Unlike equalists, feminists do not want men to share their oppression
How many feminists believe they are working towards equality? How many men self-define as equalists over feminists? Equality is almost universally accepted as the definition of feminism. But the term equality has never been questioned.
I am a feminist and I do not strive for equality. I support liberation. The defenders of equality espouse moderate feminist principles: equal pay for equal work, equal opportunity with no special considerations i.e. positive discrimination, failure is down to the individual, and above all, women must embrace hierarchal work structures where the job always comes first. Equality takes the male status quo as the standard to which women aspire.
To be equal, women have to show they are strong enough to live up to men’s standards in a man’s world. Backers of equality cheer as women enlist in institutionally discriminatory police forces, join the military in invading other countries and committing war crimes, train for the roughest of men’s sports whether its dangerous and cruel horse racing, or life-threatening cage fighting.
Once women have joined male dominated areas of work, nobody asks why anybody regardless of gender would work in these repressive institutions. The crux of the matter is that men live and work in a brutal society, which is maintained through stratified social order based on ritual humiliation, gentleman’s clubs, fights, rites of passage, sexism, and banter.
When women enter the male realm whether law, politics, or a construction site, they find themselves in a repugnant world in which their only means of survival is by undergoing a fundamental transformation leaving them with little opportunity to make any change. We see this manifested in descriptions of women professionals as harsher than men. Assertive women are seen as aggressive bitches.
It is impossible to alter male spheres, which are resistant to outside interference, because women are a minority that could be cut out at anytime, and men have vested interests in preserving the status quo.
The Equality Act 2010, which replaced the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, was designed to give the false impression that women’s subjugation had been legally acknowledged. Political support was gathered because politicians knew no great changes would ensue. Equality legislation exists throughout Europe but nowhere is there equality.
The attitude of the legal profession to equality is best shown by the number of women Attorney Generals over the years: one women in contrast to 202 men. The Act is barely enforceable due to extortionate legal costs and severe costs to time. Of 89 per cent of women health care workers who experience sexual harassment, barely 1 per cent initiate legal actions because they know that regardless of whether they win or lose they will be branded a troublemaker and all hopes of a promotion will be dashed.
The Act is a handmaiden to equality as it strikes down attempts at positive discrimination. Equalists refuse to support positive discrimination; instead they believe in equal treatment and equal outcomes. Here, a contradiction emerges, equalists support 50: 50 men and women in institutions but women will not be recruited in large numbers because ‘equality’ laws have made quotas illegal.
Other unequal situations arise from the equalist debate. A right to maternity leave or an abortion is not an equal right, women are requesting discrimination because of their gendered differences. A woman will never be equal to a man because she can never be the same, and gendered distinctiveness is not valued by equalists.
Arguing about equality or difference results in a debate that drains the life out of the feminist movement. Men plead both equality and difference when it is to their benefit. They argue equality when they want paternity leave, and difference when they want to be paid more prize money for sports.
The equality and difference argument is banal. Equality would be cruel to men if they were treated equal to women: men’s genitals would be sliced up, annual rape of men would increase from 9,000 to 69,000, male prostitution would soar, men’s penises would be sprawled across page 3, men would stroll down the catwalk with their penises hanging out, and the Labour Party would roll out pink vans to attract women voters and blue vans to entice male voters.
Unlike equalists, feminists do not want men to share their oppression.
The equalist debate is one way of preserving patriarchy, whereas feminism seeks to give power to women on their own terms – not mens. This is why I am a feminist, not an equalist. Equality is harmful to women and most men, as they are required to replicate behaviours that are degrading and dehumanising. Once women buy into the masculine terms of society, our civilization will become crueler than ever expected.
Men hold the balance of power. Power is granted in the wrong ways, and used for the wrong ends. Change can come about by redefining and redistributing power, breaking down hierarchal structures, and reevaluating the criteria designed by men.
*This piece was inspired by two of the greatest feminist thinkers of our time, Germaine Greer and Catherine MacKinnon
Charlotte Rachael Proudman is a barrister in human rights law and a PhD candidate in law and sociology researching FGM at the University of Cambridge
243 Responses to “Why I want feminism and not equality (and why they are not the same thing)”
Tom
Wow, are you low.
Gavin Gamache
Alright cool. I gotta say though that I did try to sit through the video and after a while I just made it a goal to make it to the five-minute mark. I really don’t know where to start. I think she should read some books. Like just any books. Just in the first five minutes:
– So men won the vote by fighting in wars? What?
– And then what appears to be a strawman about feminists thinking all women have always been treated worse than all men. Like. No. Two bell curves with midpoints at higher and lower levels. It’s not a hard concept.
– And wow, “relative ease” with which women forced society’s “hasty capitulation”? Like she knows that history is a thing, right? That we can look back on things which ACTUALLY HAPPENED because people wrote them down? Because I don’t think she’s looked into that…
But on to the transcript, which is much easier to navigate and pull stuff from (for other readers, here she’s responding to a feminist critique of another MRA’s video, for context’s sake):
> women were historically uniformly oppressed by their gender, and men historically uniformly privileged relative to them
This is what I was saying about the strawman. She belabours the word “uniformly”, which is what I think makes this a strawman. Nobody has made that argument.
> I mean, all it contained was typical feminist talking points framed as axiomatic, self-evident truths, the veracity of which you seem to feel no need to defend or substantiate. You just state them, and assume that any person would agree with both their accuracy, and the conclusions you believe they support.
Well I mean she does this too soooooo…
> if that government was headed by a woman
Isn’t it telling that the idea of a government run by a woman must necessarily be a hypothetical?
The next thing she goes into is biology, and it’s too long to quote directly, but I’ll point out that human evolution occurred over the course of millions of years, and human culture has necessarily only existed for ten thousand years or so. There is no interplay between them; all the causal effects go one way only.
This is starting to read like what people call Conservative Feminism, although really it’s just redressed patriarchy: women’s role is in the kitchen, and hey what a swanky role it is; LET those men have their pesky economic and cultural power…
Sorry dude. I can’t finish this. She’s wrong in really really boring ways.
Disdyakis Triacontahedron
“- So men won the vote by fighting in wars? What?”
No, she said that the vote for men has always been tied to military service. And that’s true. In most countries, including my own, men can’t vote without enlisting. Women have no similar obligation to be able to vote.
“- And then what appears to be a strawman about feminists thinking all
women have always been treated worse than all men. Like. No. Two bell
curves with midpoints at higher and lower levels. It’s not a hard
concept.”
It would be a strawman if it wasn’t constantly repeated by feminists. That’s sort of what “patriarchy” means for most of them: male privilege and female oppression.
“- And wow, “relative ease” with which women forced society’s “hasty
capitulation”? Like she knows that history is a thing, right? That we
can look back on things which ACTUALLY HAPPENED because people wrote
them down? Because I don’t think she’s looked into that…”
The fact is that women complained and got the vote. She makes a more detailed historical analysis in other videos, but the point is that women got the vote without having the same responsibilities as men. Essentially, they got it for free.
“The next thing she goes into is biology, and it’s too long to quote
directly, but I’ll point out that human evolution occurred over the
course of millions of years, and human culture has necessarily only
existed for ten thousand years or so. There is no interplay between
them; all the causal effects go one way only.”
Are you insane? Of course our culture is tied to our biology. Our brains are not independent from our biological framework.
“This is starting to read like what people call Conservative Feminism,
although really it’s just redressed patriarchy: women’s role is in the
kitchen, and hey what a swanky role it is; LET those men have their
pesky economic and cultural power…”
If this is what you understood from her points, you either:
1- Made no effort into actually understanding them, because your cognitive bias doesn’t allow you;
2- Have serious interpretation issues.
Gavin Gamache
The third option is that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about! Enlisted persons were banned from voting in France from 1872 to 1945! The Constitution of Texas likewise originally forbade military members from voting at the state level! The right to vote was almost always tied to property due to tax burden, NOT military service. Saying you need to shoulder certain “responsibilities” to be able to vote is likewise inane. In the era of women’s suffrage (still not a thing in some countries, by the way), women paid taxes. Boom. That’s more than enough.
As for what feminists say about what patriarchy is, strawman blah blah blah. Maybe you’ve talked to someone who said that once. Doesn’t really matter. It’s not the viewpoint of any major feminist theory.
I said there’s no interplay between culture and biology because the arrow only points ONE way, not both (which I think is what you meant also). She said “If men had not been prepared to willingly take on those burdens in order to spare women from them, guess what, Danielle? Women would have sturdier skeletons and bigger muscles than they do, because they’d have had to evolve those things in order to survive.” Which is implying that the evolution of sexual dimorphism in primates took place AFTER the development of human culture, which is about as funny as dinosaurs living at the same time as people. Evolutionary psychology, or biological determinism, or whatever premodern pseudoscientific sexist apologism she’s trying to pull with the hunter-gatherer example is also old ground that’s been gone over before. Furthermore, we’re not hunter-gatherers anymore. We can drop the wage gap/suffrage/whatever schtick.
Hey how about this, for every blog post of hers I read, you should read a post from this site: http://feministcurrent.com/
Considering the glaring errors in her spiel, I think I know what she’s talking about better than she does, and yeah it does look pretty Con-Fem.
Yasmine
I think you must be trolling. I’m part Jew in the sense that I have Jewish heritage. I have no desire to ‘purge’ Jews from anywhere, since that would be a dick move, and many of my family and friends would be affected.
Also, I’m not in favour of FGM *or* circumcision of boys. I don’t want ANY babies getting cut up, and on the other hand I support all adults being free to do whatever they want to their genitals.
As for your last sentence, I actually can’t work out what you mean, so I can’t address it.
I suggest if you have a problem with what I’m saying you go away and deal with it on your own, because your incoherent arguments aren’t going to convince me of whatever view it is you hold.