"Oh God, Not another Femi-Nazi!"

"It's men with low self-esteem who give women and other men the most problems, from subtle condescension to grandiosity and outright violence."
-Gloria Steinem

Ladies, raise your hand if you have ever been in a relationship with a man who has hit you or used words to slash your self esteem and make you feel lower than himself?

Raise your hand if there has been more than one. Raise your hand if you have friends or family who have gone through similar shit?

Now did this happen because you were on drugs, wear skimpy clothes or are extremely emotionally unstable? Did you meet these men in the gutter? Or on college campuses, offices and well reputated areas? Did all of these men come from extremely dysfunctional backgrounds? Or were they actually raised in fairly decent environments, come from good families and were bread to be “normal” people? And finally, were you and all your friends into “bad boys” when you met these guys, or were you just looking for a regular guy to treat you well and have a stable relationship with?

Ok, so let me get this straight, the statistics of women being abused by men is not something you just hear about on the news, about far away women in far away places??? It is happening to you and your friends.?It is not an outdated, old fashioned phenomena, it is happening to young women. It is not happening to provocative, out of control, or unstable women, who looove bad men and clearly had it coming to them? Instead it is happening to anyone who has the misfortune of crossing a gender bully.

Ladies a new occurrence has happened within our everlasting gender feuds....women have given in and men have lost control. For all of you who “don't need feminism” because of this or that, or because you're hot, or are not a “man hater”, please do not come crying back here when it happens to you. For those of you who think every woman who's met a bad man, or been beaten or abused must have a self esteem issue or be dysfunctional, then next time you get robbed and complain about it I'm going to call you a thief magnet, who was clearly provoking someone to steal shit from you.

However, stigma is stigma, and feminism has turned into the dreaded feminazi. Twitter has spread that idiotic #I don't need feminism “movement.” For all of you who don't need feminism, please take a look at this:

Rihanna after boyfriend, Chris Brown Physically Abused her

This is the face of a beautiful, successful and well educated woman who got her ass handed to her by her boyfriend, in a contemporary, civilized country where gender issues no longer exist....right? You fucking need feminism, like we all need the police, as soon as shit truly hits the fan. Thats when we all come crying back to our protectors of morality, yet condone them as soon as we are living our cushy, comfortable lifestyle. But its no longer safe in your urban upper class areas, because gender bullying has become subtle. It is starting at much younger ages and sets women up for a lifetime of hurt and misfortune when it comes to her relationship with the opposite sex. It causes deep seated resentment, pain that is almost palpable and bruises the self esteem. These are the types of problems that do not end once the outer wounds heal, they take years to go away.

For the sake of not falling into stupid stereotypes or stigmas that people have around the word feminism I would like to contribute a new terminology to this entire situation, so that anyone suffering this type of situation can have the courage to unite with others in the same boat without fear of becoming totally ostracized or called an “insert-gender-here- Hater.”

Gender bullying is what I refer to when a member of a gender uses his attributes or innate social advantage to create a false sense of superiority over members of the opposite gender. Gender bullying occurs through rhetoric, physical violence, de-humanizing and chronoically mistreating the opposite sex. Gender bullying starts before puberty, when small distintions in gender are used to create a superior and an inferior, a winner and a loser and usually solidified from the teenage years into the late twenties when courtship, or finding a mate is used as a way to fully establish the idea of a dominant and a subordinant person.

Recently,with the backlash of “those dreaded women” who actually saught to be treated equally, came a need for the opposite sex to make weakness within females an inside job. That is to say, instead of going out into the Real World and finding a male chauvinist pig for a boss, sexually harassing you, the gender bully is sitting on the couch waiting for you to get home. We are in relationships with them. Not because we condone it, but simply because we get caught in it, we get hit by it and by the time we realize what is in front of us, we have already been weakened. Kind of like that famous frog put into warm water, who doesnt know that the water is slowly reaching a boiling point until he is dead.

There are many shapes, forms and situations of gender bullying and because this is such a large and complex issue, for now I am only going to focus on the most basic point: the male-female relationship.

I would like to unravel a basic Gender-Bullying situation in the hopes that we can begin to identify and stand up to this increasing problem.

Basic Gender Bullying in the Male-Female Relationship

1. A man who appears fairly normal, comes from a decent background, is educated and has a job shows an interest in a female(you!). He shows a strong interest in pursuing you until you show the slightest interest in him. Now the ball is in his court.
2. He engages in what they call in spanish “dar una de cal y otra de harena” which means giving complements followed by digs. This step is important because it stuns the woman and leaves her in a constant state of shock where she can never fully understand the signal the man is sending her.  Back in the day, men did this because they believed that nice guys finished last and that they should “kind of be a jerk” in order to impress a women. However nowadays, this is used to clasp what I call a  low self-esteem anchor around a womans' legs. That is to say, if you stunt a womans self esteem, she will feel unable to walk away from a man, as she will feel she needs the man in question to improve her self esteem, which he will do temporarily before he proceeds to insult her again and so the cycle continues.
3. Sex is used as a form of control and any form of pleasure towards sex or approval, encouragement, compliments that you give to the man are used as advantages that the man takes over you. Instead of using your kindness as a “truce” towards his internal battle against women, he uses it as a point in which he sees you with your guard down and can easily take advantage of you.
   Sex is also used as a way to impose physical expectations about your body, hair color and dress. Once you have become naked and vulnerable to a gender bully, he can use your intimacy to make small remarks about what he has found inadequate about you in order to keep you down.
4. You begin to feel exhausted and like something is wrong with you. You think you might be depressed because of something else. You may even have muscle pains or start to look less attractive. Like anyone being bullied, your vital energy has been drained, but unlike in bullying situations which have been openly identified and publicized through the media, you do not know exactly what is wrong with you. Since the man you are with is not constantly a jerk, nor does he leave scars on you for others to see, you do not know how to understand or express what is happening to you. You try to seek compassion from others, but often any signs of standing up for women is shrugged off as being a “Femi-nazi” or “Man-hater”. You are afraid that if you raise your voice or show yourself to be less than docile, you will be shunned as undesirable by most men.
5. Somehow, you finally get out of this toxic situation, however, you are still not completely sure what happened. Was he nice or a jerk? Was it him or your own self esteem? Will your girlfriends look at you as a failure, or will they understand? What you may not know is that your are still vulnerable from what has happened to you and as in all bullying situations, you unconsciously attract more gender bullies. The mere fact of explaining your last relationship with uncertainty instead of saying : “He was an asshole and it was not my fault.” can make you seem docile and easy to take advantage of. But ofcourse can't you imagine shouting the previous statement and immediately being labeled a “manhater”, “dammaged,” or emotionally unstable?

Like in all my posts, I never delve into situations without a self-help silver lining. Although the ones who really need help are the gender bullies, you will have to heal yourself to make sure these types of people star far far away from you. And I will need to underline that gender bullies are becomming more and more common these days. They are common because we keep falling for it. We keep thinking that changing the way we look, feeling inferior and becomming docile is a natural part of being in a relationship. It is total BULLSHIT.

Here are my steps to Healing from Gender Bullying.

1. Use the steps I just described to Identify the situtation. In the case of a male/female relationship, it doesnt just happen with boyfriends, it could be a date, a hookup or a long time friend who wants something more from you. Any man looking to gain sex from you could be a potential gender bully. Another way to identify the bully is if he himself has low self-esteem, which he will usually confess to you as a sweet vulnerability,met with a sting of backlash that he throws in your face. Here's an example:
   Gender Bully: Yeah, so i recently lost my job.
   Girl: Oh don't worry, we've all been there.
   GB: Yeah you would know wouldn't you.

That subtle insult just makes you raise an eyebrow long enough where you feel the dig, but are labeled crazy for calling it out. Another sign of a gender bully is how you feel around them. Any signs of anxiety, unease or even nausea mean RUN.

Remember gender bullies can even pull drive bys on just one date, they don't need a reason, the reason is them and they are losers looking to find a woman to put down.

2. Once you have identified gender bullying situations, they could be repeated bad dates, bad conversations online or an asshole ex boyfriend, its time to go sexless. I know it sounds extreme, but it truly is for the very best. There is a 100 percent chance that your vibrator will give you an orgasm everytime you use it. A gender bully may do the same if he's amazing(which he most likely is not) however, the aftermath of all his jabs will completely counter whatever pleasure you have felt with him. The next reason to go sexless is that you cannot be in an alert state of mind, scanning the area for gender bullies while you are under the influence of sexual domination. Sex is an act which invariably makes women vulnerable and steps into their intimacy. If that vulnerability has been abused and that intimacy violated then it is time for a cleanse. Instead I urge you to use your body as a canvas for art in any way that interests you. Make your body as beautifull, healthy, well fueled and pleasing to your own eye as it can be. You are in charge of your temple.
3. Use education to counter emotional scarring. The more you know the more powerful you become. Sculpt your body into something beautiful and fill your mind with knowledge. Grab a hold of anything that interests you and explore it. Also, when you are ready, continue reading about other strong women or people who have stood up to bullies in general. Become knowledgable of other situations of oppression such as racism or socio-political genocide and understand that all oppression bleeds the same. The down trodden are universally the same so channel those who lead the down trodden, the great leaders, and become inspired by such figures. You will notice that they were all more evolutionary advanced, intelligent, peaceful and most importantly, that their powerful memories outlive those of the worlds famous bullies.
4. If need be, see the gender bully for who he truly is: under evolved. He is a caveman who feels that he is losing control of what the world falsely promised him: an inferior gender at his disposal to step on. Use your mind to slap his false sense of glory off of his face to expose a low life loser who has used bringing the opposite sex down to somehow get ahead in life.

5. Now that your temple is beautiful, your mind is full and that beer bellied basterd starts to look more and more like a run down buick than a ferrari, walk with your head held high. And the next time you chose to get back out there, keep it way up high, with your guard and sense of alertness at the exact same level. If they don't make the cut, fuck it, just keep doing you!
   Hope you enjoyed this post ladies and good luck out in the Jungle!