I think his best points are essentially the soft bigotry of low expectations thought, and how trigger warnings
I've had male students ask me to avoid triggers, most of them veterans who fought wars in situations that would make you piss your pants with fear, and kept going anyway to the point of losing limbs in the name of
your civil liberties. You calling them
weak, because they asked for a simple courtesy?
Or is it just women who are "weak" because they were brave enough to go up to a professor and ask for what they need, regardless of the backlash they know will most likely result? Believe me, there are plenty of professors who are like you, quick to belittle anyone who dares ask for help with something.
If suffering in silence unnecessarily because you lacked the assertiveness to ask for a change is a "masculine" trait, I'm not sure it's one worth keeping. No wonder so many men are screwed up in the head.
The cost of masculinity is being actively in danger for no reason? Again, as a man with a
brain I say no thank you to that stupid idea.
Are you suggesting that "real men" would just sort of put up with being constantly sexually harassed and talked down to? I assure you, with the weight of experience, that the standard braindead male response to a gay man coming up and "posing" at them in a suggestive way is not "politely, silently, demurely ignore it".
Protesting being talked down to
like you are a child is infantilizing? Someone who is free from infantilization gets talked down to and likes it? Are you a child yourself, or is this really your thought process?
are attempts to infantilize women.
So you're claiming that
protesting infantilization (which is what mansplaining
is) is infantilizing, while excusing from criticism those who directly try to infantilize women, by talking to them like they are five?
As is the stuff they do in women's studies about the "male gaze" etc.
That is a simple observation about the media. Anyone who works in it knows they pull shit for the gratification of male viewers, while avoiding doing things that would make them uncomfortable. Recognizing the blinkeringly obvious is somehow infantilizing?
As is the stuff we see occassionally about holding men but not women responsible
No one says this.
and having agency in various contexts.
It's weak to demand agency? Having the
ability to act is itself somehow weakening?
He is saying essentially that early feminists were about women being equal and tough (anything you can do, I can do, better) and that the new feminism is about them being weak and in need of special protection. He harkens the latter back to Victorian times when they were considered the "weaker" or "fairer" sex.
So if women were "equal and tough", they would shut up, whereas demanding change on issues of concern, by force if necessary, makes one weak and in need of protection? On what planet would this make logical sense?
He takes the opposite stance from people like Jordan Peterson about gender roles. Peterson would say women get paid less on average partly because they are less assertive. O'Neil calls that wrong and feels women can be just as assertive as men. He says we don't need to change workplaces to make them more "women friendly" etc and women should fight it out like the men do and like many women are.
Of course they
can be. The point is that they shouldn't have to be. Whose stupid rule is it that one gender should be forced to imitate meaningless, insulting caricatures of the other just to "earn" equal pay and positions?
Also, he doesn't know jack about early feminism.
And in any case, you're asking for two things at once, for women to be more assertive, and also less noisy. Or should they only be assertive about things
you approve of, rather than what is actually on their mind?
