And no, not just by blocking them on Instagram.
Women should eliminate men from their lives and minds, according to a new book from feminist author and lesbian activist, Alice Coffin.
Anyone who has been ghosted, gaslighted, or generally wronged by a man in their life time will have a tendency to agree with the above statement.
“Men are trash!” we scream from the proverbial Twitter rooftops, while downloading Tinder the seventh time that day.
And yet, simply avoiding men in a romantic context for the sake of our sanity isn’t what French author Coffin is suggesting. Rather, she thinks we should remove men from our lives entirely – their books, their films, their music… Pretty much anything they’ve created, really.
In her new book, Lesbian Genius, she reveals that she has stopped engaging with any creative content made my men. “We need to eliminate men from our minds,” Coffin says, actively ignorant of the fact that men still do make up just under 50% of the population and therefore, can never really be totally banished.
And nor should they be either. For all of the strife, pain, and anguish that many men have caused over centuries of power and manipulation, there remains the countless other guys who are sound, intelligent, creative, and worthy of existing in general life.
Unsurprisingly, Coffin’s book has been met with a fair amount of backlash – and not even from men, but from other French feminists who are adamant that she’s missing the point entirely.
According to the Economist, Marlène Schiappa, France’s former minister for gender equality, accused the author of advocating for “a form of apartheid.”
Similarly, a local radio host asked whether the book was seeking a “form of totalitarianism.”
Despite apparently making some valid points about the power that male sexual predators still have in the entertainment world, it doesn’t entirely make sense that refusing to watch films and read books by men will fix this issue.
Nor would such a stance encourage any men to actually educate themselves on what feminism actually is: equality.
