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[sessifet]

This is part of what feminism means to me. Feel free to disagree. :)

Okay. Here we go (this time without the stabby implements).

I am a feminist. I was raised by two feminists (Yes, men can be feminists too, in my opinion). To me it means striving towards true equality between men and women.*

It means anyone earns according to their job, their qualifications and skills, not according to their gender. It means men share the traditional jobs like childrearing and housekeeping with women. It means that a woman, a girl can live her life without having to worry about being considered a sex-object. It means girls will be brought up knowing what they look like is not the thing that defines their life.

It means realising and accepting there are things women can be better at.

It also means women have to accept that men are under just as much pressure (if not more) to be masculine as we are to be feminine (thanks to housemate for pointing that one out :)). I can turn up at work without make-up and wearing trousers, but good luck finding a workplace liberal enough to allow men to wear make-up and a dress.**

It means realising and accepting there are things men can be better at.

Feminism is not about revenge. It is not about getting our own back. It does not mean women have a moral right to treat men the way women have been treated and perceived in the past (and in some ways are still treated and perceived today). We can't allow to let ourselves get complacent and think it's okay to do unto them, which means you don't get to take out your rage at the patriarchy on the man or men in your life (unless they give you a pretty damned good reason***).

I'm still somewhat hazy and confused on certain parts of my beliefs and convictions about feminism, equalism and batshit insanity, and I certainly don't think I've all the answers. I think my feelings about all this boils down to 'Please treat each other like human beings.'

* Leaving aside those differences caused by physical attributes.

** I hope I'll be forgiven for not including TG in my post. I don't feel I'm qualified to make statements about it further than my belief of 'You are what you are, regardless of what kind of body you were born with.'

*** 'He's a man and therefore privileged,' is not a good reason. Don't use it, because you're making yourself and the rest of us look stupid.

Comments

[silly-swordsman.livejournal.com]

Sounds about right. Just out of interest, what things can men/women be better at than women/men?

Apart from the procreative functions, I can only come up with "men generally tend to be larger and find it easier to bulk up on muscle" and "women generally tend to have smaller hands and fingers and therefore be better at nimble, fiddly tasks". There's also a bit of difference in hip and shoulder joints, which makes a small difference in some areas.

[ahruman.livejournal.com]

The bulking-up-muscle thing has its applications. Swedish authorities recently started talking, again, about how terrible it is that there are so few female firefighters, and that the physical requirements should be lowered to achieve equality. Speaking as someone who’d be quite a load to drag out of a burning building, I’m not convinced. (If there’s unmotivated discrimination going on that’s another matter, of course.)

[sierra-le-oli.livejournal.com]

The biggest contributor to the difference between men and women's average strength is societal, not biological. Women are discouraged from physical exercise and certainly from anything which might create muscle bulk. Look at top swimmers - there's enough difference between the sexes that they don't compete together but for the rest of us, a few hundredths of a second difference isn't really interesting.

[the-ladylark.livejournal.com]

There are quite a lot of interesting psychological differences between women and men - the stereotype of 'men are better at engineering and women make better nurses' may not be true, but there may be biological reasons why such assumptions have come about.

For example, iirc, there is a trend towards men having better spatial awareness and women being better at interpreting facial expressions. This doesn't mean that no man ever gets lost, or that every woman is better than every man at grasping moods, it's just a trend thing, the same as 'men tend to be larger' which doesn't preclude women shot-putters :)

There's a (somewhat contraversial) theory by Simon Baron-Cohen that Autism spectrum disorders are an excessive skew towards a 'male-brain' type which is partly why they are more common in men. I make no comment on my opinions on this, just add it in there to go and read more on if you're interested.

[sierra-le-oli.livejournal.com]

I strongly disagree that men are under just as much pressure to conform to a stereotyped gender role as women are. For example, women are under the pressure of a rape culture, men certainly aren't. Women have to fight harder for the economic power they have (17% pay gap in the UK), which often means having to conform. Etc.

[silly-swordsman.livejournal.com]

I don't know what it means to be under the pressure of a rape culture. That is, I don't understand the phrase. Young men are certainly under the pressure of a rapist, or at least fondlist culture, and it takes a certain amount of strength to refuse that. It the rape culture you talk about the fear of meeting a rapist?

Is the pay gap like for like? Comparable education, experience, age, locality, titles and duties? Or is it an average (no, in that case it should be a lot higher?).

[sierra-le-oli.livejournal.com]

In short, a rape culture is a culture which normalises sexual violence against women. The threat of that violence is used to pressure women into conforming, e.g., an "uppity" woman will be threatened with a "good seeing to" to keep her in line. Men, while under pressure, don't live under that level of threat.

My apologies on having thrown in the pay gap number without stating the parameters, that was wrong. The average woman earns 17% less in a full-time job (and 36% less in a part-time job).

[silly-swordsman.livejournal.com]

a rape culture is a culture which normalises sexual violence against women

I must say I'm shocked now. Are you saying this is the common culture in the UK today?

I must be terribly naive, or coloured by spending the first 29 years of my life in Sweden (which means I'm scandalised by seing a parent hit a child - that was prohibited in law in Sweden when I was a toddler), but... really?

As for the pay gap, I think that's mostly down to the distribution of professions. That's not to say there's no issue, but it's a different issue, in that women and men are encouraged to enter different professions by cultural preferences, but it's one that, AIUI, is changing. We're far from there yet, but the progress is hidden by the long tail of women who've entered lower-paying professions in the last forty years.

It's not such a strange thing any more to see a female lawyer, judge, or doctor (indeed, I believe the majority of newly graduated doctors are women now), while engineering and natural sciences are still lagging significantly behind (but then again, nobody is studying engineering or science any more).

[sierra-le-oli.livejournal.com]

Last I heard, 1 in 4 women in the UK had been subjected to rape or attempted rape. Only a minority of rapes are reported to the police and even fewer make it to court where the conviction rate is about 5%. I don't have the stats for other sexual violence to hand but I think this is already enough to show the huge extent of the problem. Add to that, there is a distressing amount of the public who still believe that women lie a lot about rape, that it's their fault for being drunk, for being dressed "provocatively", etc, etc.

In order to do something horrible to someone, you have to dehumanise them first. Women are regularly portrayed as objects, which helps support those inclined to sexual violence.

I'm not married to the concept of "rape culture" but at the very least it's a useful tool for looking at the issue of sexual violence against women.

Re: the pay gap. The distribution of professions is only part of it. Women do get paid less for the same job. There has definitely been progress, but at the current rate of change it will take around 80 years for the full-timers to be equal.

If you want a rant about the number of students choosing the sciences, ask Jos. :-)

[swaldman.livejournal.com]

Here's something that I wrote a long time ago (2004 by the date-stamp). I might not have phrased it the same way today, but I still stand by the conclusion - which I think is much the same as Sess's :-)

http://www.firecloud.org.uk/opinions.html#gender

@Sierra, I'm not sure that the pressure to be feminine/masculine can really be compared, as they tend to be different in form.
Men are generally under pressure to be masculine from other men. Women tend, I think, to be under pressure to be feminine from both genders. The practical upshot means that there probably is a stronger imperative for the women, but I don't feel that it's easy to "do the maths".

Having said that, I'll try to give an example from my own experience.
I used to work in theatres, in various technical roles (lighting, sound, stage management, lifting heavy flightcases around, etc).
This is traditionally a male-dominated role (except the stage management, for some reason). The women who do it are typically either (a) constantly flirting with everybody to be popular, or (b) totally down-to-earth and extremely competent people who have proved themselves by their work.
Interestingly in this business the women in catagory (b) above tend to be accepted as equals. This may be rare in the world.

I left that profession, however, because I didn't remotely fit the male culture. If I had been gay, they could have understood that. If I had been a woman, they could have understood that. A gay Simon or a Simone would probably have been accepted for who they were. But the men that I worked with simply could not cope with the notion of a straight male techie who was teetotal and didn't drool over Loaded magazine and enthuse about football.

[sessifet25.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that. That was what I was referring to in particular. I think I used the wrong words to phrase it. I didn't want to go into inequality too much because that too quickly and often turns into a dick-waving* competition.

The fact that women may be more under pressure than men overall does not in any way, shape or form negate the fact that men are under pressure to conform to a certain masculine standard. Yes, it is changing, but the pressure's still there.

I didn't say it to excuse or gloss over very real issues that do mean a lot to me. To me it was just a statement of fact. Coaching it in words that make it clear that it is meant to be fact is something in which I am as yet unsuccessful.

This is also the reason I get very nervous when people use words like 'misandry' and 'patriarchy' and, yes, 'rape culture'. They're emotionally volatile words that in my opinion have no place in a reasoned discussion, not least because they have the effect of polarising groups of people.

I'm going to quote my teacher here. He was talking about something different, but just as emotionally volatile: "One can expose ugly truths without using ugly words."

* Oh hello, phallo-centric imagery. Nice to see you again.**

** I'm so tongue-in-cheek here I think I'm going to need a shoehorn to get it out again.

[sierra-le-oli.livejournal.com]

I'd have to disagree (again *g*), I think words like "rape culture" and "patriarchy" can have a place in reasonable discussion. Then again, the only times I've seen terms like "rape culture" be polarising is because the other side completely denied that rape was a problem and/or that women lied about it, etc. That said, it wasn't my intent to light a match in a gunpowder factory, especially when the factory's not my own, it's not helpful. I figured I was fairly safe using the term in replying to Orjan, who is a feminist. That's not to imply he would agree with its use.

I do agree with most of what you've said and I thought it was a good post, I'm really glad you wrote it.

[sessifet25.livejournal.com]

*g* Disagreeing is good, as long as we keep things civil (which we seem to manage quite well :)) These discussions always make me re-examine what I believe and occasionally find I need to fiddle with the settings, so to speak.

I think we may just have had different experiences with those terms. I haven't seen a reasonable discussion/argument stay reasonable and civil as soon as someone started using those terms. Occasionally because other parties took offense at the words, and occasionally because the original party had rather obviously starting frothing at the mouth. Because of this, all the terms I mentioned (and I think we can think of a few more as well) instantly cause an 'Eep.' response on my part, and I will spend a large amount of the conversation waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak.

I think we might be able to have a reasoned discussion while using those terms because you've established that while they have emotional value, they're not necessarily going to colour the rest of the argument. This does mean a lot of the 'Eep.' gets taken away. I'll never be happy about having them used or using them, though.

I hope that all makes sense. :)

[sierra-le-oli.livejournal.com]

It makes sense. But I'll leave you alone for now (hurray, say the commenters *g*) as I think I've just started a similar argument on my own blog. ;-)