PCC,

Maybe what keeps millennial women from feminism is self-aggrandizing condescension that takes the form of “feminist” missives like yours.

I’m going to try and quote you in your own words as much as I can here, since I feel as if you make the case for ignoring what you have to say on your own terms. Your first paragraph of the actual letter goes from 0-60 real quick:

You cannot ever know what the experience feels like to enjoy the Liberty Fruits gained through hard labour, you cannot ever relate to the women who came before you and paved the way, nor can you ever understand the gravity of the struggle endured just to gain basic civil rights because you were not there, you cannot call yourself a bystander and a renegade of the Feminist Revolution.

I’m not going to dwell on the pretentious insistence on using the Queen’s spelling of “labour,” because I think it speaks for itself—do you remember when Madonna started speaking in an English accent after being married to Guy Ritchie for a minute and everyone made fun of her? What’s really worth highlighting here is how you start your letter on the importance of feminism off by degrading women, claiming they can’t ever know the importance of the rights they’ve had recognized, which in the context of your argument, positions you as someone who can. Which, c’mon. You’re a gender and women’s studies major; it doesn’t make you qualified to shame women for what you feel like isn’t the proper appreciation of issues that relate most directly to them. In the very first paragraph, you claim “I am so ashamed of the viewpoints that young women have today.” You and Joseph Smith would be two sides to the same coin on this issue, Phillp.

There’s nothing fair about your argument, since you cite no actual evidence to corroborate any of your accusations about what “women today” actually believe. Where are the Pew polls showing female attitudes towards feminism and gender equality issues sorted by demographic? Where’s the citation of feminist and anti-feminist literature? Where’s anything whose intellectual origins didn’t originate from your own sense of self? Everything in this article smells like it was pulled willy-nilly from your asshole, and I can’t seem to find anything that would dispute this in your own words. The only name you check is Beauvoir, and only then to (thankfully) say that you’re not on her level. The only evidence you cite is so far down in the article, it’s easy to forget about it when reviewing your earlier portions. Even then, the figures you use are unsourced (helpfully suggesting we go fact-check them on our own) and have nothing to do with the many, many hypotheticals you set up in the few thousand words that precedes it. And the whole tone of this piece is insufferable, as if you believed there was no way anyone could take issue with it on grounds other than they're just pig-headed, misogynistic monsters who have no regard to what's just or right in the world. I'm sorry, but that's not how it comes off at all.

But your argument reaches dizzying heights of self-importance in the third paragraph.

Girls who shun the idea of feminism: are you so brainwashed by the paternal influences mainstreaming culture and your own lives that you absolutely believe in your heart of hearts that you are worth only as much as the amount of dishes you wash, the children you produce, the cleanliness of the floors you scrub down on your hands and knees while “barefoot and nine months pregnant,” and who you go to bed with? If so, then I blame your parents for never instilling in you the morals and values that you need to embody and wholly own to become a strong, powerful, independent, and successful woman. You lack drive, ambition, motivation, self-respect, etc., etc.

I have to give you credit; you’ve done a good job of welding two rhetorical fallacies together—the straw man and the false dichotomy—to say that basically, anyone who doesn’t subscribe to your exact worldview must have a very specific and terrible alternative. But don’t you think you’ve gone a bit crazy here? I’m all for hyperbole to make something funny and more obvious in its wrongness, but don’t you think you’ve reduced the alternative viewpoint to the point where you’re just being demeaning? And demeaning to a sizeable group of people you’ve caricaturized instead of addressing any specific qualms or actual, observed concerns?

Look, what’s most frustrating about all of this is how proudly you wear feminism as a badge of honor and then use it as a cudgel to bludgeon an entire swath of the demographic you’re supposed to be concerned about to an argumentative pulp. There’s no nuance, no subtlety, and no empathy in your arguments. The entire premise of your letter is putting a saddle on a dead horse and then bragging about how far you can see from how high up you think you are.

And I get it—I really do—where your frustration seems to be coming from. When you have a passion for an ideal that means a lot to you, it’s nerve-wracking to see people constantly misrepresenting what you believe in or rejecting it on premises that don’t make sense, but there’s an appropriate way to go about it that doesn’t reduce your position to something akin to a howler monkey jacking himself off. Your letter is the written equivalent of overcorrecting after hydroplaning while driving 90 miles an hour on the freeway. The instinct here is understandable, but you’re only going to make it worse by panicking. And, man, you sound panicked.

I want you to re-read another selection from your piece that I’ve pulled. I was going to abbreviate it since I didn’t think it was necessary to repeat an entire paragraph of yours, but unlike you, I didn’t feel comfortable about pulling things out of context. Just read this over, please?

I know you, girl, better than you know yourself! I know that you’re that particular girl who boasts about the many “perks” that you’ve received based on something that you had absolutely nothing to do with and can’t control: the gender in which you were born with and the fortunate privilege of your mother spatting you out in a first world country that values your image more than any other characteristic that you may or may not possess. You’re this same girl who also demands, paradoxically, to be treated like a “Lady.” First of all, can you say, “oxymoron?” Secondly, how can you call this an equal treatment of both genders? This now becomes an issue of fairness with men being portrayed as the victims for once! I already know what you’re thinking before you even say it: the feminists would love this, they would love to give men a taste of their own medicine! Well, maybe that’s what a lot of men need, but if we’re going to look at this from a rationally fair point of view, then one cannot proclaim that two wrongs would most certainly even up the score and make things right. If it is totally acceptable for women to rely on their looks and their body to get by in life—beating out that male contending for the same employment opportunity, or getting out of that speeding ticket when just a few moments ago a male driver was ticketed for the exact same offense—then there is an issue of fairness here with men being the ones who are slighted and disadvantaged.

Who are you even talking to? Which girl? Who hurt you, Phillip? Who hurt you? Nothing about this reads as someone who is really convinced of the virtues of their beliefs. It reads as petty, vindictive, and something akin to a drive-by shooting. There’s no evidence contained in any of this, just a bunch of what are at best anecdotes and what are at worst totally hypothetical scenarios cherry-picked to make it look like you’re doing the world a favor by being the only one brave enough to rail against the injustice of speeding-ticket politics. I’m not trying to say that men don’t suffer from gender politics, but the status quo is decidedly in our favor here. This paragraph abandons whatever pretenses it had to feminism halfway through and starts to feel closer to red-pill MRA rhetoric than anything I’ve read of Steinem or Roxanne Gay. It’s almost too easy to use your incorrect application of the word of oxymoron against you. And, seriously, “I know you, girl, better than you know yourself”? Like, what the hell? Do you not see the irony in a man telling women what they should think and claiming he’s a feminist? Your argument here isn’t as revolutionary and brave as you try to make it sound, it’s the same old song and dance of misogyny in a different key.

I don’t want to make it sound like what you’ve done here is the worst thing ever, or that you’ve failed on every count, because once you take a step back from stroking your own ego and cite some actual, real-world examples of why feminism is necessary, your letter becomes readable. There’s a brief period when the editorializing stops and the actual figures of feminism start that I forget for a minute that what I’m reading is the last thing in the world that’s going to convince someone on the fence about feminism to take the plunge.

For a few paragraphs, I’m convinced that your argument might not be all that bad and that you happened to get carried away. But then, goddammit, you sign off on the whole letter by saying “Sincerely[,] with much love (more so than your parents probably ever gave you).” I think you might be projecting here, dude. Love is empathetic, understanding, and patient, qualities that this letter gives the finger while dousing them with gasoline and setting them on fire before pissing on the ashes.

There’s a certain irony to me responding to this, I know. In the discussion of feminism and the political and social idea that women need to be treated equally, it’s probably going to look bad that two dudes are fighting over who’s the better feminist. So, whatever, I cede the crown, you can have it. It’s your major—make of it whatever you want, I don’t care. Call yourself “the voice of your generation” as much as you want. Polish a turd and call it a jewel, and it’s still a turd. But maybe the next time you want to approach the world that exists around the self-perpetuating space of agreement between your ears and convince someone that what you have to say has some merit, do it in a way that realizes your worldview might not be the standard to which the rest of everything holds itself to.