Disclaimer: Now I’m sure I’ll be accused of being a regressive social influence for going against, but I’m not. I’m in favour of equality before the law for all, I’m against racism, I’m a socialist and former member of the Socialist Workers’ Party, so don’t think I’m some sort of Tory or Paleoconservative or similar. So, know I’m not opposing feminism from opposition to a just position for women, or attachment to some romantic view of the past, or anything along those lines.
Now, why I am against feminism.
Ashley Judd says this:
“I believe that the social construction of gender - the cultural beliefs and practices that divide the sexes and institutionalize and normalize the unequal treatment of girls and women, privilege the interests of boys and men, and, most nefariously, incessantly sexualize girls and women - is the root cause of poverty and suffering around the world.”
http://marquee.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/12/ashley-judd-apologizes-for-hip-hop-remarks/?iref=NS1
Well, I don’t believe that women suffer unequal treatment and men enjoy privileges in modern western society. In the past, maybe. In Saudi Arabia. But not in the modern, Anglophone, world. Feminism in Saudi Arabia, I’ve got less of a problem with.
Not to say there aren’t things in society that are bad for women, but they don’t heavily outweigh those things which have a similarly negative impact on men. We can compare the position of women with that of groups universally acknowledged to suffer unequal treatment, such as black people.
Statistics can easily be found to prove the disadvantages under which black people labour. Higher levels of unemployment, higher levels of incarceration, lower levels of income, higher levels of victimisation by violent crime, lower levels of attainment in education, shorter life expectancies, lower sentences for crimes commited against them. Material evidence of disadvantage.
You can’t find the same thing for women.
In this thread we see that women have lower levels of unemployment, get more money for less work, are less likely to die on the job, can opt to do less well remunerated jobs in they prefer those jobs due to less social pressure to win bread, and when - for older women - they get less in wages it’s because they have the option to work less to have a more meaningful relationship with their children, and so forth.
Women also make up a very large majority of new graduates in all of our western anglophone nations, including newly qualified doctors and lawyers.
At the end of employed life, in the UK at least, women also get to retire five years earlier and then have several years of extra life expectancy, partly due to receiving a large majority of the NHS budget (eight ninths according to the former public health minister Yvette Cooper, now Mrs Balls).
Women are less likely to be the victims of every single violent crime other than rape, although the official count is about 90,000 male-female rapes a year in America compared to Human Rights Watch’s figure of c.130,000 in men’s prisons in America. Men are more likely to commit suicide and make up 90% of the homeless. Men are more likely to be victimised by both men and women, by both strangers and intimate partners, and are more likely to be abused as children or mistreated at school (cite 1, 2, 3). Despite that violence against men is given far less consideration. The AA and the RAC always prioritise lone women whose cars have broken down, for example. Money is put into rape crisis centres, domestic violence shelters, and so on. Obviously prison rape is a common subject of humour, rape of women never a subject for humour. Men are also more likely to be incarcerated to begin with, of course, even when convicted of the same crime (1, 2).
Also while an organisation, even some rich man’s club with no effect on normal people, excluding women is considered scandalous, whereas it’s considered to be fine when an organisation like Race For Life, supposedly a charity devoted to raising money for medical research, can exclude men and no scandal results from a group excluding a potential revenue source for their charity solely on the grounds of prejudice.
Despite all this feminism is a prominent social movement, every election has some prominent politician denouncing the so-called gender pay gap, or violence against women, or whatever else. Women’s studies are widely accepted as an almost academic discipline in universities. Special funds are set aside for women’s shelters which exclude male victims of domestic violence. The burden of proof is lowered in rape cases because it’s supposedly a scandal that too many accused are not convicted, although this is exacerbated by policies against dropping weak cases. People who consider themselves progressive, even some of my fellow socialists, identify themselves as feminists, although they wouldn’t consider calling themselves whitists.
Is anyone seriously going to suggest that this is a picture of anything other than a society in which women hold a privileged profession and men don’t? So feminism is fundamentally unjust.
So that’s why I’m against feminism: because feminism seeks to advance the interests of women when women are already at least on a par while other groups are disadvantaged and their advocates are having their thunder stolen by feminists. Violence against women funding, for example, could be taken away from the group least likely to be victims, women, and put into programmes combating, say, violence in black communities where violence is far more common.
