“Are you a feminist?” she sternly asks.

“I’m not quite sure I can identify with the entire movement—,”

I’m cut off mid-sentence.

Naturally, she proceeds with the dictionary definition of feminism.

I, perhaps unwarrantedly scorned, attempt to clarify my views, only to be dismissed as the absurdly self-despising one.

Surely, there are cultural norms and stigmas which isolate and diminish female potential—there’s no denying that. Certainly, it hurts when math, chess, and robotics clubs always maintain unbearably hostile environments for the few female attendees. It is baffling when verging on clueless male peers often receive the benefit of the doubt and effortlessly glide into leadership positions, while every possible inadequacy is scrutinized in their female counterparts.

Another girl hesitantly rises from her seat, suggesting, first, collaboration between the genders, second, casually, that not all males are patriarchal antagonists, and finally, a reminder of the statement, “Right is of no sex.” Pop quiz. Who made this phrase so famous, in the realm of both gender and race equality? A man whose autobiography many have studied—Frederick Douglass. This former male slave was historically one of the most adamant supporters of first-wave feminism, speaking at Seneca Falls and lobbying politicians, expressing greater responsiveness to the female strife than even some other women in the public sphere.
With this primer, what does she suggest as a new feminist goal? Finding similar male voices in the modern era, and rationalizing the radical female ones.

Predictably, the latter springs up, rattling how males will never take formal action to improve womanhood in our world, by expanding opportunities, and accepting us as physical, intellectual, and legal equals, as it would lessen their institutionalized privilege. Upon requests for proof of such broad claims, she relegates the onus probandi to opponents.

Frankly, this is not how human interest progresses efficiently in a presumably goal-oriented situation of bettering the lives of women, particularly when we step out from the private sphere, to the public one, and from our traditional fields of study, into technology and engineering offerings.

We owe it to one another to cease fighting over who should dominate, claiming due to longstanding patriarchy, that all males must be tainted, and females who disagree are traitors, and instead, embrace the prospects of collaborating to close the basic empathy gap between genders, through mutual education. Our generation—male and female, and any identity in between—needs to comprehend:

If we do not seize the occasion to become unified with decency, and understand—not patronize—dissimilarities, starting on the simplest level of gender, then no other individual or institution will, and we all stumble vulnerably past lost chances to leverage the unique perspectives of our opposites in tackling worldly challenges.