Entitled and re: Entitled
My response to a dude who was JAQing off in a rape thread on FB and got very huffy when I told him to stop it:
" Just to talk to you human-to-human for a second-I have been where you are. I know it’s uncomfortable to have a person jump down your throat for what seem to you well-meaning statements and arguments. But there are two reasons that I’ve chosen to engage with you this way:
"1. Being a professor is what I do for a living; I don’t work for free. What you’ve done here isn’t educate yourself-you are asking others to put in the hard work of educating you. You are repeating things that we have heard a million times before and getting frustrating when those ideas are treated like the nonsense they are. I get it-it is a blow to your ego. But it’s an important thing to learn if you truly want to be an advocate for women and against rape culture. Education is something you have to do yourself, by listening, asking questions, reading and learning. You can’t ask the teacher for the answer (a good teacher doesn’t give it.) You have to go and do the work of figuring it out because the lesson IS figuring it out for yourself.
"2. Being a good advocate also means that you interrupt the dominant paradigm where possible. Just as I was yelled at by the black folks that I well-meaningly argued with when I was first engaging with anti-racist work, so too must you endure your hurt feelings now in order to (hopefully) learn a larger truth-that oppressed people don’t owe you anything.
"No one is obliged to spend their time educating you.
"Julie has been incredibly gracious to you and deserves your thanks for her generosity, but that generosity is not owed to you. As a man, you are cultured to think that women owe you their time, their attention, and their kindness. Being a good advocate means retraining your brain to realize that this is false. Interrupting the dominant paradigm of micro-aggressions against women (esp on this topic) means that you don’t come into the convo with expectations and a sense of entitlement.
I do understand that this is difficult. I don’t expect you to do this perfectly. But I do expect and demand that you do better than you’ve done here. If you can’t treat women like human beings, then your allyship is worthless.”
Of course, he comes back to the thread TWO DAYS LATER to tell me how “hurt” he is that I “attacked his character” and how I’m just “mean.”
This is why I don’t try to talk to dudes with shitty attitudes about feminist issues, honestly. They act like misogynists, but demand you give them the benefit of the doubt that they aren't really misogynists. They argue with me about my own lived experience, but then protest that they are “just learning” and that “arguing helps their process.” They fly into a rage when I refuse to hold their hand and lead them gently to a point, all the while soothing their egos in hushed tones.
It is really not worth it most of the time.