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Happy holidays everyone! I read a comment on here a while back that said something like "the goal of FDS is to get off of FDS", that to be a HVW is to no longer need refreshers on handbook principles. I feel like now, more than ever, one of my personal goals is to get offline as much as possible. While I love FDS and the awareness it gave me, I think we are now far past the point of psychoanalyzing content about men from other platforms.
Yes, most men are trash, but continuously adding more proof to the pile has the side effect of reinforcing the belief that you will never find a man. There's a critical phase in pickme recovery where women are reliant on FDS and other radfem resources while they work on deprogramming themselves because mainstream self-improvement is overwhelmingly dominated either by narratives that benefit the patriarchy and vague libfem platitudes.
A self-aware pickme that has not yet accessed FDS/radfem only has the memories of how badly she was treated by scrotes around her and these nebulous messages about "getting a hobby" and "working on herself" from mainstream sources. Because men do not benefit from her recovery, no one is interested in helping her except places like FDS. I think the FDS handbook, FDS-approved literature, and the complete works of Andrea Dworkin provide most, if not all the necessary information for pickmes in recovery.
Recently, a lot of the forum posts I'm seeing are just sharing ragebait content from around the internet made by or about men. I try to only contribute my real-life, in-person experiences as much as possible because I think it helps more newcomers. At some point, it gets not only depressing to look at displays of male depravity, it starts becoming genuinely poisonous. Yes, it is healthy and natural to be afraid of men, but it is not healthy to simultaneously desire a HV partner and be so afraid of men that you hate them. I think for a lot of you, if your perfect HVM just fell out of the sky and you got in a relationship, that would be all you needed to stop going on FDS altogether except to share success stories. This obsession with men on the internet needs to stop.
I want women on FDS to be able to log off! I want you all to not even have time to write posts on here because you're busy living your best life; it's what our past pickme selves deserve and need. There is a huge difference between women supporting each other through recovery on this forum versus continually bringing trash into the house for all of us to look at and agree, once again, that men are horrible/only have the audacity. Information about patriarchy does nothing if we don't take the action OFFLINE to break out of the oppressive systems that have programmed our default methods of thinking about ourselves.
So I ask, what are you doing to get off this forum?
FDS is for me life a warm bath: relaxing to be around like-minded women, and a place to retreat once in a while.
Some days it feels like the whole world hates women, and it’s nice to know there is a community of us who see what’s happening, and we can help each other thrive and grow.
I stay to encourage others, and to remind myself of what’s true. I’m grateful for this community.
I’m older and not currently dating. But when I was younger, I made every pickme mistake in the book. So if I can help even one women avoid the pain of being a pickme, it’s worth it.