The truth is that any oppressed group struggling for equality and for full socio-political representation will meet with resistance from the overculture, and their efforts to organise against injustice and violence will meet with resistance - overt or covert - from that more privileged group. Part of the reason for this is that whilst equality battles are never an attack on the overculture, they always challenge it - they demand that it change its attitudes and its self-perception. That’s what International Women’s Day still does, by demanding that men and women across the world stop accepting violence against women as a fact of life.
So yes, guys, we are challenging you. We want you to see us as complete human beings, and we want you to be as outraged by physical and sexual attacks on us as you would be by physical and sexual attacks on members of your own group. We want you to unite with us to stop violence against women, without seeing that struggle as in some fucked-up way a threat to your own self-conception as men. Yes, we want you to change. Instead of shouting us down, stand up for your own rights alongside us, as allies.
And challenge us back: I guarantee that you will not find us wanting. Because, if you think about it, we all know what it’s like to feel unsafe walking home alone at night. We all know what it’s like to fear male violence. We know what it’s like to be physically threatened, to be scared, to be cowed by the ubiquity of male aggression, especially if we’re in some way weak, or feminine, or different. And we can all take a stand against that, without getting into these silly fucking scraps over whose oppression tastes best.
