One of the big objections I hear when I say I’m a feminist is that men can’t be feminists. After all, feminism is so determined to be sexist and keep to traditional gender stereotypes. Making sure that men are differentiated socially from women is what feminism is all about, after all.
That is utterly irrelevant at the moment. But the second big objection does. That being that feminism is basically finished. Gender inequality is all gone, and feminists nowadays have nothing interesting left to do. Which is why the pay gap still exists. I’ve talked about how I see feminism before, and when I did, I mentioned some of the reasons feminism is feminism, not egalitarianism*. Which Is what I’m writing about – the general perception that prejudice in our society is pretty much dead. Now, that’s not restricted to gender relations. There’s really quite a lot of it that people just don’t notice.
Firstly, keeping to the realms of general sexism, there’s the assumption that women are weak, fragile flowers who are so much weaker than men and must be protected. You can see why that one survived, given that this is one of the few areas where it’s pretty easy to show genuine differences between the sexes. The problem is that it’s exaggerated from ‘the average woman is slightly weaker physically than the average man’ to ‘women are weaker than men in ways which for some reason are expanded to include emotional as well as physical fragility’. Now, the emotional fragility thing is going away somewhat, because people have developed an annoying habit of noticing it and its inverse ‘I am a man and have no feelings but rage. Anyone who has such feeble emotions is not really a man.’ Either of those things will probably get noticed as sexism, but the physical differences are still exaggerated to a rather annoying extent. I’m male, I’m not exactly unfit, and I’m not at all ashamed to say that there is absolutely nothing physical which there does not exist a female capable of doing better than me. There’s almost nothing physical which I don’t know a female better than me at. The physical difference exists, yeah, but it’s not really that massive. And the stereotype is bad for both sexes – women get the whole patronising ‘you’re a delicate flower who couldn’t possibly do this for herself and whom I must protect from the world’ thing, and men get the idea that there’s no way they could possibly be overpowered or need protection – which is why the whole annoying ‘men can’t be raped’ idea exists**.
Another thing you can do is make out that whatever you don’t like simply isn’t that important, and then make them seem like an overreacting idiot for their constant emphasis on it. The best part is, you can make a pretty convincing case that you have a point – there certainly have been cases of overreaction, where it’s clear to pretty much everyone that ‘blackmail’ really isn’t a racist term. I, personally, think that it’s probably pretty understandable that someone should do something like this sometimes given that they’ve probably had to deal with institutionalised and blatant forms of their own particular –ism or –phobia quite a lot (and lest it be though that I’m looking down on people, I’ll admit to doing a little of the same thing occasionally). But that doesn’t mean you can say that whenever someone mentions their race, gender or sexuality you can dismiss them for overreacting. Like it or not, someone’s culture, gender identity and sexuality are all things that can form a massive part of who they are. So next time you want to condemn someone because they’re putting way too much emphasis on the thing that makes them different and forcing you to respond to it, you probably... shouldn’t. It really is a massive part of who they are, and when you dismiss it it feels like you’re dismissing a massive part of who they are. They should be allowed to be open about all of their personality. This is mostly a fairly minor thing, but it has an annoying habit of evolving into its bigger, uglier cousin, who I like to call ‘don’t force your deviance on us’, where people think they’re being open minded and unprejudiced because they are perfectly happy for, say, homosexuals to exist, as long as they don’t force it on them by talking about it (or possibly by public displays of affection, depending). That’s... not exactly how tolerance works.
There’s also the ‘I’m just curious about something new’ defence. Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with being curious about something you don’t know much about. But you’re going to have to keep to the same level of sensitivity you do with someone who doesn’t have that particular aspect to them. For example, just because I’m ace doesn’t let you ask things you wouldn’t ask a heterosexual, like the ever popular ‘do you masturbate?’ or ‘are you a virgin?’. You probably wouldn’t ask a straight person that if you didn’t know them very well, so doing it for an ace who doesn’t find even thinking about sex is rather annoying. If someone gets offended at what you ask them and it was a genuine mistake, accept it. But someone’s right to privacy is exactly the same if they’re asexual or homosexual or whatever. Yeah, if they come out as something, they probably don’t mind being asked a little about it (although I tend to be a lot more comfortable when I know people know I’m ace, so***...) but the same kind of etiquette still applies. Treat other groups like they’re real people. Try not to treat them differently because of what they’ve told you. Along with this go a load of other things where you just deny what you’re doing. Just insult people in a way you can deny later, or in a way you can say later they were bringing it upon themselves. They were wearing attractive clothing. They were on a dating site****. They were on a Pride Parade†.
Don’t do that.
OK then. I’m done now. I have nothing clever to close with, except that I’m aware that I haven’t been comprehensive, and that I may not have been as clear as I might’ve been in places.
*For the record, I’m not really sure why I said that females were naturally better at looking after children. It may or may not be true – I have no idea. The evo-psych checks out, since in most (possibly all) primate species, and a majority of mammal species, the female does look after the young, so that might be why I said it, but I have a suspicion that it might just be that I left out a ‘perceived as’ somewhere.
**I saw an advert the other day for a charity named ‘Survivors UK’, for male victims of rape. It made me happy.
***I also quite like being asked questions, as long as they’re not totally beyond the pale. Though I occasionally get a little annoyed at answering the same questions over and over, I totally understand that it’s something a lot of people haven’t heard of (it’s the questions as a whole I get annoyed at, not the particular questioners), and I know noone ever does this, but anyone who does have a question feel free to ask me it.
****There are quite a few asexuals on personals***** sites (we’re quite a bit rarer on actual dating sites). We use them for relationships, for making friends, or for taking online personality tests rather than for sex.
*****Not currently including me.
†There’s going to be an asexual contingent at WorldPride 2012 on the 7th of July. Which I’ll be in. Just wanted to plug that.
