To start with, let’s define who “we” are. I am not a woman, so I am employing an expansive definition of that pronoun—by “we” I mean the whole community of human beings that live on this Earth, now and into the foreseeable future. That’s who the audience for feminism is, and that’s who needs to hear the message.
It’s a sad thing that this conversation seems to live perpetually in the wake of outrages, such as the rape scandal at the Chi Phi fraternity at Cornell University that is currently in the news. I, and other men, might do better in helping to advance understanding of feminist issues if we were moved to write about them more often. It would be better if more people were more consistently aware that any number of men in the world actually cared about women’s rights, and not just when it was time to state on the record that we found the latest outrage abhorrent. Women are routinely abused, and their abusers routinely escape justice, in large part because the necessary conversations are swept under the rug until the latest victim steps forward to tell her story.
To put my cards on the table, I’m not claiming to be a perfect male feminist. I’m not a perfect anything. I believe in the equality of women, but like all men the person I am has been shaped by ideas and concepts that are rooted in the premise of male superiority. Men like the Chi Phi rapists get away with what they do because double standards work in their favor—we hold their victims responsible for failing to prevent their own victimization, and we deem that the crime is rarely serious enough to justify serious accountability. Like all men I have been steeped in a sea of influences that taught us to see women as things, to be acquired, used, and discarded at our convenience. To the extent that we were taught to respect women, that respect was usually adulterated by paternalism and smug disregard for their talents and abilities.
These influences don’t always hurt people directly, but they do consistently lay the groundwork for people to get hurt. They diminish human freedom by restricting the sphere in which women can safely operate, and they degrade the concept of freedom by teaching men to equate it with the subjugation of others. And unfortunately, I don’t expect that these influences will ever disappear, no matter how far humanity should progress or how close we draw to enlightenment. I expect it will always be necessary to remind ourselves and the whole world that women are human beings.
When I have found myself talking to people (students or otherwise) about feminism, I have rarely felt confident that the broader public really understands what it is all about. There is a sort of naïve history, believed by many men and even women, that tells vaguely of women’s oppression in bygone eras, a major corrective with the advent of universal suffrage, and then a series of pointless cultural skirmishes instigated by women who wanted “too much equality.” What that could possibly mean is hard to say, apart from incoherent mumbling about feminists potentially flipping the social script and establishing a thousand years of matriarchal tyranny, as though the only realistic alternative to patriarchy is its polar opposite. In real terms, simple anxiety over change drives an appeal to the imagined comforts of “traditional” careers, family structures, and social norms.
This is to say nothing of the unreconstructed contingent that remains unabashedly hostile to women and their rights. You can’t reach the kind of people who think of gender relations exclusively as an either/or, zero-sum contest of domination and submission until they’re ready to pull their heads out of their asses and get serious. It’s more important to speak to well-meaning but misinformed, misguided people of whatever gender whose minds can be changed.
The fact of the matter is, women’s rights are not just about avoiding sexual violence. Women have less political representation than men in most places, and consequently have less influence on the way that laws and regulations are written and implemented. They are consistently paid less than men for the same jobs, have a more difficult time getting promoted, and are assigned a greater share of the kinds of household labor that our society has usually not deemed fit to reward with pay. It is not necessarily a problem that representation and opportunity do not always manifest a perfect 50/50 split, but when one class of people are systemically disfavored on both counts, it’s not difficult to conclude that it just isn’t fair, and it ought to be changed. For men, it only requires the courage to publically take a stand that does not immediately or obviously benefit themselves. For women, it only takes the nerve to demand more than what they’ve been told they deserve.
Part of the essential function of feminism is explaining itself to new generations, including women whose ideas about how they ought to live as women are often twisted and obscured by a storm of conflicting values and expectations. Opposite from hysterical narratives that portray feminism as a satanic anti-male conspiracy, there is a somewhat facile notion that equates the entire movement with the vague proposition that women simply be allowed to do what they want. This is obviously less wrong than the alternative, but in the absence of context it tends to serve as a fig leaf for practices that reinforce the status quo, justifying women’s collective decisions to conform to the expectations of men as long as they can be shown to have any agency at all in doing so. As a result, too much worrying over whether somebody is a “bad feminist” for choosing a skirt over pants or preferring submissive roles during sex risks distracting from the fundamental problem: do women actually have the freedom in their lives to make decisions that do not treat the preferences of men with more weight than is due?
As I said, I’m a man, and it’s obviously not my place to tell women how they ought to dress or speak or otherwise perform femininity in order to be “good feminists.” What I believe is that feminism has been and remains necessary for redirecting the conversation back to the most fundamental issue: building a world where women, in theory and in practice, individually and as a class, have as much authentic power over their own lives and bodies as men have over theirs.
There is a sense in which my assertion that we will always need feminism may be read as disheartening; suggesting that women must struggle eternally for equality implies that it will never be achieved. I don’t mean that at all. Equality is an ideal, and I believe meaningful progress has been made and can continue to be made. I don’t believe there is a ceiling, glass or otherwise, above which the freedom of women cannot rise.
What I am pessimistic about is men: not that individual men or even a majority of men cannot be won to the cause, but that there may be something inherent in men that leads over time to the oppression of women. Just as progress may always be made, backsliding is always possible (we have seen this clearly in the international fascist wave of the past decade), and I believe that in the history of the future reversions to tyrannical patriarchy are much more likely (and more concerning) than overcorrections into matriarchy.
This is dangerous philosophical territory, and I don’t want to be misunderstood as applying gender essentialist reasoning. Hard and immutable biological, physiological, and and psychological differences between the sexes are much rarer and less important than is commonly assumed. There are not nearly enough of them to justify all the ways that women and men are and have been segregated from each other. In most ways that matter—our capacipties to reason, to laugh and tell stories, to build social bonds, to create useful things, to play, to fight, to empathize, to grieve—we are all more substantially alike than we are different, and our essential characteristics largely overlap. Our different roles in the biological process of reproduction aside, most of our differences are cultural, and culture is essentially mutable.
One thing we also have in common, and in tension with our natural inclination toward community, is the desire to impose our will on others. All forms of and inequality and slavery are rooted in this impulse, and as for why it so often has manifested in history as a hierarchy of men over women (and why it sometimes has not), that’s a subject that is too big to cover in this post. It’s theoretically possible that women could have their revenge on us men by supplanting us in a matriarchal regime, but it’s the patriarchy that has actually entrenched itself. With such a long history of culture and expectation justifying their position, I doubt that the would-be patriarchs are ever going to stop trying.
But to suggest that the future will be like the past in this way is only to say that it will change: there will be pushes and pulls, progress and retreat. If we want to see the needle move on average toward equality, we need to maintain our awareness of inequality, and to articulate our opposition to the resting injustice. For that, we need feminism.
What happened to the woman at Cornell University has elicited a familiar suite of responses. Against the victim-blaming chorus that asserts she brought rape on herself by behaving irresponsibly (to say nothing of the unbelievable New York state rape law that only considers the role of drugs in diminishing capacity for consent if the victim is rendered actually unconscious), there is the insistence that rather than expecting women to learn to be on guard against rape at all times, it is incumbent on men to learn not to commit the crime. This is the right framing, as it should be for any crime. But after hearing it repeated every time sexual assault is in the news for all my life, I’ve come to believe it doesn’t go far enough. Men don’t just need to be taught right from wrong in a sexual context—they need to understand sex and consent as a matter of human rights, and they need to understand that women are human.
My own experience may not be universal, but I think men are generally taught that it is wrong to rape. The problem is that they are also taught, from the time they are small boys, that they should be at least as concerned with the light their actions cast on their masculinity, in terms of strength or weakness, as they are with right and wrong. In that framework, accepting a woman’s decision not to have sex means accepting one’s own failure to control her. Some men can live with that, but some will behave as the rapists at Cornell did, pursuing any angle to exploit an opportunity.
Moreover, men and boys are also taught that even if rape is wrong, some women deserve it, because of how they dress or how much they drink or what they’ve consented to in the past. In that framework the inherent wrongness of the act becomes less important than selecting the correct target: the girl with the loose reputation whose judgment is compromised and who can be shamed into keeping her mouth shut. Inevitably, when they decide that it’s alright to do terrible things to certain people, they end up putting as many people in that category as they can fit. Their so-called “respect” for women becomes a dead letter, a non-binding “guarantee” that can be arbitrarily revoked on a moment’s notice.
What men and boys really need to learn is that women and girls are people, and that other people have rights, and that those rights matter more than whatever desire they may have to appear powerful or successful. It should not be a matter of refraining from sexual assault because of the possibility of unfortunate social consequences, but rather of abhoring it as they would any violation of their own bodily autonomy.
That is the heart of what feminism is, whatever misinformation you may have heard about the movement over the years. The goal is not to demonize men or to shame them for being men, but to lead men to fully respect the other half of humanity, instead of making pointless and stupid judgments about their clothes or their sex lives to justify withholding that respect. It’s about living in a fairer and more just society, and believing in a better future for all.
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