Please don’t invite Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to a debate unless she has formally invited you to send an invitation

[More: Ben Shapiro to Ocasio-Cortez: ‘Catcalling must mean something different in Queens’]

The argument is that something about being a man has deluded Shapiro into believing she owes him a response.

Why noting, as the tweet she posted did, that Ocasio-Cortez hadn’t responded to his invitation actually betrays a sense of male entitlement, the candidate didn’t explain. I suppose we’re all just supposed to nod along with her reflexive invocation of gender like freshmen in an Oberlin Women’s Studies class.

In actuality, noting Ocasio-Cortez’s silence on the offer was perfectly fair given that it amounted to declining a $10,000 campaign donation (which was part of Shapiro’s invitation), and Shapiro is one of the most prominent conservative political thinkers in the country who has a massive following of his own.

Which brings me to Ocasio-Cortez’s bizarre contention that a polite debate invitation from one prominent young politico to another is comparable to a sexual gesture like catcalling. To feminists, everyday life is like walking through a minefield of male aggression. Where the rest of us would have to squint (hard) to see sexism, their permanently-affixed feminist goggles show them it’s everywhere.

It was a debate invite. Almost all debate invites between prominent people are “unsolicited.” Even if you agree with Ocasio-Cortez that Shapiro has “bad intentions,” an unsolicited invitation sent with “bad intentions” doesn’t amount to sexism unless you have more proof of that. I would invite Ocasio-Cortez to provide it, but she hasn’t yet formally solicited such a request.

Maybe that’s just because I lack a sense of male entitlement.