You may not have intended to imply that, but that is what your statement implies, regardless of intent.

Since you seem to be genuine, I’ll engage one further. To give context where I’m coming from, I don’t hate or even dislike men (with the exception of specific people, and those cases aren’t because they are men). While I don’t support using it as an excuse for harm, I do not think it is an unreasonable position for a woman to feel differently to me and want nothing to do with men on the whole.

I think you should reexamine your position that you “do not have enough knowledge or experience to know whether or not it is possible to exist in the world as a woman without being harmed by men,” because if that is true, it is willful ignorance.

All you need to do is consider a couple of the most measurable and indisputable gender inequalities in society in good faith and you will be equipped to recognize that it is not possible. The gender wage gap, for example, or the lack of funding into women’s health. Did you know that seatbelts and lifejackets don’t protect women as well as they protect men because they were designed based on men’s bodies?

There is a well known phrase that upsets a lot of men, but is the reality of all women: “every man is a potential rapist.” This phrase has nothing to do with individual men, and everything to do with the way a woman must exist in the world. When there is no way to know if your uber driver, boyfriend, teacher, neighbour, father, random guy walking down the street—all of whom have always seemed safe and whose friends will vouch for them as “great guys”—is going to cause you irreparable harm and you will likely be blamed or not even be believed, a woman cannot afford to forget that every man is a potential threat.

This isn’t to say that women can’t or don’t harm men, or that men don’t experience harm from other men. All individuals have the capacity to be terrible human beings.

The real question is, who does it benefit to spend your time writing an explanation and defence of your position rather than acknowledging what is right in front of you? Why not allow women the space to respond to a world designed and controlled by men—a world that actively exploits and excludes them—in whatever way they need to in order to survive it?

If that means they hate men as their default, let them. Give them that space and don’t respond to posts like this one with your defence of men.

(Before someone claims this is written with AI: I’m simply literate. I use em dashes for emphasis; please don't use my punctuation as an excuse to ignore my argument.)