Ania Lucewicz looks at some common myths about feminism and tackles the possible roles for men in the feminist movement.
Mar-May 2007
First, let’s take a look at two fantastic ideas which totally inform the way I feel, think and act as a feminist: autonomous protest and co-operative protest.
For me, autonomous protest is based on the idea that women are spoken on behalf of. We are spoken on behalf of in the areas in which we are underrepresented: parliament, academia and boardrooms among others. In order to encourage women to represent themselves, we create a protest movement exclusively run by women. The idea is to express women’s issues from women’s perspective, i.e. self-expression. What we’re trying to avoid here is the kind of paternalism we see happening to other minority groups, where some ‘objective’ body like a government reduces the minority group’s discourse to a small tradition which does not really challenge the monolith of the dominant discourse.
Co-operative liberation is, well, co-operative. Some fantastic examples are White Ribbon Day— an international group of men who campaign for the elimination of violence against women — and the Men Can Stop Rape campaign. The idea is that men, as community leaders and decision-makers, can play a key role in helping stop violence against women — men talking to men about male-perpetrated violence.
But, in addition to this, there are men who feel they can and should lend a hand in the entire women’s liberation movement. Rather than just being men talking to men, these people are hoping to show their support for women’s liberation in other ways. Some examples put forward by men I know have been things like organising International Women’s Day banner painting, marching in Reclaim the Night rallies, and general volunteering within the women’s collective.
What options do each of the ideas have? Are they compatible? How do we implement the position we take with regard to these ideas in real life? Is it a matter of prioritising values? But how can we avoid the restrictive value judgements we’re trying to avoid?
In talking to people about this article, I got a number of responses to concepts of autonomy and co-operation, which I thought I would write about here and hope to exchange opinions with others.
A young man at my university suggested to me that: “Men are victims of patriarchy too, therefore we should be part of your movement.”
A number of questions are thrown up. Can people who are not biologically female identify as victims of patriarchy? What does this mean? Are we all victims of patriarchy in the same way?
I think we need to be careful of creating a false analogy between the way men and women are victimised by patriarchy. I do understand that men are in some senses stifled, judged, emotionally and creatively repressed by patriarchy. I do understand that there are men who are looking to challenge, expand and imagine new ways of thinking about gender. But I think we need to make sure we don’t conflate two issues.
The first issue is the invisible norms of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ which restrict our personalities and thereby victimise everyone. This can have serious emotional and social consequences for everyone.
The other issue, however, is what I feel is the priority of the women’s movement — the suffering experienced by women around the world in terms of sexual and physical violence perpetuated against women, the economic disadvantage suffered by women as a result of unpaid and underpaid work and barriers to leadership positions in our society.
Others claim that “by keeping us out of the decision making of your movement, you are perpetuating the same crimes of privilege which you are fighting against.”
I find it difficult to articulate exactly why I find the idea of autonomy so important. I feel that the key to understanding why women are the centre of a movement which is committed to fighting against essentialism lies in looking at the privilege enjoyed or denied to a particular group.
Whilst feminism is linked strongly to class, cultural and colonialist struggles — and as such is essentially a “human” struggle” which requires the agitation of every thinking person, male or female — it most deeply concerns women. To be most effective then revolution must come from women and most importantly the individual woman herself.
BUSTING THE MYTHS ON THE RELEVANCY OF MODERN FEMINISM
MYTH 1: “Feminism has already succeeded: you women are so hyper-networked these days you are actually more privileged than men. Look at the difference between breast-cancer awareness and prostate-cancer awareness.”.
First, we can’t abstract the status of women in our society from this one example. I have met people who use this one example to extrapolate that women are so well-taken-care-of these days that we should just hang up the banners and go home. I am angered by the claims that feminism has ‘already succeeded.’ Especially in the context of the gender balance of our parliaments, corporate boards, or the stats on how much money women earn. Secondly, these ‘concessions’ or societal changes in terms of funding and awareness of women’s issues have been hard won and fought for.
MYTH 2: “Feminism is a self-interested campaign. You’re not looking after society, you’re looking after yourselves.”
Let me clear things up: should we ring the nurses union up and tell them not to campaign for their penalty rates because that’s ‘self-interested?’ Should we hand over our campaign so that we can be spoken on behalf of again? I feel that there’s a pervading myth around me that tells me that there exists some magical “objective” opinion on how we should think about gender which everyone can understand and which makes it unnecessary for women to represent themselves. I think it is supremely important to maintain the struggle for our self-representation,
MYTH 3: DEMONISATION — the ‘Feminazi’
I am deeply offended at the suggestion that feminism is a militarised campaign. Autonomy is sometimes confused with exclusion and I worry that complexities of feminist debate are ignored in favour of demonised perspectives.
