5 Things Men Are Not Allowed To Have An Opinion On

1. Abortion.

If you are in a relationship (or just happened to have sex with someone who then became pregnant), and you are asked your opinion, go for it. If your help is asked for, and you can give it, do all that you can. But at no point is it ever your job to walk into a conversation with any woman and tell her that you disagree with her choice. It is not your place to legislate what her choice should be. And it’s ludicrous to make moral judgments on the outcomes of a scenario you will never, ever find yourself in. If you personally find it wrong, and would advise your partner against it if she asked your advice, fine. Enjoy that sentiment, revel in it, and keep it to yourself. Because as someone who will never have to deal with the physical and emotional repercussions of pregnancy and childbirth, your opinion is simply never needed. It’s cute that you can imagine what it might be like just long enough to tell us what to do, but it doesn’t ever make for a compelling argument.

2. What makes a woman slutty.

There is nothing okay with having double standards for women and men’s sexuality, and there are few things more unfair than dividing the women into Madonnas and Whores. Masturbating to a hot porn star and then denigrating her for doing things that you perceive to be wrong is pathetic. Fucking a woman that turns you on and then insulting her for having agreed to sleep with you is gross. And insisting that a man who sleeps with a lot of girls is a champion where a woman who sleeps with a lot of men is a Big Slutty Slut is incredibly childish. Either we have sex and enjoy it, or we don’t. But it’s not for a man to step in and tell a woman what is and isn’t okay to do with her vagina.

3. Makeup.

Oh, you like a girl who is totally natural and doesn’t need to wear any fake, gross makeup to look good? But you also like when she is naturally incredibly attractive and just happens to wake up looking like something out of a magazine’s “low-key models at home” photo shoot? And you think it’s really ugly when girls cake on a bunch of paint to look like something they would never look like by themselves? Great, enjoying thinking that the models you love actually look that good without stylists and Photoshop, and being constantly disappointed by the imperfect humanity of the women you date. But at no point is it okay to tell another woman that she is being “fake” by applying the stuff that a) might make her feel good/beautiful, and b) has been sold to her every day since she was old enough to respond to advertisements. She is not fake. If anything, society is.

4. Periods.

We are not interested in hearing how gross you think it is, or how weird you think we get when we’re having it, or how it makes us too irrational to perform serious tasks. I propose that we start throwing tampons at the men who insist on talking about our bodies like they are monsters who lived under our beds when we were five.

5. Women’s Body Image.

While there may be good intentions in the guys who tell women, on the internet and elsewhere, that they just need to get over their looks and realize how beautiful they are, it remains an insufferable activity. Women having incredibly low self-esteem and cripplingly warped views of self have to do with the way economics and patriarchy have combined over hundreds of years to simultaneously sell us shit we don’t need and convince us that we are not good enough for the things (and people) we want to have. It’s not about being vain. We are hamsters spinning on a non-stop wheel who are constantly trying to be strong enough to step off it for good and realize how ridiculous the wheel is to begin with. And when you attempt to wave away centuries of advertising and shaming and pressure with a “You’re all beautiful, girls,” you’re only reminding us that a man is supposed to come along one day and save us from the “pain” of just being ourselves. And it’s just as shitty. So stop it. Now.