Why am I a feminist?

The short answer is it has never really occurred to me not to be. If being a feminist means believing that men and women are equal, not the same but equal, and society should afford them the equal opportunities and rewards then of course I’m a feminist. How could any rational person be anything else? Unfortunately with this most freighted of “labels” it isn’t quite that simple.

For as long as I can remember I’ve held it to be self-evident that men and women are created equal. But I didn’t always outwardly ascribe to feminism.

To begin with I didn’t realise that not everyone else agreed with me. I knew there was a long and ugly history of structural sexism but I naively assumed that it had largely gone out of fashion — like black and white TV, marxism, or flairs.

The second reason I didn’t feel I need to say I was a feminist was that many of the most brilliant, gifted and capable people I know are women. I have the incredibly good fortune that the single most brilliant person I know is my wife. Why on earth wouldn’t they be afforded all the same chances as me?

The third, and perhaps most pernicious reason, was I didn’t really think it was my place. I’m a white, straight, middle-class, university educated man with a full-time job. That means I’ve had essentially zero perspective on what it feels like to suffer personal discrimination. Feminism, whatever that was taken to mean, surely didn’t need me to jump on the bandwagon and offer my patronising sympathies?

I was wrong about all of these things. I was wrong to assume feminism had achieved its aims just because there is more equality legislation that there used to be. The long-view of history is always an attractive one. Compared with 200 years ago the ability for a woman to have an independent life, access education and expect return for her labours is incomparably improved. That should be celebrated but it is not the same as saying things are all kosher now.

I also wrong to blithely assume that because I didn’t see prejudice and discrimination it no longer existed. As Michael Kimmel says so eloquently in his much quoted TED Talk, “Why Gender Equality is good for everyone” privilege is invisible to those have it. In his memorable phrase “if you are a white, middle-class English speaking man you are the beneficiary of the biggest affirmative action project in the history of the world, otherwise known as “The History of the World”. The brilliant women I know had to overcome things I couldn’t even see.

I was completely wrong that I didn’t have a role to play. There were two events that shook me out of this apathy. The first was an off-hand comment at work. I was running a team of 10 and only one was a woman. She had joined just as another women was leaving and this led my client to ask “why do you only let one women work for you at a time?” I think it was meant at least half in jest but it stung. The second, more public event, was the HeForShe campaign that the UN launched two years ago. Its message is disarmingly simple – if you believe in gender equality then you need to say so. HeForShe is powerful for me because it gave me a hook. I no longer needed to shyly mutter that I thought feminism was important because I had something to pledge allegiance to. I wasn’t the only one. 1.3bn people, almost 20% of the world’s population, have signed up to this pledge online, and just last week Emma Watson published the 2nd 10x10x10 Impact Report, this time focused on the role of further education. If there was any doubt that HeForShe is urgently necessarily then the coverage of this event by Rod Liddle in The Sun is more than evidence enough.

Once I started to look it wasn’t a very pretty picture. I increasingly became aware that my experience was not shared by my female friends and colleagues. I never have to think about how much attention I’m going to get when I decide where to run. I never have to worry about whether I’ll come across as shrill or bossy if I have the temerity to voice an opinion. I sat through Laura Bates talk eloquently about her ground-breaking work at The Everyday Sexism Project. Then I read the victim’s open letter to her attacker in the Brook Turner case. This last piece is perhaps the most powerful piece of writing I’ve ever encountered. There is clearly a lot to do.

And then, just to make that point on a grander scale, the American presidential campaign kicked off in earnest. Whatever you think of Hilary Clinton as a political leader it is impossible to deny that her election would be a moment of tremendous symbolic significance. It is also impossible to forget she is the only person that stands in the way of the psychological unstable, constitutional bigoted and pathologically dishonest alternative. The real problem is that this isn’t nearly a fair fight.

It shouldn’t really be a fair fight. Clinton has an unassailable advantage in terms of experience, intelligence and temperament. Trump can’t articulate an opinion on any topic and has nothing that remotely qualifies him for the role he is applying for. Analysing them through the usual tropes of political journalism isn’t useful because it assumes they are comparable. They aren’t. It’s likely me and Usain Bolt deciding to settle a dispute with a race. We rightly assume everyone who puts themselves forward for high public office meets a base level of competence. Trump isn’t even close to being able to spell competence let alone embody it.

But despite all of this it Clinton’s “fitness” for office that is constantly questioned. This was most blatantly on show when she fell ill with pneumonia. There is nothing nice about getting pneumonia but there is really nothing remarkable about it either. It is pretty remarkable to continue campaigning for President whilst having pneumonia. This is especially true in your late-60s given how most 25 year-olds react to getting a cold. That but point that didn’t get much airtime. The point that animated “commentators” for days was a thinly-veiled (sometimes not veiled at all) series of questions about whether a woman could really ever be “strong” enough to do such an important job. Trump exploited this prejudice, as he does with every prejudice, as often as he could. He would be the oldest president ever to assume office. He survives on a diet of fast food and no exercise. He has a skin tone that would cause most people to have their dermatologist on speed-dial. But none of this matters because his fitness to govern is innate. He is a man.

In addition to this absurdity Trump’s openly expressed attitudes towards women are disgusting. As with all of his other deplorable positions the list of things he has said, or done, that disqualify him from governing is far too long to document. That is presumably the point of so brazenly embracing a machismo that stopped being acceptable just after the death of Genghis Khan. By changing the parameters of what is discussed he can talk about sexual assault being the inevitable consequence of women being in the military, for instance, without it causing nearly the kind of uproar that it should. He can supply his supporters with merchandise that says “Trump that Bitch” it barely raises a shrug.

Much as I’d love to there isn’t much I can do about Donald Trump. That truth is a source of much personal angst but given it is unavoidable I’ll focus on what I have tried to do to counteract his existence.

The first thing was to try and make sure that I wasn’t part of the problem. I’ve never bought into the binary idea that to be a feminist you had to dislike men. Men and “The Patriarchy” are not synonymous. There is however a lot that individual men can choose to do to ensure they have no reason to be disliked. For instance, not lazily accepting ingrained discrimination because that is the way things are or blithely assuming someone behaves a certain way because of their gender.

The second thing I’ve done is to try and create a different environment at work. I have the good fortune to work somewhere that thinks about how to make work more inclusive. Shortly after the launch of HeForShe in 2014 the women’s network decided they would expand their mandate and become an organisation focused on gender equality. A request went out for men to be more involved and I decided that was my opportunity. I’ve since gone on to lead a group of 30 volunteers who have decided that they can make a difference. We’ve set up mentoring schemes, speaker events, a lecture series, training sessions, written opinion and generally advocated for awareness and change. Almost everyone wants this to be better but to achieve that everyone has to do their bit. These activities are not going to change the world but it feels like a good place to start.

The third thing I’ve done is written this.

Gender can be a very complex, riven with personal experience and societal expectations. I’ve really only engaged at a surface level and I’ve not read nearly enough Greer, Butler or Klein to claim any expertise. But I don’t believe that being a feminist, even a male feminist, is complicated. You won’t solve the myriad of issues in one fell swoop but that is never a good argument for inaction. In my experience all it really takes is being more conscious of how you interact with others and telling people what you believe in.

Oh and one more thing. Vote Hillary. #ImWithHer