(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

2017 has been the year of feminism.

Sure, there’s still a massive misogynist in the White House and we’re all still paying tampon tax but this year, women really took matters into their own hands.

The #MeToo hashtag sent a wave of panic through Hollywood and Parliament after decades of institutionally accepted sexual abuse.

The body positive movement carried on getting bigger and better.


And the actual word ‘feminism’ was crowned Word of the Year.

But you know, there are still plenty of women who don’t call themselves feminists. And there are hoards of men who refuse to get on board with the movement.



That, in part, is because a lot of the rhetoric around women’s rights centres around digging men out – and digging all men out, at that.

Cat Person, for example, was a horribly relateable story of a woman who was too polite to refuse a guy sex.

Reading it was hard because, well, I’ve been that person a million times.

In fact, show me a woman who hasn’t had sex at least once when they didn’t really want to but didn’t want to embarrass the other person and I’d be amazed.

But many of us failed to consider was that it this isn’t a women-specific issue. We’re not talking about being too scared to say no to sex on the grounds that we’re putting ourselves in a vulnerable position with someone a lot stronger than us. We’re talking about having a change of heart at the last minute and having to endure a romp sort of against our will but well within the law and done in good faith by the other party.

We’ve all had awkward polite sex – it isn’t a gender-specific issue (Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

And that happens to men too.

The problem is that we’ve started to believe the toxic masculinity myth that all men are excessively virile, aggressively sexual predators.

In reality…the very vast majority have as much awkward polite sex as the rest of us.

And yet, we were all quick to respond to the story as ALL MEN ARE TRASH AND F*CKBOYS TRYING TO BONE AT ANY COST.

It doesn’t take a genius to realise that tarring of an entire gender with the same brush is so problematic, not only for men but for feminism overall.

How many of us have been written off as ‘feminazis’ for voicing genuinely valid, specific points?

Men’s Rights activists love dishing the term out to any woman who dares breath a word against guys online. But more and more level-headed dudes are using the term too. And that’s a reaction to being told continuously how bad, mad and dangerous they are.

Whether misandry as a concept actually exists or not, is up for debate. Like reverse racism, these kinds of social constructs negate the idea that prejudice necessarily needs a position of power from which to work. Racism involves one race being in a more privileged position than another. Sexism, the same.

But when you’ve got educated, funny women happy – proud even – to say out loud that they ‘hate men’, we’ve got to reevaluate exactly what we’re allowing people to get away with.

I’ve worked with a number of women who say that the only blokes they want to talk to are their dads and boyfriends.



If I worked with a man who said that the only women. they liked were their wives and mums, another way around (hi, Mike Pence), I’d be edging my seat as far away from them as possible.

Instead, I’ve laughed at and with these women and let them get on with it. So maybe I’m also digging my own grave here.

Misogyny is rife both online and off, and we should be calling it out at each and every turn.

The trolling of women online is such a massive issue and one which still isn’t being addressed properly. Before getting this job, I’d never been threatened with rape for voicing an opinion – but it’s a daily reality for me and thousands of other female writers. And as a woman of colour too, those gendered threats are often coupled with racial slurs and sexual advances. That’s just a daily reality of the job.

(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

They do all come from men…but that doesn’t mean that every man is to blame. Keyboard losers are a tiny percentage of the population.

Mocking and berating men isn’t the way to show that feminism is about equality and intelligent debate.

The conversation should be inviting, it should be placing the importance on men as equal parents, equal mental health sufferers and survivors, on being as emotionally vulnerable and switched on as us.

We often joke about collecting male tears but…doesn’t that kind of add to a culture of toxic masculinity where men are forced to be repressed and stoic?


It all just seems a bit old and a bit out of date to diss dudes for the sake of dissing dudes.

Sure, there are a load of pr*cks out there, and they’re pretty vocal about their genuinely bad opinions. But they’re not going to shut up as long as we allow misandry or anti-man speech to infiltrate intelligent feminist discourse.

What we hate is the patriarchy – not men. They aren’t the same thing.

The pledge In 2018, more of us need to commit to speaking less generally and more specifically when we’re taking men to task. We need to make an effort to consider their opinions before we negate them entirely. We need to value the male experience as much as we do the female. We need to stop telling them that they can’t have a voice just for being male.

We need feminism now more than ever. We have an opportunity to make real change in society and to ensure that our daughters don’t grow up being taxed for having a period, scared of sexual assault at work, forced into unhealthy eating habits by the advertising industry.

But that’s only going to happen if men are part of the conversation.

And they’re only going to want to join in if we cut the sh*t and accept that they’re just like us…only with d*cks.

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