Tag: feminism

Are Women in Danger at the #Occupy Protests?

~ Clarissa ~ 20 Comments

I have no idea why there are fewer women at the #Occupy protests. I’m not even sure it is, indeed, the case that there are fewer women, because all of the footage I’ve seen of the protests seems very balanced in terms of gender representation. But suggesting that women don’t join the protests because they fear being raped or sexually harassed sounds completely bizarre.

We’ve already heard baseless and offensive suggestions that #Occupiers are anti-Semites, looters, litterers, and criminals. Now we are hearing they are all potential rapists. And the really shocking thing is that I found this appalling and unsubstantiated suggestion at a progressive blog. It kind of annoys me that progressive news sources are so bent on convincing women we should be afraid of being politically active because any appearance in a public space will supposedly get us raped. I thought this was a tactic normally adopted by the anti-feminists.

Does anybody need to be reminded that the place where women get raped most often is not a political protest but, rather, their own home?

P.S. And I just found yet another progressive blogger who gushes over the protests and then suggests women don’t join them because they are afraid of being raped. Have these bloggers even tried consulting the statistics? According to every study on rape, the best thing women could do to avoid being raped would be to stay away from home and spend time with strangers.

It Simply Isn’t a Gender Issue!

~ Clarissa ~ 46 Comments

The reason why I don’t participate in the #mencallmethings campaign that collects nasty names that male readers call female bloggers is that I don’t think this is a gender issue. I’ve been called names, insulted, stalked, harassed, and bullied by readers who are both male and female. I’m a feminist blogger but I honestly can’t say I see any special viciousness that male readers address to female readers. The anonymous commenting format of online communications brings a lot of nastiness out in people. There is no gender difference in how vile, threatening, and annoying online commenters can become.

Of course, when you cull out of discussions comments that men address to women, you end up with a very scary picture. But when you add nasty comments that women aim at women, women aim at men and men aim at other men, you immediately realize that this is not a gender issue.

Here is another example of what is essentially a non-gender issue that has been transformed into a feminist cause. One of the commonplaces of feminist discussions (if people need links, I can look for them but this has been discussed so often that I feel there is no need to make a separate search) is that women are socialized to please men. As a result, even in professional settings, women rarely dare to contradict men and formulate their objections in the form of questions. Often, they leave their sentences unfinished or use interrogatory intonations to avoid displeasing their male peers. This was even discussed at length in gender studies classes I took in college.

I was present at an intellectual discussion among fellow academics recently and I decided to observe people carefully to see if this was true. I’m not very observant by nature and usually just listen to myself speak during discussions, so here I decided to make a special effort to see if the theory about women trying to please men was true. Almost immediately, I noticed that it was. Female scholars of impeccable academic and intellectual credentials did, indeed, seem very eager to please even those of their male peers who didn’t have nearly the same kind of renown as they did. The star of the gathering, a female scholar who was light years ahead of all of us in terms of publications and scholarly recognition, addressed every response she made to male academics, even those who were beginning graduate students, in the form of questions. The men would sometimes say something completely silly, but she would invariably respond, “That’s very interesting. But don’t you think that. . .?” In her communications with female scholars, she was a lot more blunt and never used the question format.

“Hah!” I thought. “I guess all the theory I read on the subject was right. Women (of course, women from cultures other than mine because we have a very different history of gender relations) do try to please men to their own detriment.”

I was planning to write a post about that but never had the time to do so. And then I attended another gathering of academics. Once again, I decided to remain observant and see whether women were especially eager to please men and to avoid antagonizing them by being too argumentative.

The intellectual discussion in question consisted of two very strong, argumentative and aggressive women (yours truly being one of them) and six male academics. I immediately noticed that these male academics (several of them in a much higher standing than the women in question) were very eager to please the women. They worded their objections in the form of questions, allowed their sentences to trail off, and were inordinately pleased when women offered any kind of agreement with their ideas.

And then I had a valuable insight. Some people are more interested in pleasing others, I realized. There are also many people, however, who are not familiar with the concept of pleasing anybody. This is not a gender issue. This is an issue of personal psychology.

There are really crucial issues feminism still has to address. However, by transforming things that have nothing to do with gender into feminist causes, we dilute the power of feminist activism and serve no useful purpose.

On Tolstoy, Feminism, and 1%ers

~ Clarissa ~ 47 Comments

I’m reading a new biography of Leo Tolstoy by Pavel Basinsky. There is no translation yet, so I can’t link to it, but I wanted to share my impressions nonetheless. (If you read in Russian, though, here is the book.)

First of all, I’m really traumatized by the story of Tolstoy’s poor wife, Sonia. If you have read Tolstoy’s Kreutzer’s Sonata, you probably already can imagine the extent of Tolstoy’s contempt for women. It turns out, however, that the writer’s wife wrote her own response to Kreutzer’s Sonata and narrated her side of their marital drama. When Tolstoy married Sonia, he was a very sexually experienced man of 35, while she was a very innocent young girl of barely 18. The way young women from “good families” were brought up at that time made them more ignorant of human sexuality than any of today’s 5-year-olds. Sonia saw her entire married life with Tolstoy as a series of rapes he constantly perpetrated against her. And this was Tolstoy, a great humanist, a deeply religious person, a philosopher whose ideas of non-violent resistance to evil later inspired Gandhi. One can only imagine what less humanistically inspired men did to their wives.

Sonia gave birth to 13 children, eight of whom survived. She spent 10 years of her life pregnant and 13 years nursing. Tolstoy insisted that she keep having children as long as she physically could, even though doctors insisted it put her life at risk. He also prevented her from getting wet nurses for her children because he believed that “breast is best.” Those who are still not sure of the value of feminism will be well-served to read about Sonia’s life and ask themselves how fair is the system where Sonia’s kind of existence was actually the best a woman could hope for.

Tolstoy was a count, a landowner, a celebrity, and a very rich man. In the last decades of his life, however, he became deeply ashamed of his existence as a 1%er and dreamt of joining the 99% in their life of hardship, poverty, and hard labor. For years, he tried to convince his family to get rid of all their property and begin living the life of poor peasants. When it became clear that they were not interested, Tolstoy ran away from home and started putting into practice his plan of being a 99%er. Of course, in the very first village he reached on his journey, he discovered that he had left behind his nail-brush, his favorite cushion, and a special ink-well that had been created especially for him. And what peasant can do without an ink-well and a nail-brush? It is not surprising that Tolstoy only survived 10 days of living as a regular Russian 99%.

I read all 14 volumes of Tolstoy’s Collected Works when I was a teenager and I always considered all of the fiction he wrote to be of very little value, except one novel, Resurrection. From Basinsky’s biography of Tolstoy, I discovered that there was one person who agreed with my evaluation of the writer’s novelistic production: Tolstoy himself. In his later years, he repudiated everything he wrote before Resurrection, including the supremely boring War and Peace and the failed attempt at imitating the French realists that is Anna Karenina.

Are Good Men Scarce?

~ Clarissa ~ 32 Comments

I have just encountered yet another in a long series of articles that bemoan the scarcity of good men in our society:

The fewer genuinely good men there are, the greater the bargaining power they have in relationship — and the more concessions women (at least those who are eager for marriage) are told they must make. Since so many successful women want to draw from the ever-shrinking pool of genuinely attractive and functional dudes, rivalry (or so we’re reminded) must be inevitable.

Initially it seems like the author of the article (in spite of the completely baseless suggestion that eagerness for marriage is all on women’s side when we’ve known for almost 30 years that it’s actually the opposite) wants to subvert the myth of male scarcity. However, it soon becomes obvious that he is eager to contribute to the myth that good men are hard to find:

A society that coddles young men by allowing them to remain emotionally obtuse adolescents for a quarter century (and that admits them to college with lower grades than their sisters’) makes mature, responsible men scarce.

And then I scrolled to the end of the article and realized that the author of this most recent contribution to the “there aren’t enough good men available for all the good women” is, of course, none other than Hugo Schwyzer. The same passionate feminist who keeps warning women that if we are too fat or too old (over 35, that is) the bad, horrible men will necessarily reject us. I start to get a feeling that Hugo Schwyzer needs to promote the idea that good men are scarce to draw attention to his own exceptional goodness.

The myth of male scarcity is always part of an anti-feminist backlash. In the Soviet Union, where women reached the heights that their American sisters couldn’t even begin to imagine in the period from the 1920ies until the 1970ies, the same boring story of how women pined in loneliness because there were no men around surfaced in the decade of the seventies. Mind you, this myth did not arise in the aftermath of World War II when men were genuinely not there as a result of the huge losses of life during the war. This myth appeared after the demographic imbalance of the post-war era had been corrected in the following generation.

Of course, the belief that it’s hard to find a good man among the overwhelming majority of immature losers is as baseless in the US as it was in the Soviet Union. Women’s rights are being slowly eroded in this country. Just look at the war on birth control if you need proof. However, an oppressive system needs to offer women a reward for taking away their opportunities in the public sphere. The myth of male scarcity is one of such rewards.

This might sound paradoxical to you at first but just think about it. If a woman is not successful in her personal life, she doesn’t need to look to herself for reasons why this happens. It’s the fault of those bad, immature men. And how enjoyable is it to get together with one’s girl-friends and make fun of the immaturity and the uselessness of men in our lives! I played this unhealthy game for years and let me tell you, it rocks. Who cares if men find it easier to succeed financially and professionally if one can just dismiss all that by ridiculing their imaginary incompetence in the private sphere?

In reality, there is no shortage of good men or good women. Jerks of both genders equal themselves out. What is really scarce, though, is insightful feminist analysis that avoids reiterating tired anti-feminist stereotypes about both women and men.

Another Sad Instance of Mother-Bashing From Self-Proclaimed Feminists

~ Clarissa ~ 38 Comments

Here is the most recent piece of offensive silliness from a site where the so-called radical feminists congregate:

We are desperate for women to reject the specious narrative that within the nuclear family we have “choice,” when in fact the “choice” (regarding motherhood) is between doing one full-time job (stay home and raise kids) or two full-time jobs (do paid work and also raise kids).* We are desperate for women to stop buying into the patriarchy-sponsored message about women’s fulfillment — that is, the notion that you are a selfish blob of failure, or worse, that you are missing out on life’s greatest joy, if you don’t martyr yourself to home and family and totally subsume your identity in the process. We want women to reject marriage and the nuclear family. We want women to not have kids in the first place.

Renee from the Womanist Musings blog has written a brilliant and powerful response to this inane piece of rubbish, so all I have to add is the following:

It is not your place to “want” anything in other people’s lives. Especially not something as major as the very personal decision of whether or not to have children and how to organize one’s private life. Wanting all women to do or not to do something is essentializing, reductive, offensive, and plain wrong. Feminism struggles for equal rights for people irrespective of their gender. However, these idiotic pronouncements about how all mothers buy into the patriarchal agenda, martyr themselves to home and family and subsume their identities in whatever is an offensive generalization that can’t have any possible goal other than humiliating a huge group of women.

Why “Male Privilege List” Is Garbage, Part II

~ Clarissa ~ 31 Comments

Now let’s look at some of the statements on “The Male Privilege List” in greater detail. I will respond to them in terms of my “female privilege.”

4. If I fail in my job or career, I can feel sure this won’t be seen as a black mark against my entire sex’s capabilities.

If I fail in my job or career or end up with no job or career whatsoever this will have absolutely no impact on my gender identity. Even though I am passionately invested in my career and adore my job, losing them will never make feel like I’m not woman enough.

6. If I do the same task as a woman, and if the measurement is at all subjective, chances are people will think I did a better job.

Any task? What about learning languages? Being organized and responsible in school? Cooking? Communicating with people? Being emotionally competent? Raising children? In a sexist world, all these and many many other tasks are the exclusive purview of women.

9. If I choose not to have children, my masculinity will not be called into question.

Seriously? Since when? I can’t even count the number of times I heard jokes about men who have or haven’t been able to “prove their masculinity” by getting their female partners pregnant. I know a man who told all and sundry that he managed to get his wife pregnant on their wedding night with the kind of pride that was so intense as to be scary.

10. If I have children but do not provide primary care for them, my masculinity will not be called into question.

But if a man fails to provide for them financially, it absolutely will be called into question. And a lot.

11. If I have children and provide primary care for them, I’ll be praised for extraordinary parenting if I’m even marginally competent. (More).

Not true. Actually, what is much more likely is that a father who stays at home with children will have his masculinity questioned.

12. If I have children and a career, no one will think I’m selfish for not staying at home.

But if a man has any number of children and no career, he will be ridiculed in ways no woman ever will.

13. If I seek political office, my relationship with my children, or who I hire to take care of them, will probably not be scrutinized by the press.

If a man seeks political office, everybody will take it in their stride that he has a wife whose mission in life is to assist him. Nobody will make fun of the arrangement. Don’t believe me? Look at the way Todd Palin is ridiculed for not making as much money as Sarah Palin.

16. As a child, chances are I was encouraged to be more active and outgoing than my sisters. (More).

This is a wild generalization. All families are different. As an Aspie child, I was persecuted by people who tried to make me “more active and outgoing.” These attributes have nothing to do with gender, so I’m not even sure what they are doing on this list.

17. As a child, I could choose from an almost infinite variety of children’s media featuring positive, active, non-stereotyped heroes of my own sex. I never had to look for it; male protagonists were (and are) the default.

I don’t know when the author’s childhood happened, but if you turn on the television today, you will see as many images of men who are either bumbling, inept fools or violent criminals as you can possibly stomach.

19. If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask of each negative episode or situation whether or not it has sexist overtones.

I actually think you do, whether you are a man or a woman.

20. I can turn on the television or glance at the front page of the newspaper and see people of my own sex widely represented.

Where are all these TV shows that refuse to feature women? Can anybody think of a single night of scheduled TV programming where no or almost no women appear on the screen? Unless you limit your TV watching to the Stanley Cup, then I fail to see how you manage to miss all those female folks on television.

21. If I’m careless with my financial affairs it won’t be attributed to my sex.

If I, as a woman, mess up financially, I can always get a man to help me out. And nobody will question that or ridicule the arrangement. When I mention to people that my husband helps me out financially, they always say, “Oh, that’s great!” When I mention that I supported my ex-husband financially, they always say, “Oh, what a jerk and a total deadbeat!” Incidentally, what are the female versions of “jerk” and “deadbeat”?

23. I can speak in public to a large group without putting my sex on trial.

I speak in public to small, medium-sized and large groups on a regular basis. I dig it, to be honest. Not a single time did I feel that my sex was an issue of any kind. Now, of course, I will hear that I’m simply oblivious because of my autism.

24. Even if I sleep with a lot of women, there is no chance that I will be seriously labeled a “slut,” nor is there any male counterpart to “slut-bashing.” (More).

However, if a man is sexually unsuccessful and doesn’t manage to sleep with anybody, his prestige among his peers will be extremely low. In terms of getting access to sex, a man often has to prove his worthiness by courting a woman, waiting until “she is ready”, satisfying her or prepare to be ridiculed or rejected. As a woman, all I had to do to meet men was go to a public place and sit there. Or stand. Or walk around. It was up to men to find the courage to initiate the conversation and prepare for many rejections until a woman finally agreed to hear them out. Have you tried approaching people you like and striking up a conversation? Unless you are extremely confident and secure, this might be very daunting.

26. My clothing is typically less expensive and better-constructed than women’s clothing for the same social status. While I have fewer options, my clothes will probably fit better than a woman’s without tailoring. (More).

I don’t know where the author of this list does his shopping. Maybe I should ask him for some pointers. I’ve accompanied N. on quite a few shopping trips for clothing and I have to tell you, it’s incredibly harder to find anything for a man. Less expensive? I can find a killer dress for under $30 in matter of minutes. Try to buy a man’s outfit (mind you, you’ll need something to cover his entire body) for this amount that does not look cheap, isn’t extremely scratchy, and will not disintegrate after the first wash. And have you tried buying gifts for men? Can you honestly tell me that it’s harder to find a gift for a woman than it is for a man?

27. The grooming regimen expected of me is relatively cheap and consumes little time. (More).

Unless, of course, you are a man who works in a corporate environment and needs to shave twice a day.

29. If I’m not conventionally attractive, the disadvantages are relatively small and easy to ignore.

Just tell it to a man who hasn’t had a date in five years. Loneliness and constant rejection must be so totally easy to ignore.

30. I can be loud with no fear of being called a shrew. I can be aggressive with no fear of being called a bitch.

But you might be called a creep, a potential rapist, a jerk, and many other nice, endearing things.

31. I can ask for legal protection from violence that happens mostly to men without being seen as a selfish special interest, since that kind of violence is called “crime” and is a general social concern. (Violence that happens mostly to women is usually called “domestic violence” or “acquaintance rape,” and is seen as a special interest issue.)

How about sexual abuse of minors by teachers? When a 14-year-old boy is raped by his female teacher, lots of extenuating circumstances immediately crop up. When a male teacher rapes a 14-year-old girl, consequences are a lot more dire.

34. I will never be expected to change my name upon marriage or questioned if I don’t change my name.

When I blogged about name-change as being unfeminist, crowds of people descended on my blog to excoriate me for my position. Strangely enough, the absolute majority of these folks were women. So I really have to wonder who is truly invested in this name changing and for what reasons.

37. Most major religions argue that I should be the head of my household, while my wife and children should be subservient to me.

I guess Christianity is not a major religion, then. It’s either that or I invented the story about this guy Jesus who defended an adulterous woman and made her his disciple instead of sending her back to her male head of household to be all subservient to him.

38. If I have a wife or live-in girlfriend, chances are we’ll divide up household chores so that she does most of the labor, and in particular the most repetitive and unrewarding tasks. (More).

Also, chances are that you will end up expected (by both of you) to carry the brunt of financial burden for the family. Seriously, what’s harder: heating up a pizza in a microwave or confronting a bunch of bills every month?

39. If I have children with my girlfriend or wife, I can expect her to do most of the basic childcare such as changing diapers and feeding.

You can also expect to lose custody in the divorce proceedings and have to accept only seeing your kids once a week. If you are very lucky, that is.

42. In general, I am under much less pressure to be thin than my female counterparts are. (More). If I am fat, I probably suffer fewer social and economic consequences for being fat than fat women do. (More).

Once again, I have to wonder if all those recent articles making fun of Chris Christie for being fat are a figment of my diseased imagination.

43. If I am heterosexual, it’s incredibly unlikely that I’ll ever be beaten up by a spouse or lover. (More).

Now, let’s not exaggerate. It is less likely you will be beaten up by a woman. But not “incredibly unlikely.” This is simply not true.

45. On average, I am not interrupted by women as often as women are interrupted by men.

Yes, what a huge tragedy. Getting interrupted, that must be such a burden. Of course, if you get shot in the back by your wife while you are asleep, she will be released almost immediately. If you shoot her in the back, you probably will not.

46. I have the privilege of being unaware of my male privilege.

I’m a woman and I also have the privilege of being unaware of any male privilege that exists in some sort of vacuum, unaccompanied by great female privilege. Once again, a sexist system oppresses us all. But it also offers us all something in return for the oppression. Any discussion of who is “more privileged” under the system of gender stereotypes is futile. We are wasting our time compiling such lists, people. All of these endless arguments whose only goal is to arrive at a conclusion as to whether men or women suffer more because of sexism lead nowhere. Can’t we just agree that we all suffer from it and start moving along towards subverting this system?

“Gender wars” are a sine qua non of sexism. Lists like this one promote the idea that one gender is constantly aggrieved and victimized by the other. The reality we live in is surely sexist. It is not, however, nearly as sexist as this list.

Sorry for such a long post.

Semi-Open Thread: Rapist or Not?

~ Clarissa ~ 16 Comments

Here is  a story recently posted on The Good Men Project under the title “Accidental Rapist“:

“I don’t want to hurt your feelings,” she said, “but sometimes I really don’t want to have sex. Sometimes I do, but not as often as you want it. And sometimes I want to tell you ‘no,’ but I can’t bring myself to do it. So I try and send you signals, hoping you can just tell how I’m feeling. But that doesn’t work, so it’s… it’s just easier to say ‘yes’ or just say nothing at all.”

My face flushed. I felt nauseated. I thought instantly of the previous night, where we’d grabbed what I thought was a hot half-hour when my roommates were both gone. Katie had seemed so passionate when we’d been making out, but then gotten very quiet once all our clothes were off. I’d told myself she wanted to have one ear cocked for the sound of a key in the door. I hadn’t considered—or hadn’t wanted to consider—the more obvious possibility: she was trying to tell me that she didn’t want to have sex.

I looked out the window. I couldn’t meet Katie’s eyes. My gaze fixed in the distance, my voice trembling, I asked what seemed the only possible question: “Are you trying to tell me I raped you?”

So what say you, dear readers? Is the narrator of the story a rapist or not?

And if you followed the link and read the entire post, what is your reaction to it?

An Anti-Child Abuse Video Banned in Ireland

~ Clarissa ~ 14 Comments

Sometimes, this blog’s readers kindly send to me suggestions about topics I could use for my posts. Reader Kinjal sent me a link to this article today:

Ireland’s advertising watchdog has made itself a laughingstock—except nobody’s laughing—by banning an anti-child-abuse PSA that was powerful enough to get noticed worldwide. The brutal spot by Ogilvy Dublin, which Adweek covered at length here, shows a boy being beaten up while still articulating, in grown-up language, a manifesto for children’s rights. After getting 13 complaints, the country’s Advertising Standards Authority has banned the spot from all “Irish media” (this does not include YouTube) because it supposedly breaches gender-equality rules. “Complainants objected to the advertisement on the basis that it was unbalanced in its treatment of the subject of abuse in the home. The advertisement only depicted a male as being the aggressor, and the complainants considered this to be unbalanced,” the ASA ruled, according to Adland. The stupidity of such a ruling is self-evident. It means you couldn’t dramatize abuse without having both a man and a woman whaling on the kid at once—which would be weird and completely shift the focus of the ad from the abused to the abusers.

I understand that the objections people voiced to the video sound ludicrous. However, if we analyze the PSA in question in a wider context, it becomes clear that there is a lot of truth behind the objections. In a recent post, I shared with my readers a series of posters that are part of a campaign against domestic violence. In every single poster, the abuser is male and the victim is female. The campaign addresses emotional and verbal abuse but at no point suggests that women can – and do! – abuse men.

More often than not, we imagine a rapist as a scary stranger lurking in the bushes, even though the absolute majority of rapes are perpetrated by people who know their victims and take place at home. This way of constructing the image of a rapist makes it a lot harder to prove that spousal rape and date rape are just as horrible and traumatic as being assaulted by a complete stranger in the street.

In the same way, domestic abuse and child abuse keep getting portrayed as being perpetrated exclusively by men. What lies behind this completely skewed portrayal is a belief that women are not only “the weaker sex” incapable of being abusive but also that women have some magic access to good parenting skills and some kind of a deeper love for their children than men do.

My friend and her partner recently had a baby. They are both highly-educated, feminist, and progressive people. Still, from day one, the father of the baby kept saying to the mother, “I have no idea how to burp her / change her diaper / put her to sleep / get her to stop crying, etc. You do it.”

“What makes you think I know any better?” my friend would always respond. “I never had any children before either.”

Women don’t have any kind of a “maternal instinct” that is unavailable to men. Mothers are just as likely to engage in child abuse as fathers. Until we allow ourselves to imagine maternal abuse as something that does happen quite often, however, we will not be able to address it.

A little while ago, a female blogger wrote a comment on this blog that said,

Please lay off those of us who choose to “lop off parts” of our sons’ penises.

She then got extremely huffy when I told her off and organized a silly anti-Clarissa campaign during which other female bloggers ridiculed me for caring too much about child abuse. As hard as I try, I honestly cannot imagine any male scientist, college professor and intellectual who would feel comfortable making this kind of remark about any part of his daughter’s body in public and then proceeding to make light of child abuse. This doesn’t mean that men don’t abuse children. Of course, they do. But they don’t act about it in such a cavalier way because they know they will be condemned for it.

We need to start having discussions, articles, posters, videos, etc. about maternal abuse, too.

The Most Inane Post of the Week

~ Clarissa ~ 6 Comments

And now let me present to you the most inane piece of writing about feminism I have seen in a while. Honestly, I’d much rather some people stayed away from topic they are not intellectually equipped to handle:

And the truth is, I do, I do appreciate the options. I understand that for years, women had no options and the fact that now we have them is decidedly a GOOD THING.

But sometimes it makes me wonder if all these options are weighing us down.

Because we have to make decision after decision after decision and then we feel we have to defend said decisions — to our parents, to our partners, to our friends, to ourselves. And as we defend our decisions, we relitigate them in our minds. Yes, it was the right decision to stay at home. Yes, it was the right decision to keep my name. Yes, it was the right decision to have only one child.

It’s strange because, actually, traditional definitions explain feminism as a movement to achieve equal rights and opportunities for women. But typically, men don’t actually have all these choices, or they don’t think they do, at any rate. Most men don’t decide whether or not to change their names; they don’t think about it all. Most men assume they will not stay at home with their children. And men never have to decide between a skirt or pants! Instead of having equal opportunities, it sometimes seems like women have more opportunities than men. And also more decisions. And more decision fatigue.

Of course, a decision whether to wear a skirt or pants is somehow so much more complicated and crucial than the decision to wear a sweatshirt, a dress shirt, or a T-shirt. Oh, the horrible, horrible feminism that gave us all these confusing wardrobe choices.

Aside from the very silly simplifications the author of the post I quoted uses here, the real issue that the post attempts to address in such an unintelligent way is that many people (completely irrespective of their gender) can’t decide whether they want to stick to the system of strict gender roles or move towards the system of gender equality.

“It would be great to have a successful career and make a shitload of money. However, if I fail at achieving that, will I still be able to gain my entire social validation from the fact that somebody married me?”

“Sure enough, it’s cool not to have to shoulder the financial burden of keeping the family all on my own. But would a financially independent woman still need me? Would she also expect me to contribute equally to housework? Because that would kind of suck.”

“Of course, I wouldn’t mind a husband who splits housework equally with me. But what if he ends up making a lot less money than I do? What he ends up being unemployed for months or for years? Am I ready to accept that I will have no source of financial support to rely on in exchange for being a woman?”

“I’d definitely like to live in the world where people come together and stay together not because they have no other way to make a living but simply because they love each other. However, if I don’t manage to interest any woman enough to love me for my own sake, will I still be able to purchase one (or two, or fifteen) for my own personal use?”

The sad truth for the yet undecided is that you really can’t have the proverbial cake after you have gleefully consumed it. You have to choose whether you want to live in a world where your genitals strictly define who you are and what you can do and reap all the attendant benefits and suffer the attendant limitations that this system imposes on you. Or, you can choose to accept the idea that having a penis or a vagina carries absolutely no social, political or economic meaning. Then, you will have a new set of limitations and rewards implicit in this way of being.

The good news, though, is that this is a choice you don’t have to keep making. Evaluate the benefits and the cost of each system to you, pick one, and stick to it. Only just decide already because all this “Sure, feminism is great but. . .” whining is getting too annoying.

Who Holds All the Wealth, Men or Women?

~ Clarissa ~ 57 Comments

I said many times before that my primary identity is that of a feminist. I’m a feminist first and a professor, a scholar, a Ukrainian, a Jew, a Canadian, an autistic, a Hispanist, a blogger and everything else second. But I think that memes like the following one do nothing but hurt the cause of feminism because they appeal to cheap, meaningless outrage and not to facts and reason:

1%: The percentage of the world’s wealth held by women, despite the fact that they comprise 40% of the world’s workforce.

This just makes no sense at all whatsoever. All these men who hold 99% of world’s wealth, are they single? Or gay? Do none of them have wives? Daughters? Mothers? Sisters? Or do they all live in countries where women are legally precluded from owning the wealth of their male family members? This should mean that the Americans, the Canadians, the Western Europeans, the Australians, the New Zealanders, the Russians, etc. are all out. Who’s left then?

As to the percentage of the world’s workforce that women (or men) supposedly comprise, anybody with even a minimal knowledge of economics must surely realize that this figure is taken out of thin air. Many countries (such as the countries of the Former Soviet Union, for example) run on an unofficial employment market. There is simply no way to determine legitimately who does or does not work and what wealth they do or do not possess in such countries. Take, for example, the case of the former mayor of Moscow who, according to all paperwork, is nearly indigent because he put his billions in his wife’s name to avoid criminal prosecution. Have such people been taken into account when calculating the gender breakdown of wealth?

By all means, let’s be outraged by gender inequality. Let’s be as outraged as we possibly can. But for the love of all that’s holy, let’s be outraged about something that is worthy of outrage. Not something that is so patently silly.