Risky Thinking: Querying Feminism

For the past two or three years I’ve considered myself a feminist-allied man. I believe men and women are of equal moral value and should have equal rights, and until very recently I believed that women were historically and are presently oppressed by men as a class. The last fortnight has seen a range of thoughts and feelings arise in me about men’s and women’s moral value and treatment in society. The trigger for this happened two weeks ago.

Personal Anecdatum

Two Saturdays ago I was partying with a friend’s bachelorette party (the bachelor’s having ended) at a club in Sea Point. Almost all of the women in the group were prior friends of mine, I was one of two men in the group, and the other had temporarily left the scene with one of the bachelorettes for some amorous action. We were all (with perhaps one or two exceptions) significantly drunk and dancing comically and flirtatiously. My bum was squeezed a few times, and I’d protested (almost entirely in humour) that I was being objectified. That was the order of the evening.

It was playful and fun and everyone, especially the bride-to-be (L.), was enjoying it – except for one of my friends (N.). She slapped me twice, aggressively, in the face. I was stunned. When I asked her why she had slapped me (“What the fuck, N?” were my exact words) she said, “I’m watching you.” She soon resumed slapping me. Over the course of about three minutes, she slapped me in the face seven or eight times.

It later transpired that N had been angry that L-and-my dancing was (in her view) transgressing on the sacred grounds of an impending marriage. It most certainly was not: although L was dancing suggestively with me, as she is known to when drunk, I was not touching her in any sexual way. There were no grounds whatsoever for N’s striking me (and, incidentally, my touching L would not in any case have constituted said grounds). The next morning I wrote N an email and demanded – and received – an apology and a promise it would never happen again. It prompted a good conversation about the ways we push each other’s buttons. We’ve since had a face-to-face conversation about it, she’s apologised unconditionally, I’ve forgiven her, and we’re closer than we were before.

What’s most relevant here is the social aftermath. When I told other female friends about this episode, the first question was “What did you do?” She was not asking how I’d responded; she was asking what I’d done to deserve or invite it. I responded by thanking her “for victim-blaming”, whereupon she and another female friend laughed and began to make jokes about victim-blaming. She said “Sorry, but women don’t slap men without a good reason.” Clearly, there was no possibility of her taking my word that I’d been abused by a female friend without provocation.

On top of my anger and hurt at N’s slapping me (and my confusion that no-one had stopped or reprimanded her) I felt silenced by my friends – and very distressed and angry about that. The episode left me intensely aware of how hard it can be for a man to be heard when he talks about his own abuse by a woman, and the different standards that society applies to physical abuse. Had it been me slapping N several times, with or without provocation, I would probably have been ejected from the club and sidelined by my friends – perhaps rightly so. My story of being abused was dismissed for one reason alone: I am a man and the perpetrator is a woman.

Male Disposability

I also came across a video by Karen Straughan (girlwriteswhat, online) which I found very powerful. My commentary beforehand will only distract, so let me place it here without further ado:

As I’ve said, I’ve considered myself a feminist-allied man. Feminism has seemed a shoe-in, a sensible liberal orthodoxy that no-one in possession of the facts and a moral compass would renounce. So it was somewhat disorienting to find this video (by a self-described anti-feminist) highly persuasive, especially in its claims that:

• Women are ascribed moral value simply by being. Men are not; they must earn it by doing.
• Because of women’s greater moral value (due to their numbers being the reproductive limit on species continuation) both men and women are taught to save and protect women before men.
• Men are conditioned from birth to expect less affection and care. They are taught to “suck it up.”

Obviously, this resonated strongly with my experience of dismissal when I described being abused by a woman. I was leery of Straughan’s self-applied anti-feminist label, but I was impressed by her articulateness and persuasiveness. This led me to visit and explore the A Voice For Men website, which I’ve joined as an interested observer.

Against Feminisms

Searching further, I came across Quiet Riot Girl’s blog and particularly her piece Against Feminisms. In a welcome reprieve from walls of text, it’s concise, even bullet-point. I paraphrase (and have edited occasionally for brevity and punctuation) the first three of her six points:

1. Feminism rests on the notion that, overall, men as a group hold power in society and this power damages women as a group.
2. This relies on a belief in and a reinforcement of the essentialist binary view of gender, i.e. that male v female, men v women, masculine v feminine, are real and important distinctions. This is how feminists justify their belief that ‘men’ hold power over ‘women’.
3. To present these assumptions as fact, men are demonised by feminism as a whole. Feminism is, by its very nature, misandrist. Concepts such as ‘rape culture’, ‘patriarchy’, ‘violence against women and girls’, ‘the male gaze’ and ‘objectification’ rely on an assumption that men, in general, as a group, are not decent people. Feminists place the onus on men to prove that they are decent human beings and to prove why they differ from the (socialised or innate) ‘norm’ of dominant masculinity.

I find this hard to disagree with, although I’ll welcome arguments that do. There’s evidence to support the idea that feminism is misandrist. The Duluth Model of Domestic Violence (read the small text) is pretty signal: it flat-out assumes that all domestic violence is perpetrated by men (and that where it is perpetrated by women, the actual cause is the fault of the man). Here are some quotes that went unremarked at the time, but which have been gender-swapped to show how abruptly they would be criticised if spoken in this manner today:

“Men can do anything women can. And do it better. And do it with one hand tied behind their backs.”
— Barack Obama

“It cannot be assumed that women are bound to be an asset to family life, or that the presence of mothers in families is necessarily a means to social cohesion.”
— UK equalities minister Harriet Harman

“When a woman strikes a man, she strikes all of society.”
— Hillary Clinton

“I want to see a woman beaten to a bloody pulp with a workboot shoved into her mouth like an apple in the mouth of a pig.”
— Andrea Dworkin, second-wave feminist, said this of men

Risky Thinking

My most recent reading has led me to the distinction between “gender feminists” (interested in women’s rights, paying lip service at best to equality, and believing that gender differences are entirely socialised) and “equity feminists” (interested in equality, having no stance on gender differences). So that’s fruitful.

It felt and still feels risky to write that I’m giving series consideration to critiques of feminism. That’s partly because I think women’s rights are an important moral issue and I’ve mostly considered myself a pro-feminist man, so it’s odd to find myself in this position. It’s also due to my perception (hopefully false) that my questioning or even opposing feminism will cause my female feminist friends to withdraw their respect and affection. Ex-feminists online have described their vicious ousting from “the sisterhood”. So it feels risky. Nevertheless, I write what is true for me, and this is where I’m at.