Too Far? Feminism Hasn’t Gone Far Enough.

 

My usual response to men complaining about the evils of feminism is to laugh, if only to stop myself from descending into rage. It doesn’t surprise me that so many misunderstand what feminism actually is. Even the most ardent activists can struggle to tackle a decades long falsified narrative that paints wanting liberation from the patriarchy as evil man hating.

 

While I myself am a feminist, I fully understand why many women don’t label themselves as such, not just because of the archaic stereotypes but because many don’t see a place for them in feminism. The mainstream Western feminist narrative often excludes such women, so who can blame them when they say they’re not feminists?

 

Feminism has a long way to go, and frankly, it needs to go further than it goes now.

 

A few details: Less than 20% of British MPs are women. One in four women will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. The Fawcett Society reported last year that women still earn 14.9% less on average as men for doing the same job, and that this gap is at risk of worsening. A 2013 UNICEF report showed that over 125million women in Africa and the Middle East have been subjected to female genital mutilation. A recent VSO world report revealed it will take 120 years before women make up half of the world’s elected leaders. When feminist activist Anita Sarkessian set up a Kickstarter to raise funds for a web series of sexism in gaming, she was repeatedly threatened with rape and violence.

 

Next year in Colorado, voters will cast ballots on an anti-abortion law known as a personhood amendment, which defines life at the moment of conception, thus outlawing abortion, certain forms of birth control and could possibly lead to women being charged with involuntary manslaughter should they miscarry. Before becoming Australia’s Prime Minister, Tony Abbott proudly stood by signs aimed at Julia Gillard, calling her a “bitch” and a “witch”. In 2007, Human Rights Watch reported the case of a rape victim in Saudi Arabia who received 200 lashings, both for her own rape and for speaking out against the sentencing.

 

That’s a tiny fraction of the misogyny in our world. I could write about this all day and barely scratch the surface. When faced with this onslaught of misogyny that ruins lives, can anyone blame women for getting angry? How can anyone look at the facts and then still claim feminism’s gone too far?

 

The article to which I offer my rebuttal is a curious one. It’s short and focused primarily on a dated generalisation that all women want to marry and have children. I personally have no desire to do either and know many women who share my sentiment. Not all women are heterosexual, not all families are comprised of the old nuclear model and not all children in said families are biological. The forced default mode of the harried career woman desperate to have a child before she shrivels up and becomes useless to society is a romantic comedy plot, not the way that all women live their lives. To speak of all women as an amoeba with the same goals writes off the majority of our experiences and the battles we face.

 

Given that we’re currently in the middle of a recession that’s seen the introduction of the bedroom tax, a rise in food banks and the choice between heating our homes and eating dinner, it’s no wonder that so many women are worried about how to provide for themselves and their families. Men are still seen as the providers by the state (yet childcare provisions are shockingly low and benefits are cut for mothers), society (hence the tiny proportion of stay at home dads) and the workplace (as evidenced by the disparities in pay between the genders as I mentioned above).

 

As an unemployed woman, I worry about my situation. The last thing on our minds when we’re in dire straits is when we’ll be getting married and spawning. Being selective about a partner doesn’t condemn one to a life of loneliness. Women are constantly told they need to settle for less because they’re not going to be young forever. Why should anyone be forced into a situation that doesn’t make them happy just to please some insecure individuals? Then again, David Cameron tried to push this as government policy with his marriage tax breaks and look at how popular that was.

 

It says a lot to me that when a man writes about feminism, or what he perceives as feminism, that his focus is shockingly narrow, condescending, and riddled with all the wrong priorities. Maybe if he starts looking at women as more than shrews on a message board trying to emasculate an entire gender then we might get somewhere. 

 

 

 

Read Quentin Hawkin's article in which he proposes that feminism has gone too far 

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