DRAFT - I Said Generalising About Gender Is Sexist. Then the Feminists Came for Me.

I posted eleven words. Eleven. Simple. Words. Something that I thought was uncontroversial, simple common sense, respectful communication.

"PSA, saying 'men are XYZ' is sexist. Check yourself."

What followed was a masterclass in exactly what's wrong with a certain corner of the feminist internet. I was called tone deaf, ignorant, a pick me, dumb, stupid. I was told I was aligning with misogynists. That my rhetoric was dangerous. Someone tagged Abbie Chatfield to come and deal with me, which is a remarkable response to eleven words. Nobody called in reinforcements when I posted about earrings.

All of this because I said generalising about men is sexist.

So let's actually answer the question: can you be a true feminist and still call out sexism against men?

Yes. And here's why the people saying no are feminism's biggest problem.

The contradiction nobody wants to talk about

Feminism is about equality. Not just equality for women, equality as a principle. The argument against sexism is that judging people based on their gender is wrong. It's lazy, it's inaccurate, and most importantly, it causes real harm.

So when someone turns around and says "most men are X" and defends it, they've just argued themselves out of their own position. You cannot simultaneously say generalising about gender is wrong and then generalise about gender. That's not a political stance, it's a logical contradiction.

And yet pointing this out gets you labelled a traitor.

One commenter put it plainly: "reverse sexism cannot exist because there is no inherent power structure keeping men in worse positions than women." Another said she is "distrustful of ALL men because proving they are safe is impossible."

I want to be careful here because both of those women have clearly had painful experiences, and I'm not dismissing that. But distrust born from personal trauma is not the same as a political position. Enshrining "all men are suspect until proven otherwise" as feminist ideology doesn't protect women. It just codifies a generalisation and calls it awareness.

"But it's punching up, not punching down"

The claim is that women saying "men are XYZ" doesn't carry the same weight as men saying "women are ABC" because of structural power imbalances. Women are speaking from a position of less power, so the same words mean different things. And in some contexts that's genuinely true. A marginalised group venting about historical oppression is not morally equivalent to that oppression running the other way. That asymmetry is real.

The strongest version of this argument goes further: language doesn't exist in a vacuum. Words carry the weight of the structures behind them. "Men are dangerous" spoken by a woman who has experienced male violence isn't the same speech act as "women are hysterical" spoken by someone with institutional power behind them. Context matters. History matters. Pretending otherwise isn't neutrality, it's wilful blindness.

I'll give that argument everything it deserves. And then I'll show you where it breaks.

It breaks in three places.

First, the punching up defence requires you to actually be punching at something. A structure. A system. A specific exercise of power. "The patriarchy is real and harmful" punches up. "Men are useless" punches at every man who exists, including the ones with no power, no privilege, and no culpability. The individual man working a minimum wage job, estranged from his kids, with no institutional power behind him, is not the patriarchy. Hitting him with a generalisation and calling it structural critique is not punching up. It's just punching, with a political excuse attached.

Second, the argument proves too much. If power asymmetry determines whether a generalisation is acceptable, then the same logic applies to every other group dynamic. Does it justify generalisations about white working class men by wealthy women of colour? Does it justify generalisations about straight people by gay people who have faced genuine persecution? Does it justify generalisations about any majority group by any minority with a legitimate grievance? If the answer is yes to all of those, then we don't have a principle. We have a hierarchy of permitted generalisations based on whoever has the most compelling claim to victimhood. That's not equality. That's just a different power structure with different winners.

Third, there's a data problem the punching up argument can't ignore. If structural power is the metric, it should hold across all meaningful measures. But men die by suicide at three to four times the rate of women in Australia and across most of the Western world. They're less likely to seek help, less likely to be diagnosed, less likely to have the social infrastructure to survive a crisis. On one of the most fundamental measures available, whether you make it out alive, the power asymmetry isn't as simple as the punching up argument assumes. A framework that can't account for that without dismissing it isn't a framework. It's a talking point.

There's also a deflection worth addressing separately. Some people argue that generalisations like "blondes are dumb" don't count as harmful because they're not true and nobody really believes them. So the logic goes: if the stereotype is obviously false, it's just a joke, and treating it as sexism is oversensitivity looking for a target. This doesn't hold. "Women are hysterical" isn't true either. "Women are bad drivers" isn't true. Every gender stereotype feminism correctly identified as harmful came wrapped in the same defence. The harmlessness defence has always been the last resort of someone who wants to keep making the generalisation without being accountable for it. And the test for whether something is sexist isn't whether the target feels hurt by it. It's whether it reduces a person to a characteristic of their gender. Whether the stereotype is true or false, believed or dismissed, is irrelevant. A generalisation is a generalisation.

And most importantly, none of this was relevant to what I actually said. I wasn't talking about domestic violence. I wasn't talking about violence statistics or institutional power or historical oppression. I was talking about online content. TikTok posts. Workplace jokes. "Men are useless" memes. Dragging the full weight of structural power theory into a conversation about social media double standards is not engaging with the argument. It's replacing it with a harder one to win. Which is a tell.

The punching up defence is legitimate in its own lane. It just doesn't apply here. And the fact that people reached for it anyway suggests they knew the actual argument was unanswerable.

"Not All Men" Is Harmful?

The phrase has a specific history. It emerged as a pattern where women would share experiences of harassment, assault, or systemic disadvantage and men would immediately interrupt with "not all men are like that." The effect, regardless of intent, was to centre male feelings over female experiences. To redirect. To derail. It happened so consistently that the phrase became a recognised silencing tactic, and the women pushing back on it weren't wrong. That history is real and it matters. When someone who works in the DV space hears those words, they're not hearing a logical point about generalisation. They're hearing a phrase that has been used thousands of times to shut down conversations about male violence. That association didn't come from nowhere.

But here's where the argument breaks down. They've taken a legitimate critique of a specific rhetorical pattern and expanded it into a rule that says the underlying idea is off limits entirely. That's a significant leap. A phrase being misused doesn't make the concept behind it wrong. And my post wasn't about DV. It wasn't about violence statistics or survivor experiences. It was about social media content, generalisations, and the casual sexism that gets a free pass because it's directed at men. They imported an entire framework built around one conversation onto a completely different one.

The strongest version of the harm argument is this: even well-intentioned content gets screenshotted and circulated by people who use it to dismiss women's safety concerns entirely.

But if we accept that correct arguments should be silenced because bad actors might amplify them, we have handed bad actors a veto over public discourse. Any true statement can be misused. The solution isn't silence. It's being precise enough that misuse is harder. Which is exactly what I was doing. The answer to a phrase being weaponised is not to surrender the idea behind it. It's to say it better, more carefully, and more consistently, until the phrase belongs to the people using it honestly rather than the ones using it to cause harm.

The phrase "not all men" is only dangerous if you can't answer it. If you have a genuine logical response to the consistency argument, it's just a phrase you disagree with. You answer it and move on. But if you can't answer it, the phrase becomes threatening. It exposes a hole in your argument you'd rather not look at. So instead of engaging, you poison the phrase itself. You call it a manosphere slogan. You call the person saying it a pick me. You do anything except answer the actual question. That's not the phrase being dangerous. That's you being unable to defend your position.

What actually happened in my comments

The responses followed a pattern. When I held my position, the arguments shifted. First it was "you're tone deaf." Then "that's a manosphere slogan." Then "you're aligning with the wrong side." Then "I don't have the energy to explain this to you."

None of it addressed the actual point. Because the actual point is unanswerable: if generalising about women is wrong, why is generalising about men right?

One person told me I needed to educate myself. About sexism. Which is what I was talking about. The specific thing I was talking about. I'd love to know what curriculum she had in mind — presumably one where the chapter on generalising about gender has an asterisk at the bottom saying "unless you really mean it."

At one point someone tagged another person in the comments and asked them to "explain to Jacqui why what she's saying is so problematic." Not to make their own argument. Not to engage with the point. To summon someone else to do it for them. Think about what that reveals. You encountered an argument you couldn't answer, so your response was to outsource the answering to someone who is a known for being agressive and nasty online. 

Meanwhile my post kept getting dragged into territory I never went near. I didn't mention domestic violence once. I was talking about online content, generalisations, the casual sexism that gets a pass because it's directed at men. Every time I clarified that, the conversation reset back to "your words are harmful" and DV statistics as if I hadn't spoken. That's not engaging with an argument. That's hijacking a post to have a different one entirely, one that's a specific situation behind closed doors - ones thats easier to win.

My argument kept getting described as a manosphere slogan. The implication being that because bad actors use a phrase, anyone who says it is one of them. The manosphere also breathes air. They probably eat breakfast. Some of them have dogs they love. None of that makes oxygen a red flag. A true argument stands or falls on its own merits, not on who else happens to be making it. If "not all men" is wrong, show me why it's wrong. Don't just tell me who's in the same sentence. That's not logic. That's guilt by proximity.

Not to mention the "I'm unfollowing you immediately" and "I supported you and gave you a platform, therefore I'm outraged you would say this." With all due respect, your support shouldn't be conditional on me having the same belief system as you. Unfollowing me builds your echo chamber. You are doing more harm than good.

The one genuinely good-faith comment I got came from someone who acknowledged that women navigate a world where male violence is a real risk, while also accepting that my post wasn't about that. We actually agreed. It took about thirty seconds once the conversation was honest. That's not feminism versus anti-feminism. That's just two people talking without an agenda. It shouldn't be rare. It was.

Not one of them answered the question. If generalising about women is wrong, why is generalising about men right?

"It's giving pick me"

"Pick me" is possibly the most intellectually dishonest move in the playbook, and I want to give it the attention it deserves, which is about thirty seconds.

It's not an argument. It's a motive assignment. The subtext is always: you only think that to impress men. Which means nothing I actually said matters, nothing I argued holds up or doesn't, because my conclusion has already been explained away by my presumed psychology.

It also doesn't work on me specifically. I said generalising about men is sexist on a public platform during a pile-on, which is not traditionally how you audition for male approval. Ninety-five percent of my followers are women. I'm in a committed married relationship. If this is a pick me strategy it's the least effective one I've ever seen and I'd genuinely like some tips on how to do it better.

But more importantly: deciding a woman's motive for her, then using that invented motive to disqualify her opinion, is exactly what feminism was built to fight. The patriarchy has been doing it for centuries. "She only thinks that because she's emotional." "She only thinks that because she doesn't understand." "She only thinks that because she wants attention."

Pick me is just that, with better fonts and a different target. The irony of a movement built on women's voices using it to silence women who disagree is apparently lost on the people throwing it around.

The truth is even more frustrating than the pile-on itself. I wasn't doing this for men. I wasn't doing it to score points or court controversy or audition for some imagined male approval. I was doing it for MYSELF, to voice MY OPINION, for my female audience, for the silent majority of women who instinctively feel the same way but have already calculated that saying so publicly costs too much. My platform is ME. My opinions are mine. The idea that expressing them requires external justification, or that the motive behind them can just be decided for me by strangers in a comment section, is precisely the dynamic this piece is about. And honestly? That part pissed me off more than any of it.

I have never felt my voice or opinion was so unworthy than the way these feminsts made me feel.

The manosphere's smartest move to date

The smartest way to defeat a movement isn't to attack it from the outside. It's to get it to turn on itself. Civil wars are more destructive than invasions because the damage comes from within.

The manosphere coined "not all men" as a defensive deflection. A way for men to dismiss women's concerns, avoid accountability, and derail conversations about male behaviour. It became a phrase associated with bad faith, and rightly so in that context.

But here's the trap they set, whether intentionally or not.

"Not all men" also happens to be exactly what any genuine proponent of equality would naturally say. Because it's accurate. Not all men are violent. Not all men are the problem. If you actually want to solve something, precision matters.

So now the phrase is poisoned. Anyone who says it, regardless of their actual values or intentions, gets tarred with the manosphere brush. The phrase has been so successfully hijacked that radical feminists now attack anyone who uses it, without stopping to ask who is saying it or why.

Which means they end up doing the manosphere's work for them. They go to war with their own allies. They drive out the people who believe in equality but won't accept generalisation as a substitute for accuracy. They make the movement smaller, angrier, and easier to dismiss.

The manosphere didn't need to fight feminism. They just needed to leave a tripwire and walk away. And radical feminists, rather than seeing through it, keep setting it off, over and over, on people who are fundamentally on their side.

That's not strength. That's being played.

"Not all men" and the Malteser analogy

The Malteser analogy has been doing the rounds. Some Maltesers are shit. Literally. The non-shit ones shouldn't complain because they want help cleaning the bucket. I'll give it this: it's funnier than the poisoned ones version. And the point about men who say "not all men" and then do absolutely nothing isn't wrong. If performative objection is your entire contribution, fair enough.

But the analogy sneaks something past you. It assumes the good Maltesers are responsible for the bad ones. We don't apply that logic anywhere else. We don't tell every Muslim man to dismantle extremism before he's allowed to object to being called a terrorist. We don't tell women to fix female-on-female bullying before they can push back on a stereotype. We don't tell you to personally fix every bad driver before you're allowed to be annoyed at the one who cut you off.

"Help clean up the bucket" sounds reasonable but it's actually asking men to accept collective guilt as the price of being treated as an individual. That's not equality. That's a different kind of prejudice dressed up as accountability.

No other group gets told to fix its worst members before it's allowed to have feelings about being stereotyped. The consistency argument isn't a defence of bad men. It isn't a dismissal of real harm. It's a simple test: does the principle hold when you swap the group out? If it doesn't, it isn't a principle. It's a preference. And preferences aren't the foundation of equality. Consistency is.

Why this matters beyond my comment section

Toxic feminism, by which I mean the strain that generalises about men, silences women who disagree, and attacks allies for insufficient orthodoxy, is actively damaging the movement it claims to represent.

Every "men are trash" post hands ammunition to the people who want to dismiss women's rights entirely. Every time a woman is called a pick me for having a nuanced opinion, another potential ally decides the movement isn't for them. Every time legitimate debate gets shut down with "educate yourself," the echo chamber gets a little smaller and a little louder. And the men who would otherwise be on side? Gone. You needed them.

The ally you're making an enemy

I'm not anti-feminist. I'm pro-equality. Those are the same thing, or they should be.

I believe in women's rights. I believe the gender pay gap is real and worth fighting. I believe women's safety matters and that systems need to change. I believe in reproductive rights, in representation, in dismantling structures that hold women back.

I also believe that saying "men are X" is sexist. Not because I'm siding with men over women. Because the second you abandon consistency, you've handed your opponents the exit they were looking for. You've lost me. You've lost men. You've lost proponents of equality.

Be an Olivia Rodrigo. And don't be sexist. Both things are possible.

Olivia Rodrigo just announced a music festival with an all-women lineup, raising money for reproductive rights, women's health, and inequality facing women of colour and low income families. It's genuinely brilliant. It's the kind of thing that moves the needle. It was also used in someone's story to take a dig at me, which tells you everything about where some people's priorities are.

Here's what I'd say to that: you can do what Olivia Rodrigo is doing AND not generalise about men. You can advocate loudly for women AND believe that sexism against any gender is wrong. You can be angry at injustice AND be precise about who is responsible for it. These are not competing positions. They're the same position, held consistently.

Nothing about her activism requires her to generalise about men. She is proving, without even trying to, that you can be loudly and unapologetically pro-woman without making an enemy of an entire gender. Compare that to a comment section full of "men are trash" and "pick me" accusations. One of those is changing something. The other is just noise that gets screenshotted and used against the movement by the people who want it to fail.

You can be Olivia Rodrigo. You can also not be sexist. That's not a pick me. That's just feminism, done properly.

The real debate — who is allowed to speak

Somewhere along the way the debate stopped being about the argument and started being about the person making it. Not whether the consistency principle is correct. Not whether generalising about men is or isn't sexist. Those questions, the ones actually worth debating, quietly got replaced by a different one. Who has the standing to make this argument at all.

And that shift is everything. Because once the debate is about standing rather than substance, the argument never has to be answered. It just has to be disqualified. You're a pick me. You're doing the manosphere's work. You're not a real feminist. None of those are responses to the consistency argument. They're ways of removing someone from the conversation without engaging with what they said.

The original fight was for women's right to speak at all. To be heard in courtrooms, in parliaments, in workplaces, in public life. The whole project was built on dismantling the gatekeeping of whose voice counted. And now the question isn't whether women can speak. It's which women are allowed to speak, about what, from which position, using which language, and reaching which conclusions.

The gatekeeping didn't disappear. It just changed hands.

When I made a consistency argument about generalising about men I wasn't told my logic was wrong. I wasn't shown where the reasoning failed. I was told that thinking this way puts me at odds with women. That it isolates me. That I shouldn't think it. Which is a remarkable thing to say to a woman in the name of feminism. Not here is why you are wrong. But here is the social consequence of your position and you should factor that into whether you hold it.

That is not an invitation to think. That is an instruction to conform.

The women who reached out privately after that exchange weren't asking me to stop. They were telling me they agreed and couldn't say so publicly. That's not a fringe position held in secret by a few contrarians. That's a significant number of women who have been effectively silenced, not by men, not by the patriarchy, but by a movement that claims to exist to amplify women's voices.

It cannot simultaneously be the movement that decides which women's voices are too dangerous to hear. That's not protecting feminism. That's repeating the exact dynamic feminism was built to dismantle, with different people holding the door.

When the middle goes silent, the extremes fill the vacuum

Donald Trump didn't get elected because America became more racist overnight. He got elected because the political middle had been so thoroughly silenced, so consistently told that their concerns were invalid, their language was problematic, their instincts were deplorable, that they stopped engaging with the mainstream conversation entirely. They didn't disappear. They didn't change their minds. They just stopped speaking in spaces where speaking had become too costly. And then they voted.

The same dynamic is playing out in gender discourse right now. The disengaged middle, the people who think harassment is wrong and generalisations are also wrong, who believe in women's rights and also believe in consistency, those people are not being persuaded. They're being pushed. Into silence, into disengagement, into a quiet rejection of a movement that made them feel unwelcome before they'd finished their first sentence.

Andrew Tate understood this. Trump understood this. Nigel Farage understood this. They didn't create the alienation. They just arrived at exactly the right moment to harvest it.

The civil rights movement understood the alternative. It didn't write off the white moderate. It didn't win by chanting "white people are trash". It understood that the white moderate was the whole game. Not because the white moderate was more important than Black Americans but because converting the persuadable middle was the mechanism by which anything actually changed. You don't win by being right inside your own movement. You win by being impossible to dismiss outside it. The moment you generalise, you give the people in the middle an excuse to walk away with a clean conscience. Precision isn't a concession to the opposition. It's what makes the opposition indefensible.

The solution isn't to water down the argument. It's to make it in a way the middle can hear, from a position so consistent and so principled that the people in the middle have no excuse left not to engage with it. That's not moderation. That's strategy. And right now the side that needs it most is the one least interested in hearing it.

I'm still waiting for an answer

I started with eleven words. I've now written several thousand words explaining them. That's either a sign the argument needed making, or evidence I have a problem with brevity. Possibly both.

But here's the thing. Not one person in my comments answered the actual question. If generalising about women is wrong, why is generalising about men right?

They called me names. They shifted the goalposts. They summoned reinforcements. They brought up domestic violence statistics in response to a post about TikTok. They told me to be quiet for the good of the movement.

None of that is an answer.

I'm still waiting for one. I'll be here. The silent Majority. Probably writing something.

 Yes, I’m still working on this piece - This is a draft - open to feedback. I plan to continue to develop my ideas before possibly creating online video content..