Men Didn’t Read a Word But They Still Tried to Shut Me Up

I knew it the moment the comments started rolling in. Not because they were angry, or dismissive, or even predictable, but because they were arguing with a version of my article that simply did not exist. They weren’t responding to my words. They were responding to a title they’d skimmed, a feeling they’d had, a story they’d already decided I was telling before I ever got the chance to finish telling it.

For the first time, I could prove it.

I had recently written an article about misandry. Specifically, about the difference between misandry and misogyny, about power, violence, and structural harm, and about why pretending those two concepts are equivalent is not only intellectually dishonest but actively dangerous. It was nuanced. It was careful. It was explicit about what I was and wasn’t saying. And yet, men flooded the comments to argue points I had already addressed, clarified, and dismantled within the body of the article itself.

They hadn’t read it. And this time, I knew they hadn’t.

This wasn’t a hunch or a gut feeling or one of those quiet frustrations women are taught to swallow politely. This was visible. Measurable. Almost clinical. Men were responding to the title alone, confidently correcting me on arguments I never made, lecturing me about ideas I had already contextualised, and positioning themselves as authorities over a piece of writing they could not possibly have engaged with in good faith.

And it bothered me far more than I expected.

Not because I need universal approval. Not because I’m fragile or thin-skinned or incapable of handling disagreement. It bothered me because the article they interrupted was about silencing. About power imbalances. About the way women are talked over, dismissed, and overridden in every setting from boardrooms to bedrooms to comment sections. And here they were, enacting the very behaviour I was describing, mid-sentence, without irony.

There is something uniquely exhausting about being interrupted while explaining interruption.

Women have been naming this experience for decades. The way men cut in while we’re speaking. The way they reframe our points as emotional, exaggerated, or ill-informed. The way they assume authority not because they’ve done the work, but because they feel entitled to speak. What struck me this time was how literal it was. They didn’t even wait for me to finish the article. They interrupted the idea before it had been fully expressed.

This is not about hurt feelings. It’s about epistemic disrespect. It’s about who is presumed credible and who is presumed wrong before they open their mouth. When a man reads a woman’s headline and assumes he already knows what she thinks, what she means, and why she’s wrong, that isn’t engagement. It’s erasure.

I’ve noticed this pattern before, of course. Many times. On articles about violence against women. On pieces about reproductive rights. On writing about trauma, power, and survival. Men arrive ready to argue, not to listen. They challenge the premise without acknowledging the content. They demand balance where imbalance is the point. They derail conversations toward their own discomfort and then accuse women of being divisive when we refuse to centre it.

But this time, the proof was undeniable.

Men were responding to sentences that never appeared. They were angry about claims I explicitly said I wasn’t making. They were explaining patriarchy to me as if I hadn’t just spent over a thousand words articulating its mechanics. They were insisting I had ignored nuance that was already there, bold and unavoidable, if only they had bothered to look.

This is where the silence comes in.

Silencing doesn’t always look like shouting women down or banning them from rooms. Often, it looks like speaking over them with confidence while ignoring what they’ve actually said. It looks like replacing their words with your assumptions. It looks like refusing to meet them on the intellectual ground they’ve already laid out, and then declaring victory because you never stepped onto it in the first place.

And there is a particular cruelty in doing this to women who are writing about oppression.

When men interrupt women speaking about misogyny, they are not just being rude. They are reinforcing the very hierarchy under discussion. They are demonstrating, in real time, that women’s voices are provisional, conditional, and easily overridden by male certainty. They are proving the thesis without ever engaging with it.

The most telling part is how often this behaviour is framed as debate.

Debate requires listening. It requires responding to what has actually been said. What I experienced wasn’t debate. It was performance. A reflexive need to assert dominance in a space where a woman had claimed authority. The comments weren’t about my ideas. They were about reclaiming the microphone.

There is also a deep irony in men accusing feminist writers of silencing them, while simultaneously refusing to read women’s work in full. Being disagreed with is not the same as being silenced. Being asked to engage thoughtfully is not oppression. But many men have been so thoroughly accustomed to unchallenged centrality that any request for accountability feels like an attack.

What makes this especially frustrating is that the article in question wasn’t an attack. It was an explanation. It acknowledged complexity. It left room for discussion. It even anticipated the very objections that later appeared in the comments, fully formed and carefully addressed. The refusal to read it was not accidental. It was convenient.

Reading the article would have required sitting with discomfort. It would have required acknowledging that misogyny is not simply about hurt feelings but about systemic power, violence, and material harm. It would have required recognising that not all negative attitudes carry the same weight in a world structured by male dominance. It would have required listening to a woman as an authority on her own analysis.

So instead, many chose not to.

This is why it bothers me. Because it exposes how fragile the claim to rationality really is. Men are socialised to see themselves as objective, logical, and fair-minded, yet here was a mass refusal to engage with text in favour of reacting emotionally to a headline. Here was certainty without comprehension. Authority without effort.

And women are expected to remain calm, patient, and polite in the face of it.

There is an unspoken rule that women must endlessly clarify, soften, and re-explain ourselves to be taken seriously. If we are assertive, we are aggressive. If we are passionate, we are hysterical. If we are tired of repeating ourselves, we are bitter. Meanwhile, men are allowed to skim, interrupt, and dominate conversations without ever questioning their own behaviour.

What struck me most was how familiar it felt. This wasn’t new. It was simply clearer. The comment section became a microcosm of every meeting where a woman is talked over, every classroom where her contributions are ignored until repeated by a man, every public conversation where women are expected to justify their existence, their anger, and their analysis.

This is what silencing looks like in 2025. Not a gag, but a scroll. Not a threat, but a refusal. Not censorship, but a chorus of voices responding to something you never said, louder than the words you actually wrote.

And still, women write. We keep writing. We keep explaining. We keep documenting what is happening even as it happens again in real time. Not because it’s easy, but because naming it is the first step toward dismantling it.

If you’re a woman reading this and you’ve felt that familiar sinking feeling when your work is dismissed without engagement, you’re not imagining it. If you’ve watched men argue with ghosts of arguments you never made, you’re not alone. This isn’t about your clarity or your tone or your wording. It’s about power, and who believes they’re entitled to it.

And if you’re a man who made it this far, genuinely read it, and recognised something uncomfortable in yourself, that discomfort is the point. Sit with it. Do something with it. Start by listening.

If you’ve read every word of this and you’re still here, tell me in the comments what you noticed first: the interruption, or the silence that follows it.