Thank you for being a feminist. Men get a lot of shit for being feminists — sometimes even from female feminists — so I imagine it’s not an easy gig. I forgive the cheap first sentence because you are not the first male feminist to express this sentiment to me. However challenging I find that notion to be, I DO understand.

Allow me to defend myself for a moment — not as a woman, as a writer. You said that our tactics were to ridicule and poke fun. If you grabbed that idea from this post alone, I can see where you would think that. Yes I ridicules him. But that is because I know him and he is a clown. That’s not a feminist tactic. That’s my personal feeling. I am slowly learning that those two things cannot always be mutually exclusive.

I struggle with the idea that men are oppressive because they fear us for being “clever” or doing that weirdly beautiful birthing machine thing we do. Why is that frightening? Why is it so frightening that for years, that weirdly beautiful birthing machine thing was one of like 3 things we were ALLOWED to do, and even then we needed a sort of “permission” from a man? I understand what you are saying. I do. I don’t understand why —because we fear what you don’t know? Shall we start including racial comparisons? In another post, another day.

If there really are men out there that are afraid of women for all the reasons you mentioned, there are some who are existing with us harmoniously in a non-oppressive state. Some of those men, unlike you, do not claim to be feminists. So, there has to be a margin of men who aren’t feminists and don’t treat women like property and also think we matter as a gender.

As I opened up with in my post, I am aware that perfection is damn near unattainable. Part of my imperfection is not having said anything to this man to make him understand. I WANTED to understand him and he blamed me for his unwillingness to explain.

I don’t know everything about men. Most women don’t. We don’t understand men either and we are also afraid of them, because they rule us, are considered better than us, make more money than us. The tide rolls both ways.

I think you’re intelligent. Thank you for making me use my brain. Not everyone does that, and I am grateful.