Young adult author Louise O’Neill is best known for bringing the concept of “rape culture” to the tween audience, and she’s been called the “Margaret Atwood” of the high school set.
But this time, the feminist fiction writer took to the pages of the Irish Times to explain that calling feminists “man-haters” is lazy and that no woman can ever be sexist towards a man.
Apparently, according to O’Neill, women can definitely make stereotypes of men, and can certainly mis-categorize entire swaths of the opposite gender. And, of course, women—particularly feminists—can attribute negative qualities to mankind as a whole, including their tendency towards systematic oppression, their embrace of an amorphous “Patriarchy,” and their gender-wide hatred of any woman who isn’t submissive, domestic, and willfully stupid.
They can even openly discriminate against men, for that matter.
But don’t you dare say that that’s sexist. Because women can never be sexist, because women, as a whole, are a pitiful, oppressed minority, under the thumb of their male “betters.”
“Women cannot be ‘as sexist as men’ because that would suggest that women would somehow benefit from sexism, that they are the ones who hold the political, economic and cultural power in our society.” O’Neill claims. “It’s ignoring the importance of context.”
O’Neill’s example of how society exerts such pressure on women that they should be free to exact their prejudices against men? The difference in reactions to paparazzi shots of Justin Bieber and leaked nude photos of Vanessa Hudgens. And fat-shaming, which she declares is just a female problem, perpetuated by a male-dominated society (rather than an intra-gender problem of female judginess).
The sentiment quickly devolves into intersectionality, as O’Neill claims that when confronted with a discriminated-against woman and a discriminated-against man, respective privileges must be weighed before anyone can be declared the greater victim.
Fortunately, she says she does recognize that men have their own gender-specific requirements, but, she says, those are entirely the fault of the Patriarchy.
