Jesus fucking Christ, I take a nap and this happens?
This is the most absolutely fundamentally simple “argument” used by anti-feminists and you can blow it over with a snail fart.
Here is the fart in question: a mug labeled “male tears” or whatever is not equivalent or even remotely comparable to a globally entrenched and historically and statistically undeniable system of violence and domination. Especially because it’s a response to that system. Especially because it’s a response to men COMPLAINING that that system, in which they are privileged, is being challenged. The fact that anyone thinks it IS comparable is further evidence of the severity of that injustice.
Wow, I just blew my own mind.
Someone should write this down somewhere! Like, I dunno, in thousands and thousands of easily accessible FAQs, books, blogs, and every conceivable text-media format. Oh wait.
I’m not done though, because y'all are annoying my friend and clogging her feed and also apparently my reblog started this. So let’s use tumblr user @x7yearsofwinter’s comment as an object lesson. To save you the time of scrolling up, it was: “how can you expect men to respect women as equal humans when you treat them like a joke js.”
The answer is “because we are equal humans,” which is boring and obvious. Actually I’d take issue with the word “equal” because I have absolutely no interest in being structurally “equal” with a group of people who wield a hugely disproportionate amount of power, exercised through every kind of violence, including apparently passive privileges, over other people as a class. Which is unfortunate, because I’m white and white people (as a class) do this too, but it’s not nearly as unfortunate for me as it is for non-white people, by some orders of magnitude. Which is the whole point, and the reason I try to be an ally.
But really the only remotely interesting thing about the question is its basic presumption: that women have to do anything at all to “expect men to respect women as equal humans.”
Therein (and also in @facebooksexism’s saintly attempts to explain this thing) lies the answer to this entire riddle. We live in a world where this presumption is made. Routinely. By women, even. Forget the mug for a second. Within this presumption, as a woman, I cannot expect to be respected by men as an equal human being without DOING something to merit that expectation. I must earn my equality. Which is inherently impossible and ridiculous, because I am in a state of inherent inequality, because I have to earn my equality. See the feedback loop here? Imagine me making circular hand gestures at you; does that help? Is there some kind of little dance I could do to facilitate this?
So, snail fart aside, the very terms of the debate answer the question being debated.
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