History of Feminism

to a man, "Explain to me exactly why it is that I need to treat you like an equal." When we imagine a man saying it to another man, it is easy to imagine that the next action would be that the man who is required to justify his equality would slug the one demanding the explanation.

The epic rudeness of the act of requiring someone to justify their equality somehow never made it through my socialization brain fog before. Neither did the abasement that we put ourselves through just by the act of answering the demands for that justification.

Men (probably I should qualify that by saying "white men&quot are never asked to justify their relative worth. The requirement of that justification from women is a statement in itself. And it is a statement in which the following is tacitly understood: "You need to explain and justify this to me, because there is nothing I have ever run across before that convinces me of it."

I never once required a man to explain to me why I should not be treating them as a second class. And yet somehow I learned not to treat them that way. I never once demanded that a single one of them justify to me why I should not treat them with a fundamental disrespect based on their gender. And yet somehow I know how not to do that. Because I am a decent person.

If you need to have this explained to you over and over and over, you are either really very dim or you are not a decent person.