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The Feminist Power of a Few Good Men
Let’s retire “women’s issues” once and for all.
As a proud millennial, I still use Facebook. Whenever it pings me with a notification that I have memories to look back on, I always click.
Today, Facebook informed me of a screed that I’d posted on this day several years ago, back before I joined Medium and my Facebook status functioned as a microblog of sorts. I wrote of a toddler girl who I spotted standing with her father outside a local children’s museum. The little girl wore a t-shirt that read, “I’m not allowed to date. Ever. (Ever. Ever.).” The sight, I wrote, filled me with “unspeakable rage.”
In the rant that followed, I declared that my daughters — then twenty-two months and four months old, respectively — would never be told that they were incapable of making their own decisions or that their parents always know what they need more than they do. I swore they would be allowed to navigate their own social interactions and learn from their own mistakes.
The post received a flurry of likes and comments, all of which, to the great credit of my social media following, were affirming. After having read them all, I added one of my own.
“By the way,” I wrote, “while it’s mostly women who liked and commented on this post, a number of men did as well…