Willful Ignorance: a rant

I stayed home from school today, having succumbed to a stomach bug and exhaustion.
This gave me time to ruminate over a Facebook conversation that I had last night.

Basically, I was facing my usual dilemma: read feminist blogs or sleep? (I ended up choosing to start a feminist blog, which was probably the worst thing I could possibly do for my sleep habits. I never claimed to
have common sense.)

I feel completely comfortable posting my views on Facebook because 1. Anybody who has a serious problem with my opinions or my voicing thereof can just unfriend me or be unfriended and 2. I come from a very liberal town, so I know I won't be attacked.

All the same, things like this bother me.

It is absolutely incomprehensible to me how so many people see "feminism" as a dirty word or equate it with misandry (which isn't even a thing. Seriously. My browser doesn't recognize it as a word) when I can just open the children's dictionary that I had when I was four and see this.
Who in their right mind would interpret this as "fighting the never ending battle against men"?

I'm a bit of an optimist about human nature. I believe that there are very few people who strive to do harm and therefore, hate stems from ignorance. Still, at the same time, there's a lot of willful ignorance going around here.

It amazes me that people would go after an entire set of principles without once looking at what they actually meant. I understand the impulse-- recognizing that there are legitimate gender inequality problems means that you have to do something about it, and who wants to deal with that? 

It's the reason that just about everyone who liked my posts was a girl and just about everyone who liked Max's posts was a guy. Girls far less often have the luxury of ignorance. They know that they're going to have to go through a life with lower pay for equal work, judgmental double standards, and wave after wave of men trying to control what they do with their bodies. Guys can look down on this and only see what they want to see, chortling at the "feminazis" because facing the difficulties of the reality is just too hard.

You know what? I'd also like things to be easier. I'd like to not have to worry about all the inequality that passes relatively unnoticed every day. But I'd like that to happen when gender inequality is actually no longer a problem. As things are now, there are no good excuses not to pay attention.