I hate how we push boys and young men into radical communities then treat them with contempt even when they try to leave.

I had an experience yesterday that just left me feeling very upset. This guy made a pretty borderline-misogynistic post about how his experience seeing a shady acquaintance of his routinely hook up with married women made him scared of trusting women.

Now, I really hate doing this, but already like if we swapped genders, if I posted the same thing about men, everyone would be sympathetic. I've known a dozen or more women who have said as much in real life and online and nobody was ever rude to them about it. In fact, many women who consider themselves proud feminists encourage these feelings of mistrust!

Back to this man... I clicked his page and his recent posts were about how he is an incel and he's trying to change. He stopped consuming red pill/incel content on social media, and he's touching grass and trying to do better, but he still struggles sometimes.

So I tried to write out an empathetic response to his post that encouraged him to continue healing from his time in that community and to try and embrace a non-toxic, non-hateful outlook.

The incel community is hateful, cruel, and terrible, and they hate me just for being a woman. I want there fo be zero incels. So if I see someone trying to leave that community and abandon those beliefs, I will praise them, I will try to help them reach their goal.

But instead of anyone else trying to help this person, educate them, etc, he was treated with hatred, borderline abuse, he was insulted, called a loser and other things.... this was in a community where you aren't supposed to judge the poster, where the goal is to treat them with empathy. And every empathetic comment was talked over or downvoted to death.

It just makes me sad. I don't know what will happen with this guy. My fear is the hostility he experienced drove him back to the incel community, and now this man who had the potential and the desire to be good and do better is just... lost.

Maybe not, maybe he shrugged it off and got better. But why do we do this? We complain all the time about men being seduced by hateful communities and stuff and nobody wants incels, but when someone tries to get away from all that we treat them with abuse! WHY? It feels like the people there care more about bullying people than stopping incels.

These communities are able to reach young boys and men because they make them feel heard and treat them like they matter.... we see that doing this works. WHY CAN'T WE DO THAT TOO?! Why not? I'm so mad about this, we know how to intervene and help people get away from that stuff and we just don't do it because we'd rather project our rage at the community onto them.