Can't we all just get along?
No, actually, we can't. Seriously, there's no way. See, I'm a human being, and you hang around people who wnt to deny that very simple fact. They believe that people who have my type of genitals are evil, duplicitous, slutty, and so forth, and becuase you don't have to live with what those people say and do every day, they don't treat you that way. You want to make friends with them. And let's face it, treating women like shit just isn't a problem. The bar for treatment of women is so low that you can do just about anything and women will just accept it because, you know, there's nobody drawing a line. Except over and over again, which you fucking ignore in order to make friends with more men who hate women.

And, yeah, of course, they don't say it, but this is the thing: what the fuck do you think they'd say? "Excuse me, are you sexist?" You place such a high frickin' value on civility that you're missing that what's needed isn't civility but respect. There is a difference. It might be civil to prune your language of expletives and expressions of impatience after the three thousandth stereotype, but is it respectful to coddle bigots who just keep trotting out the same stereotypes over and over again? You're setting up one group of people for failure here, and it's not those that allegedly share your politics. Furthermore, how civil is it to be civil in the face of incivility? It amounts to demanding that the victims of polite incivility ignore bullshit---oh, dear me, a swear word!----and deal with bigotry everywhere, with no refuge, even amongst their alleged allies. If this is civility, thank you, I'll take that alleged rudeness of cutting through the bullshit and shitcanning all the same old disproven arguments.

The problem with civility is that it's easy to pretend to be civil and use it to hide all manner of hostility beneath it. I don't see much value in that. Prune away the polite terms, the passive aggressive "Oh-I-didn't-meant-to's" and what you have is hostility. So how on earth are we supposed to get along with someone who isn't bothered by people who hate us and think we're evil? How is that acceptable?

Tolerating the lies spewed by the anti-feminists like Glenn Sacks no matter how pleasant he is guarantees that the movement gets stuck in one place, fighting the same old battles over and over again. It also keeps the standards low, because if male feminsts are afraid to put their foot down with other men, those same men often feel entitled to spew their bull at female feminists, too. After all, it's okay with other guys. What, do you want special rights? What's your problem, it's civil discussion here. Look how unreasonable your response is.

Being a feminist is hard work, no doubt. It's always tempting to give up, becuase you're fighting every day, whereas sucking up to the patriarchy makes you popular. It'll make you unpopular, not popular, and it will give you ulcers. MRA propaganda aside, there's nowhere in the world where women have equality, much less superiority. You don't have to do anything, really, to renounce feminism; all you have to do is be passive in the face of anti-feminist bigotry. Oh, wait. It's a conundrum that has some people questioning how much difficulty they want to deal with if it contradicts something they feel is more important---say, bonding with male sexists and male students who want to be feminists 'later'. SAying you're a feminist doesn't make it true, and when you buddy buddy around with men who hate women, you have to expect that people will ask why that hatred of women doesn't matter. Because it does matter.

It may not matter to you. It does matter to us.