Thursday week I shall be attending a Guardian-initiated meeting on ‘Everyday Sexism’. The title is Behind the Headlines: What's all the fuss about feminism? and the blurb says: “Why do some women hate feminism? What is the 'fourth wave' of feminism? Who decides what it means to be a feminist? Can men be feminists? And, with the pay gap still widening and sexism prominent across campus and offices, where has it really got anyone?”
Perhaps part of the reason for some women hating them is that some feminists appear to think that the main enemy is not men but other feminists who in their views are not exactly correct in their outlook. This is discussed by Jennifer Simpkins in the Huffington Post under the title "You Can't Sit With Us!" - How Fourth-Wave Feminism Became 'Mean Girls', and the article starts off: “Raise your hand if you have ever felt personally victimised by a feminist.” But since this is Part I, and Part II will come after the meeting, I shall now make a brief survey of the issues as I see them.
Feminism claims to be purely and simply for equality between men and women. However this raises the problem of what constitutes equality. Some would say equal but different, where the differences may or may not be complementary - I understand that the Taliban would say that women are equal but different. And I am sure the Taliban would say their differences were complementary!
We also have the issues equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. At present we must recognise that we have neither, but the question is important for on-going and future strategies. But here there seems to be a danger - both with equality of outcome and subjective inequality - that ‘ought to be able to’ becomes ‘ought to’.
And finally there is the question of objective and subjective equality. Thus when someone says “This degrades women.” one will ask “By whose standard?”
I think we can look at three main issues: objective inequality, gender roles and sexual issues. Subjective inequality lies partly in gender roles and partly in sexual issues.
Objective inequality basically relates to inequality of pay and inequality of career opportunities and various forms of discrimination. A very big challenge is the market. If in practice men support housewives more than women support house-husbands, this increase in needs of roughly 40% will push demand for pay up among men. Likewise employers will be anxious about women having family distractions and this will push supply down. And where supply equals demand this reflects averages, but few individuals will be average: by and large you don’t support half a housewife or house-husband. And if you favour nationalisation this may be a solution, but not totally if you still want to encourage a small-business sector.
Gender-roles: I have spoken about this before. To my mind, all species other than humans have gender-roles, and likewise among human societies, certainly among subsistence communities. This is basically for two reasons: (a) you learn things better at a younger age, (b) gender roles involve an attempt at optimum combinations of tasks.
In general, gender roles are not discussed in these terms, but in terms of supposed differences in ability. And in most communities distinctions of innate and environmental differences are neither made nor understood. Cordelia Fine has written an excellent book on Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference (2010) in which aptitude tests can be biased by subtle suggestions, say, that women (or men) are not so good at various subjects or tasks. And this may well explain why girls do not do so well at maths and the sciences at co-ed schools as at single-sex schools.
But my own view is that in a post-subsistence society three things show up:
(a) We are in a state of transition from a subsistence society, since housewives’ tasks are in effect part-subsistence. But in fact this is part transition and part retrograde, since housewives represent a recent concept, first upper-class, with servants, and then middle-class, often without.
(b) We are very much in a state of transition from a survival society to a self-fulfilment society. But those of us who grew up say before 1975 can remember when a wife’s ‘self-fulfilment’ was tied in with her husband, upholding the social circle in which they lived. Profoundly confusing for poor Denis Thatcher!
(c) In our society - be it survival or self-fulfilment - risks will crop up, and in general men will be expected to take up roles which take up the risks, while mothers will take up the role of shielding children from such risks.
We should finally, in regard to gender-roles, note the pioneering work of Margaret Mead, not least in Male and Female, where she is one of the earliest to distinguish between innate and socially-conditioned differences. This brings up the issue of gender identity, and this seems often to be opposed by feminists, and I think this in particular to be opposed by many women. Insofar as it is opposed, I believe this creates hostility from other women.
Coming to sexual issues, one could say a little or a lot about these things. But the issues mainly take the form of harassment and objectification, and I am sure I shall hear a lot about this at the meeting. As I have written before, I am suspicious about the concept of objectification when applied to consensual activities. But in fact Page Three is not consensual: you have to take positive action to avoid it, and there are subtle ways in which consensual is not consensual.
Martin Prior
