I said “for others”. If you see yourself among them, that’s on you. If you don’t, feel free to explain why.
Also, I don’t feel personally guilty here and have no standing to impose collective guilt. I just understand that a lot of people aren’t willing to acknowledge that white cis-het men as a general class have been and are, by dint of the power they’ve wielded in the West, the source of the patriarchy and its associated ills for centuries.
This isn’t about repentance or punishment (very patriarchal priorities, by the way), but about acknowledgment and remediation.
There’s a lot of fear amongst certain men that if they acknowledge the various privileges they enjoy on the basis of skin colour, gender, sexual orientation, etc., that they’ll immediately get beaten up by those who’ve been excluded from those privileges. In fact, the opposite often happens, and equality doesn’t end up feeling like oppression after all.
It seems to me that opposition to the patriarchy is both very critical and, judging by the debates between second- and third-wave feminists, far from groupthink.
