“Ted” has been posting on Craigslist for months, looking for a woman to teach him how to approach women in public. It sounds coercive and awful—he’s going to pay a woman to teach him how to claim his God-given right to any woman’s attention at any time.
Unemployed as I am, I comb the Gigs section daily, and one fateful night, I decided to respond. I told Ted that he needs to learn when women aren’t interested in talking, and he also needs to think about the personal safety issues women face all the time. I even outed myself as a feminist.
Shockingly, Ted wrote back, and I made a plan to meet him at a coffee shop and discuss the job.
If I get this job, I plan to use it to teach Ted when not to approach women in public, aka 99% of the time. I don’t want to give this guy the confidence to talk to any woman—I want to teach him to recognize when women don’t want to talk and respect that. Ultimately I want to teach him that pushing women’s boundaries in public social situations is never acceptable.
I’d like to use this opportunity to mold a decent, non-d-bag man from someone who’s at least recognized that he’s having trouble talking to women, and won’t find my perspective in the standard lore. There’s a lot I can use for teaching materials, like Phaedra Starling’s piece “Schrodinger’s Rapist” and RP’s “But I’m Nice!”. But I’m worried about three things: first, if I’m helping a man talk to women, won’t my perspective necessarily be diluted? I find myself nodding my head when talking to men disturbingly often. How can I do this in good conscience? Second, what if he’s a d-bag? What if he’s a rapist? Third, what if he doesn’t really listen to me, just uses some parts of what I’m saying to manipulate women? I just don’t know how to do this, or if I should.
I need advice, everyone. Is there any universe in which this isn’t blatantly cooperating in women’s oppression?
Follow-up to that other article posted a while ago: 
Guaranteed to work!
Can anyone recommend me an essay/book/text/video/whatever that makes a clear, analytical, impassioned, awesome defense of femininity? I just found this neat book in the LGBTQI center at my school that’s called Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Gender Studies. It has this interesting format where it poses questions, then presents a YES side and NO side to the question with two different authors. One caught my eye: “Is the Quest for Beauty Necessarily Damaging to Women?” I read the NO answer and was severely disappointed by the argument. Probably because it was written by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese who was a leader of the conservative feminist movement. The whole essay was very capitalist, classist, and racist–in a nutshell it basically said, “Women bond over shopping. If you tell women they can’t buy dresses, they will not bond and love each other.” She called feminists who come out against femininity like me elitists (which I’ve been called before…) , but didn’t really articulate her reasoning or use examples, though I REALLY wanted to know why. I just don’t think she knows how to write well… She also wrote a book called Feminism is Not My Life Story… which makes me saaad.
My friend showed me 
rs at Playboy are, to think a lacy bra and panty set can bring the devil out of you. You, ma’am, were a devil from the start.
I’ve been feeling a lot of tension lately between my feminist identity and my gender identity. They both began developing around the same time. I started realizing that I what I thought was right for me deviated from the mainstream. A lot of people have been offended by my sadness for feminists who shave their legs and armpits, pluck their eyebrows, and maintain a “femme” appearance. Ever since I decided to stop doing these things (I didn’t do that many of them to begin with), and even before then, I have seen these practices as compromises to my feminism because I associated them with a desperate desire I had to pass as straight. I also hated my body hair and thought it was ugly. And I wasted a fair amount of time each day to maintaining this appearance. So whenever I see a female-identified person following these rules, I assume that they have some deep-down homophobia-based fear of looking gay or like a “typical feminist”. I was so torn about stopping shaving. I was scared people would judge me or be grossed out. Then I remembered that (a) I am an awesome person, (b) I would never want to be friends with someone who liked me only for my socially acceptable appearance, and (c) my hairy legs would just be ignorant-person repellant and do I really want to attract ignorant people? Now some feminists might say that ignorant people will only learn the error of their ways by being wooed (platonically or otherwise) by feminists. But I decided that I would rather stop wasting my time waging a war on my body hair for the sake of converting the fools to feminism.
Gender Agenda 