Slapping Women At Clubs: The Importance Of Overcoming Gender Bias

Let’s picture a girl at the club. A girl we hate a lot.

The moment she and her friends get in the door she yells about how fucked up they’re gonna get, then makes a big deal about the whiskey and tequila shots she’s taking, because she’s a “real” woman who isn’t into bitch drinks. Conflictingly, she will frequently refer to herself as the head bitch, but gets ~emotional~ if someone calls her by her self-proclaimed title.

She spends half her night running between the bar and the DJ booth to request songs every five fucking minutes, and when he by chance happens to play one of them – because it’s some Top 40 song he’s playing to keep this shit gig and pay child support – she yells for 20 minutes to anyone in earshot about how she and the DJ are friends.

She has a tramp stamp that she herself refers to as a tramp stamp.

We’re gonna call her Shelby. And if your name is Shelby, you might be a mountain of rationality writing a dissertation in algebraic topology as we speak, but even fictional insufferables have names and sometimes you’ll get stuck with theirs. Reginas know the struggle. Don’t be a Shelby about it.

The Shelbys we’re talking about suck complete and total ass. Their transparently white name might lead you to picture a white girl as our Shelby, but that’s your first mistake and that’s how you get Shelbied. Shelbys come in every shape, size, and color, and strike at any time. They’re usually as deep as a MySpace quote, and always twice as irrelevant.

They are basic bitches — but they’re more than that. They realize on some level that they aren’t interesting and try to compensate for this by masking their basicness with a torrent of quirky bullshit, e.g. “Sriracha and Kombucha literally keep me alive” or “I’m a funky pillow fort enthusiast.”

They are bitches who couldn’t decide whether to take the red pill or the blue pill, so they took both after slathering each one in Nutella. 

They are intermediate bitches.

You know who else is a funky pillow fort enthusiast? Four year olds who haven’t quite gotten the hang of potty training. You’re boring.

But this isn’t what makes a Shelby a Shelby. Intermediateness is a necessary condition for Shelbyhood, not a sufficient one.

Shelbys are women who believe that as a ~lady~ they are entitled to special treatment and that to deny them this special treatment means there is something obviously wrong with you, not them, or whatever ridiculous demand they made.

They will throw a fit about having to carry anything over 45 lbs to manipulate a guy into carrying it for her, will play the period card anytime they’re in a shitty mood to prevent other people from retorting, and will begin their sentences with ‘as a woman…’ to validate whatever bad point they’re trying to make.

Did that last part bother you? It shouldn’t. If you have to use your gender to prove a point, your point probably isn’t that great.

The idea that women should be treated with extra courtesy by men is just watered-down court etiquette imported by colonists who tried to recreate some semblance of an aristocracy in the South. They failed, then rebranded the effort with euphemisms like “southern etiquette” or “being a lady/gentleman.”

Women like Shelby latch onto these social behaviors because it gives men greater explicit demands they must meet to be “gentlemen” — carrying heavy items, opening doors, assuming monetary responsibility. This is in contrast to women, who are by default “ladies” and retain that title until they exhibit behavior that suggests otherwise.

“Being a lady” is great, because it relies on social interpretation and you can make interpretation do whatever you want if you’re convincing enough. At its strictest interpretation a woman raising her voice or sitting a certain way could be considered unladylike, but at its loosest there’s virtually nothing a woman can do to cease being a lady, because being a lady is a quality all women have — which means they will always stand to reap the benefits regardless of their behavior. Do I even have to tell you which interpretation Shelbys love using?

What makes Shelbys so fucking toxic is that they have an acute awareness of their position as twenty-something “ladies” and use this to their advantage more often than that guy who always spams Hadouken with Ryu. Seeing as we’re living in an age where nothing but a woman’s word counts as damning evidence in gender conflicts, this is basically their Roaring Twenties.

To appreciate a Shelby in action, let’s look at how she acts in a line to a restroom.

Girls deal with the fact that we have lines because a lot of our time is taken up by sitting down. If there’s one thing I can concretely count as male privilege, it’s the ability to stand and pee. And yeah, we do spend more time primping in the mirror, but mirrors don’t have an occupancy limit. Toilets do, and if you’re on your period you might as well be taking a shit. Imagine if every guy had to take a mandatory shit every time he went to the restroom – that line would stretch straight out the door into the alleyway where a gang of bros assume a twerk stance behind a dumpster. So if your club is packed wall-to-wall with girls who got in free before eleven, and that club only has one restroom with four stalls in it, there’s going to be a line and that’s all there is to it.

Let’s say you’re waiting in this line, no doubt tweeting about how much you hate waiting in lines, and you can’t help but notice all the guys floating in and out of their restroom like there’s a pee machine diffusing the urine out of their body upon entry. You’re seven girls deep in this clit conga, and the only reason you’ve moved forward at all is because the A/C at this dive is way too cold and every girl is clustering for warmth.

So, you look at the men’s restroom and say “fuck this, I’m getting in on that.”

A regular chick, after deciding to violate this set of facilitatory rules we all have implicitly agreed on, would first peep to see if a stall was open, then scuttle and handle her business.

At most, she might have to sheepishly explain to an understandably confused piss-partner how many Kamikazes she had and how her little bladder just can’t take it anymore, after which she’s going to get the fuck out and work on the rest of her overpriced cocktail. Let’s be real — you never *truly* know how drunk you are until you’re trying to piss, and this never stops you from drinking more anyways.

This might be a little weird, but it’s also pretty harmless. Most guys would have no problem with her intrusion because we’ve all overestimated ourselves in front of the squad before and needed to take a breather on the toilet — and besides potentially stalling one or two guys’ use of that particular toilet at that particular time, she had no significant effect on the male usage of their designated facilities.

Shelby does the opposite of this.

She’s going to go inside and wait for every man to finish before she even attempts to use a stall, as if they’re trespassing on the men’s bathroom, while her friend Chelsea stands guard like a ROK soldier staring down Conference Row ready to verbally fire upon any guy who gets within a four foot radius of the door.

Chelsea is going to do that because Chelsea thrives off Shelby’s constant shitkicking and willful helplessness. Their relationship is like Shego and Dr. Drakken’s from Kim Possible — in nearly every way Chelsea is much more of a threat than Shelby, she’s usually a great deal smarter, isn’t afraid of direct aggressive communication, and, if need be, can hold her own in a fight. But the essential trait Chelsea lacks is the desire to start disputes. She just likes to win them. So no matter how much Chelsea berates Shelby for the stupid thing she’s about to do, she’s going to let Shelby do it anyway because it gives Chelsea a reason to be confrontational and aggressive.

Bro: “Uh, excuse me I need to get in there.”
Chelsea: “You can’t go in there. My friend is using the restroom.”
Bro: “But this is the men’s restroom.”
Chelsea: “Well there’s a girl in there so it’s the girl’s restroom right now. Can’t you like, go pee outside?”

If you see the problem here, congratulations, you are sane. All 832 of Chelsea’s DIY Pinterest followers could be in the men’s bathroom taking the shit of their life, but that doesn’t change the fact that the owners of this slowly disintegrating club are the only people who have the authority to change whether this restroom is for men or women. Unless the women’s bathroom is shut down or there’s some sort of emergency requiring the immediate use of a toilet, women really have no claim to use the men’s room, and vice versa.

But Scarlet Bitch here legitimately believes her vagina can warp reality, and Shelby does too. Her worldview is shaped by the belief that her gender creates a change in how members of the opposite sex should treat her and other women.

This is malignant on many different levels. Forget that this belief is loaded with societal misconceptions regarding what is appropriate — Shelbys and their consorts believe gender determines what is acceptable in social interactions and what is not.

Stop and think about that for a second. We’ve had societies and cultures that have internalized gender roles. They were horrible societies.

Women and men had different educations based on what was ‘proper’ for each gender to learn – that did not have to follow the defunct “separate but equal” doctrine. Women and men were restricted in the careers they could pursue based on what their gender was perceived to be best suited for. Women and men had actions like who or where they could visit restricted based on their genders.

And we still have societies and cultures that operate like that. Shout out to Saudi Arabia coming in hot at 130th out of 140 countries for gender parity.

So what’s the point of even discussing Shelby?

Despite having less functionality than the poke button on Facebook, Shelby is notable because she is the girl at the club who is about to get the shit slapped out of her by a guy.

I’m not talking about our boy Mark, the featherweight who gets physically violent whenever he drinks and takes it out on women for no reason. That guy’s an asshole and needs his kneecaps shot. Shelby isn’t going to be the victim here. Shelby is gonna get the shit knocked out of her by some other guy because she hit him first.

And every girl in world knows if she gets hit by a guy in public, gym bros will ooze out of the walls and pelvic thrust themselves across the room to white knight your situation on the off chance they’ll get laid.

But, as a poor black-hispanic woman, surely I think men shouldn’t hit women ever?

I don’t know what the average girl reading this is like, but I counted the number of fights I’ve been in before I wrote this and it’s at least 50. I didn’t grow up in the suburbs where the worst thing you have to worry about is falling off your tricycle. I know what a punch feels like. I know what it’s like to throw one. Black women “act like black women” because we don’t get special treatment.

If you expect to be treated like everyone else, you should never put your hands on someone else unless you are 100% ready for them to hit you back, period.

There’s no justified reason to hit anyone, unless they hit you first or in some other way have placed your life in immediate danger, e.g. someone attempting to mug you by threatening you with a knife — although they haven’t *physically* touched you, your life is being threatened.

I think this is a fair standard here. In a perfect world, no one would try to hit you first or put you in danger and we wouldn’t have to have this discussion.

We don’t live in that world.

There isn’t a place on the planet where we as humans haven’t created entire careers to deal with people who violate our “don’t be dangerous” rule. So assuming you aren’t the aggressor and someone strikes you first, you have every right to turn around and punch them in the trachea. Vaginas aren’t a trap card you can activate to bypass retaliation from hitting guys, just like penises aren’t a cheat code to enable woman-beating mode.

If you’re sincerely trying to make that the standard — that women shouldn’t be hit by men even if they struck first — then what you’re saying is that it may or may not be okay to inflict damage on another person if they are the wrong gender.

If you need a word for that, it’s called gender-based discrimination. Take a second to internalize it. Keep your damn hands to yourself.

I know what people say when I say this. They say “women are weaker than men!” like there is no gray area here. It doesn’t work like that, boo. Most of it’s gray. Get comfortable.

Remember those games you would play back in middle school behind the locker rooms where you’d slap each others hands with all your preteen might until you quit and pouted about it because your crush saw you bitch out?

If you do remember those games, you know that middle schoolers are weak, stringy little monsters who can barely throw a volleyball across the gymnasium floor, but if you were to challenge one to that stupid slapping game, they would still be able to inflict pain on you. That wimpy slap on your hand is going to feel like a paddle striking your skinless flesh within three minutes max.

There is no way a grown-ass woman slapping some guy with reckless drunken abandon isn’t going to eventually cause him some pain, and what — he’s supposed to ignore that because she has a vagina and he’s “the man?” That is the definition of pussy privilege.

If she were some level 10 derp in a video game, walked up, poked a level 49 monster in the sphincter and it slaughtered her, no one would have any sympathy for her. That thing is breathing fire with a dick covered in spikes and you’re telling me that the monster should have just taken the damage because you’re weaker than it?

That makes zero sense. You deserve that XP loss.

Shit, men are weaker than men. An average woman may only bench 60 pounds, but oceans of DYEL men only bench 100 pounds, so those women could beat up weaker guys with enough lifting. And in case you haven’t noticed, most guys don’t even go to the gym. Why would they? The last thing that’s on the average guy’s mind after getting home from lifting buckets of ketchup at their generic job is getting right back up to lift even heavier shit at the gym for another hour. But if he isn’t strong, it’s his fault, and if a woman isn’t strong, fuck that guy anyway.

And unconsciously or not, people throttle their outrage if a man happens to be too big for you to fight. You don’t see guys lining up to take on the fucking Juggernaut when he slaps a chick – you see them stampeding to faceroll the Michael Cera look-a-like they know they can look hard against.

But dat 40 pound difference tho?

Please. Tell me your oral history of clubs that have gotten up in arms because a guy who benches 220 pounds beat the shit out of a guy who benches 100 pounds. No big deal, just three times the difference as the difference between the DYEL man and the woman. I don’t even want to think about the mental somersaults you’re doing if you still think this is a valid argument to make.

So if Shelby doesn’t hit the Juggernaut, who *does* Shelby hit?

Our Shelby is interacting with Noah, the unsuspecting horny male, trying to get him to do some *thing* — usually answering a question along the lines of “so do you think my friend is hot” or “you should drive us to Taco Bell.”

This isn’t the first thing she says, mind you. This is about fifteen minutes into their interaction, when it’s too late for him to kind of mumble a response into his beer and turn away. They already followed each other on Twitter, and even if he lowkey mutes or unfollows her, it’s already too late. She knows his handle. If she can’t stalk him in the club, she can stalk him online. She might stalk him anyway if he tells her to shut up when she shouts about being a Rising Scorpio as her voice pierces through else’s and the loud-ass music “her homeboy” (the DJ) is playing.

So far, all her wheedling has done is make Noah regret giving her the offhand compliment that started this whole conversation — but he is still reluctant to officially burn this bridge because he hasn’t gotten laid in a few weeks, he *thinks* he might have a chance with one of her friends, and Google has started saving his favorite porn sites on his frequent links tab.

So he tries to brush her off by slinking away to the bathroom or pretending that someone else across the room just called him. Big mistake; he’s in too deep. Shelby isn’t having any of his Houdini escape artist shit. She views her interactions as investments, and when she doesn’t get her returns, it’s Don Corleone time. No matter where he goes in the bar, she’s two steps behind him trying to get his attention again, because ignoring a Shelby is the fastest way to get her to pay attention to you.

Finally Noah’s tolerance is depleted; the magnitude of Shelby’s shitty fucking attitude completely overrides any hold her vagina held on the situation, and now Noah has zero interest in sleeping with her or any of her friends who are still at the bar taking blurry selfies — which means he has zero reason to placate Shelby’s demands about how he should talk to her.

So, Noah does what any man would do right away if Shelby’s vagina were never an issue. He calls her a stupid bitch.

But don’t think he believes this is a risk-free action. In fact, calling a woman a bitch is a dangerous gamble. Key and Peele’s ‘I Said Bitch’ bit is the realest damn thing I’ve ever seen, because they know what might happen if a woman hears them, and they know the never-ending shitstorm that will pummel their household for weeks if she finds out it was in reference to her.

I’m not saying don’t call a person a bitch — a name is a name is a name, and personally I don’t think anyone should get emotional because some speck on our planet of seven billion insulted you. God forbid you ever try to play League of Legends. Just realize what you’re getting into.

The best case scenario is that she isn’t the emotional equivalent of a soufflé and, while pissed off, is simply going to insult you back.

“A stupid bitch? I probably am stupid, because I thought you could come up with a good line.” — Shelby, if she were capable of wit.

Women who are emotional soufflés break down the second anyone insults them.

“Me? A bitch? How could you be so insensitive, you dick!”

People like this usually end up crying before being rendered speechless, which is somewhat awkward and fully nonsensical. You don’t get to enter the shit-talking ring and throw haymakers for two minutes then call the ref because your opponent made you feel bad.

The third and worst possible outcome — which is the one that’s about to happen — is all of the anger of the first option, with all of the shock of the second option.

Her anger is going to make her want to come up with some stinging retort that’ll break him down to emotional mush, but she’ll be too in awe that someone *actually* called her a bitch to her face instead of behind her back as usual. Worse, she’s come to the realization that her vagina powers have no effect on him anymore, and no amount of her “feminine charm” is going to pull him back under her control.

What happens next is the social equivalent of a C4 detonation.

She convulses in fury and foams at the mouth as one of her fake eyelashes falls from her face, then she belches a throaty battle cry as if she’s summoning the power of Grayskull to turn into She-Ra. All those nights of traipsing around in stilettos finally come into play, and in the blink of an eye she’s landing a deafening crack across his face.

Two things can happen right now: Noah can hit her back, or he can continue his escape attempt.

But Shelby doesn’t want him to escape, remember? If he tries to maneuver around her, he’s going to continue being hit by her until he is literally driving away from the bar or until one of her friends manages to distract her long enough for him to do that same thing. Shelbys will follow your ass to the fucking parking lot and beyond if you’re on foot.

Most guys choose the parking lot option, because they know that hitting a woman at a club under any circumstances is a certain way to end up in a bar fight with some dude trying to be Captain America. They’d rather get called every kind of faggot in the book by this belligerent hamster than chance ending up on WorldStar.

Unfortunately, this guy has zero fucks left to give, and he’s had enough of her shit. He slaps her back.

Just like Seal Team Six, Shelby’s pussy pack swoops in to engage the enemy. No matter what she calls it — her fam, da krew, the besties — she never goes out in public without her collection of beta bitches bolstering her status as a twenty-something lady, because the only thing more powerful than a single vagina is multiple vaginas.

The first one is always Chelsea, the *man* of the group. She’s the one who eventually picks up the moderately heavy thing Shelby complained about, routinely kills any bugs the pack encounters, and is probably the only one who knows how to change a tire. She probably owns a hunting camo jacket she’s never worn hunting, and frequently pairs it with sweatpants from Victoria’s Secret.

Within milliseconds of the slap, she has already begun screaming at the top of her lungs about this “FUCKING PIECE OF FILTH LAYING HIS HANDS ON A WOMAN,” while comforting the shell-shocked Shelby. People who were all the way across the fucking room and had no way of seeing what the fuck just happened are now flocking to this human bullhorn while fumbling with their lock screens so they can record whatever is going down.

This wail also serves to alert any man with an overblown sense of duty to the scene, because despite Chelsea’s extremely explicit threats regarding castration and arson, she isn’t actually gonna do shit. This is the real reason why she hates Shelby getting hit — it undermines her position as the macho chick within the group.

Nicole, the group PR consultant and personification of the term “can’t even,” is already to the side recording the event while texting someone else about how she hates going to clubs with Shelby because Shelby always starts drama. Nicole is almost always on her phone to distract herself from the fact that she’s hanging out with cognitive bottom-feeders.

This is the only person in the group who probably thinks Shelby deserved to get slapped; in fact, Nicole probably doesn’t even really like Shelby at all, but continues to hang out with her for some material or social benefit, like getting invited to exclusive sorority parties or “borrowing” her clothes.

Forever the designated driver when Shelby inevitably decides to sleep with whatever dude comes to her rescue, Nicole will be the one who drives Shelby’s car back to her apartment for her, but not before burning half her gas tank making a detour to that one boba tea place with free wifi.

And just in case you thought Nicole might actually make the group sane, every possible benefit Nicole provides is counterweighted by Brandi. Where Nicole doesn’t care about anything, Brandi cares about everything, frequently over-reading social situations to make sure she hasn’t been disrespected or insulted. When Brandi talks about being a “ride or die bitch,” no one giggles because they know she’s being completely honest. Her disregard for her own safety is dwarfed only by her commitment to her clique and her willingness to go to extremes to protect them.

When you read a news story about some chick siphoning semen from a condom to impregnate herself or stabbing someone over chicken nuggets and you wonder who the fuck would do that? Brandi would do that. If women were organizations, Brandi would be a Mexican drug cartel. She’s never instigating the action, and lurks in the shadows as insurance for the group. This is the chick who follows you home just so she can slash your tires, or who throws your TV out the window because you accidentally erased Gossip Girl. Everything that Chelsea imagines she will do is nothing compared to the psychotic shit Brandi plans to actually do.

Thankfully, Brandi doesn’t have to commit a felony tonight, because Hector has just arrived to save the day, with his untucked dress shirt fluttering behind him like a cape in the air-conditioner’s breeze.

Hector is the kind of guy who thinks Pitbull is the epitome of success and masculinity. He rocks 16-inch fatceps and makes a really big deal about the bottle service he can’t afford but gets anyway. The only purpose of bottle service is to sit awkwardly at some elevated table and rub in everyone else’s face that you’re spending more money than them, which is why Hectors eat that shit up. “All” he wants is to prove to everyone else what he thinks is reality: that he’s completely better than them in every way possible. He’ll brag about how much time he spends at the gym when the real weightlifters there sigh at his presence and wonder how much half-repping Hector is going to do today.

If manliness were measured by how well you could suck dick, Hector would be on the craigslist M4M page hyping up his head game and chasing after BBC with toothy blowjobs.

Now that the entire club has circled around Hector and Noah, they’re screaming for blood, because blood equals a shit ton of likes on Instagram. In a last ditch effort to avoid this ass beating, Noah points at Shelby, who is unfortunately beginning to regain control of her vocal cords, and yells:

“But she hit me first!”

Sorry Noah. If people were rational and didn’t dismiss claims of assault based on the victim’s gender, Hector would ask Shelby if this was true.

She would probably say something like, “well yeah, but he called me a bitch!”

Hector would shake his head in disappointment and motion for Chelsea to get Shelby out of the building, Nicole and Brandi in tow, as the crowd dispersed. He would be thanked by our almost-victim Noah, and they’d probably share a shot of that overpriced liquor together. (“Yeah, Jay-Z actually owns this company man, it’s totally legit. How much did you say you bench again?”)

But this isn’t what happens.

Hector is going to punch this guy in the face before the words can even leave his mouth, and everyone is going to whoop and cheer as he’s chased from the building with pitchforks and torches like it’s Salem 1692.

Shelby is going to fawn over Hector for the rest of the night because not only did she have a guy step in and save her, she had the guy with bottle service step in and save her, and even though she doesn’t know shit about liquor besides how to drink it, she knows that bottle service equals disposable income, or at least poor spending habits — either one could be directed towards her, and that’s the important thing.

Chelsea will bring up how much ass she would have kicked if Hector didn’t show up, and when she realizes that no one is listening to her, she will wander off with Hector’s bottle and challenge any guys taking shots to a drinking contest in reaffirment of her macho chick mythos.

Nicole will continue being unimpressed, and will spend the rest of the night on her iPhone before dropping off the obscenely drunk Chelsea, who will puke on the pavement the second she steps out of the car and cry because it got on her cowboy boots.

Brandi is going to ride with Hector and Shelby back to his place, and while he *thinks* he’s going to finally have that threesome he’s been telling people about for the past five years, Shelby is going to pass out on his couch while Brandi fucks him to sleep so she can poke around his underwear drawer and swipe through his phone to see if he has a baby momma. He’s gonna wake up to Shelby asking him if he’ll take her to Taco Bell and Brandi asking him if *hypothetically* he’d want a boy or a girl.

Before he can question if he wore a condom or not, Shelby and Brandi are going to get a shit ton of notifications from the video Nicole tagged them in, with descriptions like “Douchebag gets his dick kicked in after hitting a girl #equality #justice #thatswhatyouget.” Hector is going to marvel at the size of his “gains” while Brandi guesses at his yearly income, and Shelby is going to walk away from this entire situation legitimately believing that all of her actions were valid and justified.

NO. That is dogshit. That is neither equality nor justice.

Equality would have been giving both parties’ testimonies equal consideration. Justice would have been looking at situation neutrally to see who was at fault independent of their gender.

Hitting people is going to happen. It’s not a question of “should people hit people” but “should we give people a special protection from being hit” — and the answer is no, we shouldn’t. This would just give small people carte blanche to act like belligerent shitsprinklers to everyone who is superficially larger than them, and we would take the same problem that exists when women hit men and spread it to a much larger portion of the population. Even if everyone who isn’t a human chihuahua was shamed for laying their hands on a smaller person, this wouldn’t prevent these people from violently fighting among themselves. You can’t win.

Oh, but you think you can win without force in society?

Let’s look back at what happened. Ask yourself what you’re going to do if a person is being loud and confrontational to you in a club and you want them to leave but nothing you say works and they won’t go away. Will you hit them? No, of course not, Siddhartha, we’re repeating this scenario on pacifist mode. Most likely you’ll call security. And what will security do if that person refuses to leave?

Right, they’ll touch this person with a plastic box that sends an electrical current through their body and disrupts their body’s voluntary control of their muscles until they’re incapacitated and shit themselves. And if our troublemaker knocks security’s taser away, security will just put them in a chokehold. You lose.

You don’t “do” clubs anymore? Gotcha, Nicole.

So your husband bails and refuses to pay child support. The government can show up to his house, ruin his reputation, whatever; he doesn’t give a shit. If you make someone feel bad, they can just not care, and if you hit someone’s income, they can just get comfortable being poor. Welcome to the hood.

Does he never pay it? Of course he pays it. The government takes his money anyway, and if somehow he avoids that, a group of men in blue uniforms grab him and put him in a giant concrete box for a while, potentially with other larger men who may physically abuse him. And if you think that those men shouldn’t hit him, you’re going to have a great time coming up with a way to enforce that.

No one, Shelby or otherwise, should be allowed to use special treatment to avoid the consequences of their actions. It gives obnoxious men an excuse to beat up on smaller men because they think they might get pussy, and gives obnoxious women an excuse to take their obnoxiousness to 300 without fear of repercussion. If we really want our society to begin overcoming gendered biases, pretending that women have zero privilege is the opposite of what we should be doing.