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How we got here - YesYourNigel - Oct 27 2025
I've been thinking a lot about exactly which ideas have lead us to this norm in liberal communities, this utterly batshit crazy norm where it's bigoted and misogynistic to say a man's asshole cannot be a vagina. So, based on how I keep seeing the same debates play out in liberal circles, I tried to figure out which string of ideas lead to even entertaining this, because it belies a string of worsening premises inherent in it. I'll be adding more thoughts as they come along, though I tried to cover as much as I can.
LIBERALISM
The starting point, the notion that people should just be free to do whatever they want, unless/until they literally get someone killed or physically hurt. Gets used to justify ticking-bomb men because the porn and violence they consume is just fun and games haha and they are all very rational and self-critical otherwise. Not sure how that very rational very critical attitude that make most men easily compartmentalise patriarchal violence as pure fiction bodes with the fact that this violence is part of day-to-day life for most women and the fact that most men are not feminists nor engaged in feminist musings, but there we go.
Liberal feminism - feminist ideas on gendered socialisation are at odds with the notion that everyone is born being a special snowflake and the best we can do is learn to tolerate people in all shapes and sizes. Liberalism normalises male misogyny and female exploitation as biologically inherent, but liberal feminism doesn't like how that sounds, so the solution it offers is "sure, people overwhelmingly do what they're brainwashed to do, but in reality, this is just because they made their free unique special snowflake choice". It promises to keep the norms people are most attached to - porn and patriarchal sex acts for men, and beauty standards for women - and only go after those villains who hold women at gunpoint to become housewives or go after the real criminals once they do end up harming women. Full on rape is bad, but it's fine to jerk off to porn and engage in dangerous kinks that are likely to hurt women, and if they lead to rape or physical harm, that is completely accidental.
And it's okay to don tons of makeup and dress in a male-gaze-pandering way and engage in whatever kinks that get pushed on you as long as you consent to them (and you WILL consent, surely? You're not going to be a prude, are you?)! In fact, because old boomer prudes don't like sexual femininity, it's actually daring and rebellious, despite not doing anything differently from what you're expected to. Which also appeals to the laziest choice feminism notion that feminism is about "supporting women", instead of, ya know, actually increasing women's quality of life.
Generalising is bad - Because everyone is a special snowflake under liberalism, you can't make any wide observations on groups of people because that is fascist and reductive. Again this is at odds with feminism because this attitude was made to justify and excuse hedonistic men and make them seem as more of a special snowflake than they are. It's impossible to even acknowledge the harm the patriarchy and the men do to women if you can't even talk about societal trends. But because liberal feminism tries desperately to use the language of liberalism that can apply to everyone, it continues to fall into the same loop of arguing men's "If you think it's bad to generalise women as inept sex objects, why is it okay to generalise men as oppressors? Check-mate, feminazi!". And while women might overwhelmingly be feminine, we don't like literally saying women are meant to be feminine and sexually submissive, because that implies that women didn't freely make that choice. We like to use an occassional token non-feminine (or better yet, feminine alt or feminine overweight woman) to prove that we're not doing any of this for the male gaze, because women come in all shapes and sizes.
You're denying women agency - A similar "gotcha" is also used to call feminists bad for "denying women agency" when they talk of the harms of the patriarchy. It's basically just the "choice feminism" argument. Women can't make bad choices because the only real misogyny is in telling them their choices are bad. Again, these are ideas that libfems don't understand and they just use them because it makes feminism sound nice and applicable to everyone in the world. They think they've won by getting a man to call himself feminist, even if he's only doing it because he wants to validate his visits to prostitutes.
Born this way - became popular to justify gay rights (because I guess gay people should be sent to concentration camps if it turned out they were willingly being gay), now regularly gets used by liberal men to justify pedophiles, kinksters, poly men etc. and ofc trans.
You can't tell people how to identify / what they are - so I have no clue where this comes from, but obviously it appeals to the extreme liberal "everyone is a special snowflake and you're a genocidal oppressor if you ever criticise their preferences" notion. Somehow this right to "self-identification" became seen as a basic human rights issue? Even though I can't see it applying to anything but gendersouls, and I guess religion, which is very telling. Like, if an adult came and said they're actually a 5 yo and should sleep with other kindergarteners, no-one in their right mind would agree to that. Or if someone claimed to be the Queen of England, or a dog...like the whole concept is so patently absurd that I can't even see it originating from anything more sensible.
Maybe it comes from gay rights where people think the height of oppression is gay people not being believed in their sexuality or being told they'll change their mind, which also started being applied to everything else - if you tell a 12 yo that they should maybe wait before identifying as demigraysexual, you're a bigot forcing them into conversion therapy. The reason this is bad for gay people is because gay people have a history of violence associated with attempts to shove them back in the closet, not because it's inherrently violent and genocidal to tell anyone ever that they might change their mind.
LIBERAL FEMINISM
Femininity is empowering - The desire to avoid narratives of sl*t-shaming lead to the expectation of men to deal with women dressing however they want. This didn't stop at the notion that no woman, no matter how she dresses, should be safe and free from assault, but lead to the idea that women should be able to dress however inappropriately they want without ever being sexualised, even when they're dressed in decidedly sexual ways (I talk more about this paradox here). And horny men latched onto that with gusto to gaslight women - if you dare criticise stripperific women, not only are you a prude, you're also against women's rights. Meanwhile, it allowed women to keep holding onto beauty standards, the only thing that gives them value in a patriarchal society. Just keep doing whatever you've been doing, except say that you chose it, and you're free!
It wasn't enough to just say that feminine presentation is equally valid as male presentation (which it isn't. Women are consistently saddled with impractical, sexualised, decorative etc. clothes and modes of presentation on purpose and men are not). Attractive feminine women tend to be appreciated by society but also especially preyed on by men who perceive these women as higher-priority targets for male sexual violence and exploitation than other women, due to these women donning the iconography developed through decades of extreme patriarchy into signifiers of one's sex object status. This observation morphed into the idea that feminine women are uniquely oppressed for daring to be feminine, which morphed into the idea that it's femininity that makes women subject to misogyny, and that misogyny = hatred of femininity. All of a sudden, femininity, the expected patriarchal mode of presentation for all women, became a daring act of resistance, despite doing literally nothing different. Which also lead to femininity being seen as the true target of misogyny, rather than women themselves, i.e. stripper heels and lipstick are the true victims because society thinks those make you a wh*re. Which is like thinking that liking pop music makes you victimised just because certain circles of society scoff at it.
I think part of why progressives are so trigger-happy when it comes to cancel culture (aside from the actually genuine fear of letting conservative fascists sabotage their movement from the inside) is because they have these really obvious contradictions at their core that you're not really supposed to bring up, and because the people in the movement have learned to deal with that doublethink, the only ones who do are the way more numerous conservative bad actors looking for lazy "gotchas".
OPPRESSION IS WHEN FEELSBAD
Biphobia - This liberal understanding of oppression as "anything that feelsbad" is a big part of how we got to this ridiculous situation where people invent flags and identities and -phobias of said identities left and right. I think biphobia is where progressives completely lost the plot when it comes to what counts as oppression. Oppression stopped being about ideas that are rooted in historical bouts of violence, murder, enslavement and neglect that lead to a measurable drop in one's quality of life. Instead, oppression turned into "people disapprove of what I do". If people finding two same-sex people kissing yucky was the worst thing gay people ever experienced, I would not call that oppression. There has to be a history or violence, legal subjugation and persecution, and an extreme drop in one's quality of life and safety as a result for things to count as oppression. When the worst thing that biphobia gets you (that's not literally just homophobia) are those awful oppressive gay people telling them to "pick a side" or "not believing you", then, I'm sorry but just...grow a spine? People are going to disagree with you. Sometimes they'll even disagree with you for stupid or ignorant reasons. People being stupid is not automatically oppression. Furthermore, it should not be controversial to say that gay people who are forced to deal with the reality of same-sex attraction in any romantic and sexual context shouldn't be shushed by bi people whose only source of difficulty in their life regarding their sexuality comes from gay people being suspicious of them.
Oreogenderphobia - Once biphobia became popular, all sorts of other -phobias started being invented for no reason other than people not agreeing with you or, if all else fails, not even being aware of you enough for you to be controversial. Which is oppression because it makes you "invisible". Nevermind that this invisibility doesn't in any way lead to worse life outcomes for you, unless you count being oh so cruelly expected to explain and defend the validity of your oreogender or sex-repulsed heteroromantic graysexuality to your ignorant oppressors, who are oppressing you either due to not believing you uncritically enough (which is erasure and genocide), or for not talking about your identity enough to make it a part of mainstream culture.
The intersectionalism - The obsessive desire to not get men angry or alienated meant that the patriarchy has to affect everyone. If something hurts women, it's gotta hurt men more in order for anyone to give a shit about it, and ofc it's much cooler to care about all the other intersectionalist issues, even if they are at odds with women's rights. Women love any form of oppression they can talk about normally where they don't need to keep apologising for being such bad self-centered women who hate all men, which is why I think so many of them latched onto the various mental illnesses and trans identities. Part of it was also the non-feminine girls who didn't identify with the stripperific liberal feminism where you need a damn good reason to reject femininity or else you're suffering from internalised misogyny.
CHRONICALLY ONLINE
Women are just as strong as men - Part of the libfem anti-generalising attitudes was also used to disprove the very obvious notion that men are physically stronger than women, which I can only imagine gained special popularity with the rise of chronically online girls and "girl power" messaging in media, appealing to women's desire for equality, and also to garner respect from the wider androcentric society. And what it ultimately offered us is men in women's sports being lauded as champions of women's rights and female physical ability.
Internet alter egos - If you can say women are as strong as men, what else can you say? I think with the rise of all these women who are very stuck online and don't touch grass, as well as the pornsick men who collect kinks like Pokemon, as well as the popularity of drawn porn and fanfiction, we ended up with people who think that just because you can draw a TIM who looks exactly like the opposite sex, that this proves that magical sex change is real. But, ultimately, why does sex change even need to exist? Aren't we all on the internet with our avatars and our Twitter bios and better friends than irl? If a tree falls in the woods and no-one is there to hear it, can I say it was a car, or a dragon, or a TIM? Which is also how you get so much weird wishy washy bullshit like "Your body doesn't define you". This is also why I think a lot of people have these internet sexualities that don't really pan out irl (namely various flavour of bisexuality that still just end up exclusively with the most bland straight relationships imaginable).
The topsy-turvy bioessentialism - I'm still trying to figure out how tf this happened, but somewhere along the line, bioessentialism went from assigning gender roles and stereotypes to different sexes, to "if you acknowledge that male bodies are different from female, it means you're also supporting all the gender roles and stereotypes associated with them, since those two are inseparable". A big part of this whole thing has to be
fueled by androcentrism, and women being so desperate to define themselves in male "human" terms, rather than as this isolated aberration. If you look at nonbinary gender abolitionist communities, they're rife with women who think they're special and unique for essentially wanting to disappear and not have their subhuman identity ever yacknowledged, and that the true cause of the oppression they experience isn't in misogyny, but rather in anyone acknowledging the "private information" of them being female. They don't understand just how much the patriarchy exploits the staggering amount of ignorance over female bodies, such as by blindly applying male studies onto women. They think they're gaming the system by essentialy keeping their heads down and hiding within it.
Postmodernism - I think this was initiated or at least passionately embraced by liberal feminism as a way to sort out all the patriarchal contradictions within the GIRL POWER liberal feminism as well as the emerging trans activist community (who were bound to get their turn after force-teaming themselves with gay people in the 90's). Liberal feminism has a very obvious bias in favour of attractive male-pandering feminine women, despite claiming that women can be whatever they want. What about the women who don't fit into this image? Well, liberal feminism gives them the option to be feminine in an alt way (which is totally different and subversive), or to re-examine why they hate femininity and think masculinity is better (definitely internalised misogyny), or...to realise there is no problem with their dislike of femininity because they're probably just a man.
On the other hand we have the very TIM-heavy classic transsexualism whose very male ideology ("I have a pink brain that makes me a woman because I'm a sl*t that likes to wear skirts, tee-hee") is kind of hard to fit in with the whole "don't say women are inherrently girly" idea. Additionally, a lot of chronically online girls don't really have an understanding of what men are like or their socialisation beyond what they see in tv shows and cartoons. So I imagine that's what fueled this drive to not even bother to associate the sexes with anything, but to just say that words are meaningless and you can be whatever you want because telling people what they can or cannot be is oppression.
I think this is indicative of the desire of women to question the patriarchal norms they've been raised with, but also not being able to, given the very male-pandering mainstream feminism they're working with. So instead of doing away with the whole "we have to make men fit into the victim-shaped hole on the Patriarchy box", they go with "Actually men and women shouldn't matter at all and everyone should just be a magical uncorporeal being because I'm too stuck online to remember that I need to eat and piss and sleep and can't philosophise my way out of those"
THE GAY COMMUNITY
Feminism as activism nanny + eyeliner sharp enough to kill the patriarchy - Once liberal feminism separated the oppression women face for being women into oppression women face due to being feminine, it was only a matter of time before men swooped in to take center stage as the most oppressed of all. I think the domineering part that feminine gay men and drag queens and TIMs play in modern liberal feminism was unsurprising to some degree, given how much they and women get equated in popular imagination (and gay porn categories themselves) combined with the expectation of feminism needing to focus on everyone else's problems but their own. While there are certainly more gay men than straight men who give a shit about women's rights (though part of it might be because they get to sound progressive without having to give up their porn, kinks and no-strings sex), in my experience most gay men are more focused on bootlicking straight men and jerking off to that, than actually caring about anyone's rights, let alone women's. And yet women consistently seem to view them as these universally woman-centered allies. In reality, most gay men love their male privileges and they're used to navigating the world with the resulting confidence, respect and safety in mind.
People find feminine men controversial because they are stooping to the level of a sex object that they shouldn't or even inherrently cannot be, whereas for women, that's the only thing they can be, with maybe a bit of controversy over just how far you can take it before being labeled a wh*re. Liberal feminism decided both of these are the same thing and that they prove the patriarchal contempt for women has nothing to do with being female and everything to do with not being feminine.
Anti-kink is homophonic - Gay men are the first to be brought out when it comes to the subject of anal sex and kinks to prove that these are not harmful and misogynistic practices, because, see, gay people also engage in them and you are actually homophobic for criticising them. Nevermind how often there are clear heteronormative standards to justify the presence of these kinks, and also how damaging these are to men as well who really just happent o be pornsick enough to justify it to themselves as worth it. Which brings us to the fixation gay people have on imitating straight norms, often in very misogynistic and patriarchal ways, which I feel must've gotten way worse with the rise of internet porn and mainstreamification of homosexuality. From feminine men using the language of female genitalia to describe their assholes or calling it "breeding", to butch women wearing fake rubber penises over their actual female genitals and proclaiming themselves "stone tops" because they don't like any attention on their genitals, in complete opposition to what "top" means for men. Unsurprisingly, for all the magical variety of human sexuality out there, no man is interested in putting a fake rubber vulva or vagina in between his legs, even the most self-proclaimed "dysphoric" ones.
Penetrative sex - And because porn always wants more androcentric depravity, instead of the mainstreamification of homosexuality normalising nonpenetrative sex that is common in both male and female homosexual people, the opposite happened where anal sex became normalised, penetrative sex became practically obligatory for gay people, and now even pegging is becoming a popular category where even women in straight relationships don fake dicks that cover their own genitals in order to provide one-sided sexual stimulation to men, portrayed as the height of female sexual empowerment right after prostituting yourself.
Which leads us to the batshit norm currently in place where masses of self-proclaimed straight men are attracted primarily to assholes and rubber dicks, and also to femininity as the most artificial signifier of female sex object status that liberal feminism has also associated with womamhood itself. Which means that a man who fucks another man in a dress and makeup while said man calls his asshole a vagina now counts as a straight relationship. And because you have butch lesbians with rubber dicks, that's the same as a man with a "permanent strapon", so maybe lesbians need to give men a chance.
Bi people share their straight wisdom - bi people took up the mantle of offering the worst of both worlds - the painfully heteronormative straight ideology combined with a (very unfounded) persecution complex. Since it only takes one visit to the gay or bi porn category online to proclaim yourself bisexual, the movement is full of the most androcentric straight people imaginable who claim to be special and progressive for "looking past genitals". This category is also the one that is the most passionate about pushing the notion of bigotry based on genitals, or, as a corollary, portraying themselves as wise and enlightened for looking past genitals. And when they get told that maybe they're full of shit and shouldn't be telling gay people to look past their sexuality like people have been for centuries, the claims of biphobia immediately come out.
Queer straight people - the word "queer" has been appropriated by all the bi (but really straight for all intents and purposes) people trying to justify liking shit like BDSM as somehow subversive and persecuted. I think in theory straight(ish) people wanting to carve out a space where they can experiment with gender nonconformity and gender roles would've been good, but because they're straight, it mostly turned into celebration of gauche patriarchal kinks while appropriating gay people's history of victimisation to shield themselves from any criticism and refusing to accept that maybe their overwhelmingly straight existence (and no, commenting with your Nigel on how hot a woman is doesn't negate that) doesn't give them the right to speak over gay people who actually deal with the reality of homosexual relationships.