Comments Elsewhere

Trygve: “Second, I agree that brick walls are a waste of time, but plenty of people who are not brick walls could nonetheless use an education on the subject.”

People who are earnestly interested in learning something about sexism and feminism would be better off picking up one of the many fine books on the topic and reading it. Quite frankly, feminist activists have enough to do already without having to spend more time trying to educate the well-intentioned but clueless. There’s lots on this topic that men can look up on their own time, and indeed they ought to be expected to look it up before they go around making confident pronouncements about the existence of sexism, or about where it is or isn’t an active force. If they have not made the effort to make themselves less than ignorant about something before flapping their yap about it, then I can’t see why it would be obligatory or even useful for feminists to treat them as anything more than a waste of time and energy, unless and until they actually do make some effort to learn the basics on their own time.