Ohhhh God, feminism...

Preface:

This post is rage-induced. However, I would deeply appreciate an actual conversation on the issue, and I welcome comments, concerns, and/or questions through blog responses, facebook messages, or even wall posts. I don't want to pretend that I alone have the "end all" answer to anything, and it's important to understand that while I may be stubborn and argumentative, I am capable of lacking in knowledge as well.

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Okay, so this has been an issue bubbling up and around Reddit for a long time, and every time it shows up where I'm subscribed, my position is discounted and I'm seen as part of the problem.

To give you some backstory, there's a forum on Reddit called "Men's Rights." This group is, to be honest, mostly reactionary people looking for a reason to point at feminism and yell about them feeling entitled or some such nonsense. However, MR often brings very necessary reminders to our perceptual lenses- the reminders that our gender dichotomy is not an issue of womens' rights. It's an issue of gender inequality. These posts include points about false rape claims, domestic abuse charges, parenting, trust, societal bias, and the ever-present problem of the myth of masculinity itself.

Every once in a while, I'll come across a post about feminism that disparages the MR group for the initial reason I cited; many are jerks who misunderstand the point of the MR group. However, they generalize the statement across the board against all MRers. My response is always puzzled and concerned, because the way I see it, they're doing the exact same thing on the other side. Let's look at the very words we're using:
"Feminism"
"Men's Rights"

We're talking about gender problems, and we're trying to exclude an entire gender.
Yes, let's get it out of the way- women face far more societal inequality than men. There's no question about that. Am I discounting it? No- it's incredibly important. However, my point is that it's reckless and problematic to focus on it to such an extent that we forget about the problems facing humanity as a result of the gender dichotomy.

Let's examine a popular one- Men who excel in business are thrifty and wise, while women are bitchy and demanding. Men are encouraged to be CEOs with business ambition, and women are not.
This overall problem leads to:
Women
Lower wages
Lower job satisfaction
Lower job opportunities
Lower job ceiling and often a lower job floor
Societal insults and pressures
among other things.

Men
The expectation to be ambitious
The false dichotomy that if you're not, you're weak
Being forced into an unhealthy male dominated world of business
Being raised to value the importance of money over emotion
Getting trapped into workaholism
etc.

Now, yes, the situation, I would say, is pretty heavily biased towards women having the more raw deal, however, my point is that both parties are stuck regardless of what they want, which causes deep issues for both sides. As a psychology buff, I won't neglect the immense damage that can be caused by a person being trained all his life to believe an ideal about money and business only to find that he hates that life.

This gender dichotomy affects many issues that we don't talk about enough. The dichotomy causes psychological bullying among girls and physical bullying among boys. It causes eating disorders among females and violence among males. It causes hopelessness in women and stress-filled expectations for men.

This is not an issue of "feminism" and it is not an issue of "men's rights." This is an issue of gender inequality. There is so much to lose and so much to gain for both sides that we shouldn't label them as "sides," we should call it what it is- "humankind."

So often I see thrown around the word, "misogyny" to people who just want to point out that the problem extends beyond women. It discredits their own position and makes me think that they're not examining the problem from any perspective other than their own- which can be good, but it's a double-edged sword. Personal perspective is informative and emotional, but it lacks a sense of big-picture perspective, and it vehemently avoids challenges to your logic, even when those challenges are rightly deserved.

This is a confusing, complicated problem, and we cannot afford to approach it only from a single angle.

We cannot simply "raise" women up to the standing of men. Nor can we "lower" men to the standing of women. Both ideas are insulting and belie a total misunderstanding of the issues at the heart.
If we raise women up to where men are, suddenly, women have no maternal leave for parenting, women are thrown into jail as often as men, and women inherit this lovely statistic:
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/glance/tables/vsxtab.cfm
More violent crimes have always been committed against men than women. This covers the vast array of violent crimes available. While domestic abuse remains largely centered around the female victims, abuse in general (a less-discussed problem) is centered more around males. This is particularly true when we examine prison violence and issues of bullying.

I would also like to note that finding that site was nearly impossible through google since nearly every hit was about domestic abuse towards either men or women, and no one seemed interested in plain ol' everyday vanilla abuse.


So- in ending here, I want to be absolutely clear. I am not suggesting the issues caused by the gender dichotomy are more important for men OR women. I am not suggesting the issues caused are more numerous for men (they're not).

What I am suggesting is that ignoring an entire gender's problems caused by the same dumbass societal illness is effectively ignoring the problem itself. If raise women up to the status of men, we're going to cause just as many problems as we're going to solve. We need to actively deconstruct the "status" of both men and women such that there are no expectations left at all. Once that is complete, we can lump both genders together before rebuilding the foundations of how we understand gender. Only then will there be true equality.

-
Waddles

I don't normally get many messages. Let's see how much hate mail I get for this...