The Making of a Monster (That Doesn’t Always Exist)

Not everyone who disagrees with you is a Nazi; you’re just paranoid and miserable

I was going to include this in my previous piece, The Tall Tale of the Radical Feminist “Supremacist” Movement, but that one deserved its own moment focusing on the slander of radical feminism, so I left this section out. Still, I think this topic also deserves its own space, something shorter, but important and worth talking about. So here goes…

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Photo by Vitaliy Shevchenko on Unsplash

Hot take: We need to get better at disagreeing with each other…

We need to get better at having conversations without immediately trying to convert someone, punish them, or humiliate them. Social media, combined with the worst bits of human nature (arrogance), has made that almost impossible. Every time someone says this, the response is often uncharitable and dramatic, like: “So you want me to debate Nazis?” or “So you expect me to politely engage with homophobes?” That defensiveness shows how little people listen and/or read before reacting. They’re always bracing for a fight, waiting for a perceived enemy.

A question or a disagreement now gets treated as a threat. I’ve fallen into this trap too. Someone might say, “I’m not sure about your statement that only women are oppressed, based on their sex. I’ve seen XYZ examples,” and because the internet is full of bad-faith actors, my knee-jerk reaction might be, They’re sexist, they’re minimising women’s oppression, they’re mocking feminism. But if I take a breath and read what they wrote (not what I think they wrote), they didn’t deny women’s oppression at all. They simply questioned a specific claim and provided examples. That is not an attack, it’s engagement. And we don’t even have to respond to these people. But if we choose to, we can do it without deciding from the outset that the other person is malicious, stupid, dangerous, or trying to rewrite our worldview. Maybe we disagree. Maybe we can learn something. Maybe nothing comes of it. Not every conversation has to turn into a damn war.

It’s so sad and unhelpful that the instinct, now practically built into social media culture, is to take a mildly dissenting comment, rip it out of context, repost it, and turn it into a moral spectacle. “Look at this awful person!” “Look at this bigot!” If the comment is genuinely abusive, slurs, threats, trolling, fine. Delete it, block, move on. But when someone expresses a contrary view in good faith, or simply misunderstands something, launching into public shaming mode says more about the reactor than the comment itself. This is especially true in feminist spaces, which should be the one place where women can disagree without turning each other into demons. There are feminist thinkers I disagree with all the time! If someone says something about rape, oppression, or gender that hits a nerve, the adult thing is to listen properly to the words spoken, not to fill the gaps with whatever horrifying meaning I’ve preloaded in my head. Take Germaine Greer, for instance. She once said, “I was raped… but it didn’t kill me,” and “it was a fuck.” My first reaction when I heard that was shock, that high blood pressure kicked in, and my brain leapt straight to: she’s minimising rape, she doesn’t care about women who’ve been assaulted!

But if I sit with it for longer than a millisecond, if I truly listen instead of projecting everything I fear and abhor onto her words, what she’s saying becomes more complicated than my gut reaction allows. I can still disagree strongly, passionately, but my disagreement shouldn’t morph into character assassination. She said something I disagree with (big whoop), maybe even something I find painful, but that alone doesn’t require me to cast her as a villain or pretend I can psychoanalyse her morals and politics from a single sentence. And sure, some people genuinely are manipulative or doing plausible-deniability bullshit à la Charlie Kirk. But if you assume everyone who disagrees with you is doing that, you’re going to develop a level of paranoia that makes genuine conversation impossible. Not every argument is a coded attack. Not every person raising a question is some ideological threat to your safety or identity.

Lately, though, social media (especially Substack) has supercharged the paranoia and the opposite instinct: demonisation and exaggeration. A mild disagreement becomes an “attack.” A critique becomes “harassment.” People inflate everything because exaggeration gets validation, sympathy, clicks, and a cleaner narrative. Nuance doesn’t go viral; theatrics do. And along with exaggeration comes the habit of shoving strangers into what they deem undesirable demographic boxes to make the narrative more satisfying. Sometimes people even assign you a race (white), a sexuality (straight), a political faction (right wing), anything that helps them paint you as a familiar villain. Facts become optional if the caricature is compelling enough. It’s very weird seeing people confidently declare things about someone they’ve never spoken to in real life, based solely on what their narrative requires…

Meanwhile, most of these conflicts online are far more mundane: it starts off with someone disagreeing with someone, that someone doesn’t like it, they panic, they escalate it, and suddenly there’s a whole telenovela built around a moment that lasted five minutes. Like bestie, someone just said something you didn’t like; there wasn’t a Nazi in your comments.

I try to keep my own critical thinking and sanity intact by keeping things simple. Abusive comments: block and delete. Trolling: block and delete. Bait: ignore or delete. Comments that seem good faith but misguided: I might ask questions, or I might not. Sometimes I engage; sometimes I don’t. And the world keeps turning. The thing I refuse to do anymore is assume that everyone who disagrees with me is a monster. Or that every conflict is some grand moral crisis. Or that I need to turn my personal discomfort into a public narrative about being persecuted. That instinct doesn’t build character, resilience or community; it ruins it. It makes us weak thinkers, weak feminists, weak people.

So maybe the challenge, for all of us, is to slow down, breathe, read and listen to what someone actually said instead of what we fear they meant, and not immediately weaponise disagreement as a way to perform moral outrage. Because if we keep treating every difference of opinion as a threat, then what’s the point?