Why I am a feminist; or "Where's that equality we all heard so much about when we were growing up?"
So I, like Blessi, missed Blog Against Sexism. In my case I've missed it by much longer, because I feel as a male writing about feminism I need to consider my words carefully, and so it's gone through a few rewrites. Then after that I got sidetracked with a whole lot of things including my graduation. (My intelligence now has a paper trail!)
In some ways this will read as 'feminism for the uninitiated' because that was my starting point. I have only identified myself as a feminist in the past year or two. Before that, I was one of those who believed strongly in equality and in the need for the feminist movement historically, but I was convinced it was a thing of the past. Something that previous generations had fought for and won. I knew that wages were legally equal now and that it was illegal to display any bias, and that, as I thought, was that. What I came to realise, with increasing outrage, was that bias still exists in society, and moreover, that it is deeply entrenched and flourishing. I will return to this soon, but for now I will explain my own journey to identifying as a feminist and the milestones along the way.
As I've said, I have never been anti-woman in any explicit way. I may have had, or may still have, unconscious biases, but I've always believed in equality as I understood it; a person should be able to do anything in a society and not feel threatened, underpaid, or singled out based on any personal characteristic they have, be it race, gender, sexual preference, or anything else.
In first year university I took a politics subject called modern political thought. It was essentially 300 years of history told from a generally political viewpoint, and it was not really anything new to me, since I had just studied modern history for two years at school at essentially university level. The thing that was new was the inclusion of the nonviolent political movements, which I hadn't really been exposed to, since modern history tends towards being a history of war. So for one lecture we had a guest lecturer and for 50 minutes, she told us what a feminist was and what feminism had done and what it was all about. It was not, by any standards, radical; she was talking mostly about the history of feminism, in the same way that a lecture about communism, even radical, revolutionary communism, is not really radical if it is merely a history. All the same, it got me thinking. The arguments were rational, the facts were assured, the feminist movement had, all in all, been justified. Further, I agreed with some of the claims put forward by the radicals of the movement too; society as we know it is largely run by males, and moreover, historically it is almost entirely masculine. Politics, war, government, education, all the actual decisions and directions have been chosen by men. The classic male reaction here is to get defensive and say 'The world wouldn't be drastically different if women had also been there', 'Female leaders would still lead countries into wars', and so on. The funny thing (and by funny, I mean annoying) is that that type of argument is totally irrelevant. The crux of it is there is no good reason why women shouldn't have been doing these things too. Whenever they get a chance they perform just as well as men. The only reason they haven't been is because we as males have not let them, both by actual denial and by social pressure from the moment they are born.
Therefore, while you personally may have had no part in it at all, society as it has always existed and as it exists today is a male institution. The norms, the etiquette, everything about it happens within this frame. We can't ever know what a society based on female domination would look like because that society is impossible from our present perspective. Even if a matriarchal society were formed today it would still reflect the values and norms of the patriarchy that the females were raised in. The women would be acting as puppet males, enforcing a system they'd learned, not chosen. This does not mean the system itself is invalid or inherently wrong (though it may be). What it means is that women have not had access to it and have not been viewed equally by it and there has been nothing about the condition of women, their physiology, or their psychology, that has justified this oppression.
So that is what I got from the lecture. Again, I did not at this point feel like I had been converted to feminism. Rather, I'd come to an understanding that society had been unequal, that the feminist movement had aimed to fix it, and had. Yes it was male-orchestrated and dominated, but that was changing, and my generation and subsequent generations would be far more equal. This view I had did not seriously change for a bit longer, but there was one other thing I got from this particular subject. Later in the week, when it came to the tutorial, one male student was absent. This would be routine except that he had told his friend to pass on a message, which was that he had skipped the tutorial specifically because of what it was about. This repelled me. I could not understand why anyone could have a reason to not want to even talk about something as innocuous as female equality should be. I was not a feminist then, and I would have argued down any ardent feminists that had been in my tutorial, but all the same I went along to have the discussion and get the learning and the insight. I went to the tutorial on conservatism, which pissed me off and didn't sway me at all, and I went to the tutorial on marxism, which I knew in advance would not cover anything I didn't already know. I went because the whole point of the tutorial is to share ideas and discuss them, make sure everyone understands the material and see how everyone is reacting to it. There is not a single subject that could come up in a political tutorial that I would not be comfortable discussing. Yet here was this guy, taking an arrogant stand by refusing to attend a tutorial on feminism.
One thing that has always baffled me is people who refuse to subject their views to scrutiny. If you are afraid that your view will not hold up or that you will not have the answers when challenged, you need to ask yourself very seriously: 'Why do I believe it this?'
You don't have to 'win' an argument, since that comes down to twistings in logic and reasoning, but if you're not prepared to even try to defend or justify your beliefs, why do you hold them? There is no shame in being proven wrong. Even if you are the only person to believe something, you may still be right, and even if you are the last to come around to an argument, you have still let yourself be open to the idea that you were wrong. Have faith in your own argument and reasoning and do not be afraid to change your mind. The adage holds true: Wisest are they who know they know nothing.
If an accurate study is published tomorrow that shows that rape has stopped happening, wage differences have vanished and sexist media are gone, along with a host of other indicators, I will gladly concede that feminism has run its course. I would love to do so. For me, being feminist is a constant admission and declaration that women everywhere are oppressed and mistreated, sometimes in subtle or small ways, sometimes in serious, life-altering ways. It is an indictment of men and of society that the situation persists. If tomorrow it can be proved that this declaration is baseless, I will toast to that.
Yet I've skipped ahead. When we left me, I was vaguely in agreement with feminist thought, and irritated by an anti-feminist who would not allow for the possibility that he was wrong. If I had been asked to make a polar choice between supporting or opposing feminism, I would definitely have supported it. I might even have called myself a feminist in a loose sort of sense.
During second year, I met Blessi, and through her I got a few different insights. At the time and for a long time she was in a relationship that she was increasingly aware was emotionally abusive. Week in, week out, there would be tear-stained phonecalls where she tried to rationalise how she felt and constantly questioned her self-worth, intelligence and attractiveness. It got to a point where we were both realising that this was not a series of unconnected acts, but a pattern of behaviour. This, for me, was a real-life example of a woman being mistreated and undermined by a man, where the man involved was not some aberration or deviant but, to all appearances, an average male. His behaviour, we later found out, was not solely to Blessi's detriment but to the detriment of any female who was close enough to be taken for granted and belittled.
Juxtaposed against this, Blessi regularly sent (and still sends) links to articles on some of the better-known feminist blogs out there. You can find many of these blogs in the sidebar, I believe. Through these I heard a cacophany of voices with similar stories, as well as an insight into the sexual politics of the right wing in the USA, manifested through thinly-veiled, anachronistic anti-woman agendas. All this gave me a keener sense that this was something that I needed to know about, something which was missing from my understanding of the society I've grown in. In first year, Philosophy classes had bored me by taking what I had already explored in high school and re-examining it in the presence of students who found it confusing. Psychology throughout my degree, while I enjoyed it, felt too dependent on rote recall of facts and theories than on critical thinking and engagement with ideas. Sociology was exactly what I had been looking for and I seized on it with delight, but all the same it was re-examining things I had already studied, merely from more interesting and insightful perspectives.
So when it came to choosing third year topics I picked a sociology topic called Gender & Sexuality, which, from the description, sounded like exactly what I was looking for; the discipline and the way of thinking that I was fond of, applied to an area that I was increasingly aware I needed to learn about. The topic covered a lot of subjects; from the way that 'male' and 'female' are not inherent, but socially constructed roles, to examination of actual statistics demonstrating pretty conclusively that women still suffer and are disadvantaged in society compared to men, to a comprehensive, if fleeting (by merit of the course being for only a single semester) exploration of the different feminist arguments on a range of topics, from work and gender roles to sex and sexual identity. Through this I became increasingly certain that I was a feminist, or that I should be. At this point I should also stop to clarify.
I am aware that a number of feminists believe that men should describe themselves as "pro-feminist" rather than "feminist". Their reasoning is that men do not have the lived experience of being the underclass in a patriarchal society. This is true. Society defines "normal" in the western world as "white, male, middle- or upper-class, heterosexual". Every time you miss one of those criteria, you are one step less acceptable, and any problems you face, and crimes committed against you, are one step further towards being marginalised. As a white, middle class male, nominally heterosexual, I am pretty much dead centre in the middle of priviledge. It doesn't matter if I want it or not, or if I am aware of it or not, I was born with it and I carry it when I walk in public. So yes, I am completely aware that I do not have the experience of living as a female and all that entails. I believe that it is valid for me to describe myself as a feminist because I feel that 'pro-feminist' taints 'feminist' by making it sound like something that only women can be actively supporting. If males are 'pro-feminist' it is easier to make feminism look and sound like a fringe movement and play into the stereotypes that feminism is only followed by lesbians, man-haters, bra-burners, and so on. For me as a male to call myself a feminist makes that stereotype ridiculous. There is nothing manly about misogyny, and there is nothing unmanly about equality. I do not hold any illusions that calling myself a feminist is some sort of revolutionary move or that I deserve kudos for being on-side, rather, I feel that on balance I am a feminist, not a pro-feminist. I am open to discussion on this point.
On the other side, you have the camp of people who dislike the phrase "feminist" because they believe we should have or do have an equal society. These are the people who say "Why isn't there a Men's Studies" or "It should be called Equalism, I would support that" and have misconceptions about what feminism actually is. The reason it's called feminism is because it's about female equality. By analogy, the Black Rights movement has never been called the Equal Rights movement even though equality is the goal. White males don't need to fight for equality for themselves and the majority of white males insisting that feminism infringes on male equality are actually just protesting at the loss of undeserved priviledge.
Around the time of the Enlightenment, middle-class males decided they should have rights, so they got together in mobs and killed people, and, generally speaking, it worked, but no one thought to include the women, and it was not years or decades, but upwards of a century, before women got to vote. After that it took a world war snatching all the men off to combat to show that women could actually function in traditionally male jobs, and only in the last few decades have women gained acceptance in the workplace outside of secretarial and school education positions. Along the way at every turn there have been loud, angry voices telling them that they weren't suited to it, that they shouldn't do it, that it was unnatural, unnecessary, would lead to the destruction of the family. Women who have sex are sluts. Women who don't have sex need to be shown a good time. Women who dress sexy are asking to be raped. Women who don't dress sexy are denigrated. Women are either put on unrealistic pedestals or pushed to the gutter. This is not equality. This is not how you treat humans.
So since that third year sociology subject, since getting to know Blessi and understanding her perspectives, since actually opening my eyes and looking at society and at men and at myself, I have identified myself as a feminist. I don't pretend to be a perfect feminist, I believe it is a learning process. If anyone who reads this feels I have something wrong, do not hesitate to call me up on it. I will defend my beliefs when I think they are justified and I will modify them to accomodate things that are missing. If I have made mistakes, I believe they are honest ones and I am open to being disagreed with.
We're all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
In some ways this will read as 'feminism for the uninitiated' because that was my starting point. I have only identified myself as a feminist in the past year or two. Before that, I was one of those who believed strongly in equality and in the need for the feminist movement historically, but I was convinced it was a thing of the past. Something that previous generations had fought for and won. I knew that wages were legally equal now and that it was illegal to display any bias, and that, as I thought, was that. What I came to realise, with increasing outrage, was that bias still exists in society, and moreover, that it is deeply entrenched and flourishing. I will return to this soon, but for now I will explain my own journey to identifying as a feminist and the milestones along the way.
As I've said, I have never been anti-woman in any explicit way. I may have had, or may still have, unconscious biases, but I've always believed in equality as I understood it; a person should be able to do anything in a society and not feel threatened, underpaid, or singled out based on any personal characteristic they have, be it race, gender, sexual preference, or anything else.
In first year university I took a politics subject called modern political thought. It was essentially 300 years of history told from a generally political viewpoint, and it was not really anything new to me, since I had just studied modern history for two years at school at essentially university level. The thing that was new was the inclusion of the nonviolent political movements, which I hadn't really been exposed to, since modern history tends towards being a history of war. So for one lecture we had a guest lecturer and for 50 minutes, she told us what a feminist was and what feminism had done and what it was all about. It was not, by any standards, radical; she was talking mostly about the history of feminism, in the same way that a lecture about communism, even radical, revolutionary communism, is not really radical if it is merely a history. All the same, it got me thinking. The arguments were rational, the facts were assured, the feminist movement had, all in all, been justified. Further, I agreed with some of the claims put forward by the radicals of the movement too; society as we know it is largely run by males, and moreover, historically it is almost entirely masculine. Politics, war, government, education, all the actual decisions and directions have been chosen by men. The classic male reaction here is to get defensive and say 'The world wouldn't be drastically different if women had also been there', 'Female leaders would still lead countries into wars', and so on. The funny thing (and by funny, I mean annoying) is that that type of argument is totally irrelevant. The crux of it is there is no good reason why women shouldn't have been doing these things too. Whenever they get a chance they perform just as well as men. The only reason they haven't been is because we as males have not let them, both by actual denial and by social pressure from the moment they are born.
Therefore, while you personally may have had no part in it at all, society as it has always existed and as it exists today is a male institution. The norms, the etiquette, everything about it happens within this frame. We can't ever know what a society based on female domination would look like because that society is impossible from our present perspective. Even if a matriarchal society were formed today it would still reflect the values and norms of the patriarchy that the females were raised in. The women would be acting as puppet males, enforcing a system they'd learned, not chosen. This does not mean the system itself is invalid or inherently wrong (though it may be). What it means is that women have not had access to it and have not been viewed equally by it and there has been nothing about the condition of women, their physiology, or their psychology, that has justified this oppression.
So that is what I got from the lecture. Again, I did not at this point feel like I had been converted to feminism. Rather, I'd come to an understanding that society had been unequal, that the feminist movement had aimed to fix it, and had. Yes it was male-orchestrated and dominated, but that was changing, and my generation and subsequent generations would be far more equal. This view I had did not seriously change for a bit longer, but there was one other thing I got from this particular subject. Later in the week, when it came to the tutorial, one male student was absent. This would be routine except that he had told his friend to pass on a message, which was that he had skipped the tutorial specifically because of what it was about. This repelled me. I could not understand why anyone could have a reason to not want to even talk about something as innocuous as female equality should be. I was not a feminist then, and I would have argued down any ardent feminists that had been in my tutorial, but all the same I went along to have the discussion and get the learning and the insight. I went to the tutorial on conservatism, which pissed me off and didn't sway me at all, and I went to the tutorial on marxism, which I knew in advance would not cover anything I didn't already know. I went because the whole point of the tutorial is to share ideas and discuss them, make sure everyone understands the material and see how everyone is reacting to it. There is not a single subject that could come up in a political tutorial that I would not be comfortable discussing. Yet here was this guy, taking an arrogant stand by refusing to attend a tutorial on feminism.
One thing that has always baffled me is people who refuse to subject their views to scrutiny. If you are afraid that your view will not hold up or that you will not have the answers when challenged, you need to ask yourself very seriously: 'Why do I believe it this?'
You don't have to 'win' an argument, since that comes down to twistings in logic and reasoning, but if you're not prepared to even try to defend or justify your beliefs, why do you hold them? There is no shame in being proven wrong. Even if you are the only person to believe something, you may still be right, and even if you are the last to come around to an argument, you have still let yourself be open to the idea that you were wrong. Have faith in your own argument and reasoning and do not be afraid to change your mind. The adage holds true: Wisest are they who know they know nothing.
If an accurate study is published tomorrow that shows that rape has stopped happening, wage differences have vanished and sexist media are gone, along with a host of other indicators, I will gladly concede that feminism has run its course. I would love to do so. For me, being feminist is a constant admission and declaration that women everywhere are oppressed and mistreated, sometimes in subtle or small ways, sometimes in serious, life-altering ways. It is an indictment of men and of society that the situation persists. If tomorrow it can be proved that this declaration is baseless, I will toast to that.
Yet I've skipped ahead. When we left me, I was vaguely in agreement with feminist thought, and irritated by an anti-feminist who would not allow for the possibility that he was wrong. If I had been asked to make a polar choice between supporting or opposing feminism, I would definitely have supported it. I might even have called myself a feminist in a loose sort of sense.
During second year, I met Blessi, and through her I got a few different insights. At the time and for a long time she was in a relationship that she was increasingly aware was emotionally abusive. Week in, week out, there would be tear-stained phonecalls where she tried to rationalise how she felt and constantly questioned her self-worth, intelligence and attractiveness. It got to a point where we were both realising that this was not a series of unconnected acts, but a pattern of behaviour. This, for me, was a real-life example of a woman being mistreated and undermined by a man, where the man involved was not some aberration or deviant but, to all appearances, an average male. His behaviour, we later found out, was not solely to Blessi's detriment but to the detriment of any female who was close enough to be taken for granted and belittled.
Juxtaposed against this, Blessi regularly sent (and still sends) links to articles on some of the better-known feminist blogs out there. You can find many of these blogs in the sidebar, I believe. Through these I heard a cacophany of voices with similar stories, as well as an insight into the sexual politics of the right wing in the USA, manifested through thinly-veiled, anachronistic anti-woman agendas. All this gave me a keener sense that this was something that I needed to know about, something which was missing from my understanding of the society I've grown in. In first year, Philosophy classes had bored me by taking what I had already explored in high school and re-examining it in the presence of students who found it confusing. Psychology throughout my degree, while I enjoyed it, felt too dependent on rote recall of facts and theories than on critical thinking and engagement with ideas. Sociology was exactly what I had been looking for and I seized on it with delight, but all the same it was re-examining things I had already studied, merely from more interesting and insightful perspectives.
So when it came to choosing third year topics I picked a sociology topic called Gender & Sexuality, which, from the description, sounded like exactly what I was looking for; the discipline and the way of thinking that I was fond of, applied to an area that I was increasingly aware I needed to learn about. The topic covered a lot of subjects; from the way that 'male' and 'female' are not inherent, but socially constructed roles, to examination of actual statistics demonstrating pretty conclusively that women still suffer and are disadvantaged in society compared to men, to a comprehensive, if fleeting (by merit of the course being for only a single semester) exploration of the different feminist arguments on a range of topics, from work and gender roles to sex and sexual identity. Through this I became increasingly certain that I was a feminist, or that I should be. At this point I should also stop to clarify.
I am aware that a number of feminists believe that men should describe themselves as "pro-feminist" rather than "feminist". Their reasoning is that men do not have the lived experience of being the underclass in a patriarchal society. This is true. Society defines "normal" in the western world as "white, male, middle- or upper-class, heterosexual". Every time you miss one of those criteria, you are one step less acceptable, and any problems you face, and crimes committed against you, are one step further towards being marginalised. As a white, middle class male, nominally heterosexual, I am pretty much dead centre in the middle of priviledge. It doesn't matter if I want it or not, or if I am aware of it or not, I was born with it and I carry it when I walk in public. So yes, I am completely aware that I do not have the experience of living as a female and all that entails. I believe that it is valid for me to describe myself as a feminist because I feel that 'pro-feminist' taints 'feminist' by making it sound like something that only women can be actively supporting. If males are 'pro-feminist' it is easier to make feminism look and sound like a fringe movement and play into the stereotypes that feminism is only followed by lesbians, man-haters, bra-burners, and so on. For me as a male to call myself a feminist makes that stereotype ridiculous. There is nothing manly about misogyny, and there is nothing unmanly about equality. I do not hold any illusions that calling myself a feminist is some sort of revolutionary move or that I deserve kudos for being on-side, rather, I feel that on balance I am a feminist, not a pro-feminist. I am open to discussion on this point.
On the other side, you have the camp of people who dislike the phrase "feminist" because they believe we should have or do have an equal society. These are the people who say "Why isn't there a Men's Studies" or "It should be called Equalism, I would support that" and have misconceptions about what feminism actually is. The reason it's called feminism is because it's about female equality. By analogy, the Black Rights movement has never been called the Equal Rights movement even though equality is the goal. White males don't need to fight for equality for themselves and the majority of white males insisting that feminism infringes on male equality are actually just protesting at the loss of undeserved priviledge.
Around the time of the Enlightenment, middle-class males decided they should have rights, so they got together in mobs and killed people, and, generally speaking, it worked, but no one thought to include the women, and it was not years or decades, but upwards of a century, before women got to vote. After that it took a world war snatching all the men off to combat to show that women could actually function in traditionally male jobs, and only in the last few decades have women gained acceptance in the workplace outside of secretarial and school education positions. Along the way at every turn there have been loud, angry voices telling them that they weren't suited to it, that they shouldn't do it, that it was unnatural, unnecessary, would lead to the destruction of the family. Women who have sex are sluts. Women who don't have sex need to be shown a good time. Women who dress sexy are asking to be raped. Women who don't dress sexy are denigrated. Women are either put on unrealistic pedestals or pushed to the gutter. This is not equality. This is not how you treat humans.
So since that third year sociology subject, since getting to know Blessi and understanding her perspectives, since actually opening my eyes and looking at society and at men and at myself, I have identified myself as a feminist. I don't pretend to be a perfect feminist, I believe it is a learning process. If anyone who reads this feels I have something wrong, do not hesitate to call me up on it. I will defend my beliefs when I think they are justified and I will modify them to accomodate things that are missing. If I have made mistakes, I believe they are honest ones and I am open to being disagreed with.
We're all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Labels: feminism
posted by Ben | 2:07 pm
|
1 comments
