"From what I can tell, the average man doesn’t want to hear that he is wrong. It is ingrained into men’s culture, into their social DNA, that they are, for the most part, always right, always rational. From where I stand, most men who don’t know any better don’t want to be challenged when it comes to gender issues. Most of them believe that having sex with a woman is loving women; that spending money on women is caring; and that any sign of feminism a woman lets slip—be it anger, pro-queer talk, or any other kind of agency—can be silenced. They attribute the radical, pro-woman ideology to women who actually sleep with women—not to women like me: flirty, feminine, heterosexual. This belief is compounded by women who, like me, identify as heterosexual, and fit the traditional feminine model, but who cannot be bothered with personal liberation if it comes at the expense of a man. And in the worst of ways—the women I knew at Spelman who were submissive to men, whether by silence, or by action—were not so because they wanted sex, or material things, or a way into a male-dominated arena: they were submissive because they wanted approval, attention, and validation from the men around them, the men they knew, whether consciously or not, could not stomach an independent-minded woman."
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