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Feminism Isn’t About Equality

Feb 16, 2017 //
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Many people perceive the feminist quest as finding its ultimate success in complete equality between men and women, but this is quite easily disproved. Consider the following marital situations as a simple example:

  1. The husband and wife each have the exact same job, and earn the exact same pay. They both do an equal amount of dishes, an equal amount of vacuuming, an equal amount of yard work, etc. Each parent spends identical lengths of time with their children contributing in equal fashion in every aspect of their development. Each duty, household and career-oriented, are identical for each partner to promote total equality.
  2. The husband works as a police officer and the wife works as a nurse. The wife does the dishes, vacuums the carpets, and makes dinner while the husband mows the lawn, takes care of financial obligations, and maintains the family vehicle. The wife is responsible for prepping the children for school in the morning while the husband takes them to their extra-curricular activities. This could be considered the equal-but-different model.
  3. The wife works as the head of a large corporation while the husband stays at home. The husband does most of the childcare, while the wife provides financially for the family. The husband does most of the household chores as well because the wife frequently works long hours, though she does help out around the house on weekends when she has the time. This would be considered a reversal of traditional roles.

Which of these is considered the most feminist? The first is absurd. It’s like calculating the pennies when splitting up the cheque at a restaurant. No one ought to care that much. The second, though equality could be argued, is not feminist because it is representative of conformity to rigid gender roles. The last, though the relationship is unequal in its distribution of wealth dependency and household responsibilities, is the most feminist because it is clear that each partner in that relationship was not pressured to conform by outside social norms. Their roles are a definitive choice.

Feminism, therefore, is clearly not about equality but about the abolition of gender roles. If there were no roles forcing individuals into certain lifestyles, then presumably women and men would naturally navigate freely toward their own preferred choices. The distribution of pay and household responsibilities would become arbitrary since each family would have different motivations and goals.

Feminism is about each gender’s freedom to choose the life they want to live. Some might argue that it is equal opportunity that is necessary for this freedom to exist, but gender roles are the obstacle that must be overcome before equal opportunity can even exist. We must first believe that women and girls are capable of becoming doctors and lawyers or that men are capable of becoming nurses or homemakers before we give them the opportunity to do so.

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Categories Gender and Sexuality

Feminist Etymology

Dec 23, 2016 //
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The term ‘womyn’ is occasionally used to signify a feminist exodus from male-dominated language. Woman has the suffix -man in it, after all, and wome(y)n no longer exist only as a derivative of man! Eve, born of a male rib, is no longer in style.

However, an assumption about the historically patriarchal nature of language would reasonably require looking at the history of language. ‘Woman’ originally comes from the word wifman where wif refers to her status as a female, and man refers to her status as a human being. ‘Man’, as we know him today, was initially called werman, with the wer referring to his male-ness, and the man, again, referring to the fact that he is a homo sapien.

It turns out ‘woman’ isn’t historically oppressive at all, and ‘werewolf’ is in fact the more sexist term, as it would etymologically be transcribed as a male-wolf (Same with ‘android’, which literally is something that is like a male; andro + oid. The neutral version would be ‘anthroid’). Somewhat ironically, altering the –man part of ‘woman’ would seem to lessen her humanity, rather than embolden it.

Similarly, ‘female’ is not derived from male, but from femella, whereas ‘male’ comes from masle derived from masculus. In addition, ‘history’ is derived from a long series of words that all essentially mean a chronicle of the past, ultimately leading back to the ‘account of an inquiry’ definition from the Greek word historia. It is not actually the masculine-possessive’s story. As it turns out, the western languages were not conceived with patriarchal maliciousness in mind.

Does this mean that feminists are crazy for wanting to change ‘mailman’ to ‘mail carrier’ if the –man part refers to the human being-ness of this mail carrier rather than their gender? Of course not. Language evolves over time. No gay man has ever taken comfort in the fact that they were etymologically called a bundle of sticks. The evolution of ‘man’ from its gender-neutral origins has been murky, and ‘human’ is still used quite uncontroversially, but today it generally means male. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that werman is going to be making a comeback any time soon.

Changing ‘woman’ to ‘womyn’ is still stupid, however, and here’s why: it is not oppressive to refer to a woman as a female human being. Having -man as a suffix to a career could serve to identify its inclination, but wo- on its own is meaningless today, so the –man does not alter its meaning (its meaning being ‘female’, remember). If anything, the word has already undergone a feminist revolution. Can you imagine if we still used the root of ‘wife’ to define our women?

This etymological history is not entirely benign, however, and the damage that was caused had nothing to do with the term ‘woman’, but with ‘man’. It all happened back in the late 13th century when werman evolved into ‘man’. It made males the default human being. When we discuss gender and focus only on women, perhaps it is because men lost theirs back during the founding of the Ottoman Empire. I doubt the two are related, but who knows.

Post-script: All my etymology info has come from here.

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Categories Gender and Sexuality

Responsible For Violence

Sep 5, 2016 //
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I believe the root of violence to be an expression of power, typically exerted as a response to some kind of challenge to it. The domestic abuser beats his wife because he believes himself to be the dominant partner, and if there is a perception of a question to that authority, then a violent response rectifies the imbalance. School shooters are almost exclusively those who feel that their power has been chipped away by the belittlement of others, and excessive violence is their attempt to regain it. A bar fight is a dick-measuring contest between apes, seeing who is the greater alpha male, or, more simply, who is the more powerful. There are of course exceptions, but most of the journals and articles I’ve read regarding violence explain it as an assertion of dominance and control. It’s not even that difficult to project the intentions behind interpersonal violence onto international conflicts, as countries vie for control over resources, subjects, or territory, seeking only to expand their stately power.

The perpetrators of violence, those who feel the greatest need to exert power, are almost all men. There have been several inquiries into the link between violence and masculinity, and one that is easily accessible, succinct, and informative is the documentary Tough Guise which I am obviously suggesting you watch due to my linking of it here. As easy as it is to dismiss violence as solely within the deficiencies of interpersonal relationships between men forcing conformity onto one another, it is critical to realize that social pressures are universally applied.

Ice T, in his infinite wisdom, imparted this gem, “If women didn’t like criminals, there would be no crime.” While charmingly naive, Ice T may well have gleaned some element of truth surrounding the desires of women impacting the nature of masculinity to a certain degree. Remember Elliot Rodgers? He committed an unforgivable act of violence, not due to excessive bullying from his male peers, but from the ostracization he suffered from the hands of women. To the horror of many feminists, message boards lit up in the aftermath saying that the tragedy could have been averted if Rodgers possessed a greater degree of “game.” Progressive conversations raged against this wash of men who sympathized with Rodgers’s rejection as they believed, correctly, that there is no excuse for targeted violence against women. However, the conversation tacitly ignored the reality to which the message boards allude: conforming to the desires of women is significant enough to male needs to a degree that violence is seen as a semi-understandable response to its lack.

It’s pretty easy to understand the muscular definition of male bodies that is often found attractive is a representation of power, but even height, which so many women demand in a partner, is also a sign of physical dominance. Watch any fight on TV, and the man who can tower over his opponent is almost intrinsically seen as the likely winner. Financial success, most commonly seen in the tradition of men paying for the first (and usually subsequent) dates, is not difficult to see as a marker of economic power in a culture driven by the necessity of wealth. Women who wish to feel “safe” with their man are expecting that he possess enough power to provide that security for her, almost as if she needs him to be able to commit violence on her behalf if a situation calls for it. Even confidence is not so benign, and the characteristic women claim to find the most desirable is really the extension of power over one’s self and one’s surrounding environment.

I do not mean to suggest that any degree of power is going to cause a firestorm of violence if left untempered, and I still maintain my Yin Yang approach to desirable human characteristics. For instance, confidence is an easy attribute to defend, but when considered among all the other desirable traits it does not stray from the general trend. If every stipulation of manhood required by both genders, either for romantic interest or peer conformity, necessitates power, then it is of no wonder that detrimental expressions of that power will be unleashed when a man is unable to meet that requirement. Even though violence is a decisively masculine problem, we are all responsible. We cannot point any fingers. Social pressures are indicative of the norms and traditions of a whole society, infused in us, regardless of gender. If we wish to make changes, we must begin with ourselves.

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Categories Gender and Sexuality
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