If women have to get their tits out to make a point, so be it.

[Summer Hathaway]

350. If asked which DU poster ...

... I think is constantly demeaning and belittling women, you would be at the very top of my list. And the fact that you consistently do so under the guise of “feminism” is truly appalling.

You consistently stereotype men as ogling oafs, led by their penises and their apparent inability to interact with women on any level that isn’t, according to you, some obvious attempt to ‘shut them up’ or ‘put them in their place’, or adherence to some nefarious agenda that, in your mind, permeates everything.

That’s not a display of feminism – it’s paranoia. And while railing about how men stereotype women, you have no problem with using phrases like ‘men do this’, or ‘men think that’, without any qualification. You’ve been called on that before, by myself and others – and please spare us all the BS response that you shouldn’t have to qualify such statements, and everyone should just assume you’re not talking about all men when you use such terminology.

I doubt there is a person on DU who doesn’t know that if someone posted statements like, ”Women are into bondage, women have rape fantasies, women marry for money” without adding the qualifier “some women”, it would take the Admins a week to clean up the brain matter splattered all over DU as a result of your head having exploded.

Your particular brand of ‘feminism’ seems to rely solely on casting men in the role of the enemy, the oppressor, an agenda-following gender intent on the “pornification of women” at every turn.

Here’s a newsflash for you: Millions upon millions of men and women interact every day. They flirt, they banter about sex, they share jokes about sex – and they do so without any intent to demean themselves or each other. Millions of men – and women! – appreciate the beauty of the naked female body, and find no hidden agenda in said appreciation.

Millions of men (and women) are sexually aroused by a woman’s bared breasts; millions of men (and women) are sexually aroused by a man’s bared chest. Your problem seems to be not with the ‘sexism’ you find in every photo, every comment, every graphic, every work of art, but with the idea that sexuality is an inherent part of our nature as human beings.

But YOU persist in your notion that being a ‘feminist’ means denying one’s own sexuality, because to accept it is tantamount to accepting being seen as a sexual being to the exclusion of all else.

YOU persist in your notion that women who use words you don’t like are ‘adopting the language of the oppressors’, without any regard to the fact that women who are truly independent are free to use whatever language they see fit to use.

YOU persist in your notion that any woman who doesn’t adhere to YOUR arbitrary ‘rules’ about how a feminist conducts herself exemplifies the very idea that ALL women must behave in a narrowly-defined way – the very antithesis of women being free to express themselves as THEY see fit, as opposed to how YOU see fit.

YOU have consistently belittled and demeaned any woman who has refused to exchange the yoke of male oppression for the yoke of YOUR oppression.

YOU have belittled and demeaned any woman who refutes YOUR agenda by insinuating that they have been cowed by men and are too intellectually incompetent to recognize the “male agenda” you see everywhere, or are not intelligent enough to understand that all men are out to silence them.

YOU have consistently dismissed those women on this board who disagree with you in any way as being water-carriers for the men who are all, to hear YOU tell it, intent on supressing their rights.

I AM a feminist – and, as such, I am free to dress as I please, to say what I please, to use any words I please, to behave in any way I please – and even to bare my breasts if I choose to do so. And it is none of your fuckin’ business, in the same way it is none of any man’s fuckin’ business.

The women who went before me and sacrificed so much for equal rights did not do so in order for YOU, or any other woman, to dictate how I should conduct myself – nor dictate how I should view men, how I should interact with them, or how I should find their every statement, their every action, their every response to every situation as part of some hidden agenda to quash my rights.

YOU, and those like you, set the movement towards equal rights for all back decades every time you decree that women should conduct themselves according to YOUR agenda, as opposed to their own.

I don’t allow men to dictate how I should conduct myself. I’ll be damned if I’m going to allow a woman to do so - especially a woman who persists in seeing ALL men as stereotypical figures whose sole purpose in life is to ogle tits and act like little boys.

YOU should take a look in the mirror once in a while - it might be an enlightening experience.