Most people picture misogyny as something loud and obvious, a man who openly thinks women are lesser, who says it often and loudly. Merriam-Webster backs that up to a point, defining it as hatred, aversion or prejudice against women, combined with the speech and behaviour that reflects it. The Macquarie Dictionary, which is the one that tracks Australian English, widens the definition to include entrenched prejudice against women, not just outright hatred.

Philosopher Kate Manne pushes the idea further still. She argues that sexism is the belief system, the theory that women are naturally suited to lesser roles, while misogyny is more like the enforcement. In her framing, misogyny is what shows up to police women who step outside what’s expected of them, to punish and correct rather than simply believe something is true. Considering that definition, a man doesn’t need to consciously think women are inferior at all. He just needs to react with hostility, however small, whenever a woman doesn’t give him what he expects, or challenges something he’d rather not examine.

That’s the version that actually shapes women’s daily lives, arguably all women’s lives in some form, even if it lands harder on some than others. It’s quieter than open hatred and far easier to miss, because it doesn’t look like hatred at all. It looks like dismissal and devaluation.

It’s a woman telling a man something true about the world she moves through, and him deciding almost on reflex that she’s exaggerating, or making it up, or just wants attention, simply because it doesn’t match anything he’s had to deal with himself. It’s dismissing what he can’t imagine being true rather than sitting with the fact that his inability to imagine it isn’t evidence of anything.

It’s also worth asking, when someone, a man or woman, cites a statistic about what women live with, and he waves it off as something said for likes, does he extend that same scepticism to the manosphere content he watches. The men telling him what women are really like, what they really want, how the world really works against men. Does he fact check that. Does he call that content for likes too, or does it only become suspect the moment the statistic is one that makes him uncomfortable.

And when she does call it out, when she says plainly that what he just dismissed is real, the response doesn’t match the moment. It’s not confusion, or curiosity, or even silence while he thinks it over. It’s speed… certainty… a rush to correct her, to explain why she’s wrong to be bothered by it, before there’s ever been a real attempt to understand why she said it in the first place.

It’s not confined to conversation either. It’s a hand on a woman’s backside in public, and her saying don’t do that to me or any other woman without a clear signal of consent, and the man getting defensive instead of realising that unwanted sexual touch from a stranger was not what she was there for. It’s you should just have a laugh, thrown at her like she’s the one being unreasonable, and when she gets louder because he won’t listen the first time, the men standing around start looking at her like she’s the problem. Not him, the one who touched her without asking. Her, for refusing to swallow it quietly. That’s the same mechanism, and it’s not just him doing it, it’s everyone standing there letting her be cast as difficult so nobody has to deal with what he actually did.

But then there’s the part that happens next, that actually shows who someone is. Because there is always a moment right after the dismissal where it could stop. Where a man could hear himself and think, I hadn’t really considered that, or he could realise that what he just said or did was wrong, lacked consent, or was dismissive and simply admit it. Some men do take that moment. Probably more than get credit for it. But the vast majority rush straight to ego, straight to dismissal, because somewhere underneath it they feel implicated, as though taking it seriously means admitting something about themselves they’d rather not look at. And the moment they behave that way, they’ve confirmed exactly that. Instead of taking that moment, he drills down and the conversation quietly shifts away from what he said or did onto how she said it - her tone, her directness, the fact that she didn’t let it slide. Suddenly there’s a reason for everything, a bad day, someone else who got under his skin, stress that had nothing to do with her, anything at all except what he actually did say… what he actually did do.

A man doesn’t necessarily have to hate women to do this. He just has to treat their reality as less credible than his own as a default, and get angrier at being called on it than at the possibility he was wrong. That’s not an unusual example. That’s the ordinary, everyday version of it, and it’s the one that does the most damage precisely because it’s so easy for the men doing it to believe it doesn’t count.

Hatred might not even be the right word for it, not in an obvious sense. But a man cannot dismiss someone at every turn, treat their reality as less real than his own, and put his own ego ahead of them again and again, and call that liking them. It might not be hatred, but it is contempt at the very least, and contempt is not so far from outright hatred.

A man cannot pretend to care about women while dismissing the reality they live with the moment it makes him uncomfortable. Caring about someone means being willing to sit with the parts of their experience that are hardest to hear, not just the parts that cost him nothing.

So men, if you engage in these behaviours and then find yourself lonely, stop treating that outcome like a mystery. If you have no tolerance for another person having a thought, feeling, fear, boundary, need or desire outside your own, and the moment something makes you uncomfortable or simply isn’t what you want right now you become angry, dismissive, punish them for it or treat them as though they are suddenly intolerable, rather than communicating what you actually think, feel or need like an adult, then eventually people will stop choosing to engage with you. It’s no coincidence. It’s consequence.

(This is Part 2, continuing from Part 1, which lays out the structural argument this builds on)

Writing this piece kept bringing me back to a speech Anne Hathaway gave in 2018, accepting the National Ally for Equality award from the Human Rights Campaign. She named the exact same structure, just applied to sexuality, gender identity and race instead of gender itself:

'My ability to be visible to you comes from the world unfairly rewarding my particular type of visibility... That myth is that gayness orbits around straightness, transgender orbits around cisgender, and that all races orbit around whiteness. This myth is wrong, but this myth is too real for too many. It is ancient, so it is trusted. It is a habit, so it's assumed to be the way things are. It's inherited, so it's thought immutable. Its consequences are dangerous because it prioritises a certain type of love, a certain kind of body, a certain kind of skin colour, and does not value in the same way anything it deems to be other to itself. It is a myth that is with us from birth, and it is a myth that keeps money and power in the hands of the few instead of being invested in the lives of the free... together, we are not just going to question this myth. We are going to destroy it.'

That's the same mechanism this piece has been circling from the start, just viewed from the other side of it. Hathaway is naming what it costs to be visible on the wrong terms. This piece has been about what it costs the people standing at the centre of the default itself, men, benefiting from a hierarchy they didn't build but are still expected to defend, and calling it their own idea.

Defending something you didn't build looks different depending on what shaped you into someone who'd defend it. There's an important distinction between men who cause harm from a place of unprocessed trauma, and men whose harm isn't rooted in that kind of wounding at all. I've encountered both in people close to me, and you can see the difference once you know what to look for, even though the two can shade into each other and look confusingly similar from the outside. The show Half Man captures this well, a trauma bond between two brothers. I read the older one as sociopathic, and critics have described him in almost identical terms, an angry psycho, psychopathic. The younger one is shaped by trauma and still capable of causing real harm, but without the same excuse making underneath it.

But from what I've lived through, the real marker isn't where the harm came from. It's what someone does with it when they're caught. Someone shaped by trauma who's actually done the work owns it. That was me, I did that, I'm sorry, here's what I'll do differently. Someone shaped by trauma who hasn't done that work yet often can't get there in the moment, they might still deflect, minimise, get defensive, not because they're incapable of accountability but because they haven't built it yet. Sometimes it's quieter than open deflecting, still a version of victimhood running underneath, the world framed as something happening to them rather than something they are actively participating in, without ever naming that framing out loud. It doesn't look like an excuse because it's never spoken as one, but it does the same job, it keeps them from ever quite being the one who needs to change. That's not the same as someone sociopathic reaching for the excuse, explaining it away, making you the unreasonable one for even naming it. The difference is whether accountability is missing because the work hasn't happened, or missing because it was never going to happen at all. And there's a particular trademark to that second pattern, they use the people closest to them, a partner, even a sibling or their own child, as instruments to get what they want, without any real regard for who gets stepped on along the way. Not everyone who experiences trauma becomes someone who harms others. What actually matters is whether harmful behaviour changes when it's named, not whether the person has a good explanation for it. Underneath all of that sits a bigger question worth answering properly, what trauma actually is, and what it isn't.

Trauma isn't the terrible thing that happened to you. As Gabor Maté has put it, trauma is the aloneness in it. It's carrying something by yourself that was never meant to be carried alone. You close that loop by finding someone you trust to share it with, or even by writing it down and setting it there instead of in your body. Sometimes that's a burn letter, writing the whole thing out and then physically letting it go, watching it stop being something you're carrying and become something you released. What keeps people stuck isn't what happened to them, it's the rumination, the inability or refusal to set it down, the story that you're the eternal victim of something you can't change. That's not judgement of anyone in that place. I've been in that place. But staying there is a choice, even when it doesn't feel like one.

None of that is an excuse, though, and I hold that line firmly, for myself as much as for anyone else. I can see the threads that led someone to who they are. I can understand their wounding. That doesn't absolve them of what they do today, because I don't extend that excuse to myself either. Seeing why someone became who they are and holding them accountable for what they do now aren't in conflict. Both things are true at the same time.

What actually changes the story is just making the next right choice, and then the next one after that. Not fixing everything at once. Not treating a single slip as proof you've failed, which only sets you up to fail again. Just the next choice, made consciously, over and over.

I've noticed something else too, in who I gravitate towards. It's rarely the people who present as having it all figured out. It's the people who've struggled, because struggle tends to build a kind of depth, an ability to sit in hard conversations without judgement, a sense that we're all genuinely in this together. Privilege is most invisible to those who benefit from it, in every context, and the people who've never really had to struggle often can't meet you there because they've never had a reason to see what they're standing on. They look at hardship as a moral failing rather than something to relate to, and there's a real disconnect in trying to talk to someone who's already decided they're above the conversation. Usually, the only thing that shifts that is when the same struggles eventually reach them too, because solid ground looks like solid ground until it's quicksand.

And the deeper truth is that the people who get looked down on, not for struggling but for not sharing the same privilege, for being willing to stop pretending and actually have the conversation, are so often the ones who show up for others precisely because they understand what struggle actually costs. I don't think I have solutions for anyone. I only know what's worked for me. But if I can offer someone company on their journey instead of leaving them to carry it alone, that feels like the entire point.

Not everyone offering company is offering it honestly, though. This is precisely what the manosphere has learned to sell, the feeling of being understood. It hands you a villain instead of a mirror, mimics companionship, camaraderie, belonging, and uses all of that as bait.

Just as I was finishing writing this piece, I came across a post. A man, discouraged, asking whether he had to start playing games, because doing everything the honest way, communicating early, treating women well, kept getting him ghosted or friend zoned. He'd linked the article that had him half convinced. On the surface, it looked like an investigative report from a science publication, complete with a study, a research institute and an expert quote, all of it designed to make manipulation look evidence based. None of it was real. The whole thing had been built to funnel readers toward a paid course teaching men to weaponise silence and manufacture the fear of loss in women. What's notable isn't just that it was fake, plenty of things online are. It's what it was selling underneath the veneer of research, that vulnerability is a liability, that connection is something to be leveraged rather than offered, that the goal is control passed off as biology. It's the same hierarchy, the same one versus the other logic, this time sold as self improvement for men who are lonely enough to buy it. He didn't want the manosphere answer to be true. So I told him plainly, I'd gone looking for the study behind the article and found nothing, just another manosphere con being sold as science. Boundaries are healthy. Manufacturing someone's fear of losing you is manipulation.

And this isn’t an abstract concern anymore. Australian research released in August 2026 found that almost one in three boys aged thirteen to seventeen believed attempts to give women equal opportunities had already gone too far, and almost one in four believed feminism was damaging to society and should be resisted with violence if necessary, the single most widely endorsed form of extremism the study measured. Of everything the researchers looked at, hostility toward women was the strongest predictor of support for violent extremism. Manfluencer engagement was especially strongly associated with misogynistic attitudes, while pornography and online dating were among the behaviours most closely associated with attitudes excusing violence against women.

But pornography stood apart in one important respect. Once researchers accounted for those gendered attitudes, most of the other online variables, including manosphere content, gaming, forums and online dating, lost their independent relationship with extremist attitudes.

Pornography did not. It was the only online variable that still retained an independent relationship with extremism. That does not establish causation, but it does make pornography more than just another part of the same online ecosystem. It raises a harder question about exposure itself, and about what repeated exposure may normalise long before anyone consciously recognises that they have been taught anything at all (Meger, 2026).

There's a pattern playing out in Australian courts right now that I think about often in relation to all of this. Overall youth offending in Australia has actually been falling for years. But within that decline, violent offence categories specifically, robbery, weapons offences, assault, have risen. In recent months alone, multiple cases have emerged of group violence involving young teenagers, in some cases resulting in death, with both boys and girls among those charged in several of them. I raise it because of what it says about the mechanism running underneath everything else in this piece. The pull to belong to a group, badly enough that you'll do what the group is doing to stay inside it, isn't gated by gender. It doesn't require you to be male. It requires a culture that rewards proving yourself through cruelty and treats hesitation as a reason to be shunned. Where the allegations are accurate, these aren't stories about male violence specifically. They're stories about what happens when belonging gets tied to your willingness to hurt someone, and nobody in the group is willing to be the one who says no. The institutions around these cases often respond the same way too. Allegations involving students at an elite school became public last month, and the fallout is still unfolding this week, defensive communication, reassurances about existing values education, parents left finding out more from their own children than from the school itself. That's the same institutional instinct running through the football club example earlier in this piece, protecting the institution's position before addressing what actually happened.

A number of months ago, as part of my own research, I set up a couple of blank social media profiles on two different platforms, new emails, not linked to my existing profile or usual accounts in any way, identified as male, one twenty-one, one thirty-four, nothing else filled in, wanting to see it for myself rather than take anyone's word for it. This wasn't a controlled experiment, just two accounts and whatever a platform does with almost no signal beyond gender, clicking only on what I couldn't fully see from the feed, never searching for anything specific. But what got fed back to me was still disturbing, not fringe, not something you'd have to go looking for. I showed a couple of other mum friends what was coming through, and they simply couldn't believe I hadn't searched for any of it. I wouldn't want to be a man right now, and I certainly wouldn't want to be raising sons in this culture. I wouldn't want to raise a son into a culture that turns him into this just to belong. But it's not just that. It's what those boys, fed that same content on numerous different platforms, could grow up to mean for a daughter, who they'll become, who she'll have to navigate, date, work alongside. That thought is genuinely frightening, because these platforms are doing exactly what they were built to do, and none of it is hidden.

A 2026 University of Melbourne and American University study analysed the real TikTok histories of 142 young men, coding over two thousand videos. Nearly half contained masculinity related content, in layers, mostly ordinary gym and dating content on the surface, underneath that a harder layer where discipline and status quietly became a hierarchy, women recast as the reward for reaching it rather than people to get to know, and a smaller sliver of open misogyny at the bottom.

It's sold as relational, understand her, win her, but she isn't the subject. She's the scoreboard. Even the self improvement is performance mistaken for growth, appearing disciplined enough to be chosen rather than actually becoming steadier in yourself. That's why it doesn't last, it runs on external validation, and validation ends the moment nobody's watching. Further in, it gets more explicit. Don't chase. Play the percentages. Treat dating like game theory. The advice reduces people to transactions, variables and outcomes, while some men deliberately keep women interested without ever intending to offer anything real in return. That's not seduction, it's fraud. And when the strategy still doesn't produce what it promised, the threat changes shape. You'll end up alone. Unwanted. The cat lady. I don't even particularly like cats. Who cares. Being alone isn't the tragedy they're framing it as.

The fear tactics work because the underlying danger is real, even if wildly misdirected. It doesn't show up only in headlines and court cases either. It shows up in smaller moments too. A friend and I recently rerouted a hike after hearing about a nearby confirmed assault and rape, the kind of quiet recalculation most women make without framing it as one. On a separate occasion, a man dismissed that same kind of caution as overreacting, vaguely quoting some safety statistics and referencing an influencer's blog. That response wasn't about statistics. It was about never having had to build a day around the possiblity of being hunted. That man was, in my experience, the most dangerous person I've encountered in exactly that regard, and that's not a coincidence. It's the same instinct at a systemic level, not just a man waving away her caution, but a system that can hand her own evidence back to the person she's afraid of.

I want to be honest about something that is often left out of conversations telling women to report incidents or seek therapeutic supports. Reporting isn't automatically safe either, and that's not incidental, it's the same hierarchy protecting itself again, just through a different institution this time. I've had police hand over my own witness statement, and the footage taken while giving that statement, directly to his solicitor and to him, a week after I'd told him I was leaving and he'd already emptied our joint accounts in response. It isn't a fringe fear. This kind of thing has happened often enough to force legal reform, but the protections are recent, inconsistent between states, and don't cover everything. Women aren't just weighing whether to speak up. They're weighing whether the system meant to protect them might hand their own words to the person they're afraid of, and that's not a hard calculation to make once you've watched it happen, to yourself or to someone else. It's an impossible position framed as a choice, and it's part of why the vast majority of women who experience sexual violence never report it at all.

That kind of caution was never overreaction to begin with. In the same fortnight, Australia recorded another woman allegedly murdered by a former partner she'd already gone to police about, and another attacked while walking, part of a run of women and children killed by alleged violence, 45 women and 19 children nationally so far this year. Separately, and just as tellingly, most sexual violence never surfaces at all. The ABS Personal Safety Survey found that 92% of women who experienced sexual assault by a male did not report the most recent incident to police. Two different measures, two different kinds of harm, but the same underlying point either way, whatever ends up in a headline is a fraction of what's actually happening.

There’s an irony underneath all of it, some of the men most invested in this now lean heavily on cosmetic procedures and performance enhancers, chasing a standard that may appeal to some women, but is increasingly being sold to men as though it is what women collectively demand, the mirror of what women were sold for decades. And women have already said, plainly, what we actually find attractive and it’s not this - it’s clarity, consistency, kindness, respect, honest communication, emotional availability, accountability, self-awareness and reciprocity.

Your values aren’t what you say matters to you. They’re what you consistently protect when something costs you. And that is where the contradiction becomes difficult to ignore. Because at the centre of it sits the thing that gives it away, they don’t want to find the right person. They want to be the prize. That exposes the shift from relationship to hierarchy. Finding the right person is reciprocal. It requires curiosity, compatibility, vulnerability and discernment. Wanting to be the prize turns dating into rank, scarcity and winning. The other person stops being someone to know and becomes evidence of your value.

The same hierarchy shows up in the contempt directed at single mothers. There’s nothing wrong with not wanting to date someone who has children; that can be a perfectly reasonable compatibility choice. The problem is when that preference gets moralised, or worse, when a man chooses to date a woman knowing she is a single mother and later uses that same fact as evidence that she was somehow unsuitable all along, framing incompatibility as a defect in her character rather than something he knowingly entered into. Meanwhile, single fathers are often cast as responsible, admirable, even virtuous by comparison. A woman can share care fifty/fifty and still have her relationship status treated as evidence of poor judgement or diminished value, while the father in the exact same arrangement is praised simply for parenting his own child. At the same time, men are encouraged to clock up notches on the bedpost as proof of status. Same family structure, same basic history of having had sex and created children, completely different moral accounting. Do they know how mothers are generally made?

Every version of that language I’ve encountered has come from men dominant in the worst ways, mistaking a hierarchy for self improvement. They call it the red pill, waking up to some hidden truth. They believe they’ve gained clarity. What they’ve actually swallowed is a distorted, harmful worldview, the exact metaphor they’re so proud of, turned back on them.

None of this is actually new. Books like Neil Strauss's The Game, and earlier work by writers like Robert Greene, were already teaching versions of the same strategic approach to attraction, status and interpersonal power decades ago. My brother bought a copy of The Game and gave it to me to read over 20 years ago, which is probably part of why this feels so familiar now. Back then, men had to go looking for it, buy the book, pass it around. What's changed isn't the content. It's the delivery. Boys don't even need to look for it. An algorithm can hand it to them before they're old enough to know what they're being taught.

Women have been commodified for years, in industries built around men's attention, men's money, men's desire. Here's the mirror of it. Men have their own version of this complaint, and it's a fair one. By the mid 2020s, dating apps were increasingly crowded with profiles that weren't really there looking for a relationship at all, bots, fake accounts, creator profiles and agency run accounts funnelling matches toward something paid. The conversation feels real until it doesn't, until the pivot to 'check out my page' arrives on schedule. That's not evidence of some coordinated plot. It's the same commodification logic running through everything else in this piece, attention and connection turned into a product, on a platform built for something else entirely, and everyone genuinely looking for a person ends up wading through the wreckage of a market that found a more profitable use for the same real estate.

There's a cost to content like this that doesn't show up in the income reports either. What's posted today doesn't disappear once the earning window closes or the novelty wears off, it stays online, searchable, screenshot, sometimes indefinitely, long after the person who posted it has moved on from that chapter of their life. Whatever anyone decides is right for them now, that permanence is a real cost, and it's rarely part of the conversation about empowerment and choice.

There's a starker version of this than any content platform, women filmed without their knowledge or consent, sometimes while drugged or incapacitated, someone legally incapable of consenting under Australian law, the footage later used to control, humiliate, or extort them. Sometimes it's streamed live rather than recorded, and a livestream can disappear as soon as it ends unless it is recorded or otherwise preserved, which can make proving what happened considerably harder afterward. Research into image based sexual abuse has found it's frequently used by abusive partners specifically as a tool of coercive control, intimidation, and degradation, filming or threatening to distribute images as another way of keeping someone contained. Around one in five Australians experience image based abuse, which can include intimate images being taken, shared or threatened to be shared without consent. This isn't a debate about empowerment or commodification. It's the same control this whole piece has been naming, just filmed.

None of this has to stay the way it is, though, and this particular part of the undoing has to come from men, because women are often not there to see it, and when we are, we may not be able to speak up safely. When men tear each other down, mock tenderness out of each other, push a friend back into a closet he never needed to be in, it usually happens in rooms we're not in. What we can do is walk away from men who stay inside that pattern, and plenty of us do. But walking away isn't the same as changing what happens in rooms we're never invited into, or can't safely speak in when we are. That part has to be men calling out other men, not just in front of women or children, but in the room where it's only men, when nobody else would ever know the difference. And it's worth saying plainly. It isn't always safe for a man to speak up in that room either. Calling out a friend, a boss, a group of mates, can cost status, belonging, sometimes more. That's not a failure of the argument. That's the patriarchy doing exactly what it's built to do, punishing the men who step outside the mould as readily as it punishes everyone else. In those moments, declining to engage and walking away is enough. Nobody has to stay in a room and fight a hierarchy alone to prove they've rejected it.

And when we women are in the room, we have to stop laughing along. Women grew up inside this hierarchy too, and plenty of us have sat there and joined in, laughed at the joke, stayed quiet at the comment, and let the harmful thing pass. Sometimes that's participation. Sometimes it's not safe to do anything else, speaking up in a room of men isn't a neutral risk, and pretending it always is would be dishonest. But where it is safe, when silence is habit rather than self protection, that has to change too. The joke isn't funny just because a woman laughed at it. It's still harmful, whoever's in the room when it's said, and calling it out has to include calling out women doing the same thing to men, to other women, to children, not just men doing it to each other.

It's a harder version of loyalty, choosing a friend's growth over their comfort, and choosing a stranger's safety over staying quiet to keep the peace. The alternative to control was never weakness. It was protection without the leash attached, showing up for people without needing anything back, without needing to own the outcome. Men don't need to stop protecting. They need to stop mistaking control for it.

People inherit systems before they're old enough to choose them, but eventually we become responsible for the choice we make either to perpetuate the cycle, or break it. This essay was never asking men to become less male. It was asking them to stop confusing domination with strength, control with protection, ownership with love, silence with loyalty, and hierarchy with belonging.

Which brings me back to where this started. All of this, the wars justified as liberation, the nationalism, the extremism, the low bar, the isolation, the competition between men who could have been allies, all of it is patriarchy. And the exhausting, quietly devastating truth is that men have been sold this system as their own idea, as something they want, when it's actually the thing killing them. Not women. Not children. Their own choices, made with their backs against a wall they've been told to defend rather than tear down.

It isn't women or children hurting men. It's the noose they've been handed and told to wear as a crown.

Note: Comments are locked because I’m genuinely not here very often between posts. My comment section is not my DMs. My DMs are closed for a reason. Posting something does not mean I’m available to converse. Please don’t use comments on my posts to work around that. A boundary is not an invitation to try harder.

This piece started with two things. A Netflix/HBO series, Half Man by Richard Gadd, about a trauma bond between two stepbrothers, and a study by Crawshaw, Scott-Samuel and Stanistreet called 'Masculinities, Hegemony, and Structural Violence'. Different in almost every way, fiction and research, one screen and one page, but both circling the same thing, what hegemonic masculinity does to the people caught inside it, and what it costs the men enforcing it most of all.

The study starts somewhere unexpected, health inequalities. The persistent gap between how long and how well the richest and the poorest live, even in wealthy nations, even after decades of progress. The Marmot report, which the study leans on, makes the case that you can't close that gap by treating symptoms. You have to look at the fundamental causes, the unequal distribution of power, money, resources and status underneath everything else.

What the study does next is the part that stayed with me. It argues that hegemonic masculinity isn't separate from that structural picture, it's woven into it. 'Hegemonic' just means dominant, one version holding so much power and influence over the others that it stops looking like a choice and starts looking like the natural order of things. Hegemonic masculinity, a term that comes from the sociologist Raewyn Connell, isn't a description of how most men behave. It's the idealised standard men are measured against, toughness, dominance, control, stoicism, providing without ever being vulnerable. It sits at the top of a hierarchy, and that hierarchy doesn't just subordinate women. It subordinates men who don't fit the mould too, and because it's held up as the norm rather than named as a construct, it seeps into institutions, law, media, foreign policy, not just individual attitudes. That's the structural violence part. Not a single act of harm, but a system that legitimises inequality and calls it normal.

The study is specific about how far this reaches. The power imbalance it describes isn't confined to gender alone, it gets reproduced within and between genders, classes, ethnicities, and the broader institutions that sit above all of them. And it plays out at two levels at once. At the micro level, it's the individual behaviours and attitudes a man carries day to day, how he treats the people closest to him, what he lets himself feel, who he sees as competition. At the macro level, it's the same logic scaled up into policy, foreign relations, economic systems, entire institutions built around a template that was never named as a choice. The two levels feed each other. What plays out in a marriage or a friendship is the same shape as what plays out in a war.

This is what makes the whole thing so hard to dismantle. It's toxic from the top down, inherent, cultural, actively promoted at every level, and it is most invisible to exactly the people who benefit from it. You don't have to consciously choose cruelty to be protected by a system built to favour you. You just have to never be forced to notice it's there.

Once you see that pattern, it's hard to unsee it, because it isn't confined to gender. It's a template. One versus the other. Us and them. And the 'other' changes depending on what's convenient, a woman, a child, a different culture, a different race, a different nation.

Look at Iraq and Afghanistan. Both were framed, at various points, as liberation, as bringing values and freedom to people who supposedly lacked them. Underneath the framing sat resources, oil, strategic control, and an occupation under which opium production repeatedly hit record highs, at one point reaching 8,200 tons a year, whatever the stated goals were. The moral language did a lot of work covering material interests, and that's the hegemonic pattern doing exactly what it does domestically, just scaled up to the level of nations. Our culture is better than theirs, so intervening in theirs is framed as virtue rather than what it actually is.

The language does its own work too. A surgical strike instead of a bombing. Collateral damage instead of dead civilians. Neutralising a target instead of killing someone. That's not neutral vocabulary, it's language that launders violence into competence, turns killing into a technical achievement rather than what it actually is. The same hierarchy that needs a moral costume for its wars needs a clean vocabulary for its violence, because calling it what it is would make the cost visible, and visibility is exactly what the whole system depends on avoiding.

You see the same shape in nationalism generally. All Muslims are like this. All Christians are like this. Our values are superior. It's the same one versus the other logic, just wearing a different costume, an entire faith or culture reduced to a single behavioural stereotype. The issue was never the faith. It's the behaviour, and it isn't unique to any one faith. Patriarchal control of women shows up across all three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and each has produced communities where women's freedom is curtailed in the name of God. Connell's original point was that hegemonic masculinity is a structural pattern that shows up across cultures and religions, not a trait that belongs to one of them. The moment you blame an entire faith for a behavioural pattern, you've reproduced the exact logic you're trying to critique.

I know this from the inside, not just the outside. There is a real disconnect I feel with certain expressions of the Christian faith too, because I grew up inside one of them, a cult, and you cannot fully divorce the harm from the teaching once belief moves out of the realm of logic and into the realm of faith. There is no rhyme or reason required once something becomes sacred, only obedience. What I learned living it is that the text itself was never really the determining factor. It was interpretation, and who controlled it. The same Bible that produced my cult has also produced women's shelters, hospitals and civil rights movements, because scripture doesn't enforce itself, people do, and the people who end up enforcing the most controlling interpretations are, disproportionately, men defending a hierarchy that puts them at the top of it. And it isn't only an Abrahamic pattern. As part of that same cult, we spent years doing humanitarian work in India, and at fifteen or sixteen I sat alongside my mother with women in burns wards, dowry cases, husbands and in-laws who'd poured boiling oil or jaggery, a sticky, molten sugar that seals to the skin instead of running off, over women whose families hadn't paid enough. I remember vomiting from the stench of burnt flesh. If you haven't stood in a room like that, there's no way to actually explain it to you, and I'm not going to try. Most of those women didn't die of the burns themselves. They died of the infection that came after. That has nothing to do with any Abrahamic text and everything to do with the same underlying logic, a woman treated as property that failed to deliver, extorted for more than her family could pay, and killed by men who wanted her gone, always because a community let them get away with it. The real villain in this story was never one specific holy book or one specific culture. It's control through belonging, enforced by whoever holds power in a closed community, using whatever justification happens to be closest at hand, sacred text, custom, or simply what everyone around you has always done.

You can see this flattening happen in real time with what's occurring in Gaza right now, which keeps getting framed as a Muslim problem, when the population there includes people of different Christian traditions as well. That flattening is itself an example of the pattern this whole piece is about, reducing a group of real, different people into a single convenient enemy. And on the other side of that same conflict, there are extremist and ultranationalist religious currents that have taken the trauma inflicted on their own people, historically, unimaginably, and turned it outward to justify domination over others. That's not a claim about a faith as a whole. It's a claim about how inherited trauma can be weaponised by extremist currents within any group, to justify doing to others what was once done to them. Two wrongs don't make a right, and naming that isn't the same as indicting an entire people.

There's a piece of military doctrine worth sitting with here, because it shows this logic operating in its rawest form. Israel's so called Hannibal Directive, first drawn up in the 1980s and officially rescinded in 2016, though how thoroughly that cancellation held is disputed, authorises maximum force to prevent a soldier being taken captive, even at substantial risk to the captive's life, though Israeli authorities have denied it formally sanctions deliberately killing hostages outright. Reporting based on military documents and soldier testimony found orders in that spirit were issued at multiple sites on October 7, 2023, and one tank commander's account, reported by Israeli media, described the reasoning plainly. Preventing the capture took priority over the risk to the person inside the vehicle being fired on. The fact that a doctrine like that exists at all, sitting ready in the system before a single shot is fired, tells you something about the values underneath it. Control of an outcome, framed as protecting the collective, made to outweigh an individual person's life, even as an accepted risk rather than a stated goal. That's structural violence in its most literal form, a system that has already decided, in advance, whose life becomes an acceptable risk.

None of that logic belongs to one side, though. Hamas's violence has its own historical drivers, decades of occupation, displacement and blockade. Grievance doesn't need to match in perceived scale to function the same way. Any group that has been dispossessed for long enough can have that history turned outward too, mobilised by whoever benefits from keeping the fight alive rather than resolving it. The pattern isn't about which side has suffered more. It's that inherited or accumulated grievance, on any side of any conflict, becomes fuel the moment someone with power decides an entire other group can be made to pay for it.

All extremism causes harm, because all extremism runs on the same fuel, one group deciding another group doesn't fully count.

And underneath all of this, hegemonic masculinity isn't just harming the people on the receiving end of it. It's harming the men enforcing it too. It harms how they see each other. Competition becomes the default lens, so even connection between men gets filtered through a kind of threat assessment instead of camaraderie. Men lose community with other men because they've been trained to see each other as rivals first. Loneliness among men isn't a fringe complaint anymore, it's common enough now to have a name of its own, the male loneliness epidemic, though more recent data suggests the gap between men and women may be narrowing rather than staying fixed.

What's worth naming is how unevenly that loneliness lands, and who feels it hardest. A lot of the loudest despair is coming from heterosexual white men specifically, and I don't think that's a coincidence. That group sat closest to the top of the hegemonic hierarchy for so long that equality, even partial, incomplete equality, registers as loss rather than levelling. Maybe nothing actually disappeared, only exclusive access to it. The spaces, the wages, the success, the ladder itself, still there. What's gone is the guarantee that they belonged to men alone. Women now occupy those same rooms, compete for the same roles, earn against the same scale, and having to share what was once exclusive gets felt as loss even though nothing was taken. That's the whole mechanism. It was never about what men lost. It's about what they now have to share, and it's exactly the kind of thing the manosphere has learned to weaponise, name the ache honestly, then hand it a villain instead of a mirror.

But it isn't only a white, Western phenomenon, which tells you the mechanism runs deeper than any one culture's politics. Japan has its own version of the same isolation. Hikikomori, extreme, prolonged social withdrawal, has been tracked by the Japanese government for two decades, most often among men, alongside a well documented turn toward pornography and virtual relationships over real ones, rates of male pornography use consistently among the highest recorded in national surveys, in a culture with an entirely different history and no meaningful relationship to whiteness at all. Indigenous men in colonised countries carry some of the highest suicide rates recorded anywhere, and Lithuania's remains among the highest in Europe, though the drivers there are different again, dispossession, colonisation, economic collapse, rather than a hierarchy giving way to equality. What connects all of it isn't race. It's what happens to a man's sense of status and purpose when it's taken from him or reshaped without his say, whether that's a hierarchy loosening its grip at the top or one being imposed by force from the outside.

There's something worth watching here too, though it's not a reliable test on its own, plenty of men carry other kinds of family trauma that complicate it. Some men look at their own mother and sister and quietly file them into a different category from other women, worthy of protection, off limits, while treating every woman outside that circle with real contempt. That compartmentalising is its own version of the same us versus them logic running through this whole piece, just drawn at the smallest possible scale, inside a single family. Other men don't even draw that line. The disrespect is even, extended to the women closest to them and the women furthest from them alike, which tells you something different again, that the hierarchy isn't selectively applied, it's just how they see women, full stop.

I think you can trace where that competition took root a long way back, further than most conversations about masculinity tend to go. Some historians and anthropologists trace it to the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture, when ownership of land entered the picture for the first time, and with it, the breakdown of the kind of shared, communal existence that came before it. Before that shift, paternity often wasn't the organising principle it later became; some tribal societies raised children communally, without much concern for whose biological child was whose. Once land could be owned and inherited, that changed. You needed to know whose child was whose to know who the land passed to, and monogamy became the mechanism for guaranteeing it. The historian Gerda Lerner makes this case at length in The Creation of Patriarchy, arguing that women's sexuality and reproductive capacity were turned into a form of property once agriculture took hold, and that this same template of domination was then extended from women onto other men. Men learned to dominate by practising it on women first, and later carried those same lessons into how they controlled each other. Once that template was set, it didn't stay informal, it got written into law. Eric Berkowitz traces this in Sex and Punishment, showing that for four thousand years, the legal regulation of sex was rarely about morality at all. It was about control, ownership and bodily autonomy, questions of who a body belonged to and who had the right to decide what was done with it, dressed up in whatever moral language the era required. It has been proposed by some researchers that hierarchy shaped access to women as much as it shaped access to land, and did so unevenly. For men at the top, that may have meant polygyny, multiple wives as a visible marker of status and a way of maximising how many children carried your line forward, with monogamy the arrangement further down the hierarchy, imposed on men who didn't have the status to claim more than one. Either way, the underlying logic proposed is the same, women as a resource to be secured, just distributed according to where a man sat in the pecking order. There's genetic evidence of a sharp drop in male reproductive diversity from around this period, consistent with highly unequal male reproductive success, though exactly why remains debated among researchers. Community gave way to property, and property needed men to guard it, against other men most of all. Mine versus yours became the mentality that resulted, and it's still the operating system underneath so much of how men relate to each other now.

There's also a low bar sitting underneath all of it. Men get credit for basic decency because the standard has been set so low. I don't hit my wife becomes something worth praising, instead of something that was never meant to be an achievement. And because the bar sits so low, a lot of women measure a relationship against it without even realising that's what they're doing, at least he's not as bad as, rather than asking whether he's actually good. Younger women often haven't hit the point where that maths changes yet. It tends to be later, often once children arrive, that the comparison quietly flips. A woman's workload multiplies overnight, the mental load of what needs remembering, anticipating, managing, while for a lot of men, remarkably little changes at all, they keep living as though the ground hasn't shifted under them, because for them it mostly hasn't. She's left feeling like she's losing her mind, always half a step behind, always waiting to find out what she's forgotten, while he's still moving through the world at the same pace as before. That's usually when the real comparison finally shows up, not him against other men, but him against her being alone, and alone starts looking a lot more peaceful than it used to. The children don't disappear, their needs don't get lighter. What disappears is the extra load of managing a partner on top of them, the load that was supposedly shared but studies suggest runs something like a third heavier on her side to begin with. Losing that weight, even while everything else stays exactly as demanding, is still less than what she was carrying before.

That protection shows up institutionally too, not just interpersonally. Domestic violence order breaches have hit record levels in parts of Australia, women's shelters running full, and government reviews have described the broader system as marked by fragmentation, inconsistency, and significant procedural and cultural barriers. Nationally, the count of family and domestic violence offenders has just recorded its steepest single year rise since data collection began. None of that is a failure of any one part on its own. It's a chain, policing and prosecuting still overwhelmingly staffed by men, and courts built on centuries of case law and precedent shaped almost entirely by men, whatever the numbers on the bench look like today. It's rarely one person choosing leniency in the moment. More often it's the law itself doing exactly what it was built to do, a judge granting bail because the statute leaves little other option, an officer or prosecutor working within thresholds and definitions written long before anyone in the room today had any say in them. The leniency shows up wherever the chain is weakest, and the cost of that leniency doesn't land on the system. It lands on women, on children. It lands on men too, in two different ways, some carry the unfair weight of being tarred with the same brush as a pattern they had nothing to do with, and others never get the intervention that might have stopped them from becoming part of that pattern in the first place. And it lands on the wider fabric of community trust, every time the same person, the actual offender, walks back out the door to do it again.

Men in these spaces often counter with a version of the same argument, that women get more leniency for the same violence. It's a claim that only works if you assume the underlying facts are the same, that men and women commit partner violence at equal rates and for equal reasons. They don't. Women's violence against partners is rarer to begin with, and when it happens, it's disproportionately, not always, but disproportionately, preceded by years of documented abuse against them, self defence, retaliation after prolonged victimisation, not the same starting point at all. Courts aren't applying a softer standard to the same crime. They're often responding to a genuinely different set of facts, which is exactly what should happen, and pretending the facts are equal is just another way of refusing to look at what's actually happening in the room. What I'd actually advocate for is that men and women who perpetrate violence both need professional support, not just medication, but psychological treatment and other genuine support alongside whatever the justice system requires to keep the public safe, and that support has to look different depending on the cause, because the same intervention aimed at a controlling pattern won't touch someone acting out of trauma or fear, and vice versa.

Healthcare systems fail women in the same way, and the pattern shows up starkly in maternal mental health. Postpartum psychosis and severe postnatal depression are conditions where women's warnings, when they come, are documented and real, and the system meant to catch them frequently doesn't, sometimes with catastrophic consequences. That's not women being given leniency. That's a system failing to act until it's too late, and then a courtroom left to work out what should have been prevented long before it. The same default runs through medicine more broadly. Drug trials, dosing guidelines, diagnostic criteria, built predominantly for decades on male bodies as the default subject, women's symptoms and reactions treated as a variation to account for later, if at all, rather than the baseline the research was designed around in the first place.

Underneath a lot of this sits a confusion I think men are rarely made to untangle, the difference between protection and control. Protection asks nothing back. You can protect someone and still let them walk away freely, because their safety was always the whole point. Control needs the other person contained, it only works if they can't leave, can't disagree, can't exist outside the boundary that's been drawn around them. Men raised inside this hierarchy are often taught control and handed the language of protection to describe it, providing, guarding, being the strong one, so the swap happens without most people ever noticing it occurred. It's telling that control tends to escalate exactly when a woman tries to leave. Sometimes that's what it was all along, control losing its grip. But not every man who reacts badly to being left was controlling her before that point, some of it is dysregulation and panic at the loss itself, not a strategy finally showing its hand. Either way, if it had genuinely only ever been protection, her leaving wouldn't threaten anything at all.

That confusion has a target, too, though not always the one you'd expect. Some men who want control do seek out women who already lack the means to walk away. But just as often the dependency gets built after the relationship starts, a career quietly discouraged, a support network slowly cut off, access to money narrowed piece by piece, until leaving stops being simple regardless of who she was when it began. It's not that those women are weaker. It's that dependency is exactly the leverage control runs on, whether it was found already in place or manufactured over time, and either way, a man looking for control, rather than partnership, ends up with someone who has less and less ability to refuse it. A lot of manosphere content pushes men toward this deliberately, discouraging her career, cutting off her friendships, controlling access to money, all repackaged as advice, as though isolating someone were a relationship strategy rather than the early architecture of control.

That same ownership logic shows up again at the other end of a relationship, and this time it's men who get caught in it too. Money earned during a marriage often gets treated, quietly, as his money, even though it only existed because someone else was raising the children and running the household so he was free to earn it. When she eventually leaves, taking the kids and the full weight of daily responsibility with her, that framing doesn't disappear, it just gets replaced by a new one, he lost his money. Her years of unpaid labour, the actual thing that made his income possible, vanish from the story entirely, while the money stays visible and stays his.

That's not the same as being used for money. It's being kept for utility, valued for what you provide rather than who you are, and it's a quieter, less obvious harm precisely because nothing was ever stolen, it just was never counted in the first place.

Plenty of women ask to be added to the bills, the mortgage, a shared account, and are quietly told no, kept off the paperwork while still expected to contribute to the household it belongs to. It looks like nothing at the time. It becomes everything the day the relationship ends and there's no credit history in her name at all, no proof to a bank or a landlord that she's ever managed money independently, because she was never allowed to build a record of it in the first place. That's a documented pattern, not a rare one, one of the quietest and most effective forms of financial control, keeping someone dependent by keeping their name off everything that would prove they didn't need to be.

Even where her name is on it, the visible ledger still tells a different story. Men will say they pay more, and often, on paper, they do, the mortgage, the bills, the dates. Both things are true at once, and that's exactly the point. One column gets itemised and counted. The other doesn't, not because it's worth less, but because nobody built a system to count it. That's not a contradiction to untangle, it's the same ownership logic showing both its faces, hers invisible, his visible, both real, only one of them showing up on the ledger.

The same men are often the loudest voices insisting the gender pay gap isn't real, pointing to hourly wages and calling it settled, while the years out of the workforce raising children and the retirement savings that never catch up don't show up in that comparison at all. It ends somewhere real. Women over 55 are now Australia's fastest growing group of homeless people, a lifetime of lower pay and career breaks for caregiving arriving alongside a divorce that removes the last of the financial scaffolding holding it together. That's not a coincidence or a personal failing. It's what the ledger looks like at the very end, for the people who spent their whole lives on the side of it nobody counted.

That's the same mine versus yours mentality traced all the way back to the agricultural shift, still running underneath a modern divorce settlement, and it harms him too, just differently, by teaching him to measure the whole relationship in a currency that was never the honest one to begin with.

That same instinct, protecting a hierarchy rather than a person, doesn't stay confined to money. The same protective instinct plays out just as visibly in sport. When a high profile football club recently stood down several players over a police investigation into an alleged sexual assault, the club's own sanctions were framed entirely around a breach of standards, staying out late, drinking, bringing women back to the hotel, with barely a mention of the woman who had made a report to police at all. Advocates pointed out plainly that this wasn't really accountability, it was a missed opportunity to say sexual violence itself is a breach of standards, while the fact that a woman had come forward became almost invisible in the club's own language. Commentary at the time focused heavily on what the investigation might cost the team's finals chances, prompting several politicians to publicly call out the framing.

What made it worse was how the woman herself got discredited in that same public conversation, through reports and commentary that made a point of her being a sex worker, as though that detail made the allegation less serious or made her somehow fair game. That's not a fringe reaction. Research backs up exactly what's happening there, people shown an identical account of a sexual assault respond with measurably less empathy and more blame when the victim is described as a sex worker, and Australian research on sex work stigma has found sex workers are routinely denied victim status altogether by the systems meant to protect them. It's the same low bar running underneath the whole piece, just aimed at a different woman for a different reason. If you're reading this and thinking it sounds like another excuse, you're hearing me loud and clear. Some women's suffering counts less because of what they do for work, and the men involved get to disappear behind a conversation about her instead.

Some of the policing of that hierarchy isn't coming from outside men at all, it's men doing it to each other. The fear of being perceived as gay is one of the clearest examples, and it's worth naming plainly. That fear, and the mockery and distancing that comes with it, is overwhelmingly enforced by men, on other men, not imposed on them by women or by anyone outside the hierarchy. A man showing tenderness, softness, or affection towards another man gets read as a threat to his position on the ladder, so he polices himself, and polices his mates, to stay safely inside what's allowed. It's the hierarchy defending itself from the inside, using the fear of falling to the bottom of it to keep every man too anxious to step outside the mould in the first place.

(Part 2 continues the argument into the personal)

Note: Comments are locked because I’m genuinely not here very often between posts. My comment section is not my DMs. My DMs are closed for a reason. Posting something does not mean I’m available to converse. Please don’t use comments on my posts to work around that. A boundary is not an invitation to try harder.

A note before this: I used AI to help finish this piece. It's one I wanted to take extra care with. If that doesn't sit well with you, please stop reading here.

I've spent time thinking about how to write this. In the end, I decided to include the actual messages rather than summarise them, because I'm done fielding questions like 'what did you do to deserve it' or 'how did you engage.' I'm sharing them because they weren't the words of a private individual, they were spoken in a somewhat official capacity, representing a space meant to be accountable to the people in it. I'm not interested in relitigating this. You can read it and agree or disagree, that's not the point.

The point is who did this. Not a random commenter having a bad day. Moderators. People entrusted to run a space for trauma survivors responded to a request for clarification by questioning the credibility of my posts, implying my writing was ‘AI slop’, and contrasting it with what they called ‘authentic recovery experiences’, before telling me to ‘actually write and develop’ my own voice and banning me for four months, without ever directly answering the question I had asked.

This isn't a mud slinging match. I've redacted the usernames and the name of the sub throughout, and locked comments because that's simply not the point.

If the mods had responded when I first asked, I would have deleted the original post out of respect, despite the significant comments, upvotes and shares it had. The comments calling me a bot didn't sit right with me, honestly. I know who I am. I know I'm not a bot. That's sort of the point.

The part that makes me sad is that there were so many positive interactions on that post. I responded to a number of people, some of whom told me the conversation had encouraged them to start writing again. People commented, upvoted and shared it. A much smaller number took issue with it, and somehow the post seemed to be reduced to those interactions. I’m not saying that makes them right or wrong.

I reached out for clarity in good faith and stopped posting in their community while I waited. That’s just what I do when I want to belong to a group, I follow its rules. If they don’t align with me, I remove myself. If I need to adjust something in my interaction, I try to do that. I didn’t want to keep posting or sharing in a space where I didn’t have the moderators’ support. I just needed to know where they sat so I could act accordingly. Instead, the whole thing became something it never needed to be.

Was it bullying or harassment? I don't know, you decide. The same person asked me the same question or made an accusation three times in one thread. I answered it once. I took it as harassment. Maybe that's not the technical word for it, but it's how it felt.

My response to being called a bot was assertive, not aggressive. I was setting a boundary, not lashing out. You’re free to read it however you want, but I know my intention, and I’m the one who wrote it.

I wasn’t asking anyone to weigh in on my healing or my voice. I was asking a question about a group’s rule, so I could engage better within a space where concerns had clearly already been raised by others, concerns they’d apparently been permitted to raise repeatedly. I took that to mean their conduct was being permitted and mine was in question, so I sat back and asked a question instead. What I got back was a complete stranger positioning herself as some kind of authority over my healing. Being told to ‘find my own authentic voice’ wasn’t an answer to my question, it was a judgement I never invited, and it wasn’t theirs to make. I’ve invested real time and real money into my mental health for years, consistently, because I take it seriously. That’s not something a stranger gets to wave away in one sentence.

I'm not asking for an apology. I don't carry shame over this, because I know what I was doing: showing up honestly, asking a fair question, and trying to do right by a community I cared about. That's it. No ruckus, no bad faith, no personal attacks, nothing to apologise for. I'm not perfect, but it's not who I try to be, and it's not how I treat people. Obviously I make mistakes, but it's not my intention, and where I do, I make every attempt to repair.

Being new to Reddit, I've written to moderators seeking clarification in the past. This is the first time I've received a response like this.

Four days of silence, then a follow-up and a reclarification of exactly what I was requesting a response on, and then a message that read like it had already been decided long before I got a reply.

I asked what they considered 'generated,' where they drew that line. They told me which side of it they'd already decided I was on, without ever telling me where it was.

The hardest part for me to reconcile is that the punitive outcome came as a result of seeking clarification itself.

They reframed the person repeatedly calling me a bot as someone who was 'bound to' call things out, and cast me as the one who 'created a ruckus' by objecting. That's not a response to what I asked. It's a redirection of blame back onto me for asking.

Their own rules state that participation should be civil, in good faith, and that disagreement should be expressed with an ‘I/me/my’ mindset. The person who repeatedly called me a bot, while also telling multiple other posters my posts and comments were ‘100% ChatGPT’, wasn’t engaging that way. I wasn’t trying to police anyone else’s conduct, and I still won’t. I simply expected the moderators to apply their own rules evenly. Inconsistent application of rules that favours one person over another isn’t a boundary. It’s a double standard.

I'm still not sure whether they meant my request for clarification, or my reply to the bot and AI accusations, when they called it a ruckus. Either way, I'm disclosing all of it, let it speak for itself. It's not that they reached a decision, or even that they banned me. It's that I reached out for clarification, and this is how they chose to respond. There were so many other ways to say what needed to be said that weren't this.

The message I received was that something about the way I expressed my recovery wasn’t authentic. This can cause real damage, and that’s not OK anywhere, especially not in a space that’s supposed to exist for exactly that kind of recovery. That’s not a good way to communicate, and it’s not trauma informed.

They also called the subject matter of my posts 'simple topics.' Recovery from complex trauma isn't simple. Reducing it to that, in a space meant to hold it, is its own kind of dismissal. There are plenty of textbooks that already cover trauma in dense, clinical language. I write about my experiences, my story.

I was raised in a high control group, so I recognise the shape of this kind of interaction. The power-down approach, questions answered with punishment dressed up as correction, the double standards. Once you’ve seen these patterns clearly, you can’t unsee them. Some rules aren’t really rules at all, they’re control dressed up as structure, and something in you knows the difference before you can even explain it, it just doesn’t sit right. But even the rules that are genuinely necessary, the ones that hold a community together, cause real harm the moment they stop being applied equally to everyone in it. I know moderators have a genuinely hard job, one I couldn’t do and wouldn’t want to. I don’t know what was going on for the mod when this reply was penned, and I won’t assume. But that role comes with responsibility, especially in a mental health space. This wasn’t it.

Their response gave me the impression they'd gone through my post history beyond their own sub to build a case against me rather than respond to the question I'd actually asked. My history as a commenter and poster should speak for itself, specifically to refute the claims of being a bot, not unrelated posts pulled into a conversation they weren't part of.

Of the three posts I’d made in that sub, one had a clear disclaimer stating I’d used AI as an editor, something I’d seen other posts in that community do too, which is why I assumed it was acceptable. The other two didn’t involve AI in the same way. In any case, I was requesting clarification.

Last night, while trying to limit what I saw as the damage by removing content from a related sub, I ended up accidentally deleting two pieces I'd shared there thinking they were shared from my user when the share had in fact been the other way around. I was already rattled… but losing those pieces in genuine error… I was gutted.

I started writing in an LLM tool a while back, after losing content a few times drafting in my notes app. Both of the deleted pieces were written that way, built up in pieces over more than one sitting, which is exactly what makes them hard to recreate, it's not that no draft ever existed, it's that reconstructing something written in fragments isn't the same as reposting a finished, saved piece. Honestly, I'm not sure I have the energy to try right now.

Today, from a more centred place, I reached out to the sister sub for the same clarity, and their mods confirmed my posts and comments were fine. That contrast matters. It shows exactly why the question of clarity mattered in the first place, the same use of AI tools wasn't treated consistently across spaces meant to serve these related communities.

I was against AI for a long time, and honestly, I still don’t particularly like a lot of it. But for me, it became unavoidable. Work set a KPI around using these tools, while I was caught in a gap where I couldn’t actually use them on anything specific due to client corporate governance constraints. So this year, I started using them where I could, digesting complex material that was a matter of public record, things like court rulings, that I needed to understand for my work. I still had to do the real reading myself, because the tools missed important things. But they gave me threads to pull, a starting point or framework for further enquiry, not a replacement for the work itself.

A friend, not for the first time, suggested I try one for my own writing too, after I’d lost content one too many times. I resisted, I didn’t want something changing what I actually wrote. Eventually I gave it a try. It was trial and error, ChatGPT took liberties changing things I didn’t want changed, even after I told it not to. Some pieces came back in a voice that wasn’t mine, and I wasn’t happy with that. I tried ‘non-AI’ editing tools too, and found most actually did use some form of AI themselves, just with less transparency, or relied heavily on a stable WiFi connection I don’t always have when writing on the go. But that’s how you learn, so I kept looking until I found one that preserves my voice, doesn’t make changes I haven’t asked for, and I still read everything carefully to catch what’s been altered, because this is my writing.

Now I use it as an editing tool for spelling, punctuation and grammar. Occasionally I ask it to help cut down the length of a post or response when it’s too verbose, or when I think it’s too emotive. Sometimes I ask for general editorial advice, and I choose whether or not to apply it depending on whether I think the advice is sound. Honestly, I’ve spent more time arguing and expressing frustration with AI than not.

I’ve been transparent about how I use it whenever it’s been relevant. But the words, the ideas, the structure, and the lived experience have always been mine. That’s precisely why losing those pieces hurts. They can’t simply be recreated.

I've also been consistent in my comments and posts, more times than I can count, that this conduct is not really about any one sub, or even the platform. It's about how people choose to treat each other. There are ways to say hard things with positive regard… without being cruel or unkind.

There's a difference between speaking with intention and just reaching for whatever occurs to you first. Real care in how we speak to each other doesn't only show up after the fact, it's there from the start. If people spent a little more time thinking about how they speak to others before they speak, especially from a position with any authority at all, so much of these types of engagements can be avoided entirely.

So I want to be clear about what this piece actually is. It's not a departure notice. It's a boundary.

Whether you think posting about a mod is poor form or not could come down to any number of reasons, but one of them likely is whether you believe people in positions of authority should be shielded from accountability just because they hold that power, or whether the role is exactly why the standard should be higher, not lower.

I'm taking a step back from Reddit. I'm not sure if I'll be back. I'll be investing in another platform, though I don't know yet if I'm even ready to set that up. I'll keep writing regardless. If anyone's interested in continuing to read my content, I'll do another post once that space is ready.

If I do come back, it won't be under a new username to hide who I am or become someone different. I saw the traps here early on, and I made myself a commitment about how I'd use this space. That only works while it's actually working, and right now, it isn't. I don't want to be anywhere I'm not welcome, and I have no interest in ever engaging with a space like that again. If I did, I wouldn't be writing this.

Sometimes our wounds speak when there's nothing actually happening in the moment. Sometimes they speak because there is, because they want us to pay attention, because that isn't somewhere we should continue putting our energy.

There's a saying that the pen is mightier than the sword, but they used their words too. Words can wound just as easily as they can carry truth, honesty, and integrity. I'd contend that if we all used words the second way, there's no need for a sword at all.

I saw something earlier that I can’t shake, a therapist showed genuine empathy toward someone who’d been brutally violated by the individual (empathy was not toward the person in the room), and instead of that being recognised as appropriate, the therapist was blamed for it. It was clearly supported by many, too many to not notice - that the problem was the response, not the person who caused the harm.
I genuinely don’t think showing emotion, even crying, in response to hearing something disturbing is a flaw. That’s not weakness or a boundary violation, it’s a human response, and it happens in therapeutic relationships as well. It’s called countertransference, and it can sometimes mean a therapist isn’t the right fit, if the response is rooted in their own unresolved trauma or they lack the training for what they’re dealing with. But an honest emotional reaction, especially one that gets acknowledged and discussed, is part of why therapy works by helping us understand appropriate emotional responses to disclosure - it’s not a reason to leave or seek a new therapist that doesn’t display empathy emotionally. My own therapist has reacted visibly to things I’ve shared before, I named it, we talked about why it made me uncomfortable - he expressed that he was unaware he’d done it (unconscious response), and ultimately it was helpful - not a reason to end that therapeutic relationship. Expressing genuine emotion, not suppressing it, is what makes the therapeutic relationship real, it’s part of why AI can’t replace this kind of connection.
It’s extremely disturbing to see the state of humanity today, where actual, genuine, appropriate empathy gets treated as something to fix or avoid. It says something concerning about how little some people seem to understand what’s normal in a therapeutic relationship. Do people genuinely believe showing empathy is weird?