What I want most right at this moment is to punch you in the face

Laura Klein wisely points out that Penelope Trunk is a moron who needs to shut the fuck up:

Similarly, long before women had the right to vote in the US, many women didn’t actually want the right to vote. Some even felt that women were biologically not capable of voting well. And for years after they had the right to vote, many people still felt that it was the wrong decision.

How many women in the US do you know who don’t care about voting? Fewer than felt that way a hundred years ago, right?

The point is that “what women want” changes over time. What people want changes over time. Because what we want is hugely driven by social norms and massive cultural shifts and all sorts of things that may seem biological at the time but turn out not to be.

In other words, if suddenly there are a ton of women at startups kicking ass and being awesome, it might turn out that more young women want to join startups in the future. And 25 years from now, we’ll all be laughing at the idiots who said things like “women don’t want to vote…er…go to law school…I mean…join startups!”

Penelope, do you vote? Do you know women who went to law school? I do. And I am forever grateful to the women who fought not just for the right to do these things but to make them seem like totally normal things to do.

I salute the women who said, “Hey, wait a minute. Maybe having a vagina doesn’t determine what I have to want from life! Just because a lot of women want something, doesn’t mean that I have to want the exact same thing!”

And I’m still a little annoyed at the women who said, “Oh, women don’t WANT to vote. Voting is for men!” I take that back. I’m a lot annoyed at them. They sucked.

So stop doing it. Stop assuming other women want to make the same choices you do, especially when society has such an enormous and invisible impact on your choices. Stop assuming a young woman just starting her career knows everything about all of the wonderful, exciting career choices she could make.

And mostly, stop making it ok for other people to assume that I want what you want. That’s clearly not true, since what I want most right at this moment is to punch you in the face.

I am a woman. I want to work at a startup. I don’t want to have children. I want to vote. I want to wear stiletto heels and write jQuery, sometimes at the same time. In other words, I am an individual, and I have all sorts of wants that are neither determined nor predicted by my gender.

I am a woman, Penelope, but you don’t have any idea what I want. So, kindly shut the fuck up about it.