When it comes to being a woman on the internet, there are enough frustrating roadblocks every day to make your brain liquefy and dribble out your ear all gross (more frustrating roadblocks than there are fireplaces at Rosings Park, AMIRITE). But possibly the most frustrating of all are the gnashing hordes constantly demanding that you educate them, educate them, educate them. Oh, you write about sexism on the internet? Well, before we get into all that boring nuance and subtle gender dynamics that feminist scholars have been demarcating for years, can you just back up 17,000 steps and prove to me that inequality exists?

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Frank Bruni's op-ed on Monday, titled "Sexism's Puzzling Stamina," was painful in its simplicity. It's comforting to hear gender inequality stated so plainly—accepted so calmly and wholly—by someone outside of the feminist blogosphere. The fact is, our culture is still dealing with the same basic shit that was outraging kitchen-table progressives 20 years ago. We confuse comfort for freedom and then lambast women for complaining. We blame victims and apologize for predators. We dictate, to exacting standards, how women's bodies should look and move. We see nothing wrong with asking a female professional how her kids handle her frequent business trips, and whether or not she's considered staying home. We do not ask the same of men.

While racism and homophobia are treated, in mainstream discourse, like abominations (however meekly we might combat them and however aggressively they go to ground), sexism is still something of a grey area. Here's Bruni:

I keep flashing back more than two decades, to 1991. That was the year of the Tailhook incident, in which some 100 Navy and Marine aviators were accused of sexually assaulting scores of women. It was the year of Susan Faludi’s runaway best seller, “Backlash,” on the “war against American women,” as the subtitle said. It was when the issue of sexual harassment took center stage in Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings.

All in all it was a festival of teachable moments, raising our consciousness into the stratosphere. So where are we, fully 22 years later?

We’re listening to Saxby Chambliss, a senator from Georgia, attribute sexual abuse in the military to the ineluctable “hormone level” of virile young men in proximity to nubile young women.

And:

Our racial bigotry has often been tied to the ignorance abetted by unfamiliarity, our homophobia to a failure to realize how many gay people we know and respect.

Well, women are in the next cubicle, across the dinner table, on the other side of the bed.

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Maybe I shouldn't be so hostile. If you've been on the receiving end of a "hush, the grown-ups are talking" or a crying cat gif, and that was painful for you, my bad. After all you're just asking, and wasn't I just saying that I'm committed to discourse and critical thinking? Yes. I am. But here's the thing: you're not. This isn't a new derailing tactic—it's ancient. One million people have written about it before me. But if my Twitter feed is any indication, plenty of people haven't read up on their own bad behavior (weird) and need a goddamn refresher. So here's the late, great Derailing for Dummies on the subject. (Sometimes I just read Derailing for Dummies over and over again instead of therapy.)

By insisting you can only learn if they right then and there sacrifice further hours of time going over the same ground they have so often in the past, you may also make them give up and go away altogether, enabling you to win by default.

But further, you give the impression that you really want to learn, but they’re holding you back! That’s right, using this tactic you can suggest that full understanding is what you crave – you want to be a better, more connected and compassionate person – but it’s not your fault! Nobody ever gave you the education! And now that someone is here who is so obviously qualified, they’re denying you your Privilege® given right to have everything you want handed to you on a platter!

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http://jezebel.com/quit-fucking-asking-me-questions-a-refresher-course-512810149