I'm tired.
So very, very tired of having to see tides of sexism, and the inevitable flotsam of "But it's not sexism!" that follows in their wake. The filthy eddies of "They're just kids acting up, they don't know how the world really works, they don't appreciate how good they have it, we know better" that circulate in closed dead-end areas where the water of new perceptions can't wash through.
The "oh, these young kids and their demands" thing is really the most annoying. "Women in our day didn't make a fuss! It couldn't have been a problem!"
Except, yeah, they did make a fuss. Some of them went to jail or were assaulted or killed for making a fuss, but many of them continued to make a fuss anyway. A smart, logical person might conclude that a thing worth dying for must be really important to that person who died.
If you don't think there was fussing going on, it's because you have conveniently forgotten about it. Most of the time the fussing doesn't reach you, because you don't have so much to fuss about, at least in the realm of "people assuming things about you because of your gender and then refusing to believe they are incorrect when you point out that their assumption is wrong."
Saying that it's young people making all the fuss is so strange. Who do you think the young people learned to fuss from? Are you suggesting that contemporary young women who don't want to hear again about how they are oh so decorative just came up with this idea on their own? They they somehow didn't read about women in the 60s burning their bras, or women in the 40s wanting to wear pants, or women 100 years ago wanting to be allowed to vote?
I have news for you: a 40-year-old-woman has heard "You should be more ladylike, you should worry about your looks, you should find a nice man to take care of you" twice as much as a 20-year-old-woman, and an octogenarian twice as much as that. (It's called math, fellows. You're supposed to be the gender that's good at it, remember?) Depending on her individual disposition and countervailing factors in her life, she may have accepted these statements, because it's a lot easier to go along with shit than to fight against it. At least if you go with the flow, you only get the same amount of localized shit on you. Going upstream means all new varieties of shit washing over you.
And some women have fought their way upstream and they're tired, but dammit, they're going to keep fighting, because somewhere off in the distance, they think maybe they will find the Source Of All Shit, the cloaca coming from the misogyny factory, polluting these waters. The shit gets denser and purer the closer they get. But maybe if we can get there, we can figure out how to cap that shit off, or follow it back into the factory and stand there, covered in foul-smelling slime and old candy wrappers and used condoms and needles; to stand there on the factory floor stinking up the place and offending the hell out of the people working there, and say, "Hey, folks, what say you try manufacturing something else here? Or at least not dumping it in our drinking water?"
So yes, if there seems to be more fuss now than there was before, and the response to that fuss is even nastier, harder, more vicious counter-fuss, that's because maybe, just maybe, we're getting closer to shutting down the factory. We've managed to eliminate some of the bad pollution in the social environment: women can vote*, they can own property, they can earn their own money. It is considered generally unacceptable to assault them (even if this is mostly in theory rather than practice. Still, a few steps ahead of other times and places).
But no, it's still not enough. Just because our drinking water is no longer laced with arsenic and lead and nuclear waste doesn't mean we're satisfied to have drinking water infested with e-coli. There's still a lot of cleaning up to be done. I'm glad the younger people are stepping up to fuss, because frankly, I'm tired. I'm weary. I need the help of those young'uns to remind me why I swim in the shit, to encourage me to get back into it rather than just climb out of the flood and go be thirsty, albeit unpoisoned.
Keep fussing, people. And when others scream, "WHY ARE YOU FUSSING?!?" know that you are closer to the source, and closer to shutting it down. The screaming is the defense and security system around the factory. It means you came to the right place, and are addressing the correct polluters.
*I'm focusing on US/Europe/mostly Western culture here. I can't even begin to get started on places such as Saudi Arabia, because they are so goddamn backward on this point that their women are going to have to do all the steps that Western women did 100 years ago. I wish they didn't, but alas, I don't know how they're going to get change until a conspicuous number of them start dying in the streets in protests. It's awful, and I hope we find a way to inspire change swiftly enough without all the horribleness, but history shows that change is always accompanied by violence of one sort or another.