The other day, I was on Twitter checking out the Everyday Sexism feed. Retweeting stories about the sexist encounters people find themselves in day-to-day life, the majority of stories are from females, but there's the occasional story from a man or a guy feeling ashamed about or standing up to sexist behaviour. It doesn't seem to have a gender bias, so it's well worth checking out.

But while it's a great source for some truly shocking sexist stories that will spur you into action, it's also a great haunting ground for 'radfems', one of whom I encountered the other day.

That day's topic was sexism in the work place. I was looking through the stories and saw one about a young barmaid being harassed by her boss, in which she referred to him as a 'twat'. Following it was a comment from someone that told her not to use that word because it 'woman-hating.'

Now, hold on a minute. I have used the word 'twat' to call someone an idiot before, but never have I used it because it was offensive to women. It's an insult applicable to either gender, much like 'dick', 'knob', 'douche' etc. that is designed to call someone a moron and not be sexist in any way.

I decided to tweet her telling her she might be overreacting. This conversation followed: (NB: She's in black and I'm in the nice purple.)

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(The lmgtfy link I responded with was 'Wow. No need to be so rude. I wasn't even 'mansplaining'.)

I decided to drop the conversation with her at this point since she was being so rude to me, flippantly disregarding what I was saying because it didn't fit in line with her thoughts. That was the end of that, until I noticed that she'd tweeted this to the Everyday Sexism account:

Mansplain.

This was unfair: not only had she twisted my words (surely 'twat' can't be used in a non-derogatory way in any context?), she was telling people that I had done something I simply hadn't.

Defending myself, I called her out on it.

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She then retweeted me, which was then shared by the Miss Andry Twitter feed, which finds, shares and makes fun of the most hilarious cases of sexism towards men.

I was absolutely stunned. Here I was trying to educate her about how the world really is and at every turn she ridiculed me, poo-pooed everything I had to say and treated me like scum. The fact that she couldn't come up with a decent argument in her favour, instead relying on things that had happened hundreds if not thousands of years ago to reinforce her stance and then blatantly denied that misandry exists, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, just goes to show how ignorant, weak-minded and ill-informed she was. Every time I tried to demonstrate the flaws in her logic by flipping the genders in the situation in a courteous manner, she childishly insulted and 'LOLZED!!!' at me.

It made me so irate. I am a staunch believer of equal rights for all genders and here I was being accused of being sexist by a hypocrite who was doing exactly that. It's 'feminists' like this that are giving the proper ones that are truly striving for female rights a bad name and image. It's highly ironic that she believe she's fighting sexism by being highly sexist herself. Apparently being an egalitarian is woman-hating.

I gave up talking to her at this point: if she wasn't going to respond with a modicum of the respect I was giving her, why should I reply to her at all. Besides, how can you argue with someone that has such a hate-filled mindset?

Despite her militant narrow-mindedness, what little respect I had for her evaporated whenshe soon afterwards proved herself to be homophobic. Perhaps she's not just hateful towards men, but to everyone that doesn't fit into her world view? Who knows.

I sincerely hope that the majority of people don't see the world like she does. She claims to be a feminist, working towards equal rights, yet defecates on them when they don't suit her mindset. It's hard to work towards gender equality when there's people like her obfuscating facts and progress, endangering the work of decent men and women for a noble goal.

Hopefully she's an unheard voice amongst the noise. God knows there are far more knowledgeable and coherent ones out there.

TL;DR: Tried engaging a 'radfem' in a discussion, received a load of uninformed, ignorant abuse instead. Turned out to also be a homophobe.