Let Me Explain That To You -- One More Time

If you live on the internets (as so many of us do), you probably saw John Scalzi's pretty funny play, which got pretty much everywhere last week.

Here's a link, in case you didn't.

An Anti-Feminist Walks Into A Bar: A Play in Five Acts

This is not a post about that play.

Nope.  This is a post about what happened in the comment section, which is -- frankly -- what happens in every comment section of every post which is even remotely about a feminist issue ever.

(All y'all who are interested in feminism don't even need me to finish now, do you?)

Yep.  A Concerned Man showed up -- well, in this case it was two, or it might have been three Concerned Men, I lost count by the end -- who Just Wanted Women to Explain to them Why Feminism Couldn't Be X.

And -- you guessed it -- instead of the thread being about feminism or women, the thread then became All About These Men.

For the next several days, everyone who was commenting on that thread

• talked about these three men, 
• talked to these three men, 
• concerned themselves with these three men and their feelings (because they got so hurt that people were being mean to them and disrespecting them saying mean things about men in general) 
• tried to educate these men
• Endlessly parsed and explained and re-explained concepts of Feminism 101 to these men 

So that, instead of talking about feminism, we were, as always happens, once more talking about men.

And all through this, one of these men kept insisting, earnestly, that he just wanted men to have equality too.  Why did we have to keep talking about women all the time?  Why didn't we talk about men's equality sometimes? Huh? Huh?

Which is why I'm glad this site is now available.  Women can stop doing this work for free, which apparently this sort of men think we should do -- educate them for free.  They can now get educated on their own time, and their own dime.  From now on, Ladeez, just link here!  The Womansplainer.