Male expectations

[map_of_the_world]

Something that really, really pisses me off is men expecting women to educate them on feminism and at the same time behaving like they are doing us a favour or its some great benevolent act on their part that they are interested.

I was sorting the emails in the feminist group email account the other day and one of the emails was from a male student basically wanting to come a long and take notes on the group, and interview "key members" for an assignment he was doing.

he prefaced this by saying i hold pro feminism views, although my knowledge is quite hazy at best, how can you hold pro feminist views if your knowledge of feminism is hazy exactly? How can you know feminism (or any political movement) is something you want to support until you know what it is?

Anyway I told him no, he couldn't come and take notes, because we were not guinea pigs, members may very well feel uncomfortable and guarded in what they say if they knew it was going to be written up by someone outside the group, it wasn't our job to educate men about feminism and we were an egalitarian group so we didn't have "Key members"

And he sent me this really rude passive aggressive email in reply, clearly pissed off that we wouldn't cater to his needs. He told me I hadn't understood what he was asking when I clearly had. Ive noticed that the passive aggressive thing is really common as well, it happens a lot online when men post to feminist blogs asking completely inane questions which are totally googleable and then the female posters are like "go find out for yourself" and the men say something like "I was only trying to learn, you should be pleased/grateful I'm interested" Like what does he want a cookie?


Its not that I think men shouldn't be involved in feminism, I think they should, our group is open to men, I just think it is not our job to educate them on what feminism is, there are plenty of resources both online and in book form that they can find to educate themselves.

It has always been women's job to cater to men's need and wants and I'm dammed if I'm going to let that happen in feminist spaces.

Comments

[vientral.livejournal.com]

The general idea of feminism being equality essentially. It just doesn't seem equal to automatically include a woman and treat a man with derision, anger even. He may have shown himself to be ignorant but your response seems have done nothing but encourage his negative attitude and if your response would have been different for a woman it just doesn't seem fair to me.