Let's Discuss Feminism Without Killing Each Other
What is feminism, and what does it get right?
Why I don’t Think Anyone will Kill Me.
When I started this blog, I promised to never write about the culture war topics. I don’t plan to post anything about the latest debates over cancel culture, race, or gender identity. I also won’t avoid these issues when they arise. My equality piece, for instance, argued against pursuing demographic equality. While I cited race in one example, I think the same argument applies to say, equal representation for conservatives in academia. I didn’t write that article to attack or defend wokeness. There’s enough articles doing that.
And, yet, you’re reading an article about feminism. After some deliberation, I decided that the culture war no longer includes feminism. Maybe it’s just my media diet or friend group, but feminism seemed to have disappeared from the mainstream discussion. I can remember a time when friends would link me to feminist articles in blogs or mainstream outlets, when I would see “smash the patriarchy” or “feminist tears” attire, and where every online political figure fit into the feminist or anti-feminist camp. In college, I read feminist and feminist-critical papers in classes about philosophy, art, and anthropology. I have identified as a feminist or anti-feminist at different points in my life, but I haven’t given the topic much though in recent years. In both the mainstream press and internet dumpster fire, other issues seem to have replaced it.. As a result, I don’t consider a post about feminism to pertain to the culture war anymore than an SNES vs Genesis debate would pertain to the modern gaming industry.
With this cultural shift, I think we’re all more capable of a mature discussion on feminism. We can avoid defensiveness, obfuscating terminology, and gruesome details on individual allegations of sexual assault. I’m confident that I can write this without being penned as a feminist or anti-feminist writer. I think I’ll incur more rage from criticizing Wingspan than anything I write in this article. In other words, no one cares that much anymore, and I’m always ready to bore my readers.
How do we Define Ideas?
To make things easy, here’s the Wikipedia page to No True Scotsman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman. I want to save my commenters a few clicks.
In all seriousness, a lot of colloquially feminist ideas kinda suck. I don’t favor any sort of misandry that takes the form of “men are evil” or “men are trash”. I also oppose confusing claims about “gender.” I don’t see any reason to deny that men and women differ in behavioral traits (though, these differences are smaller than one might expect). I don’t particularly care whether an individual man or an individual woman obtains this or that powerful position, and we don’t need to pretend that the US has made no progress in women’s issues over the past half-century.
Can I just dismiss those ideas as not “true” feminism? It’s easy enough to defend feminism by insisting [things you like] are real feminism while [things I don’t like] are fake-news knock-off feminism. It’s just an easy for a anti-feminist to do the opposite. However, I think these dismissals can create too much abstraction, and prevent us from discussing extant beliefs. We’re never going dig deep enough to find “true feminism.” We’re stuck with the stuff that exists in the real world.
To reduce this abstraction, I’ll engage in even more abstraction. What version of X counts for X?. Anti-communists works like the Black Book of Communism will note the failures of Stalinist Russia or similar regimes. Communists can counter that they’re not arguing for Stalinism, while also highlighting the “actually existing” capitalism (like climate change). The anti-communists can say that they don’t believe in these things, and everyone leaves the discussion with a headache.
Each side claims that they support X, but that Y is a bad form of X or that Y is not a form of X. On one hand, these claims make logical sense. I support data analytics, but I think many firms apply it poorly. On the other hand, I don’t think anyone finds these dismissals satisfying. We will never see that ideal, perfect form of X that we find in philosophy seminars. Shouldn’t we care about the results of X in the material word?
I have two thoughts on this problem. First, I think we have to consider the results of “actually existing” X, whether or not X is the “true X.” People need to explain why the application of their ideas will perform better in the future.
Secondly, we can try to find the “essence” or “core” of an idea. Doing so is, uh, hard. Christianity, for example, includes thousands of denominations, and I don’t think it’s fruitful to sift through each one to find the One True Christianity. Instead, I think we can find some commonalities between them, and see which of these commonalities the believers consider most important. I’m not an expert in Christianity, but I imagine these core beliefs include the resurrection, forgiveness, and original sin. On the other hand, I don’t think the prohibition against mixing fabrics seems important to practicing Christians. If I researched every single denomination, I might find some that don’t believe in those core ideas. I might also find non-Christian belief systems that believe in them. There’s no quadratic formula for this; we’re going to have to take some shortcuts. My best attempt goes something like this: set A is a core idea of X if any idea with A is likely to be X, and any idea lacking A is unlikely to be X.
What might set A look like for feminism? If I need a clear definition of a complex topic, I’m not going to find it on Tumblr or Reddit. In The Gender Knot, Allan Johnson defines patriarchy as a system that is male-dominated, male identified, and male centered. Male-dominated means that men tend to control the levers of power. Male-identified means that we tend to view men as the default person, and male-centered means that we tend to focus on the needs and experiences of men. I think these ideas plausibly represent core ideas of feminism. I think any ideology that accepts these is likely to be feminist, and anyone that rejects them is highly unlikely to be feminist.
Before analyzing this definition, I need to state three caveats. One, I read The Gender Knot years ago and don’t recall many of its details. However, I remember this definition of patriarchy, as it represented a point of clarity in a debate that lacked it. Two, you’ll notice Johnson makes a descriptive claim, not a normative one. This definition alone doesn’t tell us what to do about patriarchy. It’s logically consistent to accept Johnson’s claims and believe that patriarchy is a good thing. As such,I will ignore the ought questions for now.
Three, I need to address the word “patriarchy,” since I’ve seen the term draw tons of ire and confusion. How could the term “patriarchy” apply to both Saudi Arabia and the United States? The answer: that’s how nouns work. The noun “conflict” refers to both world wars and bloodless (though often blood-boiling) merge conflicts in software development.
In another universe, English contains a grammatical feature in which nouns end in “u” to represent a dramatic or severe version and “a” for a banal version. In that universe, I think Allan Johnson would argue for patriarchy-a, not patriarchy-u. That universe might have also avoided many of the bad faith arguments I’ve seen over the years. There, people could not use evidence of patriarchy-a to argue that we live in patriarchy-u, and their opponents could not employ evidence against patriarchy-u to argue that we don’t live in a patriarchy-a. For the rest of this piece, I will stick with Normal Universe Grammar and use the term “patriarchy,” but it will always refer to a patriarchy-a. I agree that the US isn’t Saudi Arabia, though some subcultures or corporate environments might amount to a mini patriarchy-u.
With those caveats, let’s discuss the definition.
Male Dominated
This one seems right. I didn’t research any state, but we all understand the big picture: most powerful politicians, business executives, military leaders, etc are men. Men hold more power than women. More often than the reverse, men hold power over women. I don’t mean the sort of nebulous power that gender expectations put upon all of us. I’m referring to the sort of power where one person says “here’s an order” and some other people say “oh geeze, I gotta follow that order.” In the US, men are more likely to hold the former position, and women are more likely to hold the ladder.
People often counter this by stating that many women hold positions of power and many men don’t. That’s true, but I don’t think it refutes the point. Consider this claim: military officers hold more power than infantry soldiers. The infantry soldiers could stage a mutiny, and that would provide them more power than their former superiors. Still, this wouldn’t refute the general principle that officers hold power over soldiers.
Another point boils down to the idea that a lot of life sucks more for men. Men die earlier, get sent to war, constitute most of the prison population, and suffer more than women in a myriad of other ways. I agree, but I still don’t think this refutes the male domination piece. First, there are other power structures; it’s not as if mass incarceration refutes patriarchy. Second, none of these aspects (generally) represent women holding power over men. Finally, life-enjoyment is not the same as power. Would you rather be a software developer at Google or the CEO of Google? Personally, I’d prefer the developer role. Being a CEO seems so stressful and unpredictable that it's probably not worth the extra money and power. Yet, the CEO clearly holds more power than the programmer, even if his life sucks more.
Finally, there’s the topic of nature vs nurture. Is it just natural for men to dominate? While the answer should inform our solutions, it doesn’t refute the claim of male domination. I think it’s uncontroversial to say that humans dominate chimpanzees. We cut down their forests while they barely impact our lives. I also don’t hesitate to say that this unequal distribution of power stems entirely from our DNA. For the mere description of male domination, nature vs nurture doesn’t matter.
Verdict: True
Male Identified
Johnson observes that men are the “default” sex. We refer to an unidentified person as “he,” though the singular “they” is slowly taking that spot. On bathroom doors, the generic stick figure refers to the men’s room. Despite his alien origin, Superman is male, and that seems normal to us. Data, a pretty nondescript android, looks male. Women can wear men’s clothes, and not the other way around, because we view men’s clothing as the “default” set. Despite never reading it, you probably one which sex Simone de Beauvoir writes about in The Second Sex. I’ve heard many women say they feel like a divergence from the “normal” sex, but I’ve never heard any man say the same.
That said, I need to acknowledge that none of these points provide conclusive evidence. Maybe the comments section will feature dozens of men stating that they feel like aberrant sex and dozens of women saying they feel like the normal one. If that occurs, I can’t refute it. I’m kinda reliant on the “vibe” for this one.
Verdict: Probably true, but not conclusive
Male Centered
I’ve read people like Tyler Cowen argue that our society has been feminizing (and it's a good thing). I’ve also heard conservatives like Tom Cotton argue that our society has been feminizing (and it’s a bad thing). On the other side, progressives will argue that we’re too masculine. There’s probably some extent to which the media features more men, but that’s easily explainable by the male domination and identification. As far as I can tell, both women and men have ample access to media that centers them. Ultimately, I don’t know what people center nowadays, and I’m not sure my weirdo readership will help.
Verdict: ???
Bad Stuff
Though I mostly accept Johnson’s claims, I still need to discuss the negative aspects of feminism. Going back to the communism and capitalism analogy, I need to address feminism’s Stalin and climate change. For this exercise, I think it’s useful to divide the “crappy ideas” into two types: academic and mainstream.
I can’t pretend to speak for academic feminism. Johnson’s The Gender Knot remains the only academic feminist book that I’ve read. As for academic articles, I probably can’t even legally access them. That said, I know there’s rejections of biological differences between men and women, and strange writing about performativity. I either don’t agree with or can’t understand these arguments, but I’m not worried about their impact on the real world. I don’t think rejection of biology can withstand much real world contact. If anything, I think people still exaggerate male-female differences (e.g., “women are so hard to understand.”) Secondly, I don’t think confusing academic concepts impact the real world. If Martha Nussbaum can’t understand Butler, how will the layperson?
As for the mainstream idiocy, I also don’t think feminism itself adds much to the ugliness in the word. During its heyday, internet feminism lead to misandry and other unacceptable behavior towards men. That’s bad, but I don’t think it’s any worse than the usual nastiness that men face. After all, It was the anti-feminist movements that gave us “soy boy” and “cuck.” I’ll also address lean-in feminism quickly: I don’t think feminism invented the idea of assholes trying to climb the corporate latter. Ultimately, I think angry internet feminism displaced bad behavior rather than creating it.
The Salience Objection
In 2016, Democratic presidential hopeful Lincoln Chafee ran a campaign so forgettable that I will always remember it. Out of all his policies, the former Rhode Island governor and senator enjoyed advocating for switching the United States to the metric system. I agreed with him, but I didn’t think the issue warranted much attention. The voters agreed, and he dropped out before the Iowa Caucus.
I could see a similar objection to feminism. Even if Johnson’s descriptions hold, what can we do about it? It’s hard to legislate sex and gender, whether these differences stem from nature or nurture. Maybe we can’t help women as women, but we can help working class people, many of whom are women. For example, the PRO Act might benefit predominantly female service-sector workers. However, it would benefit these women as workers, not as women.
Ultimately, I think the salience objection will win, if it hasn’t already. Americans mostly care about the economy, healthcare, crime, education, and other bread-and-butter-issues, and I think that will remain true for the rest of my life. Regardless, I think the topic of feminism deserves intelligent discussion, and I hope I’ve provided a tiny bit of that.
Very thought-provoking post. I tend to agree that “feminism” as a cultural word-of-the-moment is losing momentum, turning outdated. It’s associated now with moms wearing pussy hats and corporate pop-culture social justice, one step behind the priorities of the *real* radicals.
Like you, I’ve bounced a bit between feminism and rejection of (especially more current) feminism. But as a legal aid attorney, I find myself returning to it again and again, because while I don’t subscribe to the idea that “men are trash” and find the smug derision associated with misandry dull and juvenile, I have to keep confronting the fact that most of the women I represent would have, like, 75% fewer problems if not for men.
I’ve never worked in family law. But in eviction defense, in consumer protection, in immigration law, it’s a constant: The women have been brutalized by the men in their lives. The number of low-income female clients I’ve had with an active protection order against a man who has physically hurt them and/or threatened to kill them has got to be over 50%. Women come to me and the fact that they have recently spent the night in the hospital because of something a man did to them is a background detail in a complicated legal story, worth mentioning only as context.
I worked a year in a minimum-wage back-of-house job in a restaurant between law school and my first legal job. Over time, word got around there was an attorney on staff, and women started pulling me aside. Every single one of them wanted to know if I could help them with a problem a man had caused: A recent uptick in domestic violence. A protective order ignored again and again and the cops did nothing. He said he’d take the kids two days and kept them a week and I couldn’t do anything and I can’t afford to go back to court. He said he’d stop helping with rent if I don’t take him back. His brother is stalking me. I went on two dates with a guy and now his friends wait around the corner in a car wherever I go to make sure I’m not seeing anyone else. He found out I’m in school because the court forgot to redact one page of the record and he waited all day in the parking lot of my community college with a gun. A customer follows me home every night ever since he learned I live next to the restaurant. The UPS guy comes in when he knows I’m working alone and follows me around.
I struggle with this. I generally believe that the world, even where men dominate in many spheres, is much more complicated than oppressor ==> oppressed. I know that the representative sample of women ==> women in poverty ==> women in poverty with complex legal problems is smaller than it feels; my job definitely causes significant selection bias. But I really have to work to believe that, whenever I have a week where I see more than an average number of women who live under the thumb of men who expect women to be under their thumb in this brutally physical way. The progress of women’s rights in the U.S. is so deeply bound to class - poor women have the right to divorce and the power to have their own bank accounts, but so often not the ability to live without a second income, to refuse sex (and the ensuing children) to a man who demands it, or the money to make rent.
Of course, not many of these women would know or care what I was talking about if I phrased their situations in the Marxist-feminist framework, them as an oppressed class and men as their oppressors. They’re often leery of educated do-gooders who imply that help is contingent on their leaving the man in question. The idea they *should* leave their relationships would strike many of them as presumptive and naïve. If you want marriage, kids, sex, a relationship, this is how it is - it’s how it is for every single woman in their lives, mothers and aunts and sisters. They don’t think of themselves as oppressed, just as individuals in tough situations handling them as best they can.
In the end I think my personal definition of “feminism” revolves around anything that would make these women able to live without having to depend on a man, for as long and on whatever terms they wished. Childcare, higher wages, a social safety net geared toward supporting mothers, anti-stalking laws, decent health insurance, educational opportunity, protective orders with actual legal teeth, consciousness-raising circles, all-female communes with high walls--I don’t know what makes that happen soonest but whatever it is, that’s my priority.
So is the culture male dominated, male identified, male centered? Sure. Are men monsters? No.
There are some difficult things about being a woman in our society, and those include the familiar complaints.
At work, women (even confident women) are spoken over, interrupted and their ideas dismissed, compared to even really dumb men with bad ideas.
For careers in the same family, it’s almost always the man’s career that comes first; and if the man is offered a better job, well duh, the family moves for that job, and screw the woman’s job or what she might want or aspire to. Women’s jobs are not as important. Even in families with, say, two PhDs, the man usually determines where they move, and the woman has to piece together some adjunct work here and there.
There is really a sense in which women are deeply held by our culture to be “lesser” whether or not anyone holds that view overtly.
At home, while things have been improving for a while, women are still the default parent (doctor’s visits, buying the school clothes, buying the presents, arranging the child care, staying home when the kids are sick), and often the default house cleaner (and various other things). If the family is going out of town, the woman is typically the one who packs everything, arranges pet-sitters and mail pickup, shops for the trip, and often (depending on the destination) cooks and cleans on the trip. On holidays, the woman is typically the one to make sure everyone’s drinks are filled, that everyone’s food preferences are accommodated, who has shopped and cleaned for the occasion and who often cleans up afterward.
There are still these big imbalances in work and home life, even if you’ve got a model husband who treats you well. And…
If you’ve _not_ got a model husband, he comes and goes as he wishes; whereas if the wife wants to go out, she “asks” if he can “watch” his children and then she makes it super easy for him, preparing a dinner ahead of time and bathing the kids early.
So yeah, is our society imbalanced in terms of power and perceived worth? It’s not even a question.
Insofar as feminism says these types of imbalances are wrong and need to be addressed, I’m all for that. I’m not for third wave feminism that decided that work and domestic issues were boring and decided “sex work was empowering.” Yeah no. It’s not. It’s just sad.
And it’s true that men have a raw deal in other ways. They have more learning disabilities. They have shorter life expectancies. (Those are not things that men do for women though, in the same way that women shop and cook and clean and move for men, and make sure they have fun on vacation and at dinner parties.) They are more likely to be shipped off to fight in wars. They are expected to provide for and physically protect their families. They are often the default bug killer and handyman of the household. The status of the family is often determined by the man’s job, so he needs to worry about status, whereas women’s job is often considered extra money (no pressure to be a high earner or have high status).
Things are hard for everyone. I like to see imbalances made less …unbalanced.