Khouri — who had written the most famous feminist film of the 1990s — addressed the graduates' inevitable encounters with sexism with a parable. She told the story of a woman pastor whose male parishioners take her fishing and refuse to bring her back, telling her she'll have to swim. She walks across the water. The men look at each other and say: 'They send us a woman pastor and she can't even swim.' The joke set up a serious point. Khouri acknowledged that disrespect would come, and that it often stemmed 'more from ignorance, from some misplaced fear, than from real prejudice.' She advised giving people the benefit of the doubt — but never letting it pass. 'Any more than I would let pass discrimination based on race, color, or religion, I do not tolerate it. I do not excuse it.' The warning was that accommodation was the real danger: normalization of disrespect, not the disrespect itself.