Is Meninism the New Feminism?

As anyone who knows me moderately well will be aware, feminism isn’t something I have trouble talking about.

I studied it a bit at uni, wrote some pretty decent essays on it, and never cease to be amazed at how gender influences everything from raising a kid to greeting someone in the street.

I think feminism is as valuable and necessary today as it was a hundred years ago and could happily spend hours telling anyone who’ll listen why this is the case.

But I know a lot of people who don’t agree with me; people who are mostly kind, intelligent and not particularly sexist.

I used to be a big fan of quoting the dictionary definition of feminism in debates: no matter how big and complicated we make it, eventually it all comes back to equality. That’s what we want, right? That’s all it is.

Trouble is, equality doesn’t mean the same thing for everyone.

Look at the controversy about religious dress: telling a woman she can’t wear a veil or headscarf because it’s anti-feminist is just as bad as telling her it’s sinful for her to be seen without one.

What it comes down to is this: there’s no such thing as a universal female experience.

My experiences as a woman are almost entirely incomparable to the experiences of women of other countries, faiths and ages, and that’s what the “equality” narrative sometimes forgets. 

Dictating how other women should be liberated isn’t very liberating, and pretending that there’s some shared characteristic uniting women across the world is, at best, unhelpful.

So what is feminism?

As with any movement for social change, there’s no rulebook and its members aren’t a hive-mind. We don’t release a new edition of the Feminist Manifesto every year and adjust our actions accordingly.

Much of the actual theory comes from academics in the humanities and social sciences, but perhaps more influential are the organisations that put feminism into practice: global charities like Amnesty, national charities like the Fawcett Society, and charities for specific causes like End Violence Against Women.

Beyond this, you have smaller local or student groups who promote feminism on their home turf, and finally individuals like me.

And none of us can agree on what feminism “is”.

Professors and theorists are incredibly intelligent, well-informed individuals but that doesn’t make them right. In fact, if uni has taught me anything it’s that academia is mostly about poking holes in other people’s work.

This is the beauty and the curse of feminism: it’s a discussion, not a doctrine.

This is why I don’t usually mind arguing about it. Often people aren’t trying to tell me women don’t deserve equal rights and freedoms; they just don’t agree with the way feminists sometimes go about doing it.

This is where ‘I’m all for equality but I’m not a feminist’ comes from and I can understand why people – especially men – might feel this way.

All the “feminist organisations” I listed above are movements for women’s rights; they’re about bringing practical help, safety and freedom to disadvantaged women and this is brilliant, admirable work.

A quick Google search, for example, turns up a reasonable number of domestic abuse shelters for women in the UK’s major cities. The majority of these are quite strictly single-sex but also accept boys who arrive with their families.

However, a similar Google search for men’s domestic abuse shelters gives me noticeably fewer results, though some women’s shelter organisations like Refuge do have specific resources and advice for men too.

This indicates either that men aren’t generally victims of domestic abuse or that feminism is overwhelmingly concerned with women’s issues, and is very limited in the things it can (or is willing) to do for men.

If you’ve read my previous posts you’ll know I’m wary of statistics, but I think it’s important to give them some consideration here.

According to a report by the Office for National Statistics, as of 2013/14, 28.3% of women and 14.7% of men in England and Wales had experienced some form of domestic abuse since they were 16. That’s 4.6 million female victims and 2.4 million male victims.* 

It could be said that the shelter discrepancy is just about supply and demand: women are disproportionately affected, so there should be a disproportionate amount of help available to them.

But we also know that domestic abuse is one of the most under-reported crimes in the country.

The ONS report cites “embarrassment” as the most common reason participants didn’t tell anyone about their most recent abuse.** Though this response isn’t broken down by gender, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume men are more likely to be embarrassed about reporting domestic violence.

While I think we can also safely assume, even taking under-reporting into account, that the amount of female victims is higher, it can’t be denied that the attitude towards male victims needs to change.

There could be as much help available to men as there is to women, but that might not make those who are embarrassed or frightened any more likely to seek it out.

But is this a feminist issue? The domestic abuse of men doesn’t seem directly connected to women’s rights when you look at it this way.

Anti-feminists often point out just this: that the problems faced by men as a result of gender relations are ignored. Lack of support for domestic violence victims, longer jail terms, high suicide rates, and difficulty gaining custody of children seem to be the most commonly cited.

The thing is, these are feminist issues.

The lack of support for male domestic violence victims is the brainchild of the patriarchal notion that men are inherently more powerful, frightening and dangerous than women and should be treated accordingly. The same can be said of longer jail terms. Frankly, that’s as offensive to women as it is to men.

According to the Samaritans Suicide Statistics Report, suicide rates in the UK are consistently higher in men across every age group, with the highest at 21.9 (per 100,000 of the population) for 30-44 year-olds and 23.9 for 45-59 year olds.*** 

Patriarchal masculinities have a long history of emotional repression, in which men are implicitly taught that the only truly “manly” emotion is anger. We still see it today in action films with the hero-wins-battle-after-channelling-fury-at-death-of-girlfriend trope.

To sum up: woman cry because woman weak and delicate. Man no cry because man not like woman – man strong.

It’s not that all men are incapable of talking about their feelings, but patriarchal masculinity doesn’t encourage meaningful engagement with emotion in the same way as femininity. I’m also not saying this is the sole reason for higher male suicides – it’s one of many factors, albeit a significant one.

You see, all of these supposedly “anti-feminist” issues are rooted in the problems with gender that feminism is already dealing with.

The equality definition doesn’t really cut it for me anymore because I don’t think it captures that.

“We want equality between these two groups” implies that we need to preserve the two distinct groups in the first place; it implies that women’s problems are not men’s problems and that solving one means ignoring the other. I don’t think that’s the case.

For me, it’s not always about bringing women back from a place of disadvantage – though unfortunately this is often necessary. Instead it’s about breaking down and rebuilding the very things we understand ‘male’ and ‘female’ to mean, because inequality is too deeply ingrained into them for anything else to make a real difference.

I think some existing feminisms have a lot of work to do here.

“White male privilege” is a phrase that’s thrown around a lot in some militant feminist circles and I’ve seen it used as an excuse to ignore men with valid contributions to make to the discussion.

The feminist hatred of toxic patriarchal masculinities can also come across as a hatred of men, and I can see that being very alienating. So-called ‘meninism’ might be a ludicrous waste of everyone’s time but I can understand how it came about.

To be clear: you can care about individual men very much and still be opposed to the weird hyper-macho, emotion-supressing, femininity-fearing masculinity that Western culture is trying to shake off. Separating the two in your head is perhaps the most important part of being a feminist.

In short, I think it’s more helpful to think of feminism as being about choice.

When men and women have complete freedom of choice in what they can aspire to, how they speak, dress, behave, express themselves and so on – independent of gender-dictated expectations – we’ll know we’ve done a good thing.

I used to be a member of the equality-but-not-feminism brigade too. Then I realised that not being a feminist wasn’t  going to make the problems I had with the movement go away.

My Barbie dolls might have been able to ride around on toy dinosaurs, but other little girls and boys aren’t so lucky. After that, I decided that the only way forward was to throw my hat in the ring and switch I’m not a feminist but... with I’m a feminist and...


*http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171776_394500.pdf, p. 5

**http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171776_394500.pdf, p. 22-23

***http://www.samaritans.org/sites/default/files/kcfinder/files/Samaritans%20suicide%20statistics%20report%202016.pdf p. 15