Feminism is one of those things everybody has an opinion
about. Women, because it affects them; men, because they think it doesn’t
affect them. The belief that we all know how to do feminism, however, is rooted
in deep and probably completely unacknowledged and unwelcome misogyny: it must
be simple, it’s only something that women do. “How complicated can it be? I’ve
read a few CiF columns and even maybe a book or two on the subject, of course I
totally get it. Plus some of my best friends are women”. Applied to any other
area of life, such an approach would be absurd. Can you imagine a senior Guardian columnist barging into a football supporters’ forum & haranguing
them about the offside rule? Or a journalist marching into a mechanic’s workshop &
lecturing him at length about how it’s the clutch he should be looking at
because obviously tires are of only minor importance in the grand scheme of
things? (Disclosure: I know next to nothing about either football or cars. Not
because I’m a woman, but because they’re both pretty boring subjects. Then
again, the men who lecture feminists about doing feminism know close to nothing
about feminism, so I reckon we’re even).
When women attack feminism, they tend to go for the how (this is one of those enormous rhetorical generalisations to which there are
many exceptions that I haven’t got the energy to fight with you about below the
line, dear reader: just work with me here): you need to do more of this, less
of that, you need to listen more to marginalised voices, you need to be more
inclusive. These criticisms can be intemperate, even hurtful, and they can side-track
the conversation for a while, but they accept the basic premise of “doing
feminism right now is quite an important thing”.
Men on the other hand
have a tendency to concentrate on the what: don’t campaign for inclusion,
campaign against rape. Don’t you know there are women who have no access to
education? Haven’t you heard of FGM? And did you hear the government are
instituting cuts that mostly hurt women?! (Nah, I haven’t heard; do tell me
about it, oh wise man, because being but a weak and feeble woman, I don’t
actually read the news or know how it affects me. It’s this crazy thing we
little ladies do).
The difference between the two approaches, which is obvious
when you look at them side by side like this, is that the first approach is
designed to make feminism better; the second is designed to make feminism impossible. We can’t not-campaign for anything because we are currently not
campaigning for everything. The enormity of the systemic discrimination and
oppression of women makes it a priori impossible to tackle it all in one big
go; we have to break it down into smaller chunks and deal with each of those at
a time – not just as individual campaigners, but also as a movement overall. Hence
waves, in case you wondered. Mind you, I don’t really think the men telling us
to go and campaign about FGM when we’re talking about sexual harassment in the
workplace actually care about FGM (I’d like to see their campaign on it, for a start): it’s just become a kind of
Godwin’s Law of feminist-bashing, a shortcut to the moral high ground for
people who are more interested in shutting you up, because you’re making them feel
uncomfortable, than in mutilated vulvas.
This feminism related Dunning-Kruger effect serves not only
to embarrass otherwise intelligent men by temporarily reducing them to the
level of analysis & insight of Daily Mail commenters; it’s also pretty damn
draining on the limited and already embattled resources of the still-too-small
cadre of brave women tackling systemic discrimination, male sexual violence,
economic injustice and cultural femicide head-on. We know pretty damn well what
we’re fighting for and why, and, actually, much as it might astonish the Dan Hodgeses & Michael Whites of this world, we have a pretty solid understanding
of what’s important to us and how it fits into the big picture of ending
sexism. We, unlike you, get it. Now be a love and let the big girls get on with
it while you sit quietly on the side-lines and maybe learn a thing or two.
