I was going to continue adding posts to this series when I saw the following photo David Gendron has posted on my Facebook wall:

 

Immediately, a female relative of mine from Ukraine responded, “Well, what’s wrong with that?”

And you know what? The guy holding the poster doesn’t bother me in the least. Just look at him. He is a miserable, unkempt, ugly loser who has no other way of connecting with women emotionally than to try to annoy them with his stupid poster. He has no idea how to inscribe himself into modernity and knows that he is nothing but sad old flotsam and jetsam of a dead world.

The reaction of my relative, however, does bug me to no end. This is a woman who would not know how to be submissive to anybody to save her life. She never got married and never took care of any children. She has been completely self-sufficient her entire life. As a fully Soviet person, she cannot have any knowledge of or interest in the Bible. And all of the men of her generation in Ukraine are now dead precisely because of the idiotic gender stereotypes she swoons over on Facebook.

I have seen so many women who never even get anything from stupidly and irreflectively parroting these gender stereotypes yet who keep doing so. I’m not talking right now about women who exploit these stereotypes to gain something for themselves. Such women are trying to benefit themselves which, at least, is rational. I don’t approve, of course, but they don’t make me nearly as rabid as the unthinking chirpers.

There is no feminism without intensive and ongoing education. People need to realize that the moment they succumb to the desire to simplify reality by saying anything about “all women” or “all men”, they contribute to promoting gender stereotypes that will continue thwarting their lives.