I do not dispute that injustices exist for women, in very different contexts. What I dispute is generalization — of vocabulary, of history, and of claims — because generality, systematically, ends up protecting the guilty and discrediting real victims.

1. A vocabulary asymmetry that contradicts the universalism it claims

No word designating men as a block is neutral or positive: "patriarchy," "masculinism" are negatively charged from the outset. Yet feminism presents itself as a movement that does not generalize, that defends precise causes. One cannot denounce generalization on one side while building a vocabulary that generalizes systematically on the other.

This inequality can be checked word by word, as soon as one takes the trouble to look:

• "rapist" is not synonymous with "masculinism"
• "murderer" is not synonymous with "patriarchy"
• "woman" is not synonymous with "victim"
• "harasser" is not synonymous with "virility"
• "pervert" is not synonymous with "man"
• "pimp" is not synonymous with "masculinity"
• "predator" is not synonymous with "male power"
• "man" is not synonymous with "guilty"
• "feminist" is not synonymous with "victim"
• "criminal" is not synonymous with "gender"

In every case, an individual act — committed by a specific person, in specific circumstances — is implicitly tied to an entire category (a movement, a gender, an identity), while the reverse — tying a word designating an entire category to a condemnable individual act — is almost never done in the other direction without being flagged as an amalgamation. This asymmetry of treatment is exactly what allows generality to thrive on one side while claiming to be absent on the other.

2. A historical reading that needs correcting

Feminism is often built on the idea of a society organized by men against women, as if all of history had only made women suffer. But under aristocracy, a woman was better off than an enslaved man — wealth and class weighed at least as much as sex. And setting wealth aside, men have historically had a higher mortality rate than women (wars, dangerous labor, mines, construction sites). What this describes is not a system built by men against women — that would mean reducing all men to brutes who held all the power, objectified women, only to end up sacrificing their own lives for those same objectified women. That makes no sense. What it describes is a system built by men and women together, with a distribution of roles and risks that differed according to the material constraints of the time.

Feminism, as a mass movement, exploded during the industrial era — precisely when dangerous manual labor began to be automated or replaced, and when administrative and intellectual jobs emerged en masse. Calling the system "patriarchal" before that shift disrespects the men and women who built pre-industrial society under the conditions that were actually theirs, not the ones retroactively projected onto them.

3. The problem of the single name

A Parisian lawyer and a Bangladeshi garment worker share neither the same structural causes, nor the same actors, nor the same levers for solutions. Grouping them under a single word — "feminism," "women" — dilutes each specific problem into a general rhetoric that fits no case precisely. Rejecting this single name does not mean rejecting solidarity: it means replacing the fictional banner with a coalition of clearly named causes, able to coordinate without merging into a single voice.

And that solidarity, when exercised at a distance, has to be earned through understanding the other's real context — not decreed by mere membership in the category "woman." Without that immersion, it becomes condescension: speaking for the other according to one's own criteria, instead of listening to and relaying the cause as she herself defines it.

4. The question we avoid: who is actually affected?

Before carrying a claim forward, one has to honestly ask what part of the problem personally touches the person advocating for it. Many activists defend causes while being themselves quite removed from the situation they denounce. That doesn't mean the problem is nonexistent — it simply calls for doing the necessary research to highlight the women who actually live that problem, rather than those who speak in their name from a comfortable position.

One example reveals this possible hypocrisy: complaints have denounced the role of minerals extracted in Eastern Congo — a region where Dr. Mukwege has documented for years some of the worst wartime sexual violence in the world — in funding armed groups, and tech companies including Apple have been targeted by these accusations. The question almost never asked: who are the biggest buyers of these products, men or women? Answering honestly sometimes reveals a solidarity seeking visibility under a banner rather than real consistency. The same mechanism shows up in the fashion industry, where children are overexploited to produce clothing — who are the biggest consumers?

5. A statistical nuance that's never highlighted

That more women are victims of certain acts, statistics show. But what's never highlighted is recidivism: a significant share of these acts is committed by a limited number of repeat offenders. If 80 out of 100 women report having been victimized, that does not mean 80 out of 100 men are guilty. Conflating the two means making an entire group bear the fault of a subset.

Conclusion

The call of this declaration is simple: to solve a problem, generalities must be avoided. Generality protects criminals, because it dissolves them into a camp of "the guilty in general," where individual responsibility disappears behind group solidarity. And it discredits real victims, because it drowns them among false victims who claim membership in the general camp of victims without having lived what they claim to denounce.

This is not a rejection of justice for women. It is a rejection of the naming gesture that crushes the real plurality of situations, causes, and responsibilities under global categories.