I’m much less harsh these days on terms like “be a man”. Usually when people say this, they are talking about how a physically mature male should grow up and act like an adult and not in reference to some ridiculous ideal of masculinity even if it comes off as “bad form”. More recently I’ve heard people say “woman up” when speaking to women who make a litany of convenient gendered excuses for their bad behavior. Though I think such an inverse of a masculinized phrase is fraught with problems, it’s amusing enough and perhaps reflective of where we should be at as a society. For all the cooption and intelligence meddling in feminist movement in the west — not to mention how many women its victorious liberal variant has left in the dust  — women are largely viewed culturally and in everyday transactions as competent adults. Whether they receive all the material benefits that are usually attached to competence is a matter of class, race, and often body and beauty standards.

Liberal feminists are here to remind us for eternity it seems that incompetence is determined by one fact alone: sex. Privileged liberal feminists can move in and out of social networks proving their cred with hyperbolized tales of male assumptions about their abilities, having their bonus slimmed due to the existence of a married male coworker with children, or any number of things that just don’t rate among the many struggles that most of the women on the planet have to deal with daily. That’s not to say that these occurrences aren’t sexist, it’s just that they are magnified within a spectacle that simultaneously allows for a greater perception of feminine ability while cutting more women off from the tools and resources they need to simply exist.

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