A Feminist Response – Neil Austin.

Introduction:

John (not his real name) says feminism is harmful, pointless, and “no regular male” wants anything to do with it.
That “no regular male” thing got right up my nose, as did the rest of his anti-feminist nonsense. So I posted a point by point response.

A Feminist Response:

That’s some rant you posted there John. It’s your right of course, public domain and all that. Me, I couldn’t agree less, so let’s break it down.

Your opening point:
‘… feminism is often used to oppress people and hurt others – and there’s no denying that.’

Well, it’s hard to deny it when you skipped the bit about ‘how’ it’s used to hurt and oppress others. You referred to the Family Court at one point, so is that what you mean? By feminist oppression? There is a point to be made there because the court does, at times, give judgements that hit fathers like a knife in the heart.

However, it must also be said, the family court is part of a legal system where the majority of law makers and enforcers are men. Our legal system is not something feminists dreamed up. It’s societies attempt at fairness.

Next, you take a swing at men who support feminism. That’s me and the majority of my male friends. Supporting women in their drive for equality comes natural to the kind of men I value and respect.

You say; ‘Hardly any mentally and physically healthy regular male will say “I’m a feminist”‘; yet here I am. I’ll put my ‘mentally and physically healthy’ feminist self up against your ‘poor victim me’ anti-feminist self anytime.

Who is this ‘regular male’ you evidently think you represent anyway? I’m 65, which gives me 41 years on you, ample time to have lived all sorts of lives with all sorts of men. What have I learned? Men who like to call themselves ‘regular’ males are usually men in need of a gang to prop them up. I don’t need that and I have no problem with calling myself a feminist male; at work, in the pub, or here. I’ll take a joke about it, but I won’t be put down for it.

Your next clanger: ‘Hardly any girl would appreciate being picked up by a self-proclaimed feminist or am I wrong?’ Yep, wrong again. I’ve had a rich and varied sex/love life as a self-proclaimed feminist. How’s the ‘anti-feminist’ stance working for you John?

The women who interest me and welcome my approach (not keen on ‘picked up’ as you call it) are certainly not interested in anti-feminist men. So who are these women you’re talking about? Or is the key in your use of the word girl, instead of woman?

When I was a teen, the girls were weirdly attracted to boys who mocked and bullied them. But it soon turned around.  That bullshit might pass as ‘manly’ with young girls but soon enough they see it actually marks the immaturity of a man. If you’re looking for what turns women off, carry on like a boy child.

These boy/men get stuck in a groove, growing steadily older than the girls they seek to dominate. These are the men who cling to the young ones because they are unable to keep up with women’s growing independence. I’m not saying younger woman older man is bad in itself, any more than older woman younger man is. But when it’s grown men pursuing girls because they’ve failed to grow into true manhood, then it’s an issue.

In my experience it’s manliness that’s attractive to women, not demanded submission. (Sex play is another story, not what I’m talking about here.) Manliness is a confidence, an inner security, usually intelligent, often funny. It can manifest in a quiet guy at the office, or a loud guy on a building site. In a sporty dude or a nerdy dude. This manliness; considerate, empathetic, protective; includes an interest in women’s welfare. What’s not attractive about that?

Perhaps when you say, ‘Hardly any mentally and physically healthy regular male will say ‘I’m a feminist’, you’re thinking of some fool sucking up by waving an ‘I’m A Feminist’ sign. But methinks that’s another one of your made up characters, like the ‘regular man’. This time it’s a straw man for you to knock down.

Your next point: ‘Also women are mostly as free as men nowadays so being a feminism (sic) only makes sense in certain areas of life.’ Now you’re just ignoring the facts. The list of areas where women are nowhere near as free as men is so long I don’t know where to start. I’ll have a go though.

Let’s start with the work place. The obvious thing here is the issue of the pay gap between men and women. MRAs (Men’s Rights Activists) simply declare “there’s no such thing” and leave it at that. NATSEM (National Center for Social and Economic Modelling) however, did not leave it at that. Here’s the report they prepared regarding the wage gap in Australia.

“Utilising robust microeconomic modelling techniques, we found that simply being a woman is the major contributing factor to the wage gap in Australia. Indeed, the results showed that if the effects of being a woman were removed, the average wage of an Australian woman would increase by $1.87 per hour, equating to an additional $65 per week or $3,394 annually, based on a 35 hour week.”

In real terms, at the top end of the pay scale the average male earns 25% more, bottom end earns 10% more. All in all, the average woman will work an extra 66 days a year to earn the same pay as the average man.

Leaving the pay gap issue aside, inequality in the workplace includes everything from male hierarchies determining advancement, to the sexist attitudes and encroachment on space that can make the workplace a minefield for women. So that’s just the work place.

And the rest? Actually, I’m not going to get into all of it here ’cause we’ll just bog down. I do suggest though before you next say ‘women are mostly as free as men nowadays’ or ‘feminism only makes sense in certain areas of life’, do some research. Here are some topic suggestions.

: Comparative levels of assault and sexual harassment.
: Sluts and studs used to define the same behaviour.
: Body shaming (‘no fat chicks’).
: Gas lighting (making out women are crazy for imagining they’re not as free as men.)
: Political representation.
: Expected duties from unpaid child, disability and age care to housework.
: Freedom of movement (don’t walk alone in the park).
: Privacy (from the abuse of private images to the physical invasion of space).

And before you say ‘men too’, the point is ‘comparative’ levels of freedom.

So, back to your understanding of feminism. You say, ‘Feminism is a movement that is trying to establish equality of women. But equal to what? Equal to men? To which men? To all men? In which country? In every country? It makes no sense.’

Why is this so difficult to conceive John? Yes … equality with all men in all countries. Difficult to achieve, but what is it about the concept itself that ‘makes no sense’?

I’m guessing it’s the meaning of ‘equal to men’ that’s the problem here. After all, women are not men, men are not women. Different bodies, different hormonal systems, different brain structure and wiring. Different patterns of thought and emotion. Different life experience. So how can they ever be the same?

But remember John, equal does not mean same. Equal and same are different concepts.

I’m guessing, again, that you suspect equality would mean some kind of levelling; where women would cease to be soft, nurturing and lovely, and men would lose their strength, their drive, their balls. (Admittedly these are clichés, but in general, they hold up.) If these feminists get their way men will become passive doormats to domineering women.

When women first sought the vote, men argued like that. They said the suffragettes, the early feminists, wanted to be men. It was ridiculous then, it’s ridiculous now. That’s not the equality that feminism is striving for. Feminism doesn’t mean turning everything on its head with women coming out on top.

In our society, our world, women and men do not have equality. Not in wages or opportunity. Not in political representation. Hell, there’s no equality in just walking down the street. Few men walk home in fear of assault because it’s quiet and dark and there are women about, or that some woman will assume his clothing means she has the ok to attack him.

Nor does a man go through his day dealing with uninvited and annoying sexual innuendos and advances. He does not get abused by total strangers for his appearance. A man doesn’t have bigger stronger entitled men getting in his face, demanding his attention, denying him the basic right to personal time and space, insulting him, maybe even attacking him if he doesn’t deliver the demanded response.

I presume you must have some female friends you do consider equals John, so ask them about all the above. Really. Ask. Listen. What is a normal day like for a woman out and about? Is she treated the same way, “equal” to you? If not, shouldn’t she be?

You say that to be a feminist means adopting “a pre-determined way of thinking, pre-determined perspective, that’s going to distort your view some way.”

I think I understand what you’re getting at here. To be a Nazi or a Communist, a Christian, Muslim or Jew, you must adopt a prescribed system of belief. You’re saying it’s the same with feminism. Nah, it’s not like that. Feminism includes a huge range of people and perspectives, the only unifying factor being a concern for the welfare of women. All races and genders are welcome.

I suspect from the way you speak, that you incline to the wounded MRA view of feminists as man-haters, hysterical women loaded up with irrational frustrations. These, I guess, are the feminists of your opening statement, the ones who use feminism to “oppress people and hurt others”.

Next, you speak of domestic violence. You say it happens both ways. Of course it does. 1.5% of the violence men experience comes from their female partners. But since 40% of the violence women experience comes from their male partners, to make these things equal means women need to do a lot more bashing, or men cut right back.

These men’s groups who try to equate the two, thus dismissing domestic violence as a feminist issue, are ingenuous to the extreme. They disgust me. Instead of trying to help, instead of shouting loudly that “we won’t ignore the evils other men do”, these men give the simplest stupidest response possible by pointing the finger at women and saying “you do it too”.

This is the kind of imbalanced illogical nonsense you hear from the man who washes the dishes and sulks because he wasn’t thanked. This after his wife has cooked the dinner, washed his clothes, sorted the house and the kids and still managed to stroke his ego to maintain peace in the home. Sorry for the load up of clichés there, but that really does happen.

This “what about me and my hard time” coming from men, is pathetic.

For me, feminism simply means believing in and working for a world where women are just as entitled to feel safe as me. A world where women are not treated as less important than me. It means quietly talking about the issues with another man while we work as much as making public rants like this. It means being aware of a woman’s space, choosing to cross the street rather than raise her anxiety by walking behind her.

My experience of feminism is not that it’s about women hating men. Certainly some do and they have their reasons, but little girls do not hate or fear men automatically. Little girls worship their fathers, their brothers. So if a woman has bad feelings about men as an adult then we have to ask: “What happened in between?” It isn’t because she came across feminist thought. Men did that.

The women I know, and love, want their men strong. They’re not out to hate us, to emasculate us.

I’ll leave it there John. If you want to respond then perhaps we can talk some more.
__________

“John” did reply, at some length. I would share it all if I thought it was in any way constructive. But it isn’t. John got angry. Here’s a sample of his thinking and why I don’t care to give him any more oxygen.

“Few men walk home in fear of assault. Really? You can’t be robbed? Beaten to death for a wristwatch? Sure you can because you have something valuable. Every woman has something valuable and it’s vagina. That’s how nature works and you can’t change the fact it’s not like rapists give a shit about feminism just LOL. I have a solution. Look ugly! Look fat! You’ll be free of fear of assault. Nobody wants to fuck an ugly girl and risk jail. There’s a solution. But of course I am not running down the street with 5000 euros in my hand so of course nobody will assault me cause I am a man I have no vagina.”

Up against that kind of twisted “ugly and proud of it” mind it can sometimes seem hopeless. But it isn’t. Change is happening. As a child I watched as mum struggled with shitty jobs, for little pay, because dad chased the dream of a younger woman and abandoned us. He wasn’t penalised, mum was. There was no government assistance then and there wouldn’t be now if women, and men, hadn’t fought for change.

Though male privilege and harassment of women continues, it’s nothing like what it was 40+ years ago when I joined the work force, when men routinely treated women like shit. Most of my working life has been in the building trades, with what John would call regular males. But these ‘regular males’ are nowhere near as prejudiced against feminism, and women, as John seems to think. Most big building sites in Australia these days have some women working with the men. Those women are given the same respect that’s offered to any qualified and competent work mate. That old idea of a building site as a place where neanderthal goons hang off scaffold and insult passing women is not so funny anymore, if it ever was. It does still happen but way way less than what was normal 40 years ago. With female workmates as part of a crew it’s just not on, and peer pressure soon lets the perpetrators know this.

One of the best things to happen to feminism in recent years is the rise of social media. There are numerous excellent feminist sites and pages around that allow for dynamic discussion.

There are also men’s groups and a few of these do great work in encouraging men to share and support each other. The majority of men’s groups though are the MRA (Men’s Rights Activists) variety, horrendously ugly and cruel. So stupid and ugly are these groups that any comparison between them and feminist groups leaves them looking so ridiculous, by their own hand, that they drive intelligent men straight into welcoming feminist arms. It’s great to see the increasing number of men sharing on feminist sights now. Savvy, intuitive and empathetic men.

I’ll leave it there.