Then your issue isn’t with ENM. It’s with men (I should also note that this equally applies to women and nonbinary people, but we’ll ignore them for now) staying in an ENM relationship that they clearly do not want. Why are they staying in that relationship? It’s worth exploring that.

Is it loneliness? Is it dependency? Is it a fear of not being able to find another partner? These are issues that we don’t often explore and try to help in men.

I definitely am sexist, likely in ways I don’t even know. I am working to fix those biases as I encounter them. It is tough, though in this particular situation, I don’t see those biases, so I’m trying not to be inconsiderate. I think I am holding men, women, and non-binary people to the same standard in this case.

But you are directly holding women responsible for ENM relationships when they didn’t really do anything wrong. If a man did the same thing, would you have an issue with it? If you want a harem and tell everyone in the harem about it, what’s the problem?

I did ask because I wanted to know. I just thought they were reasons to come to a different conclusion. Societal and cultural pressures on men aren’t dealt with to the same level as women, and we do leave men to fend for themselves because many men learned a set of behaviors that were tolerated until they weren’t. And that change can feel unfair. I think we can express masculinity in a positive way, allow us to focus on positive character traits and not physical ones.

There was a sentiment that you were hurt by someone who was ENM, and whether that was because you tried ENM and didn’t like it or whatever, it did seem to be tacked onto your perception of women. I just thought I’d try and give another view of it, in the off-chance that you or someone else reading this needed some more perspective.

Gonna be honest with you, these all mostly sounds like toxic masculinity, which isn’t really dealt with well by conservatives, mostly because they don’t like critical thinking and all that.

a lot of “ethically non monogamous” relationships that are basically a woman gaslighting their partner into letting them cheat on them

Um, I actually think it’s the opposite? It’s not cheating if all partners consent. If you don’t want to date someone who is ENM, then… don’t? Most ENM people don’t want to date monogamous people! That’s why you tell everyone before you do it (that’s the ethical part.)

women are highly encouraged to support other women regardless of circumstances. A failure to do so is implied to be sexist.

I don’t see the problem here? Is it bad to support women, or is it that they somehow support bad women? Do men not do similar?

In general there is this default assumption that a man is nefarious, usually with some reference to true crime or “the implication”.

This has some truth to it, and while I understand that this is, indeed, a sexist take, it’s one that is perpetuated by a patriarchal culture. Men have unreasonable standards thrust upon them the same way women do, but the standards are not necessarily equal in how they affect us, even on an individial level. Men are indeed seen as more violent as a whole, just as women are seen as sex objects as a whole, and working to change those societal pressures to conform to them is the point of pointing to “toxic masculinity.” There are good aspects to masculinity to admire, that we can try to positively adopt those, the same way that women try to adopt positive aspects of feminimity!

I actually see this the worst among conservative men and women. Conservative men and women tell you to “man up”, that “men don’t cry”, that you need to “take it with your own hands”, the idea of “alpha and beta males”. Very aggressive, and that’s a toxic mindset. The hard part about those cultural aspects is that they DO affect us all! Part of feminism is undersranding these biases within yourself and actively working to change them.

The first thing I do when I meet a woman I don’t know in a social setting is to somehow work in that I have a girlfriend in a way that feels organic, and a good amount of times I can see their body language shift

This actually goes both ways, too. Women very often have to tell men they aren’t interested, trying to tell them gently that they are taken. (There is the joke of “I have a boyfriend.” out of the blue to the most innocuous things.) This is a consequence of a society that pushes men to be the active pursuer of relationships. It is, frankly, stressful to have every interaction possibly be taken as a signal that you want a relationship. It is easy for me to understand their perspective because it feels like how my PTSD manifested. Trauma is hard to deal with, and being understanding and accomodating can also be hard, too.

There are a lot of single women I know that are very much architects of their own misery. They have super shallow dating standards, unrealistic expectations, and this mentality that if a man is attractive enough red flags are just misunderstanding.

Very much applies to anyone of any gender, so I’m not sure of the issue. I have seen this in cis-men, cis-women, trans-men, trans-women, enbies, gay men, lesbian women, and so on. This is not exclusive to women, and never will be.

• There are multi hundred member Facebook groups of women in every city that gossip about the men they date. This is obviously toxic, but the organizers frame it as a #metoo thing so it’s widely considered acceptable.

Okay? Don’t date them? I don’t see the issue, but discussing your partners isn’t particularly weird, and men do this too, and if it bothers you, well, don’t date anyone who does it.

• Basically everything I mentioned would be considered absolutely unacceptable if genders were reversed, but if you bring this up then you’ll get a pseudo academic lecture about historical oppression and the patriarchy that basically boils down to “it’s different when I do it”.

There’s some truth to that. Women are, ostensibly, an oppressed group, having less rights than men do, as well as being the one responsible when they get pregnant. They maintain a level of risk that most men do not have to face (though you could consider it a different type of risk, since men also face their own adversities that women typically do not.)

However, that’s irrelevant because none of the things you listed were women-exclusive behaviors, but I figured I would explain why it might be important just in case.

• This isn’t a big deal at all, but it’s sort of ridiculous that most women I meet both consider themselves feminist but will get peeved if men don’t pay for the date.

Don’t date them, then? I mean, I get it. I like when my dates offer to split, and I do judge them if they don’t. But it’s definitely silly to bring up as though they aren’t a feminist for engaging in that behavior. Progress is made incrementally, and sometimes we aren’t aware lf our own biases.

I support queer identities, but have become more conservative in my idea of monogamy and commitment.

Hey man, monogamy is a dating choice, just like ENM. No one makes you have to be one or the other. It is okay to be monogamous, but no one has ever oppressed monogamous people.

I even briefly considered staying home this election when it looked like the main line of attack democrats were gonna do was just to call republicans weirdos over and over again until November, because I’m personally just done associating myself with middle school mean girl politics.

It is really weird to me that you thought calling people weird for legitimately fascist behavior as a way of denormalizing that behavior was somehow a step too far, but the behavior that provoked it wasn’t, as if they hadn’t attempted to call the behavior out beforehand and were ignored.

If that was gonna dissuade you, then I think you might have bigger problems.

What behaviors do you mean and how does that correlate to being conservative?