Fifty years after the publication of Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking book, “The Feminine Mystique,” the face of feminism has undeniably changed. Terms like intersectionality, sex-positivism and rape culture are now in the vernacular, and there’s a movement to re-claim sexist slurs and remove their stigma. It’s not your mother’s feminism.
Currently in its third wave, the movement has lost much of the power it once had, when it had the more broadly understood goals of dismantling legal obstacles to female equality in the government and workplace. The aims of third wave feminism, though no less admirable than those of their predecessors, are less easy to pin down.
For this reason, some say that feminism, after initially making a tangible difference for women, has stalled.
To continue to be relevant and effective in improving the lives of women, feminism must become, again, about women, and what women themselves can do to improve their status. It is the best way to get more women to understand and support feminism’s basic goals. Only by drumming up the same support that it had in the 1960s and 1970s can we see a return to real progress.
Recently, feminism seems to have been directed not towards what women should do to enhance their status, but what men shouldn’t do. Most of the discourse is aimed at eliminating gender-based violence, and while this is of course an incredibly important issue the feminist movement must address, unfortunately, upending a paradigm in which misogyny and violence against women is accepted is not the place to start.
Not only is that Herculean task incredibly difficult, I believe the reasoning behind it hurts the kind of female agency the movement was meant to engender in the first place. One of my favorite quotes, by Roseanne Barr, is “The thing women have yet to learn is nobody gives you power. You just take it.” Fed up with their claustrophobic, nearly option-less lives, second-wave feminists attacked institutionalized sexism from multiple angles at once, ultimately destabilizing the system.
I don’t think “Take Back the Night” and “Slut Walk” are having the same effect. Unfortunately, the stereotype of feminists as “man-hating” harpies endures and causes some women to reject the movement. To combat this, we must be proactive and direct our efforts to where they’ll make a real, tangible difference.
Improving conditions for women in the workplace, which are still not up to second-wave snuff, is one place to start. Making women more respected and valued members of society will precipitate other changes, as sexist behavior will simply become less acceptable.
Feminism isn’t about hating men, but about improving the lives of women. It doesn’t ask for the betterment of female lives at the expense of men. The only way feminism “hurts” men is by making sexist behavior less acceptable.
You can love the men in your life and still realize that they have privileges you do not. Wanting women to be afforded those same privileges doesn’t make you hysterical, disloyal, or hateful. It makes you a feminist.
Hannah Sparks is a Collegian columnist. She can be reached at [email protected]
Dr. Ed Cutting • Mar 24, 2013 at 11:46 am
Hannah — I don’t remember the citation, but they did two studies with children a while back. First, they let a bunch of girls play with trucks and to their surprise, found that the girls had created truck “families” — the “Daddy” truck, the “Mommy” truck and the “baby” trucks — a society of Tonka trucks.
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Then they had a bunch of boys play with dolls and a doll house. The boys soon discovered if they laid the doll house over on its side, it made a ramp which they could use to launch the dolls into space. The boys soon had a competitive game where they all tried to send their doll flying downrange the furthest.
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There is something there — and I like to remind people that the entire concept of female beauty — the fashion industry, the fashion magazines and the rest –is women & gay men. Again…
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And as to the famous/infamous study that found that teachers tended to call on male students more often than female ones, and to spend more time with their answers, there are two more things often overlooked. First, these (like most teachers in the elementary grades) were FEMALE teachers — this was a female authority doing this.
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There also is a second part of that study that is rarely reported — after observing that the teachers tended to pay more attention to the male students, the researchers went to the female students and asked them if they knew why the teacher was doing this. One 10-year-old responded “because the boys will be bad if she doesn’t.” The girls understood…
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We’ve spent half a century trying to make three generations of boys into girls — and we haven’t been able to do it. Without exception, every one of the bright/ambitious women whom I knew as an undergrad has walked away — partially or completely — from a “good” job in her desired career so she could have children and be home with them. In one case, my jaw dropped when a friend told me that she was “doing the mommy thing” — she was upwardly bound in her field and leaving the guys way behind but this is a free country and people are free to live their lives as they wish.
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It is discrimination to say that one must be a certain way or only do certain things because one is male or female. But is it not equally discrimination to say that one must not be a certain way or not do certain things because one is male or female?
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Should my friend have been required to put her kids into daycare and to continue on in her career — as happened in the Soviet Union? Or should she have been free to make her own choices?
Dr. Ed Cutting • Mar 24, 2013 at 11:22 am
The human hand — male or female — has the exact same number of bones, muscles & nerves — regardless of its size. Hence while a bigger hand has more physical strength, it has less fine motor control for the same reasons why it is easier to parallel park a compact car than a PVTA bus.
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Men tend to have bigger hands, women tend to have smaller ones — this is an objective fact. Not even getting into the nature v. nurture debate, not even getting into the possibility of there being real biochemical differences between male and female brains, anyone able to conduct objective research can find that male hands (and bones in general) tend to be bigger than female ones.
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Hence, in general, women are going to do better with tasks that require fine motor control, be it fancy hand sewing or setting motorcycle piston rings. Most guys don’t even know what a piston ring is — each piston has two or three pieces of spring steel that make a tight seal between it and the adjacent cylinder wall so that when the cylinder “fires”, the explosion can’t “blow by” the piston. Instead, the piston is forced down, turning the crankshaft which turns a bunch of other stuff and makes the car (or motorcycle) go forward.
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There is a direct correspondence between the size of the engine and the size of the pistons — the “size” of the engine is the volume of air displaced by the pistons. Hence while the piston on a large Diesel truck can be 5″-6″ around and old ones are often used as ash trays, a motorcycle piston has the diameter of a stack of quarters (a chain saw piston has the diameter of a stack of dimes). For a bunch of reasons, it is not uncommon to burn/blow a hole through the center of a motorcycle piston — and you have to replace it if you want the bike to run.
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I have had to ask my mother, my sister, and other women I knew to put the new piston in because my hand was just too big to fit. Fingers only bend at their joints and hence I couldn’t hold both of the rings in at the same time — the fine motor control issue. (Yes, there are tools that professional mechanics use instead in case one is wondering, but I didn’t have them.) And the female hand could do something that mine simply couldn’t.
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Hannah, this isn’t sexism — most men wouldn’t even recognize a piston if you handed it to them, rebuilding engines on this level is a greasy/grimy “guy-type” thing that no one is ever going to consider “girly” — and yet the woman’s hand could do something that the man’s couldn’t.
Take vision — the female eye apparently is able to tell the difference of how makeup will look under various forms of light (i.e. indoors or outdoors) and some women have “make up” mirrors that simulate 5 or more different types of light. By contrast, I don’t see exactly the same colors out of both eyes. Hannah, I am not getting into if women should wear makeup or not, my point is that women are able to observe fine nuances of differences in color that men simply can’t.
The ability to move fingers with precision, the ability to notice fine distinctions of color — those are objective differences. What the feminists fail to understand is that men & women are different and complement each other — that different does not necessarily mean unequal and that there is “female privilege” every bit as much as “male privilege.” Or put a different way, someone over 6 feet tall can reach things on the top shelf with ease, but also is often combing dried blood out of his hair (from hitting it on something).