katie writes stuff

A few years ago, our local cycling club created a women's trophy exists because my mum was the first woman in the club's history to beat everyone including all the men, and apparently they couldn't stand the idea of a woman winning the competition, so they gave her a new trophy and put the name of the second place winner, who happens to be male, on the winners trophy.

History has just repeated itself, but unlike my mum, I'm gonna fight for what's mine.

Murray isn't a "sexist" in the old school, women should stay in the kitchen, kind of way. But "equality" doesn't mean the right to insult people in sexist or racist terms and then shrug off criticism because "it was just a joke". Unfortunately he's representative of a deeper problem, that of trying to convince liberal, well intentioned men that feminism isn't just about equal pay and opportunities, but about changing the culture so that we understand that there's a difference between whether a woman has value as a person and whether you want to sleep with her. Murray has, in the past, said that he intellectually acknowledges this truth - and I believe him when he says it - but it still seems a while to go before the bravely "non-PC" liberals out there realise that if they make jokes that implicitly conflate those things that they're undermining feminists' attempts to make it true.
— The Frustrations of Feminism by mcduff

I'm so glad at not only seeing somebody finally saying all this, but specifically seeing a man saying it; I feel that nobody would take this message seriously from a woman, but these "jokes" really are the one reason I often feel like I'm fighting a losing battle. So, even if you already know you agree with it, read the whole thing anyway. It is long, true, but it deserves to be read, over and over again.