Can we please do away with the word ‘feminist’?
Feminism has a noble tradition and an awesome goal — different genders should have equal opportunities in society. What’s not to agree with it?
When the word is used in this sense, I embrace it unconditionally. But this is not the only sense in which the word feminism is used.
The connotations of the word have become massively threatening, for both men and women.
It has now become a divisive word even among people that very clearly all sympathize with the goal of an open, equal-opportunity society.
It has also become the vector of tribal crossfire, where the front-trenches have been seized, on every side, by hotheads.
Look North, and you have self-professed liberal men, and some women, who seem pathetically proud to define themselves ‘anti-feminist’, and freely disburse insults like the popular ‘feminazi’ to anyone who is arguing in favor of a more inclusive society.
Look South, and you have women, and some men, who in exchange wield the label ‘feminist’ as a sword ready to amputate any argument that does not readily conform to their particular sub-version of clan thinking. That’s not how you win hearts and minds to a worthy cause, nor how you engage in a rational discussion.
If you fight a battle on the real issues, it’s of course OK to have discussions and people organized around ideas. How should society support maternity and paternity in a spirit of equal opportunities? What’s the role of sex-education in making young women more empowered? Is there something smart and appropriate to do to get more women elected for office? What’s the right balance between respect of other cultures and defence of women's rights?
Those are interesting questions with a lot of ramifications — and without black & white answers.
If I look at the answers I tend to give to questions of this nature, I definitely fall on the “feminist” side of things.
But the problem with the word feminism is that it has grown to signify both a very worthy ideal, and at the same time a tribal affiliation that appears to demand to choose sides in the most trivial battles usually fought online.
I am happy to define myself a feminist, if that means subscribing to the worthy ideal. However, I want nothing to do with the bloody battles of the pronouns, with the latest sub-sub-gossip on elevatorgate or gamergate or whatevergate, and with whoever is the trending enemy or hero of the day on Twitter.
(Incidentally, I love a good discussion about the pronouns, and I am cautiously sympathetic to the idea that grammar matters on the road to equality. But again, it’s not a black & white issue, and I wish to discuss it without the threat of being filed among the penis-toting mansplaining patriarchs, or enlisted among any of the angry twittermobs.)
In the middle of the battlefield you have, one would presume, plenty of reasonable people of different genders who sincerely care about men and women having the same opportunities — but that are intimidated just like me by a label, feminist, that has sadly grown to automatically imply ferocious affiliation or equally ferocious anathema.
As often is the case with tribal wars, it seems that the real issues are buried on every side under a mountain of gossips, you-started-first attitudes, personal acrimonies, prejudices, lynching campaigns, trivial rivalries of comments and hashtags, mob cheers and boos.
All this is boring, and sad.
Most importantly, if you really cherish the idea of a society where every human being is given equivalent opportunities in life, all this looks like a gigantic waste of time and effort.
I love quite a bit of the wide and multi-faceted history of feminism. As with any movement so broad, you can find stuff to like, and stuff not to like.
I find some of the feminist battles and some of the feminist historical figures truly moving and inspiring; I also find some gender-studies-derived academic work bordering on postmodernist nonsense.
But overall, the way I see it, feminism as a historical force is magnificent and inspirational. As a hashtag, it’s unfortunately much less so.
Honestly, I think the word feminist is doomed, as a banner.
I think it’s doomed because i can’t find any argument or any discussion that would be more useful when happening under the “feminism” banner, as opposed to the same discussion happening without such a banner. Therefore, it seems to me that if you are still using the banner, then you are guilty of caring more about the banner itself than about advancing the actual ideal of equal opportunities.
Sometimes, words become too charged with unhelpful tribal connotations and baggage to be recoverable. Feminist has crossed the threshold, at least for a few years and outside of special contexts.
For myself, I still wouldn’t mind a word that I could proudly use to express my sympathy for gender equality.
Of course, humanist is a perfectly cromulent word that subsumes it all — but perhaps it’s nice to have something signaling special attention for gender equality in the context of the humanist endeavor.
For the time being, if someone asks me if i am a ‘feminist’, I will point them to this article and I will declare myself simply a fan of Olympe de Gouges, the author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Female Citizen.
She was a playwright, essayist and hero of the Enlightenment. She was clever, had sense of humor, and more energy than anger. She argued for marriage rights, divorce and sexual freedoms ahead of her time. She was grounding her advocacy on her confidence in reason and humanism, and she was never a one-feminist-trick-pony — she was rather an all-round humanist who wrote as eloquently about slavery and racism.
She was executed, during one of the madness phases of the French Revolution, for “seditious behavior”.
#OlympedeGouges is hopefully one banner and hashtag that triggers no excessive automatic tribalism. Maybe I am naive, but I will try.
If you really care about advancing gender equality and broad, gender-neutral humanism, rather than fighting tribal wars, you should probably drop ‘feminism’ too.
