(I'm sorry, this turned out super long, but you seem like the kind of person who might actually read and think about it, so it seemed worth it to keep going)

In a lot of ways it reminds me of (another even more dangerous land mine here) the response you'll sometimes see to "Black Lives Matter".

"Oh, I see how it is, feminists want to advance women over men!" is a similar misinterpretation as "No I believe that ALL lives matter! "

Because right, sure, no one disagrees with that. But right now, there's one piece that's not being equally addressed. To borrow a somewhat overused metaphor at this point: if a family sits down for dinner but Billy doesn't get any food, he would rightly complain. "Billy's dinner matters!", he might say, and its silly to respond with "Ah Billy, ALL dinners matter!" when there's only one person who hasn't got one. Call Billy's cause for dinner "Billy's Dinner Matters" or "Billyism"—its focused on getting him up to par with everyone else at the table.

Continuing the BLM/feminism comparison, it also seems that the majority of the opposition is: "it's not as bad as you say it is, you just want special treatment". Which is perhaps whythe metaphor above doesn't land seem to land for some people.

"Billy just got a dinner he doesn't like, so he's trying to say he doesn't have dinner at all! I bet he only got that dinner he doesn't like because he did something bad, and he DESERVES that dinner".

It's really hard to argue with that. You'd think it should be easy with statistics but, well, as we continue to argue about the "myth of the gender pay gap" or "blacks make up a higher percentage of crime" I think it's obvious that those statistics can be twisted to say just about anything we want.

Given that, the only reasonable conclusion I see is to take those people at their word. I'm not black. I'm not a woman. I see some bad shit happening to both groups though, so when they tell me "man it's worse than you realize" it doesn't seem crazy to believe that. Are there people in both groups who want to play up their suffering to get sympathy? Certainly. All groups of people have assholes who want to take advantage of things. And there's probably people who HAVEN'T really felt the effects of discrimination and yet want to jump in and get some some free shit.

"But there's so many people that are just doing it for attention, the people who really want equality just change their name!"

is something I've heard a lot, when people say "feminism" as a dirty word. But, well, tough shit, that's not really how words work. Especially when the original meaning was there first, it's pretty damn hard to just change the name of a whole movement or line of thinking. Judge someone on the specifics of of what they believe and how the implement them, not the word they use to describe a complex topic.

And as a WHOLE, when enough people say "this problem is worse than you think it is" I think the only rational move is to believe them. By definition, they have more information than I do about being black, or being a woman. Are they not at least MORE likely to be correct? And given that I personally wouldn't claim to know exactly how women or African Americans face inequality, it seems the logical thing to do is listen when a whole group tells me something. Even if that person isn't any smarter than me, they certainly have more data points on what they're talking about, and that matters.

Not to say that feminism and BLM are identical, I get that. I just think it's an opportunity to get at the root of why there's such a stark culture divide around those, because in a lot of cases it seems people are either "pro BLM and pro feminism" or "think that BLM and feminism are going too far". It seems like at its core it's the same issue:

"Do other people have it as bad as they say, and what should we do about it?"

Pete Buttigieg (another name that might get me downvoted in this sub?) had a great response when someone asked him if, in general, he supported "promoting inequality to achieve equality". His response was just, "Well, I believe that when something was stolen, it should be given back".

Sure, sometimes it looks like one group wants special treatment. It may even look like we as a society are giving them special privileges. But I don't think anyone can deny that in maybe history of the US there HAS been sexism and racism, and that stole something from people. So we ought to give it back.

Holy shit I'm sorry that turned out so long. If you made it this far, thanks for reading. And I would honestly love to hear your thoughts.