Hi. I don’’t know if I can make you feel less disgusted but perhaps just less angry.

1) Why is it not plagiarism?

In short it’s because a) he changed it substantially enough to make it a derivative work, using a style which is a well known method in which one re-writes a work to demonstrate a point about how it might be perceived if it was put into a different context and b) he has that acknowledgement of and link to her original post as inspiration.

My opinion is that the text he did take directly from Kel’s original post would be considered fair use BUT fair use doesn’t mean you can use it without credit and I’m pretty sure that if he originally posted it without that link then he would have been in pushing it. As long as that credit is there to cover the amount of words he actually took straight from her piece then he’s probably fine.

2) Why does his article not undermine Kel’s points?

Again, this is just how I see it but I see a couple of reasons:

a) The deconstruction fails because the examples he uses to "answer" Kel’s examples aren’t equivalent and if he wants to use this particular style of attack then they need to be. A stranger performing a trivial act that he considers a politeness but which impacts a woman in unwanted, unnoticed ways and which the woman feels afraid to rebuff is nothing like the date you’ve spent the whole evening with expecting you to pay for dinner. The stranger at a bar flirting to get them to pay for a drink is closer but since cash is exchanged and it potentially suggests time spent drinking it together (even if it is a shot) it’s far less trivial and is easily rebuffed without fear (in the vast majority of circumstances). Being called a cunt on Reddit is obviously nothing like a woman being called a cunt by a man in person.

b) Even if the deconstruction was successful and he had shown that men experience exactly the same discrimination as women it’s irrelevant. Discrimination against one group does not cancel out or make acceptable the discrimination of another group – even if said discrimination is performed each by the other group. At best all he would be arguing is "we’re discriminated against, too." To which the appropriate response is "Oh dear, that’s terrible we must do something about that, too."

I don’t know if that helps but that’s how I see it. The loss of Kel is awful but really, it’s best just not to give these guys oxygen because their arguments are mostly bunk anyway.