In the weeks since Emma Watson issued her formal invitation for men to
take up the mantle of feminism, I’ve seen a number of articles, blog posts, and
tweets encouraging dudes to follow Watson’s good advice. As the Women Goodwill
ambassador to the United Nations, Watson is currently promoting the HeForShe
campaign, a solidarity movement aimed at recruiting men to fight for gender
equality for women. A core goal of this
movement is to push back against the "persistent misconception" that feminism
is anti-man.
There’s a lot to admire in this effort, and the visceral reaction to Watson’s
speech from some corners of the Web—from sexist comments to direct threats of
violence—only serves to validate many of her points. As someone who supports gender equality in
the workplace, shared parental responsibility at home, and a number of the other
goals that Watson puts forward, I can’t help but feel like I’m a prime target
for this kind of cross-gender outreach. Yet
Watson’s speech and the HeForShe campaign more generally also hints at a central
problem within the contemporary feminist movement that often dissuades men like
me from taking her up on her offer.
As the name implies, the primary objective of HeForShe is to “bring
together one half of humanity in support of the other half.” Under this
conception of feminism, gender solidarity appears to be a one-way street, where
men champion women’s rights without any reciprocal obligation on the part of
women. Issues that disproportionately affect men—paternity rights, gang
violence, homelessness, sexual assault in the criminal justice system—are
simply not part of the contract, except to the extent that they can be
re-framed as women’s issues.
This is obviously not the way that all—or maybe even most—self-identifying
feminists view gender solidarity, but today it’s all too common to see this
kind of one-sided dialogue. Privilege
provides men with a shield of protection, where social stereotypes may cause annoyance,
but never lead to real problems. This is
a common
refrain among some of the most vocal feminist activists and bloggers:
"[G]eneralizations about women–along with misogyny as a whole–can lead
to rape, murder, abuse, belittling, harassment, wage gaps, and handfuls of
other harmful things. Generalizations about men cause hurt feelings."
How did so many modern feminists arrive at a place where even the
suggestion that men also experience violence, sexual abuse, and discrimination
is often greeted with sneering responses about how this “derails” the
conversation? When did prominent feminist voices decide that “male privilege”
demands that we de-contextualize every issue so that even the specter of disproportionate
male victimization in some areas of life is treated as a distraction, rather
than a common cause?
More than three decades ago, Karen DeCrow, the president of the
National Organization for Women, broke
with feminist orthodoxy when she served as the defense council in Frank
Serpico’s paternity case, arguing that “[j]ust as the Supreme Court has said
that women have the right to choose whether or not to be parents, men should
also have that right.” DeCrow took the position that because men have no “legal
power to either veto or compel an abortion, it is only just that they shouldn’t
have to pay for a woman’s unilateral decision to bring the pregnancy to term.” This
is a complicated and controversial issue, and reasonable people can come to
different conclusions about the value of forcing men to support children they
did not want. But today, prominent
feminist bloggers respond with the following non-sequitur at the mere
suggestion of a man’s right not to be tied to an unwanted child:
"Boo fucking hoo . . . . Yeah, it’s unfair
for them, but it's not nearly as unfair as forced motherhood."
The same can be said for issues like sexual assault, where the mantra
of “teaching men not to rape” is infused into feminist dialogue. The suggestion
that very few men actually commit sexual violence, or that men also confront
rape (at the hands of women) far
more often than people tend to believe, is all too often met with the following retort:
"If you don’t want women to think of you as a
potential rapist, then maybe you should start by working to end rape by
educating men not to rape women, rather than attacking women for implicating
all men in rape culture. Men are the people doing the majority of the raping in
this country. Acknowledging this reality is not anti-male, [it’s] simply
stating a fact. You
never raping anyone doesn’t negate the fact that most rapists are men."
If feminist advocates want more men to fight for equal opportunity and
reproductive rights for women, and against sexual violence, then the movement
truly has to become about mutual respect and support, rather than a megaphone
for vicious and sweeping generalizations about men. If you don’t believe that
this is a wide-spread and frequently ignored problem within the contemporary
feminist movement, I’d like to offer a simple thought experiment. Imagine for a
moment that a prominent Christian thinker tweeted the following quote, in
reference to the on-going persecution of Christians in many parts of the Muslim
world:
"'Muslims are afraid that
Christians will laugh at them. Christians are afraid that Muslims will kill
them." #YesAllChristians."
What would be the reaction to this
tweet? I suspect this kind of language would be treated by many progressive
thinkers as a malicious and bigoted smear against a religion practiced by
nearly 1.5 billion people. Many would take issue with the implication that
Christians are incapable of committing religiously-motivated violence against
Muslims. Others would offer a more nuanced caution against treating relatively
a small group of extremists as though they are the ambassadors for a vast and
diverse faith.
However, in the modern feminist
movement, literally thousands
of people can re-tweet the following quote from Margaret Atwood under the #YesAllWomen campaign without a hint of protest
from prominent feminist thinkers:
"Men are afraid that women will
laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them."
Pointing out the inherent bigotry in this kind of language all too
often results in lectures about patriarchy, or non-sequiturs about how violence
is really an instrument of institutional power structures and privilege. The
only appropriate response is to accept your own privilege, which means
recognizing that you have no right to be offended. In other words, the game is rigged.
I'd love to call myself a member of a movement for true gender
equality—one that rests on mutual support, accepts responsibility for its own self-policing,
and applies universal standards of respect and reciprocity. But I won’t call
myself a feminist until the movement does some serious soul-searching and stops
pretending that every problem in modern feminism is a fiction invented by Men’s
Rights Activists.
