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Because my nitpick topic is the intersection between politics and gender/sex, in the last months since 7 October I began a very unscientific analysis of the social media content, especially on Instagram, of my friends, acquaintances and other people I follow. (Context as always, European middle-upper class, intra-national environment, very EU-based)
I cannot emphatise enough how much the driven behind pro-Palestinian content is driven exclusively by women. Between the thousands of people I follow, there is a core of around 50 people, all women apart one anarchist guy, who are hard Palestinian-posters (And remember, there is a lot of interests in politics in my environment, it is normal to see all these people interested in stuff like this). And I am not talking about random posting, I am talking of months and months of posting, all inserted in a moral framework of "do not touch the children" or "Israelis are racists". Having followed the process since the beginning, it was fun to see how it took at least one month until the start of the pro-Palestinian posting, as if they were checking where it was the consensus in their group before beginning to post.
The question I ask the community here, why a topic that is so far from our location and interests (again, we are no Columbia University or Middle East, we are far away both ideologically and physically) is so interesting for women, that makes them post about id dozens of times every week, for months straight? And I am talking about a very intense interest, is not rare to see online meltdown of suffering, death menaces or simply histrionics directed towards obscure metaphysical forces.
Again, my observation are reinforced from what I saw in the US and Europe about the universities and campus protests; the protestors are overwhelmingly women, and the most desperate are women.
For me the question rotates around two different forces;
Thinking about the past, it makes me smile how much it was common to hear, until twenty years ago, that women are very uninterested in politics, unlike men. For my generation, this idea looks absurd. Men do not care about politics at all.
Young women are materially more likely to identify as liberal or progressive than young men. Palestine is a huge liberal issue.
I noticed the same thing during BLM, it was almost exclusively women posting about it.
To what extent do you think the few men who post about it are doing so for the approval of those women as opposed to out of any genuine sentiment?
I think that most men who engage in progressive activist politics ultimately do it to simp to women. Or just to fit in with their social circle which includes activist women, to be less uncharitable.
I base this on a guy who reconfigured his entire personality to be a gay black communist in 2017, because that was maximally appealing to college-educated white women. Even changed his Tinder bio to "Queer."
Edit: I should be less-totalizing. Yes, there's genuine sentiment among men, but it's still motivated thinking enforced by the context that leftist women create.
Did it work? Did he get laid?
Women are generally revolted by simps.
I don't think they realized he was simping. He was just presenting them with everything it was trendy for them to want. Yes, lots. During COVID. While privately being a complete piece of shit. It made me hate the world.
Why would it make you hate the world? Men lying to get laid, is as old as the hills. Hating that behavior (and perhaps the people who use it) seems the more accurate response?
Because every time I tried meeting anyone, I ran into the full Covid gauntlet of Bubbles and Taking It Seriously, stuff that women mysteriously stopped caring about once it stood in the way of fucking him.
And because he had become a hollow skinsuit of upward-mobility who spoke entirely in progressive talking points, to the point where it reminded me of the guy from Nightcrawler. And had a pathetic fucking meltdown where he tried to hold his girlfriend hostage by locking his door with her keys in his room, plus all the emotional abuse before. And he tried to steal the lease out from under his roommates. And he'd poison people against his roomates by calling us racist. And he collaborated with the landlords (to steal the lease), and simped for them massively despite them calling him racial slurs behind his back, which we informed him about in our bid to convince him that they were bad people whom he should not make deals with, especially with him valuing his Blackness so much. So he was a Queer (straight but wants to fuck leftist chicks who hate straight men) Black (ish,) Feminist (who abused women) Communist (who sold out his prole roommates). Eventually he had some sort of psychotic break and attacked me with a fire axe, I maced him and got a restraining order to get him removed from the place. And to this day I have former mutual friends who won't talk to me, because he's Black and Leftist and I'm a straight white male who called the cops on a Person of Color. And wherever he is now, he's undoubtedly balls-deep in some chick he met at a pro-palestine protest, while I still can't get anyone to fucking turn up for fucking coffee after getting my heart mutilated in 2019. Because people are so fucking retarded that they misinterpret me as some kind of monster, while he's the Jesus of their new religion.
That is why I hate the world.
Again the vast majority of that is about him manipulating other people, weaponizing their beliefs to his own advantage. Cult leaders do the same with religious beliefs. It just seems odd to hate his victims. Like it would be odd to hate the world because some people fell for Jim Jones. I can understand hating your former friend or indeed Jim Jones but the fact that people fall for a presumably at least superficially charming person doesn't still seem like a great reason to hate the world, rather than hating the people who manipulate the world. The people who went to bat for him, presumably did so because they believed he was a sympathetic victim not a monster.
I've encountered people like him (minus the fire axe, substituting a broken pint glass) and many people did believe he was a lovely person and he took advantage of that over and over. But it didn't make me hate the world so much as hate him. People generally assume other people are operating in good faith in personal relationships and that allows people who are willing to cheat and lie to take advantage of it. You are a victim of him, but so are the people that believed his lies and manipulations. They didn't side with him because they hated you, they sided with him because he knew exactly what to say and how to say it.
You and the world are both victims of people like him. Hating your fellow victims is I think missing the point. Having said that it seems like a terrible experience and I am sorry you were dragged into his machinations.
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