Senior English major
Dear ladies,
If you’re reading this, I assume you’ve made it out of the binder. Nice!
Let me break down how the world works because I’m a man and you’re a woman, and, therefore, I need to teach you what you otherwise wouldn’t know. After all, your brain is smaller than a man’s. That’s what you mean by size matters, right?
We live in the fairest, most equal era of gender, race and sexuality relations in history, and guess what? It still sucks.
In the U.S., we have never realistically considered one of you for president. We make more money than you, we decide on legislation dictating your bodies and babies and, at one point, we even burned you at the stake — by way of trials directed by men — for being witches. You have to endure countless hypersexualized movies and stereotypes and endless stupid kitchen and cleaning jokes. Oh, and if that’s not bad enough, our only real value to you — our role in creating children (sexy time) — also happens to be our favorite hobby, pastime and what we think about all the time. C’est la vie!
From my male perspective, it seems this gender hierarchy has created a pretty gnarly “us vs. them” philosophy penetrating your billowier chests and living deep in your smaller hearts. This is feminism: a social philosophy, like all social philosophies, spurred by inequality and a desire for change. You’d think such fundamentally righteous ideas would resonate in our bigger brains and hearts.
Nope. Most of us don’t really respect feminists. To us, feminists are like mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are different from us. We lump you, mosquitoes and other people different from us together. We swat you away and call you annoying, feeble little pests who suck our blood and live off our life force. Because we — the top dogs of the world — assume everything is already equal. I mean, life is great for us! That’s why we fail to see you’re just trying to survive in the world we’ve made — you must live in our world and play by our rules.
Save a few good men, the best you’re going to get from us is apathy because caring about such injustices is inconvenient and makes our big heads hurt. Most of us either don’t believe we are equal (and therefore don’t care), or think you’re just complaining about nothing, because the word “feminist” has a negative connotation. When we don’t want to help, we cry out that you have hidden agendas and bad motives for simply wanting equality.
Men and feminists essentially have the same relationship as certain heterosexuals and same-sex marriage advocates. Some straight people have either an “I don’t care” or “no way in hell” mentality about gay men and women getting married. While one is actively hurtful to the gay community, the other isn’t too helpful, either.
So I guess what I’m saying is all that really needs to happen to get feminism rightfully thriving is a shift in our general philosophy and a little more patience from you. When we break down feminism to its barest parts, all we get is the fundamental human desire for balance, and yet we still can’t all stand together.
Stay focused. Keep doing what you’re doing. The good ones will come around eventually.
Signed,
Drew Farrell
P.S. High five, gentlemen!
From one of the guys.
Drew Farrell is a senior English major. He can be reached at opinionumdbk@gmail.com.
