I cannot even begin to express how much this pisses me off. This is a speech by Abby Wambach, a retired professional soccer player, at Barnard University's commencement. She based it on the story of Little Red Riding Hood. Here's the key part of it:

If I could go back and tell my younger self one thing it would be this:

“Abby, you were never Little Red Riding Hood; you were always the wolf.”

So when I was entrusted with the honor of speaking here today, I decided that the most important thing for me to say to you is this:

BARNARD WOMEN—CLASS OF 2018—WE. ARE. THE. WOLVES.

In 1995, around the year of your birth, wolves were re-introduced into Yellowstone National Park after being absent for seventy years.

In those years, the number of deer had skyrocketed because they were unchallenged, alone at the top of the food chain. They grazed away and reduced the vegetation, so much that the river banks were eroding.

Once the wolves arrived, they thinned out the deer through hunting. But more significantly, their presence changed the behavior of the deer. Wisely, the deer started avoiding the valleys, and the vegetation in those places regenerated. Trees quintupled in just six years. Birds and beavers started moving in. The river dams the beavers built provided habitats for otters and ducks and fish. The animal ecosystem regenerated. But that wasn’t all. The rivers actually changed as well. The plant regeneration stabilized the river banks so they stopped collapsing. The rivers steadied—all because of the wolves’ presence.

See what happened here?

The wolves, who were feared as a threat to the system, turned out to be its salvation.

Barnard women, are you picking up what I’m laying down here?

Women are feared as a threat to our system—and we will also be our society’s salvation.

Our landscape is overrun with archaic ways of thinking about women, about people of color, about the “other,” about the rich and the poor, about the the powerful and the powerless—and these ways of thinking are destroying us.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

We will not Little Red Riding Hood our way through life. We will unite our pack, storm the valley together and change the whole bloody system.

  • This woman is onstage only because she's a professional soccer player. A few points about this. If she had to compete openly against men, they'd destroy her, so for her own welfare, they had to create a female-only league. Because there isn't much interest in soccer in the US, particularly women's soccer, the league has to be heavily subsidized and is small. She's able to be an athlete for a living because a bunch of men are covering for her.
  • She's also a gay woman who's married. In any other culture or time in history, she would be, at the very least, shunned for this. The men who run this country created legal status and protection for her that allows her to do something (marry another woman) that contradicts the entire idea of marriage as it's been known literally since civilization was created.
  • She's speaking at Barnard, an all-women Ivy League university created and funded by men, to educate only women.

And finally, her whole wolf metaphor? The individual wolves who actually do the killing, who take down the prey, are the males. They're bigger and stronger, and they're the ones who can bring down a deer. The females herd, and assist, but one-on-one with a male, have no chance at all.

In other words, what you have here is a lesbian recruiting other young women into the We Hate Men Club, for her own personal reasons, and delivering a speech at a very exclusive, prestigious school, that's a complete lie. This is who we're up against.