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To all the Male Feminists-Mayowa Omogbenigun

To all the Male Feminists-Mayowa Omogbenigun

Here’s a letter to all the male feminists-“Men dominate everything on earth so why do they feel the need to dominate feminist spaces”.

FEMINIST
Credit[Image: The Telegraph]
I have been in university for barely a year and I’ve already found myself knee deep in matters of feminism and race –two features of society that I find most interesting.

When I got the email about this being the Men’s issue I rolled my eyes and sighed, do men really need to infiltrate platforms for women? This simple question made me query the nature of feminism and the role of men in feminism and I will explain why.

I have started my own online feminist women’s magazine and it has been amazing. Within a few days, my magazine’s page got 160 likes on Facebook and I have been bombarded with emails from feminists from all over the world.

One message that caught my attention was from a male student who said that he was also planning to start a magazine with feminism as the main focus and I was puzzled.

I spoke to fellow feminists and like me, they couldn’t figure out why a white man wanted to start a feminist magazine. The first reaction many women had was irritation and I’ll explain why.

Men dominate everything on earth so why do they feel the need to dominate feminist spaces? Now, this is not to say that there is no place for men in the feminist movement but like racial equality movements, the oppressor should not lead the revolution.

This might sound ‘prejudice’but think about it, in the simplest way, men simply don’t know what it is like to be a woman and therefore cannot begin to fully understand the different ways women are oppressed in society.

To put it simply, if you do not know what a period feels like or how uncomfortable a bra gets after hours of bondage or even what it feels like to have to be bald from your eyebrows down all because ‘women should be hairless’, you cannot begin to imagine the deeper themes feminism aims to cover.

I tried to tell this to my male-online-feminist-magazine-founder friend and he simply could not understand. He then said he’d be tackling feminism from a ‘philosophical’perspective and that is where he lost me.

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All of this led me to ask myself if excluding men from the leading ranks of feminism was right or was it really prejudice? The resounding answer was NO.

So, to all the male feminists out there, though I will not applaud you for seeing me as equal, I will say this, you have a place in feminism but be prepared to take a back seat. Just think about it, the last thing a woman wants is to be told how to empower herself by a man.

 

 

Culled from TW, April 2015 edition

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