Hey Fellas, Can You PLEASE Stop Taking Offense When Women Blame “the Patriarchy”

This isn’t ABOUT you. It’s about changing the larger social system.

Photo by Erik Lucatero on Unsplash

Are corporate office temperatures really glaringly sexist? Or TV studio temperatures?

Are cold women, the world over justified in blaming all the evil Men-Who-Run-Thermostats for this grave, first-world inequity?

In fact, are evil, patriarchal men just bound and determined to victimize women in every possible creative way possible?

Or is this whole thing just women, all over the world, “overreacting” again?

Before you castigate me for posing these loaded questions, I’ll just put this very important disclaimer — beautifully crafted by my friend Elle Beau ❇︎ in her excellent piece on this topic — right here.

Here’s something that we need to get straight before we go into the substance of this topic. When someone is talking about “men” in this culture, it doesn’t mean blaming every single man as an individual for things they may not have even done. It does, however, mean holding mainstream masculine culture accountable — something that is upheld by every single man in America — either through his actions or his inactions, his words, or his silence.