Olushuyi Olutimilehin First, thank you for taking time out to respond to this post. I read through your response twice to truly understand your point of view and i find it informative to say the least. I was heartbroken to hear of your personal experience with violent sexism — a key part i didn’t include in my post. I wrote this post quite frankly from personal experience so i understood its limitations and expected strong disagreements as well — i welcome this as it makes for better quality conversation.
To your first point about it being unfair to feminists having to bear the additional responsibility to educate patriarchal men, i quite agree. You’re right, it is unfair. Women have been through unbelievable harm from gender inequality and i think it is for this very reason we must still educate even though it isn’t fair and it is an additional burden. It is in our interest we do, we are the beneficiaries of the imbalance and we know better. Perhaps, the term responsibility/duty comes from my personality. You come across to me as an idealistic person and we share that in common; over time I’ve come to realize that the ideal is the goal and the journey there is usually much less than.
Secondly, i understand the fact that some people will never accept feminism no matter how it is presented merely because of its sensitivity and how disruptive it can be, honestly i get that. For me, i think this even underscores the importance of how our message is communicated. Your worry about tone policing is valid, and we can put that into consideration however, on a basic level communication is a mixture of what you say and how you say it, irrespective of how people will perceive it, it is our responsibility to communicate as effectively as possible from our end.
On the issue of fighting men, i honestly didn’t write this post with the spotlight on on violent patriarchy and sexism as you’ve rightly pointed out and i can only imagine the horrors that the experience entails — it sounds horrible and I’m sorry you or anyone had to go through that. It also is easy for me to say because of my lack of personal experience, but as with other areas of my life of great pain i’ve realised it is a slippery slope and it is important that we take care to despise the terrible act — speak openly and fight it, but not necessarily fight the entire class of person (in this case, men) because then we are prone to the error of generalization.
I can’t say how glad i am you added to this conversation — what i can say is it has most definitely added to my perspective on feminism (and i guess other readers too) and that counts for a whole lot.
