Reply #1: I'm inclined to say "Deal with it."

[noamnety]

We all realize it's not all men perpetuating such offenses. At the same time, most of us realize the vast majority of men do receive male privilege whether or not they contribute to the systemic attitudes toward/against women or not.

The best comparison I can make is that some of us are also white. We attempt to not be racist assholes, obviously. But most of us also realize we've been raised with certain attitudes, and inundated with messages from the media. Thus it's our responsibility to listen when another person tells us we've offended them in some way. Not to be offended - but to LISTEN to them. We all screw up from time to time, with choice of words, with hidden attitudes we didn't even realize we had. Sometimes they are exposed in the light of day, sometimes we hear or read something that gives us a flash of recognition of something wrong in ourselves that we are fortunate enough to reevaluate in private, without public scrutiny. But what we ought never to do is get mad that somebody pointed out an offense, or dared to talk about racism as a SYSTEMIC problem, for obviously it is.

It is counterproductive for me to tell a black person I'm offended by their discussions of racism. If they are talking about how white folks as a whole treat them, I don't need to chime in to say "that's not all white people." They know that. I know that. If they are talking about racism, to paraphrase Julian Real, that's the time for me to adopt a posture of listening.

Likewise, if women are talking about being oppressed as women in some way, you need to recognize that it is not individual cases; it's the cultural norm. Demanding that we treat it as individual cases is not helpful. It's not helpful to act as though violence against women is being perpetrated by "a few bad apples" and we need to individually weed those out through the court system with its stunning 2% sentencing rate. Demanding that we stop talking about it as if it's a cultural norm is not helpful. It's a means of silencing us.