Feminism Revisited

I think I blogged about- a year ago? about the topic of "feminism". I remember I was very bitter about the subject, and I was very adamant in stating, "I don't believe in feminism- humanitarianism is the better phrase". I now realize that I was being a COMPLETE AND UTTER DIPSHIT and I'm glad I now know better than to say things like that ever again.

I didn't realize I had such a terrible way of thinking, until I saw the "all lives matter" movement. It's weird, but I felt the "all lives matter" movement was annoying as fuck. When I heard about it on the news, I thought to myself, "these people are trying to make a point about violence against black people, and the social injustices they face. Why do you have to go in there and shit on their parade? Sure, all lives matter- but that's a different conversation, isn't it? That's a point to be raised when discussing whether the death penalty is the same as state-sanctioned murder- but in the context of preventing racial violence, bringing something like this up is in poor taste."

Then the irony of my stance dawned on me, and I was like, "holy shit, that's exactly what I said about feminism". I admitted that women had it bad, but then I tried to make it about men, under the pretense of inclusion. I thought I was being practical, but I was just being an unmitigated ass. Saying something like "well what about the gender inequality men face" is just trying to undermine the feminism movement, after all. The women are working towards a fairer world for themselves, and instead of being helpful, I essentially stole their conversation. And that's not a nice thing to do, when I claim that I "believe in equity".

I think apart from ignorance and stupidity, there were other reasons I thought the way I did. Part of it is the slew of misandry thrown around casually in the name of "feminism". That made me equate the two, that if you were a feminist, it meant you wanted to drag men to the ground. Obviously it's not TRUE, it just felt that way after I kept on hearing it. I mean, it's a statistical fact that men are over-represented as the perpetrators of violence against women, and there's no denying that if you want to get anywhere meaningful in life, you're better off being a man than a woman. That still didn't justify abhorrent behavior towards men, or ridiculing them for saying "not all men are like that". I know it sounds childish and overly-defensive, but it's hard not to be defensive when your gender is being attacked. You can't just say something like, "men are all sleazebags" and expect me to sit comfortably. Even if you look at me and say, "oh, I don't mean YOU"--- but I'm a guy, so if you say all men are sleazebags, you're either calling me a sleazebag or insinuating that I'm not a man. I don't like either of those options.

Men's rights activists are a different story. I wouldn't mind it so much if their sole existence wasn't to mock women's rights activists. I believe there are social issues which require male representation- like how men are less likely to get custody of their children, or how nobody believes than men could be victims of domestic violence. Those are important issues, but that's not really what men's rights activists fight for. Most of what I've seen is a cesspool of misogyny, and circular arguments about how women hate men because they're women. The hardest thing to do is for them to acknowledge that equal rights for women does not equate misandry, and that was difficult for me to realize, as well.

I blame the radicalization of the feminist movement. Change is well, change. Change is different and change is scary, and when change threatens to even the power balance and take away privileges held for as long as history goes, people get a little uncomfortable. It only takes one overzealous person to take things too far, before we start to feel threatened.

There's also contentious things like workplace quotas and whatnot. I always felt really weird about it, that you HAD to give x amount of jobs to women because they were women. I thought it defeated the purpose of a meritocracy, and it seemed unreasonable that a potentially more competitive male candidate would lose to his female counterpart, because they were female. Well, that's my only theoretical objection. Truth being, it's not difficult to find competent female employees, even if you had to fulfill some arbitrary quota. We like to think of our society as a place that rewards hard work, but it doesn't really. For centuries men were preferred over women, because they were men. I'm not suggesting we reverse the trend by swinging the other way, and the quota still makes me feel uncomfortable, but saying "men are just more capable than women" is a poor excuse, after all, especially in this day and age.

In the end, the whole men vs women debate is arbitrary, isn't it? I know we conjure certain images in our head when we think about what a man should be and what a woman should be, but no one fits those images perfectly. Surely, if I can get defensive and say "not all men are alike", then "not all women are alike" by the same logic. People are just people, after all. We are not bound by these things, and when people realize that, we'll be headed to a better place after all.