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The internet is full of men who hate feminism. Here's what they're like in person. - Vox
For all his derision toward the "professional victimhood" of feminists, there's something a little less than sarcastic in Max's own sense of oppression. Hard-pressed as the social justice left is to admit any advantage, the West these last decades has seen the rhetorical value of victimized stance. The irresistible cudgel of "I am oppressed and this is my experience and you cannot speak to it because you do not know" is valid enough, of course, especially in those cases where ordinary enculturation does not provide natural empathy toward some suspect class. But it is a seductive cudgel, too, especially alluring when it can be claimed without any of the lived experience that makes marginalization a lonely-making sort of suffering. American Christians are "persecuted" now; men are the ones being "squelched" by feminism; white Americans are the victims of "reverse racism." The "victim card" is a child of the '70s, and 40 years out, who wouldn't use it, no matter how disconnected from reality? We are typically aghast when reactionaries accuse the maligned of perniciously employing this rhetorical immunity, but they are not wrong to see how the trick might be exploited. The irony is only that they know this possibility in virtue of their own projection.