The air is poisoned, the ice caps are melting, and men are trash. Probably unsavoury, but in the general sense, it's true. Some are going to argue about it, and it's going to be mostly pointless because the arguing usually doesn't accomplish anything. If we all dropped everything and combined our human intellect and resources for a day, we could probably solve it all. But then we'd all have to take a day out of our lives, and we only get so many of those.
My first thought was, well ,yes, I suppose, men have historically oppressed women, been violent towards women, subjugated women, sexually assaulted women, hell, men have done all of the above to other men for not being "manly" enough. You could swop out trash for any number of adjectives, including but not exclusive to garbage, shitty, genocidal, misogynistic, toxic, oppressive, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and in the most general sense it will ring true. Hell, you don't have to look far, there are parts of the world where women aren't allowed to drive, study, organize, choose who they eventually marry, show any parts of their bodies among other things. In the western world there's a gigantic debate about whether a woman is even allowed to make a choice about a fetus growing inside her. Men are literally bothered with the physical insides of a woman they can't see and subsequently try making laws to control those bits because God forbid women make their own choices.
In all this it did strike me to wonder if this will accomplish anything. The feminist side of me is revelling at all the butthurt manbabies with hurt emotions because a bunch of strangers on the internet called them a bad thing, and some of their friends kind of agree. The skeptic side of me did start to wonder if this isn't an exercise in futility. After all, it's hard to imagine this having any longevity apart from the initial traction it's already gained.
While I've read some genuinely rock-solid points in not only defense for the tag and it's users but definite reasons to support it, I've also read a bunch of defenses which can ultimately be summed up as "because you don't think men are trash, maybe you are trash". Sure, it's a clever way to put down a detractor and there are plenty people I don't want to debate the issue with because, let's face it, the ratio of people with something genuinely interesting to say on the matter versus special snowflakes who've never been insulted in their lives is disproportionate and well, at some point I have to get back to scrolling through memes and geeking out over stupid 90s videogames. But there is a culture of dismissiveness. They disagree, so they must be mostly conservative, which means the eventual argument that's going to break out from this will mostly be a waste of time. I'm not going to ask anyone to listen to every argumentative ass-whistle, because most of it is a steaming pile of crap. But there are valid criticisms. And you are going to run into one, eventually. And you're not going to want to, but I urge you to consider for a moment pushing aside doubts and trying to listen.
Another weird thing I've noticed happening is the defenders of the tag trying to almost deny detractors the right to criticism. And I'm not going to give any detractors credit here, as of yet the most nuanced thing anyone has managed to say is that generalizing is generally bad and calling half the people on the planet garbage is probably not the best way to get them on your side. Sometimes detractors devolve into criticisms of the far left, which is weird because it's not the far left that's saying this, it's actually normal women noticing terrible things and vocalizing an observation they've made. Your beef isn't with those darn leftists and their little feminist clubs, and it might feel that way because it is people with generally left-leaning political views propagating the tag, but just listen. You're going to have to tell real women who've been through real trauma why you think they're invalid for vocalizing an observation about their every day experience. And yes, perhaps the nomenclature is objectionable and you're perfectly entitled to that opinion, hell, it's a rather popular and valid opinion, you also have to try put aside your own personal objections and try understand why this isn't a viewed as a put-down on men and as a statement about everyday womanhood in South Africa.
If nothing else, it's a pretty interesting social experiment. The amount of men responding to #menaretrash by actively proving how trash men can be is astounding, like watching a bee repeatedly fly into a window. Furthermore, let's be real, we tolerate and even glorify song lyrics, television and media that actively call women bitches and hoes, but when men get called trash, we react like a bunch of precious snowflakes who've never been insulted in our lives. It's a little eye-opening, if nothing else.
Look, I'm not saying to not be critical of it, because let's face it, there is going to widespread use of this to backhandedly talk down to almost literally half the planet and you know what, yeah, that's a shitty way to do anything. No one wants to be scrolling down their feed on some idle Tuesday and be told their entire gender is trash, regardless of how well-intended it may be. I also don't know if I feel great about people putting the tweets on shirts and making money off them. I get it, bills to pay, capitalist economy, free market, if you're good at something don't do it for free. I don't care about what people wear on a shirt, wear what you want, none of us are going to escape the degradation of entropy anyway. But if it doesn't rub you a little wrong that the people making these shirts don't care about the message behind it and just want to make a quick buck off a social media trend, you're a more sensible person than I am.
I do think that if women can go through their entire lives being referred to by gender specific slurs, even when those don't apply to them (ie, being called a slut for wearing skimpy clothes despite not being especially sexually active, and this is of course not avocation to call a woman anything but her name) us dudes can take one for the team and deal with women calling us trash, even if we don't deserve it. If only to get one man to open his eyes and say, huh, so this is what women go through.
But all in all, the air is poisoned, the ice caps are melting, and men are trash.
Sure, the both the aforementioned and the responses to them ring true. Not all the air is poisoned, not all the ice is melting, not all men are trash. But despite repeatedly saying that a stupidly large amount of air is poisoned, a stupidly large amount of ice is melting, a stupidly large amount of men are trash, it's not like a lot of people give a fuck about poisoned air or melting ice caps if it's not happening right in front of them. Life is full of little worries. People have jobs to get up for in the morning, debt to pay off, taxes to do, groceries to buy, existential dread to keep at bay. If it's not my air that's poisoned, if it's not my ice that's melting, why should I give a fuck, and who are you to tell me that I'm a bad person for caring about my own issues over the issues of others?
Naturally this logic is a little flawed, because these issues affect everyone.
But getting people to care about the issues that don't directly impact them is hard. It's really fucking hard, trust me. And if you're saying you've never avoided or put down a good cause just because it was inconvenient at that point in time, you're lying. Hell, I'd wager as to say you probably do it on a regular basis. We've got limited time, we've got limited resources and honestly, limited fucks to give. And yeah, we've all at some point gotten made because someone called us out on it, and it does feel like bullshit because most of us are generally not bad even if we could be better. Sure, it's probably wrong of us to get mad and it probably isn't bullshit, but that's how it feels because life is hard and fuck it, we've got to keep ourselves entertained before we all fuckin die and our existence just ends and the more time spend getting called out is the more time that could have been used laughing at tasteful memes.
Maybe we won't ever understand each other, and me pretentiously trying to hold a higher ground while deriding both sides is just an attempt to feel better than everyone else and bolster my own ego. But truth is that the air is actually polluted, the ice caps are actually melting, and men are actually kinda trash. Not all air, not all ice, not all men. But too much air, too much ice, too many men.
And we're all going to get to that age where we're going to have to leave a legacy, plant trees we'll never sit under, fuckin leave something for our idiot great grandchildren we'll never meet. We probably don't want to leave them unbreathable air, melted ice caps and trashy men.
I don't wanna leave my great grandkids trashy men.
So I guess I'm just asking, hey, guys, going forward, can we try not be trash? If nothing else, can we stop sending unsolicited dick pics?
A well reasoned article. I still don't understand this dickpic thing though. It's so ubiquitous that I wonder if it is not in fact an effective mating ritual.
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