The "equilibrium of gender relations" is artful language because it side steps "equality" and adds relation which is key.
I'm not sure I can ever do anything that equals pregnancy. As long as pregnancy is part of the female experience, legal and economic expectations cannot be practically equivalent. (If the set of female people is a superset of pregnant and potentially pregnant people, and the set of male people is disjoint from pregnant and potentially pregnant people, the set of legal and economic rights associated with pregnant people is exclusively applicable to females. Unless you dissociate gender and pregnancy or deny any specific rights associated to child rearing there will always be female exclusive rights/duties/responsibilities. So from a set theory perspective, the set of applicable rights is never "equal".) Obviously, I know I'm the only one that thinks about set theory when they hear "equal rights", but the equilibrium language is much better.
The relational aspect is super interesting because it should address man -> man, woman -> woman, man-> woman, woman -> man. There is a focus on how men treat women, but the other three are so rich as well in both a descriptive and prescriptive mode. Arguably feminism should have something to say about at least 3 of the 4.
Thanks, Paul! Yes, I think that it’s justified for early feminists to have focused on male > female relations but agree that the other categories are also potentially rich areas, especially worth exploring now. In addition to male > female relations and the categories you list, I think second wave and later feminism also focused on women’s relationship to themselves, and recognizing internalized investment in potentially restrictive gender norms. And to some degree to how men relate to themselves as individuals.
It would be cool to have a chart to track relational types across ideological modes. Why? Better pinpoint some of the differences in emphasis and ideology. For example from the traditionalist perspective I would describe male -> male ideal as communal task oriented camaraderie (barn raisings, "the hunt", military). This is one of the key problems from a feminist perspective as the boys club can be exclusive, but if you need to raise a barn it's really useful. Traditional male -> female is equally messy as the ideal is something along the lines of chivalry, protect and provide. That makes sense in a low physical and economic security culture, but feels pretty condescending in the high security context of 2024 West.
Early in my career, I was in a conflict resolution meeting with a female colleague and our boss. She didn't like how I spoke to her, and my response was I'm treating you just like I treat one of my brothers (direct, passionate, problem oriented). My boss laughed and said that was exactly how I treated him; I wasn't treating her differently on account of her sex. Lesson learned was that male -> female is in fact different from male -> male. (One plausible response is that traditional male -> male relations are toxic and feminism is fundamentally about regulating male behavior with everyone.) Much more to say on these dimensions.
Thanks Paul, good observations. As for your example with your colleague-I see the fact that she assumed your communication style had to do with her gender to be a potential example of the overreach of gender theorizing in some cases - like, she didn’t consider that maybe you and her just have different communication preferences as individuals, instead assuming it was an expression of sexism. Understanding how gender impacts communication and interaction in general is interesting, but I also want to remind people that we’re all pretty different anyways and the same sorts of conflict can arise in different gendered communications. Anyways, will write more on this soon.
Just the potential of an interaction being perceived as being gendered leads to change of behavior. This results in men being less guarded with other men and trusted women, which in itself is gendered behavior.
The biggest problem with the term patriarchy is that it means something totally different in academic contexts like women's studies -- they take it to mean something like the societal forces which enforce traditional gender roles. I'll often have the experience of reading a paper in those areas whose upshot is something like: men are being made worse off by stereotypes which regard them as failures if they adopt a more nuturing role or aren't the breadwinner but -- despite the fact they may be describing a harm inflicted on men in large part by women -- they describe it as a harm imposed by the patriarchy.
I believe this bears on those flaws you mentioned that many people who identify as feminists share. The problem is that academic feminism has decided that rather than correcting the popular understanding when it amounts to an attempt by women to complain about men and demand special treatment they are going to choose words and presentations that are easily misconstrued as supporting the women are aggrevied narrative rather than the real content which is a claim about the harms of pressuring people to comply with traditional gender roles.
Yes, it might be that women are in practice supporting the value that men must be breadwinners, and so are harming men, but it’s also correct (imo) to describe that as a patriarchal value. It comes out of a society structured around males being leaders, having liberty and therefore being responsible for protecting and providing (all of which has some basis in sex differences of course) - which is a patriarchal society. And also men enforce this stuff on one another as much as women do (imo). It’s similar to how women complain about beauty standards. Like yes, men care a lot about how women look, and coming from a history where women were not allowed to participate economically we have inherited a culture that encourages women to place far too much value on how they look. But regardless of where it comes from, women are the ones enforcing this on themselves in large part, men do not care if you have a perfect manicure or are super thin etc. but it’s also not every woman’s “fault” if she struggles with this because it’s really pervasive in our society. Anyways, I’m rambling, thanks for the comments!
Rhetorically, the *most* common way I see "patriarchy" used in modern discourse is to subtly shift the blame on to men for any sort of gender-related problem. If a woman body shames a man, or shames him for opening up emotionally, and men complain, women will say "see, patriarchy hurts men too". Greater male homelessness and male workplace deaths are also declared products of the patriarchy.
As a general trend, the contemporary female discourse seems to believe in personal responsibility -- but for men only. If women fall behind in some area, that's a problem society needs to address. Fire up the government programs. If men fall behind in some area, they either terminally suck ("men are trash"), or they need to try harder. If a man makes a sexist joke about a woman, fire up the cancellation machine. If a woman makes a sexist joke about a man, that is understandable due to overarching societal forces, and we can't blame her as an individual. I'm hard-pressed to think of a single area where the modern prestige discourse believes that women need to take responsibility, or a single area where men are thought to be victims of forces beyond their control.
We know that women are always the victim, because look -- there are stories about women being victims everywhere! Hence women get carte blanche to insult men because hey, they're the victims, everyone knows it! If a man complains about gender-based disparities in education or sentencing -- he's not allowed to play that victim card, because we live in a patriarchy, so we don't put it up on the "which gender is more victimized" scoreboard. Women retain their blank check to insult and discriminate against men.
It's incredibly common for women to make negative generalizations about men, and this is seen as essential in warning other women about how dangerous we are. On the other hand, if men generalize negatively about women, women will stop him right there without considering whether the generalization is true. But over in a different discussion, women will shame men for treating women in a certain way, saying "you idiot, women don't like it when you _", basically making generalizations about women themselves (often inaccurate generalizations, essentially assuming that all women share *that* particular woman's preferences). Somehow these philosophical/moral "you can't generalize like that" objections only come in to play when it's a *man* doing the generalizing.
Similarly -- If a study is published showing that women outperform men, that's nifty and progressive. If the study shows that men outperform women, we can assume that the authors are creepy sexists, scrutinize their research thoroughly, and if it has any weaknesses, our initial diagnosis of "creepy sexism" can then be confirmed. So there's a big bias in the prestige outlets towards research that praises women. This constitutes further evidence that men only ever fall behind because they terminally suck.
Anyway, I think the gender roles stuff is a red herring. Patriarchy is a confused conceptual bundle. Obviously there's some amount of gendered specialization of labor -- women give birth and nurse children. And the male breadwinner doesn't logically imply a society where men rule. Consider an imaginary society with a male-breadwinner norm where only women are allowed to vote, for example. At this point I think we should move past discussion of gender roles and focus directly on welfare. What degree of gender roles make people happy? Almost every profession has some level of gender skew, and if I recall correctly the level of professional skew is actually stronger in societies that are more gender egalitarian according to other measures. Furthermore, women's happiness has trended downwards in recent decades as gender roles have weakened. So the picture seems complex there.
I don't have strong views on gender roles. I just want feminists to pick a consistent moral position and apply discourse standards equally across sexes. As an example, last time I browsed Craigslist looking for a room to rent, there were a ridiculous amount of ads specifying that the tenant should be female. This appears to be a clear case of gender-based discrimination, and it could easily be a result of negative stereotypes on social media (e.g. consider the famous man vs bear thought experiment). It's also easy to see how this could lead to the much higher rate of homelessness among men. A woman might respond "well it's just factually the case that men are more violent". Now imagine someone making the same argument for profiling tenants based on race! And if I was to say that "it's just factually the case that women are less logical, that's why there are fewer women engineers" -- now I'm a creepy sexist. At this point, I don't even care that much about the question of us living in a "free speech" society where it's acceptable to make negative generalizations, vs a "hugbox" society where those generalizations *aren't* acceptable. I just want to see a consistent standard applied everywhere.
Thanks for your comment ! I don’t have time to reply properly but i did write something on the general topic of gender roles and welfare, might be relevant to themes that you mention near the end - let me know what you think if you have time to read:
Seems to me that the ultimate enforcement of any masculine norm is less by men than by women in terms of who they will date and marry. That’s a bit of an overstatement, certainly guys care about being seen as a man among men, but at the end of the day men can let go of the approval of other men more easily than they can the sexual approval of women. This is where I think the notion of patriarchal culture gets hopelessly muddled with biology and differences in attraction between men and women which may or may not be malleable.
To be clear, I totally agree with the project of pushing back on the pressure to comply with traditional gender roles.
However, I think using terms like patriarchy to describe this falls somewhere between a delibrate attempt to confuse people and a neglegent failure to clarify what one really means while taking advantage of the rhetorical benefit (eg to avoid conflict with the people who don't have any interest in avoiding imposing those harms on men).
Yeah I think it’s mostly negligent failure to communicate what is meant, but I will say in feminists defense that there is also a motivated contingent that has intentionally misrepresented what feminists are saying. So I think there are two sides to this confusion. Generally, feminists will say that a patriarchal society is more harmful to women than it is to men, but that it’s also harmful to men. They will say that men are victims of the outcomes of a society which is invested in patriarchal values, as are women, and that both men and women contribute to maintaining those values. But I think that at this stage we’ve addressed the harms to women to a larger degree, and women have more theory to turn to when they notice they’re dealing with internalized issues like overly focusing on appearance etc while men do not have the same resources available. But all that said, I try to avoid the term at all given the confusion and the very broad ways in which it is used by others.
Yes, though I'm a bit less forgiving to the academics who study this area who then tweet and get involved in mainstream discussion while employing terms like patriarchy without explaining it doesn't mean what you think it does -- I am sure some of them are aware at some level they are trading on the different meanings that words like patriarchy have in informal and academic contexts.
Sure, it's a numerically very small percent but I think they play an outsized role in making sure that the movement and liberal attitudes more generally don't take concern about how men are impacted seriously -- because most self-identified feminists are good people who naturally are inclined to care about unfair treatment in all cases. I think it's much the way some academics define racism to be privlege plus prejudice to define away the possibility of ever having to deal with concerns about reverse racism.
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That's why I appreciate people like you so much. I think it's really important for women to get up and make clear that being concerned with the ways women are harmed by gender roles should compliment concern for the same regarding men. Unfortunately, I feel that too many people who believe this are cowed by a few people claiming to speak with academic authority but not accurately conveying what the literature really says.
Or I'm just an academic who sees academia as being more important than it really is ;-).
--
P.S. Also the question of who has it worse is a bit of a red-hearing. Like most social issues it's probably more important to ask what can we do that provides the most benefit per unit effort and I think we've dealt with the low hanging fruit for women more than for men.
And yes to your final point, I think feminists need to actively support a focus on improving men’s emotional and spiritual health (not too sound too woo). And not just by getting more men in therapy. But what I’m thinking about now is whether that needs to be led by men, and I think it likely does. I think that feminist theory can be a useful jumping off point, but as it’s nearly all from the female perspective will almost surely fall short. The problem is that men’s rights is associated with resentful misogynists, and how true that is of people sympathetic to the movement in general I don’t know, but what they have to realize is that they’ll have to convince women to get mainstream. One of the things I say in the piece is that it’s a problem that feminists have stopped trying to convince men of their views - early feminists were talking to men as well as women, but especially to men. Now feminists write for other feminists, and that needs to change. But the men’s rights guys should realize that women got feminism off the ground, yes by protesting etc, but also by getting men on their side by making strong arguments that appealed to their interests.
I think it's very hard for men to create such a movement until women lead the way here -- or at least open up the space. That's because unfortunately the way much of the discourse about gender occurs interacts with traditional gender norms about how men should behave to make it virtually impossible to occupy that space.
As you correctly point out it can't work as long as the movement is associated with angry resentful men or with men who are all seen as losers or low status. But any movement lead by men that is protesting about injustices or unfairness they experience is going to be virtually impossible to avoid being seen that way and from attracting those individuals.
The problem is that men generally benefit from advertising how confident, powerful and successful they are (to what degree this might be malleable isn't important only that it's true now) so even if you're a man who completely agrees that some way men are being treated is deeply unjust and unfair your incentives aren't to join some kind of protest but to shrug and basically send the message "I'm so confident/powerful that I'm not bothered by the fact that men are being screwed in this way." This makes it really hard for such protests or movement to not primarily draw men who are going to be seen as bitter resentful losers. And yes I think the way some feminist activism gets realized reinforces these ideas about appropriate male behavior being to shut up and help the poor women not complain about your own situation.
Add to that the problem that male gender norms themselves say that you aren't supposed to advertise weakness like this and you get pressure coming from both sides.
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I think it's much easier for it to grow out of women working to dismantle gender barriers and men participating in that and then branching out to tackle similar problems that disadvantage men. Eventually it may be lead by men but I think that kind of origin makes it easier to avoid the vibe of sour grapes.
The attempt to help other men do better in school is also a good place to help get it off the ground but I think it's hard to enlarge the scope there.
I disagree that women have to lead the way here, as I think that part of what men need are examples from other men who lead happy, fulfilling lives that aren’t dependent on confidence, power, and success, and women cannot provide that. Maybe I am wrong about this, but power, confidence and success I think are mostly sought after by men as instrumental goods, and if men believe (accurately) that they can obtain the things that they want without them, then I think that men would not feel the same need to try to live up to traditional gender roles and stereotypes.
"That's why I appreciate people like you so much. I think it's really important for women to get up and make clear that being concerned with the ways women are harmed by gender roles should compliment concern for the same regarding men."
--- But too many men don't see it this way. If you look at MRAs and the Manosphere, they do not believe that patriarchy has harmed them, rather that Feminism and "the gynocracy" has. They believe that if patriarchy had remained strong and not conceded to Feminism, they wouldn't be facing all the problems they are now.
And to some degree they may be correct. I mean arguably the average white person would have been better off in a world that still accepted the enslavement of blacks. Humans prefer to be at the top of status hierarchies not at the bottom so eliminating social norms that grant you a privleged position can make you worse off. But on net society as a whole is better off because we removed rules that kept women and minorities limited to inferior positions (and since men in the old days used to thank God they'd been born a man I think it's clear it was inferior).
And I wouldn't be surprised if lots of men weren't particularly concerned/harmed by enforced macho gender norms (assuming you using patriarchy in that way...in the common sense meaning almost no one in the west today is harmed by it). But at the same time those pressures do harm some men and offer very little benefit so there is something to be gained by eliminating them.
But I think the most important reason for doing this is that I think a big source of the fight over feminism and etc is the sense people get that it's not really about any universal ideal of equal treatment since those cases where those principles would give men a benefit suddenly seem to have exceptions.
I think such a movement would -- if taken seriously -- do alot to fix the abuse of feminism to just gain a leg up (or perception thereof) and make men feel like their welfare is given equal consideration.
"And to some degree they may be correct. I mean arguably the average white person would have been better off in a world that still accepted the enslavement of blacks. Humans prefer to be at the top of status hierarchies not at the bottom so eliminating social norms that grant you a privleged position can make you worse off."
--- But their argument is that Patriarchy made everybody - men, women and children, better off.
"But I think the most important reason for doing this is that I think a big source of the fight over feminism and etc is the sense people get that it's not really about any universal ideal of equal treatment since those cases where those principles would give men a benefit suddenly seem to have exceptions."
--- Could you explain further what you mean by "those principles would give men a benefit suddenly seem to have exceptions." ?
"I think such a movement would -- if taken seriously -- do alot to fix the abuse of feminism"
--- What do you mean by the abuse of feminism?
"to just gain a leg up (or perception thereof) and make men feel like their welfare is given equal consideration."
--- How is men's welfare neglected more than anyone else's? What particular needs do men need met that women also don't? The USA is not known for having a robust social safety net for its populace. Men, women and children are suffering here due to a lack of this, but what problems are men facing specifically that other Americans are not?
The sexual revolution brought about by the contraceptive pill and later on legalised abortion which were welcomed by the majority of women of the western world had far more effect on gender relations than any feminist struggle for equal rights. With the widespread availability of the abortion pill adding to the transactional sexual behaviour that's the foundation of the interaction between the sexes in the 21st century
The Pill has always been used mostly by married women to space children or by women in long-term relationships. Women and men who are just dating but not in committed relationships use condoms as their contraceptive of choice.
If the patriarchy harms men, we need a story about how and why. Nobody ever claimed that slavery and Jim Crow also harmed white people, and that this is part of why ending slavery and institutionalized racism was so important. Likewise, Musk and Bezos aren't being hurt by capitalism. An exploitative system of oppression that can't even manage not to harm its own beneficiaries is an odd duck indeed...
The problem here is that the term patriarchy is often defined in areas like women's studies or feminist philosophy to mean enforced traditional gender rolls. And it's easy to see a way that can harm men (eg different treatment in the draft).
Using the term that way is pretty deceptive and objectionable. I'm pretty sure it came about out of people pointing out that it wasn't only women who might be hurt by gender norms but weren't willing to critisize others who called themselves feminists.
And that's exactly what I think is wrong with the feminist movement today. People who think about this stuff deeply are too willing to engage in verbal gymnastics to avoid conflict with others who call themselves feminists and the mostly good willed people who don't think about these issues deeply end up without thoughtful guidance.
I hope we can all agree that performative wokeness is bad but avoiding that requires people who engage in serious thought about these issues like Reagan to stand up and be clear about the implications. Unfortunately, too many academics in this area have perfectly reasonable views when you talk to them in person but only speak up online or politically to support their side and stay quite when supposedly feminist causes actually reinforce gender norms. But that's part of a broader issue about academia and public expertise.
How wrong can you be. Slavery DID harm the majority of white people and only benefitted the slave owning class and their privileged lifestyle. After all they were the ones who used the phrases "white trash ".
And also, it’s true that many female supremacists will use such terms in a way that I would not agree with either. All of which supports being more careful and specific with language, rather than resorting to lazy use of “the patriarchy”
When it comes to areas where patriarchy harms men you won't find even men's rights activists or "the manosphere" approaching men's issue this way. They blame men's problems on feminism and "gynocracy". They frame it as a failure of patriarchy to maintain its power. They think if patriarchy had not conceded to feminism, their lives would be better.
Yah it was a bad term from the start. It's never been men vs women it's been people enforcing gender roles and it's usually most strongly enforced by members of the same gender.
Sure it may have looked like men letting women in because it was men at universities, buisnesses etc etc who formally choose not to hire women but if you looked more carefully you'd see they'd never have done that if their wives and mother's weren't telling them it was natural and appropriate.
Fuck just to see how dumb that theory is consider the fact that women traditionally raised the next generation. No gender norms women aren't part of enforcing persisted.
That's why all the serious people don't subscribe to this men oppress women framing and accept that women and men are both part of enforcing gender roles and just call that idea the patriarchy despite it not just being men. Unfortunately, they aren't willing to cut ties with the popular support from women who are less into theory and mostly just want to bitch about the stress that comes from male/female differences so they call it the patriarchy still to disguise the fact that they aren't actually agreeing.
It seems like you’re trying hard, scratching and clawing to salvage the ‘feminist’ moniker or rather bring it back into acceptable society. This is laudable but it might be too late and it too toxic to resurrect (kinda like the name adolf).
You should’ve also defined “gender equality”. At least in the west, there are no rights that women are lacking vs men. In fact the legal system, educational and corporations favour them. Unless by gender equality you were going for achieving equal representation in the construction industry, homelessness and front line military troops…
Also, it wasn’t clear at all what “suboptimal gender equilibrium” is. Who determines this? How many genders have to be equilibrated in the framework? Etc
Wait for my next piece! It was too much to do in one post. I agree women are obviously formally equal to men and have been for some time. I also don’t think women overall have a worse “deal” than men do (in our context). I think the relevance of feminist analysis or activism now is to attempting to increase the percentage of men and women that see members of the other sex as spiritual equals - rather than claiming that one sex is seen as less than the other overall. I don’t know but when I see dating discourse etc. I can’t help but conclude that issues remain, and many see the other sex as less than if not depraved, and feel we could all benefit from a society that has significantly less misandry and misogyny.
I forgot to add to my previous comment that at least Mary Harrington labels herself a radical feminist, which at least is slightly different and a spin on the un salvageable word.
I have more to say but I’ll wait for your next piece.
I think you might be thinking of “reactionary feminist” - “radical feminist” is a very old term and is opposed to “reformist feminist”, this is one of the axes which I’ll explain in my next piece. The type of feminism I subscribe to isn’t new, it’s just not in vogue, I’ll differentiate my views using the various axes which I’ll introduce and also compare to others, including Mary, in the next piece.
It’s unusual? I’m not sure why that matters - I’m writing about this because it seems that the definition is poorly understood, as evidenced by a series of blog posts referenced here.
I’m not sure what you consider to be concrete claims - but this early post of mine goes through some of what I think a positive version of feminism has accomplished and where it often goes wrong:
I don’t think I understand your point - that it’s a bigger distraction - a distraction from what?
The reason I continue to use the word feminism is that most of the theory and thought I am referencing and building upon was produced by other people who called themselves feminists (or who were subsequently called feminists by others). I don’t think feminism is at all opposed to humanism or liberalism, and if there were a gender neutral term for the cultural analysis of, and activism related to, gender norms, relations, etc I’d use it - but there isn’t one - the term “gender studies” carries even more baggage if anything than “feminism” does.
Agreed on the first point. It’d probably be much easier to generate a productive societal consensus around gender liberation than it would be to get a societal consensus behind the word “feminism”.
Just spitballing here, but… when I think about other liberal and progressive causes that I care about, I’ve found that the concept of equality both mesmerizes us but gets in the way of what I really care about, and what members of the groups in struggle care about. This became clearer to me after reflecting on the BLM moment: what troubled me the most was that there were millions of people who felt excluded from a sense of community with the larger society that they were inevitably a part of. The alienation was captured in the slogan “Black Lives Matter” which is a tacit double negation: stop acting as if our lives don’t matter. This is not, it seemed to me, a demand for equality so much as it was a demand for caring, community, and inclusion, and if you have those parts solved, the “equality” aspect becomes far less important. By contrast, it does no one much good if we somehow enforce equal bad treatment in a world where everyone feels alone and everyone hates everyone. Anyway, I started thinking about Black lives from the perspective of “what needs to happen so that everyone feels included, cared about, empowered, free, etc.” In short, the target should be ending alienation, not ending inequality. Nor is this an easy task. It’s unlikely to be an inexpensive one.
What if we rethought feminism from this perspective? Crazy, I know, but what if the focus became, let’s build a world in which women are happy? Maybe equality is just too—Second Wave, and distracts us from what we really want?
Yes, this is my position actually. It’s hard to articulate and the word equality might actually be more confusing than clarifying. What I’m trying to get at when I say that we want to “improve the equilibrium with respect to gender” is exactly what you allude to - that the real goal is that we want to improve people’s lives, relationships and ability to contribute effectively to society. But I do think this is more easily achieved if men and women see the other sex as equals, not in every attribute but in a human sense - and I see so much demonization of the other sex online that I feel we have not gotten to an optimal place on this. I also think legal equality and access to opportunity which first wave feminists fought for are required to achieve any good outcome with respect to this equilibrium, but that forcing equality of outcome will necessarily involve coercion and does not serve our actual goals.
I feel I have to tell you this: I'm working on a book, and one chapter in particular has really given me writer's block, and your post turned some kind of key in my head and the whole design of the chapter just fell into my lap. So thank you, and please keep writing!
Thank you for tackling a complicated topic. As someone who called himself a feminist, way before it became fashionable in urban India, I have since steered away from that term, for many of the reasons you articulate so well. Meanwhile I also lost most of my 'feminist' friends, colleagues and peers (both male and female) for committing the sin of inquiry- I foolishly presumed that being willing to engage in a rational discussion about something they believed strongly about would be welcomed.
My interest in gender relations, these days, has to do with the health of open and free societies. I will be writing about this on my Substack:
Feminism says the patriarchy harms men too but many men don't see it this way. Many men believe that it was the failure of patriarchy to remain strong and stave off feminism that is the cause of all their suffering.
>To me, participating in feminist analysis entails analyzing society with a view to identifying the ways in which we’re failing to achieve gender equality, articulating why that failure is a problem, and suggesting ways to change the status quo in the direction of greater gender equality.<
We need first to define what is meant by "gender equality." Do we mean equality of outcome, such that feminism becomes tantamount to gender communism? Because that is how most feminists seem to operate in practice, except with a heavy gynocentric bias. "Gender equality" seems to require that the so-called "gender pay gap" somehow be eliminated, that at least 50% of CEOs are women, etc., but not that 50% of sewage workers are women, or that women be subjected to the draft alongside men.
Men and women have different preferences and abilities. These differences are not small or narrow in scope--they are huge, and wide-ranging across every facet of life. This means that if left to their own devices, they will be equal in almost nothing. To achieve equality of outcome, you must therefore engage in DEI-style forcible social engineering. If this is not your definition of "gender equality," then you must answer:
1. What is it?
2. What is your limiting principle for when it's been achieved, or when we've at least gotten closer to it?
I am not sure if I have ever seen a single "feminist" answer these seriously. Whatever they may say in the abstract, in practice their ideology always seems to be a gynocentric spin on perpetual-revolution left-wing identity grievance politics. Just as the BLM activist is never satisfied and always demands that more be done to combat the unfalsifiable influence of "systemic racism," so it is with feminists and "paytreearkee."
>I continue to identify as a feminist<
Why? If your primary concern is truly gender equality, why not call yourself a gender equality advocate and just drop all the baggage? What compels you to cling to the "feminist" label--intellectual stubbornness? Pseudo-religious identification?
>That said, I do think feminism needs to do a better job of talking to men and addressing their issues. That belief was one of the reasons I started this blog, so how can I do better?<
I would suggest dropping the term "feminist." The inability to understand the conflict of interest that this term connotes demonstrates just how gynocentric your frame is. Let's say that there is a group of people called "white-inists" whose primary belief is that the world is unfair to white people, and that they must constantly advocate on behalf of white people in order to achieve what they call "racial equality." These people also claim that their work actually benefits all races because they are critiquing "toxic rigid racial stereotypes" or something like this.
If I am a black person, and these people come up to me and earnestly ask "we think that white-inists need to do a better job of talking to black people and addressing their issues, how can we do better?", how do you think I should respond to that? Do you think I should take this request seriously, or should I perhaps question the real motivations of these "white-inists?"
What individual feminists think gender equality looks like depends on beliefs along the various axes I’ll discuss in the next post, probably the most relevant of which is whether you’re a sex realist (as I am) or are a pure social constructionist (the position you’re criticizing).
To me, gender equality does not imply that men and women will end up behaving the exact same or achieving the exact same average results. First wave and second wave feminists achieved the goals of securing women equal liberties to men. Second wave and later feminists also developed theory, some useful and some less so, around how social expectations and internalized investment in gender norms can be constraining for individuals for whom they’re a poor fit. I think these were important advances that benefited society as a whole.
As for when equality has been achieved - obviously we have achieved formal equality, yet there seems to be a lot of gender strife, at least some of which is the result of sexist beliefs which disable men and women from interacting and partnering in a healthy manner. I see so much casual misandry and misogyny online, much of which is tied to dating frustrations etc. and I think we could find a better equilibrium around how we present how women view men and vice versa. I would like more men and women to see the other sex as, yes slightly different, but ultimately similar to them, and looking to find ways to productively partner with one another rather than promoting transactional approaches to relationships and demonizing our points of difference.
I think the language of optimal gender equilibrium is actually more useful than equality here since it brings to mind synergistic improvements to everyone rather than power trading. In this light, the idea is that there's a value to analysis which discusses how gender norms and mating market norms etc. are working for men and women in terms of fostering a healthy society, good relationships etc. and so it's unclear when it's complete - but rather would be more or less relevant depending on what is happening in the society - and right now it seems relevant as there appears to be a lot of gender strife and casual reinforcement of bad faith interpretations of the other gender's behavior.
You said that you’ve never seen a feminist answer these questions seriously - out of actual curiosity to understand where people who follow me get their concept of feminism from, who are the feminists you’ve been exposed to, or who have tried and failed to explain their movements end point etc. or who say men and women must be identical in all parts of the economy? I’m trying to get a sense if you and others are referencing people when you say these things or policies or the gender pop culture ideas that I reference in the piece…
As for using the term feminism - I’m not strictly opposed to finding another term, however the theory I build my own ideas in this area off of is mostly theory and writing from feminists. So it feels correct to identify that I’m adding to that intellectual line. And because there actually are many feminists, mostly from earlier periods, who basically hold my position. And no one else is using a new term etc. whereas women with diverse sets of beliefs continue to identify as feminist. And because many societies around the world remain true patriarchal societies and I think women like me should be also talking about feminism as it’s relevant to women living in those societies. But yeah, like I said I am not opposed to it, it’s just that there isn’t really another term to use which indicates that you’re participating in a particular genre of scholarship.
>As for when equality has been achieved - obviously we have achieved formal equality, yet there seems to be a lot of gender strife, at least some of which is the result of sexist beliefs which disable men and women from interacting and partnering in a healthy manner. I see so much casual misandry and misogyny online, much of which is tied to dating frustrations etc. and I think we could find a better equilibrium around how we present how women view men and vice versa. I would like more men and women to see the other sex as, yes slightly different, but ultimately similar to them, and looking to find ways to productively partner with one another rather than promoting transactional approaches to relationships and demonizing our points of difference.<
I'm totally on board with that, but it seems to me that this strays quite far beyond what feminism was originally about, and also beyond what it is still about for many people who call themselves feminists today. When you're at the point where you're having to put in so much effort to differentiate yourself, why not simply drop the term and all the baggage that it carries? Gender war framing is obviously counter-productive to the goal of getting men and women to stop seeing each other as enemies, and like it or not, saying "feminism" activates gender war framing. And with good reason! You're fighting against over a century of history there.
This is why I don't call myself a "men's rights activist" or anything else of the sort, even though I can recognize that some of the grievances of such people are legitimate.
>I’m trying to get a sense if you and others are referencing people when you say these things or policies or the gender pop culture ideas that I reference in the piece…<
I imagine most of my exposure has been to "gender pop culture ideas." But if that's the overwhelming majority of what the average person is exposed to, can you reasonably expect them to put all of that experience aside and just trust you that actually feminism isn't about that at all?
>As for using the term feminism - I’m not strictly opposed to finding another term, however the theory I build my own ideas in this area off of is mostly theory and writing from feminists.<
I just gave you one, "gender equality activist." It's kind of clunky, but you could probably play around with it and find a better-sounding variant, if you wanted to. The English language is very flexible.
>But yeah, like I said I am not opposed to it, it’s just that there isn’t really another term to use which indicates that you’re participating in a particular genre of scholarship.<
Who cares about "participating in a particular genre of scholarship?" This isn't a university, no one is going to hand you a diploma in feminism for including the term in your articles.
Thanks for the feedback on the term feminism, I take your points regarding its usefulness in conversations like this. It does activate culture war framing to many that hear it. I will just say though that I don’t feel I’m fighting against 100 years of sex war framing, I think early feminists were righteous and those who opposed them were anti gender equality in a very obvious way, and in a way that I think was negative for society as a whole. I do think people should put their limited experience with feminism aside and believe me, the person who has clearly studied this stuff and is summarizing the relevant info for you, when i explain what feminism has been and means as a general term. That doesn’t negate your arguments for not using the term in conversation etc. though, from a strategic point of view, but yeah, I think if I were you I’d believe me about what feminism is. Anyways, I don’t actually use the term that frequently in my articles for that reason, and your feedback may result in me doing so even less, but I do continue to personally identify with it for reasons explained above. Most importantly that I’m building off of people who were feminists and who saw their work as part of feminist scholarship.
If you must use the term feminist, you should at least give it some kind of modifier to distinguish the way in which you are using it. Mary Harrington's "reactionary feminist" is a good example of a modification that disarms most of the pre-conceptions people tend to have about feminism. But again, I think it would be better than this still to simply drop the word feminist entirely, or to otherwise specify that feminism is not the primary lens through which you are viewing any given topic.
This is why, despite considering myself a Christian and considering that my guiding worldview, I often write articles that do not use the word "Christian" or any sort of religious lens at all. I don't insert it unless it is particularly relevant, specifically because I want my writing to be accessible to everyone including non-Christians. It's counter-productive to get bogged down having to deal with people's numerous assumptions about Christianity if there are other, more widely shared points of reference that I can use instead.
Yeah, I agree with that, but if there were a bunch of people in your subculture who were always writing about “what does being a Christian mean?” And making guesses like… “I guess it means people who promote non-violence and family values” wouldn’t you feel motivated to write an article explaining … “well actually it’s about belief in Christ”?
I’m going to go over the axes that are relevant to disagreement between feminists, and to what gender equality means in practice in the next piece. But I describe my blog as having a sex-realist, pro-liberty, positive-sum feminist perspective which I’ll explain more in the piece.
Absolutely--if your article is about disagreements within feminism itself, well yes, of course you're going to use the word "feminist" a lot in that article. And it will be the same if I were to write an article justifying why I am Russian Orthodox and not any of the other varieties of Christian.
But when I write about anything other than Christianity itself, I generally reach for secular arguments first and religious justifications only as an afterthought, if at all. This is because anyone and everyone can recognize the former as a common point of reference, but the degree of people who share a common point of reference with me on the latter is quite limited.
While it is doubtful that legislation can bring equality to housework or child rearing, there is a larger arena that remains overlooked.
WHAT IF - there was a third world war and instead of sending all able bodied MEN to war, the WOMEN were conscripted as well?
eg: Israeli law subjects all male and female Israeli citizens and residents to a military draft. Israel is a parliamentary democracy, consisting of legislative, executive and judicial branches.
A second point I'd like to make is this: We (women & men) need to teach our children values at an earlier age - that men are not to treat women as objects and women are not to expected to grow up as princesses.
We live in a society and in an age where the likes of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West are idolized, where football players make millions and school teachers are underpaid, where political corruption is praised and honesty is dismissed as an unworthy trait.
I agree that our 'society' does a disservice to BOTH men & women - the change, however has to start when children are young and for now it will remain an unequal, unfair, mysandrist and misogynist mess!
"Israeli law subjects all male and female Israeli citizens to the draft ".Yeah right a law that's effectively meaningless and worthless as seen in the Gaza war where there's not a single female on the front line
Assuming there were no new grievous infractions against women, what would be a list of measurable/actionable demands society could make good on that we could put this to rest? Are the people you’re calling feminists even capable of coordinating this into an action? It seems very hard to have a conversation in good faith with feminists. Seems like they would prefer a permanent perch from which to lobby demands and complaints than get their way.
It kind of seems like you are getting distracted by the moniker “feminism” in the same way people thought Black Lives Matter was an organization that would improve the black experience and the way people think the Atlantic Council is really into finding lost cities lol.
"It's about reducing unjust prejudice and improving gender relations" So if this is not about fairness, then to what end, other than purely a question of power?
read my next post - but generally feminist arguments are justified by claims that they are positive sum. The most obvious one is that opening up career paths to women and reducing *unjust* prejudice against them increases the degree to which our society is meritocratic and is pro-progress. Several first wave feminists were arguing not that women were overall worse off than men, but that both men and women were worse off when women's liberty is restricted. Many of these arguments take it for granted that men and women will on average have different duties but that even within a role as homemaker, a woman who can participate politically and who is properly educated and encouraged to demonstrate human virtues of courage, rationality etc. will perform that role better. Many second wave feminists argued that rigid gender norms cause a lot of suffering for any men and women for whom they're a poor fit - anyone who's gender non-conforming basically - and that being invested in these norms makes healthy heterosexual relationships more difficult. Louise Perry et al argue that stricter norms around monogamy are better for women but also for men and society etc. I could go on and on....
> "Several first wave feminists were arguing not that women were overall worse off than men, but that both men and women were worse off when women's liberty is restricted."
Indeed. As a Canadian -- even if as something of a fair-weather friend ... 😉🙂 -- you probably know, or should know of a famous quip by Nellie McClung, one of the Famous Five band of suffragettes responsible for getting women the vote in the early 1900s:
👍🙂 Justly famous. I have one or more of her books, her "The Stream Runs Fast" in particular. Inherited it from my mother's mother, a passage from which, a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, that I'd read at my mother's "Celebration of Life":
"Stranger, pause and look; From the dust of ages; Lift this little book; Turn its battered pages; Read me, do not let me die; Search the fading letters, finding; Steadfast in the broken binding; All that once was I."
>"'Patriarchy' names a system in which men rule or have power over or oppress women, deriving benefit for doing so, at women's expense. Feminists believe that this system exists, and not as something minor or peripheral or as a hangover from an earlier age, but as central, woven into the fabric of social reality."
Yes, feminists believe in patriarchy. Calvinists believe in predestination. Capitalists believe in the Invisible Hand. Chauvinists believe a woman's place is in the home. Children believe in Santa Claus. QAnon believes in the Deep State. TRAs believe there's an active trans genocide.
And increasingly, because patriarchy just doesn't hit the same as it used to, feminists believe in RAPE CULTURE.
Feminists have long since lost the plot. Next to no one would deny that sexism exists, but it certainly isn't what it used to be—and EVEN THEN was hardly an organized system of oppressively obtaining benefit at women's expense.
You simply can't expect to be taken seriously while positing an unfalsifiable, untraceable, yet ubiquitous system of oppression that, conveniently, can be blamed for literally anything (these days, it's transfems in the ladies' room; yeah, that's how we're doing machismo these days, TERFs called it).
Men don't actually see much benefit from this patriarchal system of rape culture, but feminists will reply that this is precisely the problem: patriarchy hurts everybody! Well, that's a far cry from "a system in which men rule or have power over or oppress women, deriving benefit for doing so, at women's expense."
The patriarchy, like the Illuminati, isn't just an external locus of control but one that cannot even be shown to exist—a sign of disordered if not delusional thinking that literally strips women (as individuals and as a group) of any significant agency or accountability. While, of course, demonizing men as complicit in the systemic exploitative oppression of women. That black-and-white, zero-sum-game approach to reality is also indicative of a personality disorder: whatever the problem is, it's guaranteed to be somebody else deliberately, sadistically screwing over the designated perpetual victim.
It's just shameless blame-shifting, projection, and paranoia at this point.
“activists who are focused on promoting societal change in order to benefit women but who acknowledge that women aren’t treated unfairly could still be called feminists:”
I took Caplan's point not to be a search for an airtight philosophical definition of feminism, but a better characterization of the difference in attitude between those who do and do not self-identify as feminists. The vast majority of people in western society agree broadly with the more motte-like definition of feminism, including those who do not self-identify as feminist. So whatever the replacement ought to be, it isn't just “people shouldn’t be mistreated because of their gender.” This idea has won, but feminism marches on.
Can't comment on your Zero-Sum Beauty Work, so will ask here: Regan, what do you think about attractive women who put a lot of time, money and energy into their fitness and beauty upkeep telling their partners, be they boyfriends or husbands that looking this good is a full time job and that if they (the male partners) want them to keep looking this good, they are going to have to pay for it. These women say, "if you want me to get an outside job and contribute financially to the household/relationship I can. Just know that I will have to neglect all the things that make you attracted to me. " ???
The "equilibrium of gender relations" is artful language because it side steps "equality" and adds relation which is key.
I'm not sure I can ever do anything that equals pregnancy. As long as pregnancy is part of the female experience, legal and economic expectations cannot be practically equivalent. (If the set of female people is a superset of pregnant and potentially pregnant people, and the set of male people is disjoint from pregnant and potentially pregnant people, the set of legal and economic rights associated with pregnant people is exclusively applicable to females. Unless you dissociate gender and pregnancy or deny any specific rights associated to child rearing there will always be female exclusive rights/duties/responsibilities. So from a set theory perspective, the set of applicable rights is never "equal".) Obviously, I know I'm the only one that thinks about set theory when they hear "equal rights", but the equilibrium language is much better.
The relational aspect is super interesting because it should address man -> man, woman -> woman, man-> woman, woman -> man. There is a focus on how men treat women, but the other three are so rich as well in both a descriptive and prescriptive mode. Arguably feminism should have something to say about at least 3 of the 4.
Thanks, Paul! Yes, I think that it’s justified for early feminists to have focused on male > female relations but agree that the other categories are also potentially rich areas, especially worth exploring now. In addition to male > female relations and the categories you list, I think second wave and later feminism also focused on women’s relationship to themselves, and recognizing internalized investment in potentially restrictive gender norms. And to some degree to how men relate to themselves as individuals.
It would be cool to have a chart to track relational types across ideological modes. Why? Better pinpoint some of the differences in emphasis and ideology. For example from the traditionalist perspective I would describe male -> male ideal as communal task oriented camaraderie (barn raisings, "the hunt", military). This is one of the key problems from a feminist perspective as the boys club can be exclusive, but if you need to raise a barn it's really useful. Traditional male -> female is equally messy as the ideal is something along the lines of chivalry, protect and provide. That makes sense in a low physical and economic security culture, but feels pretty condescending in the high security context of 2024 West.
Early in my career, I was in a conflict resolution meeting with a female colleague and our boss. She didn't like how I spoke to her, and my response was I'm treating you just like I treat one of my brothers (direct, passionate, problem oriented). My boss laughed and said that was exactly how I treated him; I wasn't treating her differently on account of her sex. Lesson learned was that male -> female is in fact different from male -> male. (One plausible response is that traditional male -> male relations are toxic and feminism is fundamentally about regulating male behavior with everyone.) Much more to say on these dimensions.
Thanks Paul, good observations. As for your example with your colleague-I see the fact that she assumed your communication style had to do with her gender to be a potential example of the overreach of gender theorizing in some cases - like, she didn’t consider that maybe you and her just have different communication preferences as individuals, instead assuming it was an expression of sexism. Understanding how gender impacts communication and interaction in general is interesting, but I also want to remind people that we’re all pretty different anyways and the same sorts of conflict can arise in different gendered communications. Anyways, will write more on this soon.
Just the potential of an interaction being perceived as being gendered leads to change of behavior. This results in men being less guarded with other men and trusted women, which in itself is gendered behavior.
The biggest problem with the term patriarchy is that it means something totally different in academic contexts like women's studies -- they take it to mean something like the societal forces which enforce traditional gender roles. I'll often have the experience of reading a paper in those areas whose upshot is something like: men are being made worse off by stereotypes which regard them as failures if they adopt a more nuturing role or aren't the breadwinner but -- despite the fact they may be describing a harm inflicted on men in large part by women -- they describe it as a harm imposed by the patriarchy.
I believe this bears on those flaws you mentioned that many people who identify as feminists share. The problem is that academic feminism has decided that rather than correcting the popular understanding when it amounts to an attempt by women to complain about men and demand special treatment they are going to choose words and presentations that are easily misconstrued as supporting the women are aggrevied narrative rather than the real content which is a claim about the harms of pressuring people to comply with traditional gender roles.
Yes, it might be that women are in practice supporting the value that men must be breadwinners, and so are harming men, but it’s also correct (imo) to describe that as a patriarchal value. It comes out of a society structured around males being leaders, having liberty and therefore being responsible for protecting and providing (all of which has some basis in sex differences of course) - which is a patriarchal society. And also men enforce this stuff on one another as much as women do (imo). It’s similar to how women complain about beauty standards. Like yes, men care a lot about how women look, and coming from a history where women were not allowed to participate economically we have inherited a culture that encourages women to place far too much value on how they look. But regardless of where it comes from, women are the ones enforcing this on themselves in large part, men do not care if you have a perfect manicure or are super thin etc. but it’s also not every woman’s “fault” if she struggles with this because it’s really pervasive in our society. Anyways, I’m rambling, thanks for the comments!
Rhetorically, the *most* common way I see "patriarchy" used in modern discourse is to subtly shift the blame on to men for any sort of gender-related problem. If a woman body shames a man, or shames him for opening up emotionally, and men complain, women will say "see, patriarchy hurts men too". Greater male homelessness and male workplace deaths are also declared products of the patriarchy.
As a general trend, the contemporary female discourse seems to believe in personal responsibility -- but for men only. If women fall behind in some area, that's a problem society needs to address. Fire up the government programs. If men fall behind in some area, they either terminally suck ("men are trash"), or they need to try harder. If a man makes a sexist joke about a woman, fire up the cancellation machine. If a woman makes a sexist joke about a man, that is understandable due to overarching societal forces, and we can't blame her as an individual. I'm hard-pressed to think of a single area where the modern prestige discourse believes that women need to take responsibility, or a single area where men are thought to be victims of forces beyond their control.
We know that women are always the victim, because look -- there are stories about women being victims everywhere! Hence women get carte blanche to insult men because hey, they're the victims, everyone knows it! If a man complains about gender-based disparities in education or sentencing -- he's not allowed to play that victim card, because we live in a patriarchy, so we don't put it up on the "which gender is more victimized" scoreboard. Women retain their blank check to insult and discriminate against men.
It's incredibly common for women to make negative generalizations about men, and this is seen as essential in warning other women about how dangerous we are. On the other hand, if men generalize negatively about women, women will stop him right there without considering whether the generalization is true. But over in a different discussion, women will shame men for treating women in a certain way, saying "you idiot, women don't like it when you _", basically making generalizations about women themselves (often inaccurate generalizations, essentially assuming that all women share *that* particular woman's preferences). Somehow these philosophical/moral "you can't generalize like that" objections only come in to play when it's a *man* doing the generalizing.
Similarly -- If a study is published showing that women outperform men, that's nifty and progressive. If the study shows that men outperform women, we can assume that the authors are creepy sexists, scrutinize their research thoroughly, and if it has any weaknesses, our initial diagnosis of "creepy sexism" can then be confirmed. So there's a big bias in the prestige outlets towards research that praises women. This constitutes further evidence that men only ever fall behind because they terminally suck.
Anyway, I think the gender roles stuff is a red herring. Patriarchy is a confused conceptual bundle. Obviously there's some amount of gendered specialization of labor -- women give birth and nurse children. And the male breadwinner doesn't logically imply a society where men rule. Consider an imaginary society with a male-breadwinner norm where only women are allowed to vote, for example. At this point I think we should move past discussion of gender roles and focus directly on welfare. What degree of gender roles make people happy? Almost every profession has some level of gender skew, and if I recall correctly the level of professional skew is actually stronger in societies that are more gender egalitarian according to other measures. Furthermore, women's happiness has trended downwards in recent decades as gender roles have weakened. So the picture seems complex there.
I don't have strong views on gender roles. I just want feminists to pick a consistent moral position and apply discourse standards equally across sexes. As an example, last time I browsed Craigslist looking for a room to rent, there were a ridiculous amount of ads specifying that the tenant should be female. This appears to be a clear case of gender-based discrimination, and it could easily be a result of negative stereotypes on social media (e.g. consider the famous man vs bear thought experiment). It's also easy to see how this could lead to the much higher rate of homelessness among men. A woman might respond "well it's just factually the case that men are more violent". Now imagine someone making the same argument for profiling tenants based on race! And if I was to say that "it's just factually the case that women are less logical, that's why there are fewer women engineers" -- now I'm a creepy sexist. At this point, I don't even care that much about the question of us living in a "free speech" society where it's acceptable to make negative generalizations, vs a "hugbox" society where those generalizations *aren't* acceptable. I just want to see a consistent standard applied everywhere.
Sorry this turned into a bit of a rant.
Thanks for your comment ! I don’t have time to reply properly but i did write something on the general topic of gender roles and welfare, might be relevant to themes that you mention near the end - let me know what you think if you have time to read:
https://www.allcatsarefemale.com/p/gender-roles-and-gender-trouble?r=ipqw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Seems to me that the ultimate enforcement of any masculine norm is less by men than by women in terms of who they will date and marry. That’s a bit of an overstatement, certainly guys care about being seen as a man among men, but at the end of the day men can let go of the approval of other men more easily than they can the sexual approval of women. This is where I think the notion of patriarchal culture gets hopelessly muddled with biology and differences in attraction between men and women which may or may not be malleable.
To be clear, I totally agree with the project of pushing back on the pressure to comply with traditional gender roles.
However, I think using terms like patriarchy to describe this falls somewhere between a delibrate attempt to confuse people and a neglegent failure to clarify what one really means while taking advantage of the rhetorical benefit (eg to avoid conflict with the people who don't have any interest in avoiding imposing those harms on men).
Yeah I think it’s mostly negligent failure to communicate what is meant, but I will say in feminists defense that there is also a motivated contingent that has intentionally misrepresented what feminists are saying. So I think there are two sides to this confusion. Generally, feminists will say that a patriarchal society is more harmful to women than it is to men, but that it’s also harmful to men. They will say that men are victims of the outcomes of a society which is invested in patriarchal values, as are women, and that both men and women contribute to maintaining those values. But I think that at this stage we’ve addressed the harms to women to a larger degree, and women have more theory to turn to when they notice they’re dealing with internalized issues like overly focusing on appearance etc while men do not have the same resources available. But all that said, I try to avoid the term at all given the confusion and the very broad ways in which it is used by others.
Yes, though I'm a bit less forgiving to the academics who study this area who then tweet and get involved in mainstream discussion while employing terms like patriarchy without explaining it doesn't mean what you think it does -- I am sure some of them are aware at some level they are trading on the different meanings that words like patriarchy have in informal and academic contexts.
Sure, it's a numerically very small percent but I think they play an outsized role in making sure that the movement and liberal attitudes more generally don't take concern about how men are impacted seriously -- because most self-identified feminists are good people who naturally are inclined to care about unfair treatment in all cases. I think it's much the way some academics define racism to be privlege plus prejudice to define away the possibility of ever having to deal with concerns about reverse racism.
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That's why I appreciate people like you so much. I think it's really important for women to get up and make clear that being concerned with the ways women are harmed by gender roles should compliment concern for the same regarding men. Unfortunately, I feel that too many people who believe this are cowed by a few people claiming to speak with academic authority but not accurately conveying what the literature really says.
Or I'm just an academic who sees academia as being more important than it really is ;-).
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P.S. Also the question of who has it worse is a bit of a red-hearing. Like most social issues it's probably more important to ask what can we do that provides the most benefit per unit effort and I think we've dealt with the low hanging fruit for women more than for men.
Agree with everything here - thanks!
And yes to your final point, I think feminists need to actively support a focus on improving men’s emotional and spiritual health (not too sound too woo). And not just by getting more men in therapy. But what I’m thinking about now is whether that needs to be led by men, and I think it likely does. I think that feminist theory can be a useful jumping off point, but as it’s nearly all from the female perspective will almost surely fall short. The problem is that men’s rights is associated with resentful misogynists, and how true that is of people sympathetic to the movement in general I don’t know, but what they have to realize is that they’ll have to convince women to get mainstream. One of the things I say in the piece is that it’s a problem that feminists have stopped trying to convince men of their views - early feminists were talking to men as well as women, but especially to men. Now feminists write for other feminists, and that needs to change. But the men’s rights guys should realize that women got feminism off the ground, yes by protesting etc, but also by getting men on their side by making strong arguments that appealed to their interests.
I think it's very hard for men to create such a movement until women lead the way here -- or at least open up the space. That's because unfortunately the way much of the discourse about gender occurs interacts with traditional gender norms about how men should behave to make it virtually impossible to occupy that space.
As you correctly point out it can't work as long as the movement is associated with angry resentful men or with men who are all seen as losers or low status. But any movement lead by men that is protesting about injustices or unfairness they experience is going to be virtually impossible to avoid being seen that way and from attracting those individuals.
The problem is that men generally benefit from advertising how confident, powerful and successful they are (to what degree this might be malleable isn't important only that it's true now) so even if you're a man who completely agrees that some way men are being treated is deeply unjust and unfair your incentives aren't to join some kind of protest but to shrug and basically send the message "I'm so confident/powerful that I'm not bothered by the fact that men are being screwed in this way." This makes it really hard for such protests or movement to not primarily draw men who are going to be seen as bitter resentful losers. And yes I think the way some feminist activism gets realized reinforces these ideas about appropriate male behavior being to shut up and help the poor women not complain about your own situation.
Add to that the problem that male gender norms themselves say that you aren't supposed to advertise weakness like this and you get pressure coming from both sides.
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I think it's much easier for it to grow out of women working to dismantle gender barriers and men participating in that and then branching out to tackle similar problems that disadvantage men. Eventually it may be lead by men but I think that kind of origin makes it easier to avoid the vibe of sour grapes.
The attempt to help other men do better in school is also a good place to help get it off the ground but I think it's hard to enlarge the scope there.
I disagree that women have to lead the way here, as I think that part of what men need are examples from other men who lead happy, fulfilling lives that aren’t dependent on confidence, power, and success, and women cannot provide that. Maybe I am wrong about this, but power, confidence and success I think are mostly sought after by men as instrumental goods, and if men believe (accurately) that they can obtain the things that they want without them, then I think that men would not feel the same need to try to live up to traditional gender roles and stereotypes.
Only (white)males can be losers or low status. A basic law of feminism.
"That's why I appreciate people like you so much. I think it's really important for women to get up and make clear that being concerned with the ways women are harmed by gender roles should compliment concern for the same regarding men."
--- But too many men don't see it this way. If you look at MRAs and the Manosphere, they do not believe that patriarchy has harmed them, rather that Feminism and "the gynocracy" has. They believe that if patriarchy had remained strong and not conceded to Feminism, they wouldn't be facing all the problems they are now.
And to some degree they may be correct. I mean arguably the average white person would have been better off in a world that still accepted the enslavement of blacks. Humans prefer to be at the top of status hierarchies not at the bottom so eliminating social norms that grant you a privleged position can make you worse off. But on net society as a whole is better off because we removed rules that kept women and minorities limited to inferior positions (and since men in the old days used to thank God they'd been born a man I think it's clear it was inferior).
And I wouldn't be surprised if lots of men weren't particularly concerned/harmed by enforced macho gender norms (assuming you using patriarchy in that way...in the common sense meaning almost no one in the west today is harmed by it). But at the same time those pressures do harm some men and offer very little benefit so there is something to be gained by eliminating them.
But I think the most important reason for doing this is that I think a big source of the fight over feminism and etc is the sense people get that it's not really about any universal ideal of equal treatment since those cases where those principles would give men a benefit suddenly seem to have exceptions.
I think such a movement would -- if taken seriously -- do alot to fix the abuse of feminism to just gain a leg up (or perception thereof) and make men feel like their welfare is given equal consideration.
"And to some degree they may be correct. I mean arguably the average white person would have been better off in a world that still accepted the enslavement of blacks. Humans prefer to be at the top of status hierarchies not at the bottom so eliminating social norms that grant you a privleged position can make you worse off."
--- But their argument is that Patriarchy made everybody - men, women and children, better off.
"But I think the most important reason for doing this is that I think a big source of the fight over feminism and etc is the sense people get that it's not really about any universal ideal of equal treatment since those cases where those principles would give men a benefit suddenly seem to have exceptions."
--- Could you explain further what you mean by "those principles would give men a benefit suddenly seem to have exceptions." ?
"I think such a movement would -- if taken seriously -- do alot to fix the abuse of feminism"
--- What do you mean by the abuse of feminism?
"to just gain a leg up (or perception thereof) and make men feel like their welfare is given equal consideration."
--- How is men's welfare neglected more than anyone else's? What particular needs do men need met that women also don't? The USA is not known for having a robust social safety net for its populace. Men, women and children are suffering here due to a lack of this, but what problems are men facing specifically that other Americans are not?
The sexual revolution brought about by the contraceptive pill and later on legalised abortion which were welcomed by the majority of women of the western world had far more effect on gender relations than any feminist struggle for equal rights. With the widespread availability of the abortion pill adding to the transactional sexual behaviour that's the foundation of the interaction between the sexes in the 21st century
The Pill has always been used mostly by married women to space children or by women in long-term relationships. Women and men who are just dating but not in committed relationships use condoms as their contraceptive of choice.
If the patriarchy harms men, we need a story about how and why. Nobody ever claimed that slavery and Jim Crow also harmed white people, and that this is part of why ending slavery and institutionalized racism was so important. Likewise, Musk and Bezos aren't being hurt by capitalism. An exploitative system of oppression that can't even manage not to harm its own beneficiaries is an odd duck indeed...
The problem here is that the term patriarchy is often defined in areas like women's studies or feminist philosophy to mean enforced traditional gender rolls. And it's easy to see a way that can harm men (eg different treatment in the draft).
Using the term that way is pretty deceptive and objectionable. I'm pretty sure it came about out of people pointing out that it wasn't only women who might be hurt by gender norms but weren't willing to critisize others who called themselves feminists.
And that's exactly what I think is wrong with the feminist movement today. People who think about this stuff deeply are too willing to engage in verbal gymnastics to avoid conflict with others who call themselves feminists and the mostly good willed people who don't think about these issues deeply end up without thoughtful guidance.
I hope we can all agree that performative wokeness is bad but avoiding that requires people who engage in serious thought about these issues like Reagan to stand up and be clear about the implications. Unfortunately, too many academics in this area have perfectly reasonable views when you talk to them in person but only speak up online or politically to support their side and stay quite when supposedly feminist causes actually reinforce gender norms. But that's part of a broader issue about academia and public expertise.
" Nobody ever claimed that slavery and Jim Crow also harmed white people"
Yes they have. From everything from lack of employment to forbidden relationships, slavey and Jim Crow harmed white people too.
How wrong can you be. Slavery DID harm the majority of white people and only benefitted the slave owning class and their privileged lifestyle. After all they were the ones who used the phrases "white trash ".
And also, it’s true that many female supremacists will use such terms in a way that I would not agree with either. All of which supports being more careful and specific with language, rather than resorting to lazy use of “the patriarchy”
When it comes to areas where patriarchy harms men you won't find even men's rights activists or "the manosphere" approaching men's issue this way. They blame men's problems on feminism and "gynocracy". They frame it as a failure of patriarchy to maintain its power. They think if patriarchy had not conceded to feminism, their lives would be better.
The winning move is to realize that if there ever was a patriarchy, it hasn't existed for quite some time now. Women were never powerless.
Yah it was a bad term from the start. It's never been men vs women it's been people enforcing gender roles and it's usually most strongly enforced by members of the same gender.
Sure it may have looked like men letting women in because it was men at universities, buisnesses etc etc who formally choose not to hire women but if you looked more carefully you'd see they'd never have done that if their wives and mother's weren't telling them it was natural and appropriate.
Fuck just to see how dumb that theory is consider the fact that women traditionally raised the next generation. No gender norms women aren't part of enforcing persisted.
That's why all the serious people don't subscribe to this men oppress women framing and accept that women and men are both part of enforcing gender roles and just call that idea the patriarchy despite it not just being men. Unfortunately, they aren't willing to cut ties with the popular support from women who are less into theory and mostly just want to bitch about the stress that comes from male/female differences so they call it the patriarchy still to disguise the fact that they aren't actually agreeing.
Christian-coded Capitalism is a fine name for it, no?
Get wise to the dark side of feminism in my podcast her:
https://soberchristiangentlemanpodcast.substack.com/p/s1-scgp-feminism-deception-rebroadcast
It seems like you’re trying hard, scratching and clawing to salvage the ‘feminist’ moniker or rather bring it back into acceptable society. This is laudable but it might be too late and it too toxic to resurrect (kinda like the name adolf).
You should’ve also defined “gender equality”. At least in the west, there are no rights that women are lacking vs men. In fact the legal system, educational and corporations favour them. Unless by gender equality you were going for achieving equal representation in the construction industry, homelessness and front line military troops…
Also, it wasn’t clear at all what “suboptimal gender equilibrium” is. Who determines this? How many genders have to be equilibrated in the framework? Etc
Wait for my next piece! It was too much to do in one post. I agree women are obviously formally equal to men and have been for some time. I also don’t think women overall have a worse “deal” than men do (in our context). I think the relevance of feminist analysis or activism now is to attempting to increase the percentage of men and women that see members of the other sex as spiritual equals - rather than claiming that one sex is seen as less than the other overall. I don’t know but when I see dating discourse etc. I can’t help but conclude that issues remain, and many see the other sex as less than if not depraved, and feel we could all benefit from a society that has significantly less misandry and misogyny.
I forgot to add to my previous comment that at least Mary Harrington labels herself a radical feminist, which at least is slightly different and a spin on the un salvageable word.
I have more to say but I’ll wait for your next piece.
I think you might be thinking of “reactionary feminist” - “radical feminist” is a very old term and is opposed to “reformist feminist”, this is one of the axes which I’ll explain in my next piece. The type of feminism I subscribe to isn’t new, it’s just not in vogue, I’ll differentiate my views using the various axes which I’ll introduce and also compare to others, including Mary, in the next piece.
Yes my bad reactionary. That was a slip.
Mary Harrington believes that there are 3rd rate men but not 3rd rate women
It’s unusual? I’m not sure why that matters - I’m writing about this because it seems that the definition is poorly understood, as evidenced by a series of blog posts referenced here.
I’m not sure what you consider to be concrete claims - but this early post of mine goes through some of what I think a positive version of feminism has accomplished and where it often goes wrong:
https://www.allcatsarefemale.com/p/gender-roles-and-gender-trouble?r=ipqw&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I don’t think I understand your point - that it’s a bigger distraction - a distraction from what?
The reason I continue to use the word feminism is that most of the theory and thought I am referencing and building upon was produced by other people who called themselves feminists (or who were subsequently called feminists by others). I don’t think feminism is at all opposed to humanism or liberalism, and if there were a gender neutral term for the cultural analysis of, and activism related to, gender norms, relations, etc I’d use it - but there isn’t one - the term “gender studies” carries even more baggage if anything than “feminism” does.
Agreed on the first point. It’d probably be much easier to generate a productive societal consensus around gender liberation than it would be to get a societal consensus behind the word “feminism”.
Just spitballing here, but… when I think about other liberal and progressive causes that I care about, I’ve found that the concept of equality both mesmerizes us but gets in the way of what I really care about, and what members of the groups in struggle care about. This became clearer to me after reflecting on the BLM moment: what troubled me the most was that there were millions of people who felt excluded from a sense of community with the larger society that they were inevitably a part of. The alienation was captured in the slogan “Black Lives Matter” which is a tacit double negation: stop acting as if our lives don’t matter. This is not, it seemed to me, a demand for equality so much as it was a demand for caring, community, and inclusion, and if you have those parts solved, the “equality” aspect becomes far less important. By contrast, it does no one much good if we somehow enforce equal bad treatment in a world where everyone feels alone and everyone hates everyone. Anyway, I started thinking about Black lives from the perspective of “what needs to happen so that everyone feels included, cared about, empowered, free, etc.” In short, the target should be ending alienation, not ending inequality. Nor is this an easy task. It’s unlikely to be an inexpensive one.
What if we rethought feminism from this perspective? Crazy, I know, but what if the focus became, let’s build a world in which women are happy? Maybe equality is just too—Second Wave, and distracts us from what we really want?
Yes, this is my position actually. It’s hard to articulate and the word equality might actually be more confusing than clarifying. What I’m trying to get at when I say that we want to “improve the equilibrium with respect to gender” is exactly what you allude to - that the real goal is that we want to improve people’s lives, relationships and ability to contribute effectively to society. But I do think this is more easily achieved if men and women see the other sex as equals, not in every attribute but in a human sense - and I see so much demonization of the other sex online that I feel we have not gotten to an optimal place on this. I also think legal equality and access to opportunity which first wave feminists fought for are required to achieve any good outcome with respect to this equilibrium, but that forcing equality of outcome will necessarily involve coercion and does not serve our actual goals.
I feel I have to tell you this: I'm working on a book, and one chapter in particular has really given me writer's block, and your post turned some kind of key in my head and the whole design of the chapter just fell into my lap. So thank you, and please keep writing!
Aw that’s excellent! Thanks for letting me know and good luck with your writing!
Anyone that brings the anti white racist criminal organisation called black lives matter into the conversation deserves to be flushed down the drain
Thank you for tackling a complicated topic. As someone who called himself a feminist, way before it became fashionable in urban India, I have since steered away from that term, for many of the reasons you articulate so well. Meanwhile I also lost most of my 'feminist' friends, colleagues and peers (both male and female) for committing the sin of inquiry- I foolishly presumed that being willing to engage in a rational discussion about something they believed strongly about would be welcomed.
My interest in gender relations, these days, has to do with the health of open and free societies. I will be writing about this on my Substack:
https://villageidiotstudio.substack.com/p/the-global-conspiracy-against-thinking
Thanks very much! I will check out your piece :)
“That said, I do think feminism needs to do a better job of talking to men and addressing their issues.”
Richard Reeves seems like a paradigmatic model feminist for this goal.
Feminism says the patriarchy harms men too but many men don't see it this way. Many men believe that it was the failure of patriarchy to remain strong and stave off feminism that is the cause of all their suffering.
>To me, participating in feminist analysis entails analyzing society with a view to identifying the ways in which we’re failing to achieve gender equality, articulating why that failure is a problem, and suggesting ways to change the status quo in the direction of greater gender equality.<
We need first to define what is meant by "gender equality." Do we mean equality of outcome, such that feminism becomes tantamount to gender communism? Because that is how most feminists seem to operate in practice, except with a heavy gynocentric bias. "Gender equality" seems to require that the so-called "gender pay gap" somehow be eliminated, that at least 50% of CEOs are women, etc., but not that 50% of sewage workers are women, or that women be subjected to the draft alongside men.
Men and women have different preferences and abilities. These differences are not small or narrow in scope--they are huge, and wide-ranging across every facet of life. This means that if left to their own devices, they will be equal in almost nothing. To achieve equality of outcome, you must therefore engage in DEI-style forcible social engineering. If this is not your definition of "gender equality," then you must answer:
1. What is it?
2. What is your limiting principle for when it's been achieved, or when we've at least gotten closer to it?
I am not sure if I have ever seen a single "feminist" answer these seriously. Whatever they may say in the abstract, in practice their ideology always seems to be a gynocentric spin on perpetual-revolution left-wing identity grievance politics. Just as the BLM activist is never satisfied and always demands that more be done to combat the unfalsifiable influence of "systemic racism," so it is with feminists and "paytreearkee."
>I continue to identify as a feminist<
Why? If your primary concern is truly gender equality, why not call yourself a gender equality advocate and just drop all the baggage? What compels you to cling to the "feminist" label--intellectual stubbornness? Pseudo-religious identification?
>That said, I do think feminism needs to do a better job of talking to men and addressing their issues. That belief was one of the reasons I started this blog, so how can I do better?<
I would suggest dropping the term "feminist." The inability to understand the conflict of interest that this term connotes demonstrates just how gynocentric your frame is. Let's say that there is a group of people called "white-inists" whose primary belief is that the world is unfair to white people, and that they must constantly advocate on behalf of white people in order to achieve what they call "racial equality." These people also claim that their work actually benefits all races because they are critiquing "toxic rigid racial stereotypes" or something like this.
If I am a black person, and these people come up to me and earnestly ask "we think that white-inists need to do a better job of talking to black people and addressing their issues, how can we do better?", how do you think I should respond to that? Do you think I should take this request seriously, or should I perhaps question the real motivations of these "white-inists?"
What individual feminists think gender equality looks like depends on beliefs along the various axes I’ll discuss in the next post, probably the most relevant of which is whether you’re a sex realist (as I am) or are a pure social constructionist (the position you’re criticizing).
To me, gender equality does not imply that men and women will end up behaving the exact same or achieving the exact same average results. First wave and second wave feminists achieved the goals of securing women equal liberties to men. Second wave and later feminists also developed theory, some useful and some less so, around how social expectations and internalized investment in gender norms can be constraining for individuals for whom they’re a poor fit. I think these were important advances that benefited society as a whole.
As for when equality has been achieved - obviously we have achieved formal equality, yet there seems to be a lot of gender strife, at least some of which is the result of sexist beliefs which disable men and women from interacting and partnering in a healthy manner. I see so much casual misandry and misogyny online, much of which is tied to dating frustrations etc. and I think we could find a better equilibrium around how we present how women view men and vice versa. I would like more men and women to see the other sex as, yes slightly different, but ultimately similar to them, and looking to find ways to productively partner with one another rather than promoting transactional approaches to relationships and demonizing our points of difference.
I think the language of optimal gender equilibrium is actually more useful than equality here since it brings to mind synergistic improvements to everyone rather than power trading. In this light, the idea is that there's a value to analysis which discusses how gender norms and mating market norms etc. are working for men and women in terms of fostering a healthy society, good relationships etc. and so it's unclear when it's complete - but rather would be more or less relevant depending on what is happening in the society - and right now it seems relevant as there appears to be a lot of gender strife and casual reinforcement of bad faith interpretations of the other gender's behavior.
You said that you’ve never seen a feminist answer these questions seriously - out of actual curiosity to understand where people who follow me get their concept of feminism from, who are the feminists you’ve been exposed to, or who have tried and failed to explain their movements end point etc. or who say men and women must be identical in all parts of the economy? I’m trying to get a sense if you and others are referencing people when you say these things or policies or the gender pop culture ideas that I reference in the piece…
As for using the term feminism - I’m not strictly opposed to finding another term, however the theory I build my own ideas in this area off of is mostly theory and writing from feminists. So it feels correct to identify that I’m adding to that intellectual line. And because there actually are many feminists, mostly from earlier periods, who basically hold my position. And no one else is using a new term etc. whereas women with diverse sets of beliefs continue to identify as feminist. And because many societies around the world remain true patriarchal societies and I think women like me should be also talking about feminism as it’s relevant to women living in those societies. But yeah, like I said I am not opposed to it, it’s just that there isn’t really another term to use which indicates that you’re participating in a particular genre of scholarship.
>As for when equality has been achieved - obviously we have achieved formal equality, yet there seems to be a lot of gender strife, at least some of which is the result of sexist beliefs which disable men and women from interacting and partnering in a healthy manner. I see so much casual misandry and misogyny online, much of which is tied to dating frustrations etc. and I think we could find a better equilibrium around how we present how women view men and vice versa. I would like more men and women to see the other sex as, yes slightly different, but ultimately similar to them, and looking to find ways to productively partner with one another rather than promoting transactional approaches to relationships and demonizing our points of difference.<
I'm totally on board with that, but it seems to me that this strays quite far beyond what feminism was originally about, and also beyond what it is still about for many people who call themselves feminists today. When you're at the point where you're having to put in so much effort to differentiate yourself, why not simply drop the term and all the baggage that it carries? Gender war framing is obviously counter-productive to the goal of getting men and women to stop seeing each other as enemies, and like it or not, saying "feminism" activates gender war framing. And with good reason! You're fighting against over a century of history there.
This is why I don't call myself a "men's rights activist" or anything else of the sort, even though I can recognize that some of the grievances of such people are legitimate.
>I’m trying to get a sense if you and others are referencing people when you say these things or policies or the gender pop culture ideas that I reference in the piece…<
I imagine most of my exposure has been to "gender pop culture ideas." But if that's the overwhelming majority of what the average person is exposed to, can you reasonably expect them to put all of that experience aside and just trust you that actually feminism isn't about that at all?
>As for using the term feminism - I’m not strictly opposed to finding another term, however the theory I build my own ideas in this area off of is mostly theory and writing from feminists.<
I just gave you one, "gender equality activist." It's kind of clunky, but you could probably play around with it and find a better-sounding variant, if you wanted to. The English language is very flexible.
>But yeah, like I said I am not opposed to it, it’s just that there isn’t really another term to use which indicates that you’re participating in a particular genre of scholarship.<
Who cares about "participating in a particular genre of scholarship?" This isn't a university, no one is going to hand you a diploma in feminism for including the term in your articles.
Thanks for the feedback on the term feminism, I take your points regarding its usefulness in conversations like this. It does activate culture war framing to many that hear it. I will just say though that I don’t feel I’m fighting against 100 years of sex war framing, I think early feminists were righteous and those who opposed them were anti gender equality in a very obvious way, and in a way that I think was negative for society as a whole. I do think people should put their limited experience with feminism aside and believe me, the person who has clearly studied this stuff and is summarizing the relevant info for you, when i explain what feminism has been and means as a general term. That doesn’t negate your arguments for not using the term in conversation etc. though, from a strategic point of view, but yeah, I think if I were you I’d believe me about what feminism is. Anyways, I don’t actually use the term that frequently in my articles for that reason, and your feedback may result in me doing so even less, but I do continue to personally identify with it for reasons explained above. Most importantly that I’m building off of people who were feminists and who saw their work as part of feminist scholarship.
If you must use the term feminist, you should at least give it some kind of modifier to distinguish the way in which you are using it. Mary Harrington's "reactionary feminist" is a good example of a modification that disarms most of the pre-conceptions people tend to have about feminism. But again, I think it would be better than this still to simply drop the word feminist entirely, or to otherwise specify that feminism is not the primary lens through which you are viewing any given topic.
This is why, despite considering myself a Christian and considering that my guiding worldview, I often write articles that do not use the word "Christian" or any sort of religious lens at all. I don't insert it unless it is particularly relevant, specifically because I want my writing to be accessible to everyone including non-Christians. It's counter-productive to get bogged down having to deal with people's numerous assumptions about Christianity if there are other, more widely shared points of reference that I can use instead.
Yeah, I agree with that, but if there were a bunch of people in your subculture who were always writing about “what does being a Christian mean?” And making guesses like… “I guess it means people who promote non-violence and family values” wouldn’t you feel motivated to write an article explaining … “well actually it’s about belief in Christ”?
I’m going to go over the axes that are relevant to disagreement between feminists, and to what gender equality means in practice in the next piece. But I describe my blog as having a sex-realist, pro-liberty, positive-sum feminist perspective which I’ll explain more in the piece.
Absolutely--if your article is about disagreements within feminism itself, well yes, of course you're going to use the word "feminist" a lot in that article. And it will be the same if I were to write an article justifying why I am Russian Orthodox and not any of the other varieties of Christian.
But when I write about anything other than Christianity itself, I generally reach for secular arguments first and religious justifications only as an afterthought, if at all. This is because anyone and everyone can recognize the former as a common point of reference, but the degree of people who share a common point of reference with me on the latter is quite limited.
100%
While it is doubtful that legislation can bring equality to housework or child rearing, there is a larger arena that remains overlooked.
WHAT IF - there was a third world war and instead of sending all able bodied MEN to war, the WOMEN were conscripted as well?
eg: Israeli law subjects all male and female Israeli citizens and residents to a military draft. Israel is a parliamentary democracy, consisting of legislative, executive and judicial branches.
A second point I'd like to make is this: We (women & men) need to teach our children values at an earlier age - that men are not to treat women as objects and women are not to expected to grow up as princesses.
We live in a society and in an age where the likes of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West are idolized, where football players make millions and school teachers are underpaid, where political corruption is praised and honesty is dismissed as an unworthy trait.
I agree that our 'society' does a disservice to BOTH men & women - the change, however has to start when children are young and for now it will remain an unequal, unfair, mysandrist and misogynist mess!
"Israeli law subjects all male and female Israeli citizens to the draft ".Yeah right a law that's effectively meaningless and worthless as seen in the Gaza war where there's not a single female on the front line
Assuming there were no new grievous infractions against women, what would be a list of measurable/actionable demands society could make good on that we could put this to rest? Are the people you’re calling feminists even capable of coordinating this into an action? It seems very hard to have a conversation in good faith with feminists. Seems like they would prefer a permanent perch from which to lobby demands and complaints than get their way.
It kind of seems like you are getting distracted by the moniker “feminism” in the same way people thought Black Lives Matter was an organization that would improve the black experience and the way people think the Atlantic Council is really into finding lost cities lol.
"It's about reducing unjust prejudice and improving gender relations" So if this is not about fairness, then to what end, other than purely a question of power?
read my next post - but generally feminist arguments are justified by claims that they are positive sum. The most obvious one is that opening up career paths to women and reducing *unjust* prejudice against them increases the degree to which our society is meritocratic and is pro-progress. Several first wave feminists were arguing not that women were overall worse off than men, but that both men and women were worse off when women's liberty is restricted. Many of these arguments take it for granted that men and women will on average have different duties but that even within a role as homemaker, a woman who can participate politically and who is properly educated and encouraged to demonstrate human virtues of courage, rationality etc. will perform that role better. Many second wave feminists argued that rigid gender norms cause a lot of suffering for any men and women for whom they're a poor fit - anyone who's gender non-conforming basically - and that being invested in these norms makes healthy heterosexual relationships more difficult. Louise Perry et al argue that stricter norms around monogamy are better for women but also for men and society etc. I could go on and on....
> "Several first wave feminists were arguing not that women were overall worse off than men, but that both men and women were worse off when women's liberty is restricted."
Indeed. As a Canadian -- even if as something of a fair-weather friend ... 😉🙂 -- you probably know, or should know of a famous quip by Nellie McClung, one of the Famous Five band of suffragettes responsible for getting women the vote in the early 1900s:
“No nation rises higher than its women”
https://isabelmetcalfe.ca/enduring-spirit-of-the-famous-5/
Yes, great example! Thanks
👍🙂 Justly famous. I have one or more of her books, her "The Stream Runs Fast" in particular. Inherited it from my mother's mother, a passage from which, a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, that I'd read at my mother's "Celebration of Life":
"Stranger, pause and look; From the dust of ages; Lift this little book; Turn its battered pages; Read me, do not let me die; Search the fading letters, finding; Steadfast in the broken binding; All that once was I."
Triggered! Thanks for the memories ... 😉🙂
"The "most" important and cool sex "MORE.
From your endnotes:
>"'Patriarchy' names a system in which men rule or have power over or oppress women, deriving benefit for doing so, at women's expense. Feminists believe that this system exists, and not as something minor or peripheral or as a hangover from an earlier age, but as central, woven into the fabric of social reality."
Yes, feminists believe in patriarchy. Calvinists believe in predestination. Capitalists believe in the Invisible Hand. Chauvinists believe a woman's place is in the home. Children believe in Santa Claus. QAnon believes in the Deep State. TRAs believe there's an active trans genocide.
And increasingly, because patriarchy just doesn't hit the same as it used to, feminists believe in RAPE CULTURE.
Feminists have long since lost the plot. Next to no one would deny that sexism exists, but it certainly isn't what it used to be—and EVEN THEN was hardly an organized system of oppressively obtaining benefit at women's expense.
You simply can't expect to be taken seriously while positing an unfalsifiable, untraceable, yet ubiquitous system of oppression that, conveniently, can be blamed for literally anything (these days, it's transfems in the ladies' room; yeah, that's how we're doing machismo these days, TERFs called it).
Men don't actually see much benefit from this patriarchal system of rape culture, but feminists will reply that this is precisely the problem: patriarchy hurts everybody! Well, that's a far cry from "a system in which men rule or have power over or oppress women, deriving benefit for doing so, at women's expense."
The patriarchy, like the Illuminati, isn't just an external locus of control but one that cannot even be shown to exist—a sign of disordered if not delusional thinking that literally strips women (as individuals and as a group) of any significant agency or accountability. While, of course, demonizing men as complicit in the systemic exploitative oppression of women. That black-and-white, zero-sum-game approach to reality is also indicative of a personality disorder: whatever the problem is, it's guaranteed to be somebody else deliberately, sadistically screwing over the designated perpetual victim.
It's just shameless blame-shifting, projection, and paranoia at this point.
“activists who are focused on promoting societal change in order to benefit women but who acknowledge that women aren’t treated unfairly could still be called feminists:”
I took Caplan's point not to be a search for an airtight philosophical definition of feminism, but a better characterization of the difference in attitude between those who do and do not self-identify as feminists. The vast majority of people in western society agree broadly with the more motte-like definition of feminism, including those who do not self-identify as feminist. So whatever the replacement ought to be, it isn't just “people shouldn’t be mistreated because of their gender.” This idea has won, but feminism marches on.
A bloated, meandering piece that fails to arrive at a sensible conclusion.
Loooooooooooooool
Can't comment on your Zero-Sum Beauty Work, so will ask here: Regan, what do you think about attractive women who put a lot of time, money and energy into their fitness and beauty upkeep telling their partners, be they boyfriends or husbands that looking this good is a full time job and that if they (the male partners) want them to keep looking this good, they are going to have to pay for it. These women say, "if you want me to get an outside job and contribute financially to the household/relationship I can. Just know that I will have to neglect all the things that make you attracted to me. " ???
Read my reply here!: https://open.substack.com/pub/wollenblog/p/mansplaining-the-definition-of-feminism?r=2248ub&utm_medium=ios