminist thinker that I have never met. I am optimistic that she will have some concrete suggestions for how I can restore the parts of me that patriarchy tried to eradicate, as well as how I can possibly help the men in my life do the same.

I have felt alienated and hurt as a man in feminist spaces before. Particularly in one I used to be in on Facebook. I was harassed and pushed out after lightly pushing back on black and white rhetoric one time. I think I still have the journal entry I wrote about that somewhere.