We (Still) Need Feminism
But I’m not sure blaming men alone is the answer
I am a feminist. I believe in, and advocate strongly for, women to be treated as people. I call out misogyny frequently, which means I’ve frequently annoyed people in my life with my advocacy. That often seems to be the mark of a feminist, and so I consider myself a feminist.
And yet. And yet I still have trouble with essays that seem to assume too much. Maybe it’s because I am a man, and seeing things ascribed to me by virtue of my gender rankles. Maybe going through life on the lowest difficulty setting has left me thin-skinned, ill-prepared to face valid criticism. Or maybe, just maybe, the essay assumes too much, with negative consequences.
The trigger for that essay was a photo of a young girl measuring herself, with the caption, “Feast on the corpses of the men who do this to our daughters.” As the parent of two daughters, I feel aggrieved at the idea of a healthy young child spending any time at all focusing on such a ridiculous thing. That adults clearly must be responsible upsets me. I only stumble at one word in that caption: men.
Feast on the corpses of those who do this to our daughters.
There is no question in my mind that there are fathers out there who say horribly destructive things to their little girls, whether they mean to or not. There is also no question in my mind that there are mothers out there who do the same. It can even come in the form of a compliment. There are also strangers, sometimes well-intentioned and sometimes not, whose stray comments are entirely inappropriate and unhelpful. Any focus on beauty at that age seems destructive to me, but I’m not sure why men are singled out. I have never in my life said anything to either of my daughters to “do this” to them, and yet both of them, now teenagers, worry about their weight. They didn’t get it from me. From whom did they get it?
I agree on the problem. I’m just not sure I agree entirely on the blame. I don’t know that I blame “media,” either.
Criticism of American puritanism is en pointe. That said, I don’t recall hearing fathers complain about Miley Cyrus’ nude video. Maybe it’s just my social bubble, and CNN’s, but most of the complaints I heard were from mothers. Society may be terrified by women in charge, but I don’t think it’s only the men who are scared.
Criticism of Robin Thicke’s terrible song and his performance with Cyrus at the VMAs again get no disagreement from me. That he wasn’t called out for his part seems to me like another sad chapter in a ridiculous story that has existed for at least as long as the woman “caught in the act of adultery”—but not the man—was tossed in front of Jesus (by men) two millenia ago.
There’s so much of the essay I agree with, but then I stumble over the same assumption again and again. The author refers to google searches that sound to me like magazine headlines, but the editors of Cosmo magazine (mostly) aren’t men. When I tried the suggested search, most of the articles I found weren’t written by men, either.
As a man, I can’t pretend to know why or how some women feel comfortable perpetuating these things to other women. I don’t know why women who may have grown up feeling like they were seen as little more than sex objects would turn around and work to make other women feel like little more than sex objects. I’m not sure how singling out men alone to blame helps with these situations, either, since it seems to let complicit women off the hook.
Imagine a country in which police officers routinely abuse non-white people. The United States, for example. Do black police officers get a pass when singling out black drivers?
The system itself seems broken and racist, and for the system to reform, everybody responsible must take some responsibility and change their behavior. Everybody, not just the original white police officers who started it.
By the time we get to the numbered list of why we still need feminism, I think any reasonable person should agree: female genital mutilation, rape, child brides, gender-motivated infanticide, so-called “honor” killings, and so on, they’re all horrifying. Only two out of the ten listed items are primarily about the west (Criminalized Pregnancy and Employment Law), but two are enough for it to be clear. We still need feminism in the west, as well as everywhere around the world.
People who prop up a system that values women less than men need to be called out, as I was. Whether out of ignorance or wilfullness, their actions are destructive. Until every single person in the world agrees that women have value just as men do, we still need feminism. When 71% of American women don’t self-identify as feminists, we still need feminism. Until 100% of American men self-identify as feminists, we still need feminism.
