Letters to the Editor
jontv
Published Letters: 38 Editor's Choice: 9
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What do people dislike about feminism?
[Read the article: "Strident" and proud]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]A number of writers have affirmed the general discomfort with "feminism", as a word and/or as a movement. That always kind of puzzles me. What is it that bothers people so much about feminism? I would really like to know.
I think most of us, certainly most readers of Salon, would probably agree that the sexes should be considered equal, that men and women should have the same opportunities and get paid the same for equivalent work. I doubt that many here believe women should all quit their careers, have babies, and keep a tidy house for their husbands. So what's with the growing animus against feminism?
Is it that people think these battles have all essentially been won? Evidence says otherwise, and I would hope that people are willing to hear it on its merits -- instead of just rejecting it out of hand.
I won't offer any negative conjectures about people's negative attitudes toward feminism, in hopes that somebody who feels that way will enlighten me.
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What should feminists do differently?
[Read the article: "Strident" and proud]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]While I appreciate the fact that a few people addressed my previous question, about where the animus against feminism comes from, I don't feel I've received much insight.
So much of the antipathy seems to be focused toward "the leaders of feminism", as though it is some kind of world-wide political organization with a structure and monolithic platform. Even if it's true that feminism's leadership is "too strident" -- and I'm not sure it is, and if people perceive it that way, there are probably reasons having nothing to do with the actual leadership (e.g. the media warps the message of anyone who challenges the status quo) -- I think it is dubious to demean a whole body of critical thought on the basis of how a few people associated with it behave.
Progressives, of all people, should know better than to push guilt by association that way. Just as the Bush administration does not represent all Americans, nor fundamentalists all Christians, "strident" feminist leaders are not necessarily representative of feminism or feminists.
And then there's the old "man-hating" charge. What do you say to that? So much of this depends on personal experience, and I have never felt that hating men is a common thing among feminists. I am a man, and a feminist, and I certainly don't hate myself. I do hate many of the behaviors that are so common in my fellow males, but with the tools that feminist thought has given me, I can separate the person from the behavior, the behavior from the gender construct, etc.
I have spent most of my adult working life on college campuses, and I've noted that most women on their way to becoming feminists do go through a stage in their educations when they are angry at men. And many of them do, for a time, sometimes vent that anger on people who don't deserve it (or maybe only partly deserve it). But in my experience, very few of them remain in that state of indiscriminating anger for a long time. If anything, I think that feminists, as a whole, are maybe even too accomodating of male bullshit -- probably because even in this day and age, there is still not a huge pool of enlightened men for feminists to spend time with, if they are interested in that kind of thing. So many of them put up with a lot.
The anger at our patriarchal world doesn't go away, entirely, but most feminist women I know don't do much of the male-bashing feminists are infamous for. I'd say most of the worst male-bashers are not really feminists: they are women who buy into social gender roles and find men lacking even by those standards. So it is hard for me to go along with the idea that "misandry" is a serious problem for feminism.
I definitely think that many men are oversensitive to the possibility of being bashed. Maybe men just aren't used to being criticized, or having to think about why they behave the way they do. Or maybe they can't separate criticism from personal attack. The politics of gender does seem to cut to the bone and bring out people's hard feelings in a hurry. I think many people identify too strongly with their maleness or femaleness and therefore take feminism too personally.
If so, that is particularly tragic, because to my mind, the ultimate goal of feminism is to free us from the constraints of gender constructs in the first place. In some ways, that may be the thing that bothers people so much about feminism. We don't want to be free of gender. We are so gendered we can't imagine ourselves any other way.