Good Riddance

I try not to post too much about the politics of social media, but it's the world we live in now.

I try not to complain about the commenters who tell me to just go ahead and hang myself. I just block them and move on.

But this one is a story I thought worth telling.

Sometimes, you have the opportunity to actually get to know someone by what they choose to post, so I accepted a friend request from someone who was just an acquaintance.

It wasn't long after I started watching his posts roll by in my feed that I saw the kicker.

He declared that if any of his Facebook friends were "rad-fems" (radical feminists), they should go ahead and unfriend him. Not only that, but if any of us thought that the United States has a patriarchal government, just do him a favor and block him.

Now, sometimes people say things like that just to stir things up. When you don't really know someone all that well, it's hard to decipher what they're getting at—or ascertain their tone—when you're just reading their words.

Instead of unfriending or blocking him, I replied that some people think that all feminism is radical feministm, and if he was one of those people, then he could go ahead and unfriend me, if he wanted to.

And, by the way, our government is patriarchal, so he could block me if that was really a problem.

And you know what? He unfriended and blocked me.

And I say, good riddance.

Being a feminist simply means that you think that women should be treated equally with any other gender, all other things being equal. Women shouldn't get special treatment per se—they should just be allowed to vote, drive, run for office, get elected, and get paid just the same as anybody else.

What's so radical about that?

My ovaries and estrogen are not a handicap. I can probably focus better with this anatomy than if I had external genitalia. I can keep mine in my pants. My eyes do not wander to sports or indiscretions.

And thanks to a rough past and an unnatural amount of testosterone raging through my system, I've got bigger cojones than most of the men I've encountered in LA.

Don't tell me to take a backseat because you think you know me, based on the letters of my chromosomes.

And from your own privileged stance of manhood, don't tell me that this country isn't run by men in every position of power, be it government, entertainment, religion, corporations, or culture.

Right now, our society and government are controlled by men. That's a patriarchy. We don't have a queen. We've never had a female president. Men are, by and large, running the show.

It's not a criticism. It's just a fact.

And I wonder—when you object to the notion that the U.S. is a patriarchy, what do you think we are?

I'm glad I don't have to debate this with someone who's sure to be a radical chauvinist.

You know who I think would be a "rad-fem"? A man who stands up for women's equal rights. Now, that would be radical.

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