I Wasn’t Always a Feminist.

I’m going to confess something.

During my teenage years, I was on the right. Truth is, I didn’t know a lot about politics, and what I did know is that the ‘left-wing’ I knew at home was a particularly un-feminist brand of ‘feminism’ that involved more talking badly about women than empowering them.

It’s a fact of reality that being on the left does not make you a good person. Not even close. And depending on what media you consume, you can be shaped to just about whatever ideology the media will shape you to be. In a previous article, I discussed Louis Althusser’s idea that our beliefs are formed as much by our perception of reality as reality itself.

And for me, feminism represented self-centredness, the putting down of women it did not approve of, and the dismissal, or outright mockery, of men’s issues. Combine that with having a strained relationship with my own mother at the time, and it wasn’t hard for my view of social politics to be stained the colour of anti-sjw youtube content and men’s rights activists.

The truth is, many people claim the label of feminist. That includes plenty of shitty and dishonest people. But because my personal experience of feminism had been harmful, that was the reality of modern feminism for me. Meanwhile, online, I was subjected to so much of the right, that it was malleable. None of…