Hey, I'm having a discussion with a friend of mine right now. We're both super liberal, socialist, secular nuts, but where she considers herself a feminist, I consider myself an egalitarian and humanist. I believe that although there are certain parts of seciety where females have it tougher, men have a lot of problems as well (as you are all well aware of) and that there's no simple balance of who has it "worse." My ideal world would be one where disadvantages based on gender are eliminated entirely, but she refuses to cede that there are ANY challenges faced by males, and whenever we try to have a meaningful discussion, she ends with "I will never change my mind, you will never change yours, I don't care, this is over." That's enough background information though.

So today she posted a status on facebook where she praised the author Marilyn Frye for her essay "Oppression." You're free to read it yourself, you can find a copy online for free, but the basic idea of it is that while men face challenges, you shouldn't call it oppression, and lays down the difference between having some societal difficulties and being oppressed. I ended up talking to my friend about it, and it basically boiled down to the fact that I don't consider females to be oppressed. Her most basic example was the prevelance of sexual harassment: basically every single female has been harassed in some way at one point. I told her that it was not oppression because it was a small minority of men who harassed women. It only took one man to harass a potentially infinite amount of women. Then she had the guts to say this bullshit.

"It's not a minority, that's the thing. It's the vast majority of males. It's almost every guy we went to high school with."

Now, I am rarely offended by anything. Sticks and stones, and all that jazz. But this actually hit me like a physical strike. I told her that I was offended by that, and that it simply wasn't true. Even using the most broad definition of sexual harassment, like "lewd comments," it's only the lowest common denominator of classless asshole or drunken douchebag who harasses women. She simply would not agree that perhaps she had exaggerated, or misspoken, but instead insisted that the majority of men, and most of the guys we graduated with harassed women sexually.

Am I right to be offended here? What do you even say to this?