Let’s be completely honest, it happens in both directions plenty. Yes, women have an easier time getting away with it than men these days, but I personally don’t find it worthwhile to turn it back around to justify continuing the cycle. It’s all shit, and the truth is that if you tell people that it goes both ways, the reasonable women will listen. The ones who don’t? Well there’s plenty of guys who continue to be awful to women, but I’m not gonna waste my breath on them or use them to paint all men as bad, and I won’t do that to the women that are asshole either.

Case in point: I used to work at a Scottish pub during my undergrad. I had to wear a kilt, and had plenty of women make comments and even some drunk ladies grab at the kilt. So I told my boss (also a woman) that I was being sexually harassed and she shut that shit the fuck down. All it took was one person saying “you can’t treat people like that based on their gender” and they understood and never did it again. Will it always be that easy? No of course not. But if you don’t call out the root problem, then the conversation will always dance around the real issues. Most actual feminists, men and women, who have read literature and don’t just use it as an excuse to be shitbags understand that. I don’t want to continue a toxic cycle, we should all be treated with the same amount of basic decency no matter what.