Justice

12 Things So-Called Feminist Men Have Said To Women

August 18th 2015

The hashtag #ThingsFeministMenHaveSaidtoMe started trending Monday night on Twitter, highlighting some of the hypocritical comments so-called male feminists have said to women. The apparent idea behind the hashtag is that many males consider themselves male feminists but do not necessarily speak or behave in a way that a feminist male ought to.

"Many men seem to reach for the 'feminist' label first to shore up their sensitive-dude bona fides and, second, to get a little female validation," New York magazine writer Kat Stoeffel wrote last year. "[And it] works. Think of the praise lavished on Joseph Gordon-Levitt simply for saying what women have been saying all along: 'There’s a long, long history of women suffering abuse, injustice, and not having the same opportunities as men, and I think that’s been very detrimental to the human race as a whole.')... The fact is that even though you know better, and are truly a male feminist, you’re still stuck being the bad guy. You can’t opt out of the privileges you inherited at birth. Or, as my (male) feminist friend once put it, 'I’m not one of the good ones and neither are you and neither is anyone, FYI.'"


Last month, writer Alicen Grey broached the subject as well in a Medium post:

"If you’re a dude reading this, and you consider yourself a feminist, then I just have a few questions for you: Are you more likely to stop supporting the porn industry because it brutally exploits and abuses women — or because you’ve watched too much porn and now your dick won’t work properly?... And did you give a flaming crap about women’s issues (abortion, the wage gap, street harassment, sexual objectification in the media) before you became aware of feminism — or did you wait until you heard that men get hurt by patriarchy too, to start caring about how women get hurt by it?"

It's easy to question the intentions of feminist men when they don't walk the walk, and that's one of the reasons #ThingsFeministMenHaveSaidtoMe is going viral. Here are some powerful tweets about the hashtag.

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