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.
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
*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