Since last week, I’ve had to do some soul-searching to find it in me to keep writing — not because my freshman seminar professor shredded my first essay with the same rapture my five-year-old self found in making confetti, but because my one “successful” work this year didn’t directly achieve what I had hoped.
By metrics of circulation, my column titled “Keep misandry out of feminism” was, in fact, a success: it sparked 154 online comments, emails from as far away as Denver, a response column by Marni Morse and a retweet by feminist author Christina Hoff Sommers to her 20,000 followers. But a truly successful opinion article should precipitate change, and this is where my article fell short. Not that I came here expecting to change campus — I didn’t. However, the outspoken resistance to new ideas from voices on all angles of the issue floored me. On one hand, dozens of men unaffiliated with the University bashed me for supporting feminism. The movement, they said, has become inseparable from misandry. Although their words underscored my argument — that feminism’s dearth of male support stems from its conflation with misandry — they betrayed a failure to consider that most feminists fight for equality. Conversely, a small number of commenters attacked me from the other side. One wrote, “the feminist movement is not defined by men,” thereby continuing to exclude half the population from a conversation that affects everyone.
I am not bothered by disagreement per se. I expect it, and it’s healthy. Actually, the culture of resisting new ideas is not even unique to those who disagree. For example, Sommers praised my article because it reinforced her position in her 1994 book "Who Stole Feminism?" Had I written from a perspective that she did not already champion, I doubt she would have been so supportive — in fact, I doubt she would have read my article at all. Internet news sources are so plentiful that it is all too easy to read only those sources that confirm your viewpoints. I am especially guilty of this. In truth, I am the most guilty. Reading 154 items of feedback on my column should have given me a more nuanced view, but I too remained static in my beliefs. My stability of opinion in this conversation is probably an error.
In praise of our campus community, we err less spectacularly than I have become accustomed to. Biases were so self-reinforcing in my rural southern town that my AP Biology teacher never endorsed the veracity of evolution. My grandfather took pride in never reading any book except the Bible, and my aunt eschewed bipartisan news for left-wing commentary. By contrast, the minds I have encountered here have been overwhelmingly tolerant of ideas different from their own.
Why there is a breakdown between that in-flesh openness and the uncompromising firewall that my article hit, I cannot say. What I can say is that zealous resistance breaks down in intimate conversations. Perhaps the physical presence of other people forces you to consider their humanity. Perhaps the quick back-and-forth of conversation demands you evaluate the merit of what someone is saying, rather than take time to convince yourself their idea is wrong.
After she published her column, Marni and I ate dinner together and found that our opinions are mostly concordant. We walked away friends. I am all but certain that I, at least, would not have been so receptive had our dialogue played out in a 750-word rant glorified as an opinion column. Besides, it would not have helped. These columns, I’ve decided, don’t do anything — not by themselves at least. They don’t change how people think unless they spark face-to-face discussions. That’s why Marni’s column was good: agree with her or not, she started a conversation.
I hope that I — and my fellow ‘Prince’ writers and every other voice whose words you hear — bring about change indirectly by inviting conversation. That’s why we write. That’s why Emma Watson gives UN speeches and our colleges host dinner with guests like Anne-Marie Slaughter '80. We don’t do this for ourselves. We don’t do it for Internet commenters. We do it for conversationalists. So show this page to someone else. If you have different reactions to something, talk about it. Your words, not mine, are the agents of change.Newby Parton is a freshman fromMcMinnville, Tenn. He can be reached at newby@princeton.edu.
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