Feminism 1: Just Trying to Help You
I’ve put off writing about feminism for a long time, mainly because the idea of feminism has changed dramatically over the last few years, morphing from the classic liberal approach which was about ending discrimination (the idea that it was pre-decided that women could not go to university or become pilots or operate their own bank accounts because they were women) into something where there are considered to be all-encompassing, yet zealously pre-defined and inflexible, collective interests of all women and different collective interests of all men.
It gets even weirder with the corporate understanding of feminism which preaches that I (and every other woman) should somehow be fanatically rooting for the material success of perfectly strange women I don’t know and frankly couldn’t care less about. If someone who happens to be female takes home a million-dollar paycheque is that somehow through the irrational laws of transmutation my success? No. It truly isn’t. Because we’re different people.
Rather than accepting that women can also be individuals and full human beings (the road I thought we were on), we’ve really come back to a pre-Feminine Mystique view of them as being somehow ‘different’ and ‘other’ than men and also weirdly connected as some kind of amorphous blob.
Probably the number one way this has shown up is in the idea that being female itself is often now regarded a qualification. For example, it is now often understood that one should not have a panel of five male experts only. One should also invite at least one woman. This is often applied in a manner in which a woman is invited, regardless of qualifications. Rather than accept that the previous issue was that organizers were overlooking and excluding actually qualified women, who based on the criteria applied should have been invited, organizers simply invite a woman, any woman. The underlying message continues to be that it’s so outside of their conception of reality that a woman could do anything worthwhile that we’re all interchangeable. This is policed with the idea that failure to celebrate any woman, no matter how manifestly incompetent or positively detrimental they may be to you, is now an act of treason against a team no one signed up to, as one’s personhood is completely swallowed up in one’s identity as a woman (and not an independently thinking human)
Sometimes people even ask for ‘a female perspective’ on topics that can’t remotely be connected to what’s between anyone’s legs. I was once asked during a job interview if I had ‘a feminist theory of contracts’. When I responded in the negative, the interview was quickly wound up. Do men have ‘masculine theories of contracts’? I learned law the same way they did. A contract’s a contract. I don’t recall having any difficulty learning the law of contract – in fact, I excelled at it. I have my perspective, which I don’t think has been so tainted by my gender as to be somehow (and via a manner no one can explain), irrationally and completely inseparable from it. And if someone believes it has been, they should address this point, rather than making blanket assumptions.
Blanket assumptions, however, have been on the rise for the past decade or so, and I think their total impact has been to generate less respect for anyone who happens to be a woman, and certainly a severe downslide in the acceptance of the diversity of any group of people, including women. Rather than accept the reality that there are as many different kinds of women as there are women, we seem to be on our way to constructing a new version of womanliness that will ultimately be just as confining and closely policed as the last one. Many of the things today that are billed as ‘disrupting the patriarchy’ are misogyny reasserting itself by pushing us into a pre-defined box.
And to make matters worse, on the way, we’ve come to ignore a whole raft of behaviours that are truly detrimental, frankly ass-holish, and that are often directed at women who do not conform to misogynist expectations of ‘correct’ behaviour. In other words, you get punished for behaving in ways that do not conform with someone else’s designation of you as an inherently low-status individual and the assumptions they make about how you are going to behave in any given situation.
So, in these blogs, I will, using stick figures, attempt to show the reality of my own life experiences in this department. These are, frankly, a lot more disturbing and depressing than most of what you will see in media. Also, I hasten to explain that none of this is exaggerated even slightly. It’s just the unvarnished, very unpleasant truth.
So, here’s the first little scenario that happens to me a lot. It begins with me simply heading somewhere, minding my own business.
Note that this is very different than a scenario where someone genuinely offers to help you, because you are struggling to carry a large package or looking around like a lost tourist. In the scenario described here, all the guy wants is to lord it over you for a while and then tell his buddies that he met ‘a hot chick’ today that he’s now adding to his mental harem (note: with this kind of guy, how you look is immaterial – as long as you flatter his opinion of himself, you automatically become ‘hot’). So, because you’ve thwarted this little fantasy and he is, in fact, not needed, he’s going to punish you for his disappointed expectations.
This is all quite unpleasant and the accost-you-out-of-nowhere act (which takes many varieties) is one of the biggest reasons I don’t particularly care to meet new people. You never know when they are going to unload on you like this.
But what is really annoying, is what happens when you tell someone.
That’s right. Some random dude demands that you fulfil his crazed emotional needs out of nowhere, and society’s answer is: ‘you should have given him what he wanted’.
I think there is an acceptance in this that these guys are mentally pretty whipped and will never change, hence pursuing that line of reasoning is hopeless. Thus, just endure the attack and get rid of them ASAP. There’s also, I believe a sense in this ‘advice’, of trying to ‘fix’ the situation, and avoid an escalation where this guy gets violent on you (after all, the threats have already begun).
That’s not without its scars, either, though, because when you accept help you don’t need from someone it makes you look weak. Also, it does indeed, ‘normalize’ behaviour that is extremely destructive. There may be no hope for these wannabe tyrants on a personal level, but surely their behaviour should not be tolerated to the extent that they are given management positions from which to perpetrate this kind of behaviour, which FYI certainly occurs a lot more in allegedly ‘professional’ atmospheres than randomly on the street.
I believe what we require in these situations (and so many others) is a kind of etiquette, because the etiquette we’re using now isn’t working.
Firstly, let’s deal with the ‘après-event’. If someone tells you that someone has accosted them and become belligerent over their refusal to take their advice-no-one-asked-for, refrain from telling them how they can avoid being shouted at by surrendering in advance. Maybe just say something, like, ‘Yeah, what a jerk, eh?’ This is often all it takes. Sure, it didn’t ‘fix’ the situation (this jerk is still going to jerk around), but it places the moral burden, as it were, back on the jerk, and does not blame the victim (again, I’m not exaggerating here, people have been giving me advice on how to placate men who pick on me all my life).
Secondly, let’s deal with in-situ (when he’s getting all worked up that you aren’t doing what he’s barged into your life to tell you to do): these kinds of guys are usually pretty easy to deflate by some other guy coming along and saying something like, ‘Yo, mate, what’s your issue?’ (unfortunately, other women, to these problem guys, are ‘all bitches together’ so intervention by other women rarely has the same effect). These troubled men can’t explain their completely irrational issue, so often the least demand that they do so, makes them throw in the towel and take off. Often, of course, on to the next victim. But still, I find this a marked improvement on the accepted state of affairs today, where most people just sit around and see if you defend yourself against these out-of-the-blue attacks as if it is some kind of gladiatorial entertainment and/or suggest that you are being the bitch for failing to buckle under.
Thirdly, let’s deal with puncturing the fantasy world that perpetuates this behaviour. Does Larry (as I will henceforth call this living annoyance in all future jobs) really go around helping fair maidens everywhere, as he constantly tells everyone he says he does? Did he really ‘fix’ everything for Linda and Amy and Sarah and Jody around the office, like he’s constantly telling everyone? I think a nice question to ask Larry when he’s pontificating about all of the things he does is: ‘really, Larry? How exactly?’
I think we don’t do this, because we all know the Larrys of this world are incredibly emotionally fragile. We let them coast, because we’re kind of afraid of what they’ll do if we don’t. But making them my burden and the burden of every other person who has to bear the brunt of their behaviour is also not an acceptable state of affairs. So…much to ponder…there’s more where this came from. So much more.