The harm of Bialik’s op-ed

By: Kayla Hunt, Columnist 

Recently an op-ed piece was published in the New York Times by Mayim Bialik. The headline of this piece was “Being a Feminist in Harvey Weinstein’s World.” Since the article was run, Bialik has been facing endless backlash by social media users across all platforms for some of the comments she made in her piece.

One of the main things that stuck with me from this op-ed was that Bialik suggested that women are somewhat naïve about the culture we live in today:

“In a perfect world, women should be free to act however they want. But our world isn’t perfect. Nothing — absolutely nothing — excuses men for assaulting or abusing women. But we can’t be naïve about the culture we live in.”

After reading this sentence over a thousand times, I was trying to grasp the notion of the claim that she was making. I, along with many other men and women, completely agree that there are absolutely no excuses that should be made for some men’s demeaning and ignorant behavior.

Rationalization should not be applied to the behavior of men, however; we all know this is not always the case. This is what allows the cycle of rape culture to continue, this is what allows rape culture to exist. This is a nation of rationalization, especially when it comes to the justification of the acts performed by men; more prevalently, white men.

After reading this and taking time to analyze what Bialik claimed, I believe that she is contributing to this cycle of rape culture. By claiming that women are naïve about the culture that they live in says more about that culture and society than it does about the women.

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