I recently had an at length discussion with my Mother about why feminism is relevant and necessary. She has become extremely religiously devout in the past 3 years and it was the most heart breaking conversation I’ve had in a long time. Her argument against mine boiled down to:

-Men were created with different traits than women and are better at different things, like leadership vs. child care.

-As women we are unable to comprehend the hardships men suffer, therefore we actually have no right to complain

-There is no way to change the way people think, its wrong to legislate laws in favor of one way of thinking, so we just have to learn to deal with it (anyway its not really that bad. see point two).

In fact, at one point when I mentioned one time when a man on the street flashed me and then started peeing right in my path on the side walk, she just laughed and said, “well they just do that because they can [pee anywhere because of their anatomy].” and in response to someone grabbing my ass on the bus she said I shouldn’t have gotten on if it was so full I was going to have to “expose myself” to someone’s hand by standing.

The worst part was, even though I presented really sound arguments, even solid scripture based arguments (I’m really well studied after growing up in that household), all she heard was “blah blah liberal academia angry oversensitive rant blah blah”.

It really breaks my heart that she’s chosen to believe these things and looks down on me as if I’m the ignorant one.