Reader Audra submitted this article, Confessions of a Young Anti-Feminist, by Josephine Asher. I’ve long maintained that sexist arguments are rarely rational, and usually represent intellects that are more privileged than trained, but rarely have I seen an article do a better job of inadvertently making the argument for me. Asher’s failure to separate rationalized emotion from rationality begins here:
Instead of harnessing the different qualities of men and women to energise us, we are striving to make men and women equal.
I long ago banned gender essentialist arguments from this site. Gender essentialism is the idea that men and women are inherently different, and therefore any woman claiming not to like pink and babies is either lying, rebelling or deranged – and likewise, any man claiming not to care for sports or want to spend time with his kids even if it means changing diapers is similarly deranged. The assumption of inherent biological differences completely lacks scientific foundation, and I make that case more thoroughly in the article linked above. But worse, what it’s founded on is an emotional desire to believe that everyone who doesn’t conform to gender “norms” is defective and can therefore be discounted as a representative of humanity. If we want to be taken seriously as thoughtful human beings, the desire to believe any large group of people defective is something we must all struggle to avoid, not struggle to legitimize with pseudo-intellectual chatter. Unfortunately, Asher missed this memo.
More women are joining the battle for the CEO’s chair and pursuing dominance in their homes and communities. But in the process they’re becoming more like men. And men are becoming… well, less like men.
“Less like men?” And what are men like? Some claim carpenters and farmers are real men while stock traders are not. Some claim richer men are more manly than poorer ones, so the stock traders would beat the carpenters. In some cultures, manly men greet each other with double kisses on the cheek. Where I grew up, that would start a fist-fight. So, again, what does “like men” mean?
Asher has found a compatriot in pseudo-scientific emotional bigotry rationalization:
Renowned Australian neurosurgeon Charlie Teo believes men and women have different roles “set not only by society but set by physiology”.
“The current trend is for dads to be more hands on. But for all we know it may be proven in a hundred years time that that may be a negative thing for the upbringing of children,” he said recently on Seven’s Sunday Night program.
“They’re there to be protective. A man has to have a good job; he has to do well at school so he can get a good job and support his family. A woman has to be loving and caring,” he said.
Ah, here comes the heteronormativity – another perspective that seeks to negate the experiences of all people who don’t conform to gender norms. Even though millions of men miss the mark Teo sets for them – and many others aren’t even aiming for it – we know this is what men should be like because, um… well, let’s see if Asher has any science to clarify it. Maybe this statement?
For thousands of years men were providers and protectors and women nurturers. Evolution provided each with the physical and emotional assets to do these jobs well.
Hmm, nope, sorry. You can’t look at each trait we have now and assume evolution had a great and noble purpose for it. There is debate, for example, over whether blue eyes were actually an advantageous adaptation or merely a trait that bottlenecked in a particular population, but didn’t hurt anyone, and therefore became rather popular. We’ll probably never know for sure.
But there are additional problems with Asher’s claim. First, in hunter-gatherer societies, it’s ridiculous to negate the role of women in providing since gathering is part of that. Second, there is a history of some women fighting to protect their tribes or villages, and there are cultural reasons why women have been excluded from warfare.
But here Asher offers some statistical information. Stats can be scientific, when they’re properly gathered and sensibly applied, so let’s give them a shot.
The Annual Child Care and Workforce Participation Survey found 33 per cent of women who returned to work did so for independence, and 27 per cent for career progression.
However, a British survey of 2000 men revealed one-third of men would prefer to be the sole breadwinning traditional father while another quarter would like to be the main breadwinner with their spouse working only part-time.
When she said “however,” weren’t you expecting her to follow with something that revealed more about the women’s responses in the first survey? Instead, she counters a statement about women’s preferences with one about men’s: “Women want X; however, men want something mutually exclusive with X.” Surely she’ll explain the significance of this contradiction.
Instead, men are sporting aprons, doing their own ironing and pushing trolleys down supermarket aisles – roles that don’t exactly exude manliness.
The survey also found more than half of respondents thought 21st century society was turning men into “waxed and coiffed metrosexuals”, who had to live according to women’s rules.
Oh, I see now: her point was simply that men aren’t getting what they want thanks to feminism. You know, I kind of thought that might be her point all along. It usually is the point with people making this argument: “Feminism is making men unhappy. I don’t like that. I shall find a way to rationalize my desires into what sounds kind of like logic, and then no one can stop me!” But wait – there’s a Real Problem here:
When a man is stripped of his sense of purpose, it’s more difficult to satisfy that instinctive hunger for power and purpose. Could this be part of the reason why one in eight Australian men experiences severe depression in their lifetime?
Actually, no, no, no, no, no. Plenty of men have always experienced depression, and typically manifested it as manly manly rage. It’s not that more men are experiencing depression; it’s that more men are getting treatment for it and being counted. You can thank feminism and mental health advocacy for that: in seeking to make the culture understand that depression is neither just a bad attitude nor a factor of wacky female emotionalism, they made it less uncomfortable for men to seek treatment instead of just drinking themselves into an early grave or shooting themselves in the face, like they did back in the good ol’ days.
At no point does Asher mention how many women are depressed.
Never does Asher offer any logical foundation for her assertions (or Teo’s) that men are supposed to protect and provide for a family while women nurture. That’s because there isn’t one. That’s because the woman who could’ve been a big somebody if only she hadn’t gotten pregnant with those damn kids and had to marry existed long before feminism. The man who didn’t derive purpose from his occupation also existed long before feminism. These people and many other non-conformists are part of why feminism came into being: because millions of people have always found a conflict between their true inner nature and the supposed “norms” of their gender.
The “norms” have never been true mathematical norms: sure, many people naturally happen to conform to stereotypes of their gender, and that’s absolutely fine. But a huge minority don’t – much too big a minority to be dismissed as a fluke. Especially when you consider how the minority might be increased if we could somehow eliminate from the count people who have merely convinced themselves they conform in order to make life easier. Because it does make life oh so much easier.
If the norms were really norms, why would culture work so incredibly hard at brainwashing us all into our acceptable roles, that we have an entire collection of industries for this site to critique for that very reason?
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I seem to remember reading an article about a study where they did a double blind agression study using testostrone. I believe that what they found was that the people that thought they were getting testostrone became more agressive and impatiant regardless of whether they were actually given testostrone, and those that didn’t think they were but were given it became calmer, and more able to focus.
DragonLord(Quote) (Reply)
That’s very interesting!
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
What, you thought the patriarchy would be fond of a massive, intelligent, and highly successful order of insects by name of Hymenoptera? Especially when sex for men means instant, gory, entrails-ripped-out death, and for women means the penis-as-weapon metaphor is very literally true (same organ structures, hells yes) and positively destroys any argument for Freudian penis envy??
You’d think they’d be fonder of a social structure where men’s live could be all about sex without responsibility, even if it’s in the frigid depths of the ocean, but anglerfish kind of give a new meaning to “shrinkage”.
Gena(Quote) (Reply)
:Sade voice:
Hymenopterator… HYMENopterator…
Maria(Quote) (Reply)
Or that, poor savage dears, they were/are either on their way to where we are, the end product of the Natural Evolutionary Path, or the little primitive barbarians were bass-ackwards, as you said.
There was a Calvin and Hobbes strip outlining that attitude, but the image is copywritten and I can’t find it online. :/
Gena(Quote) (Reply)
I’m not sure, offhand, what the actual difference is. I do know there have been a lot of studies that disprove the testosterone = aggression link, just by way of small example. For instance, that male inmates do not have higher levels of testosterone than other males, that people with high levels of testosterone are not super-aggressive, etc.
Along the lines of this sort of stuff, one of my college friends learned about a study where, since gay men are obviously too womanly, they were artificially given testosterone in the hopes it would make them want to have sex with women like real men. Instead it just made them want to have sex with men more. (I am a little bit skeptical of studies about gayness in general, mind).
It’s also interesting to me that it was decided *testosterone* is what causes the perceived differences, and not estrogen.
Shaun(Quote) (Reply)
Yeah, I’ve got issues with hippos. That, and ever since I saw one yawning on Sesame Street when I was little, I just got the overwhelming impression that they ate babies, because their mouths were certainly big enough.
Hippos might actually kill more people along the Nile than crocodiles do, because of their size and people not taking them seriously.
Gena(Quote) (Reply)
Ooh, that does sound good! And I looked it up and it’s written by Warren Ellis!! <3 <3 <3 Nextwave was amazing.
*adds to Amazon wishlist*
Gena(Quote) (Reply)
Those give me, like, long-distance secondhand nausea, and make the totally benign kind of father-daughter dances creepy.
Gena(Quote) (Reply)
Well, my sister and I have hormone imbalances. She is a big fan of kittens, puppies, scorpions, Tom Hardy, and Kingdom Hearts. I’m a fan of fart jokes, zombies, Star Trek, fairies, and unicorns.
WELP. *shrugs*
Gena(Quote) (Reply)
re: shaun
I suspect it’s because testosterone has been proven to increase muscle mass in people (it’s why men are typically stronger than women lb for lb), and so a “causal” link was made between that and aggression by the observation (false as it is) that men that are more aggressive tend to also have more muscle
DragonLord(Quote) (Reply)
Oh yes, don’t they realize the progression of history and ladder theory of anthropology went out with the Victorians?
Fitting, given they want to drag our gender roles back to the Victorians too.
Attackfish(Quote) (Reply)
The link to testosterone and aggression is probably also “supported” by people’s observation of “‘roid rage,” but I suspect that’s more because of uncontrolled, variable-quality, self-induced hormonal imbalance associated with steroid use rather than that testosterone on its own = CRAZY MAD DOG ANGER.
I’m not sure if HGH has similar side effects, or if changes in mood when using tes’ have been compared to, say, cisgender women and transwomen undergoing hormone therapy. (I know for a new study, you could use a random population, but it just seems odd that the data would be out there already and not looked at critically, you know?) It would be interesting to compare, anyway.
But I can say that when my hormones were all wonky and unsuppressed, I was getting into physical fights, was incredibly irritable and ready to argue with people over nothing, mood-swinging, eating uncontrollably, and feeling suicidal two weeks out of every four. Just saying.
Gena(Quote) (Reply)
*consults wikipedia*
Male adult bodies make 10 times the testosterone of female adult bodies. Women have “significantly higher” estrogen than men.
But then, this same source says: “Falling in love decreases men’s testosterone levels while increasing women’s testosterone levels. It is speculated that these changes in testosterone result in the temporary reduction of differences in behavior between the sexes.[26] It has been found that when the testosterone and endorphins in the ejaculated semen meet the cervical wall after sexual intercourse, females receive a spike in testosterone, endorphin, and oxytocin levels, and males after orgasm during copulation experience an increase in endorphins and a marked increase in oxytocin levels. This adds to the hospitable physiological environment in the female internal reproductive tract for conceiving, and later for nurturing the conceptus in the pre-embryonic stages, and stimulates feelings of love, desire, and paternal care in the male (this is the only time male oxytocin levels rival a female’s).[citation needed]”
Citation needed, indeed.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
I… really dislike The Authority. Under Warren Ellis, it exemplified all of the flaws of none of the strengths found in his writing. Once Mark Millar took over, it was… well, it was Mark Millar comic, which is to say it was a bunch of horrible people doing horrible things and it’s supposed to be “edgy” and “controversial.”
Great Rao, but I do hate Mark Millar.
Patrick McGraw(Quote) (Reply)
Well the character was a badass swordswoman, who felt the hippos were not a threat and she should be keeping an eye out for lions. It ended with her shamelessly running for her life. She still has a minor grudge. ^_^
Shaun(Quote) (Reply)
I haven’t read a lot by Warren Ellis (that I know of). I thought the characters’ powers were rather neat, especially Jack Hawksmoor and the Doctor, and I felt like everyone on there had a place–even the Midnighter and Swift, who I initially questioned.
As far as the edgy stuff, I liked his comic at the very end of the 2nd graphic novel. If nothing else, Gena, if you read the first 2 and hate Millar’s comic you don’t have to buy the third one. Not sure what you didn’t like about it, though, Patrick.
Shaun(Quote) (Reply)
if I’m not fappan, which I mostly do ‘cuz vibrators are awesome
Yes! I’m so sick of everyone telling me that women must have sex with a partner. It’s like the whole fucking world wants us to have sex with a man so that we can please him with out lady bits. But if I want to have a really good orgasm then I can take care of that myself, thank you very much.
M.C.(Quote) (Reply)
Mark Millar is hateworthy. Warren Ellis isn’t
Even though I agree that the Authority is the weakest I’ve read by him. Transmetropolitan is awesome. Ministry of Space has a killer ending. He does feature women characters who are just as foul-mouthed as his men 
And he likes science.
The Other Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
I actually trained in what was at the time called “psychobiology” and referred to the general biological basis of human psychology, not specifically gender differences. The main problem I have with evolutionary psychology as it’s practiced today is that it’s laughably bad science.
In order to say anything about human beings’ evolution, you need to remove the confound of culture. So you have to look at anthropology, and you have to look at the great apes, because otherwise you’re going to be very much confounded by culture. And it turns out that there are very, very few human universals, and the very few that there are have a huge number of exceptions.
The few human universals that exist are:
- women are always more involved with child care than men are. However, the amount to which men are involved varies widely.
- men are always more aggressive and more likely to be warriors/soldiers than women. However, the amount to which women are aggressive or warlike varies widely. There have even been societies where all the warriors were women, although that was generally done because women were forbidden to have power, so it protected the power structure by preventing military warlordism.
- men almost always believe that whatever role their culture assigns to men is better than the role assigned to women. However, the degree to which women agree or disagree with that assessment varies widely.
Everything else is up for grabs. Women are more emotional? Not in some cultures, where women are considered to be hard-nosed and practical, while men are weepy and expressive (of course, in those cultures men value being emotional highly.) Women are less interested in sex? Um, try reading some fanfic sometimes. Women dress up to be attractive to men? Among the Maasai, young warriors wear elaborate makeup to look fierce because fierceness is considered to be attractive to women… women don’t wear makeup. In Japan, men make the money, but women manage it and hand their husbands an allowance. In Russia and even Iran, women are found in high numbers in the hard sciences, mathematics and programming. In bride-price cultures, men pay women’s families to marry women, but in dowry cultures, women’s families pay men to marry them… which sounds a lot like male prostitution, when you think about it.
In fact, in our lifetime, the stereotype has changed from “women are flighty, silly and irresponsible, and kind of dumb, while men are smart, focused, and responsible” to “women are smart, focused, and responsible, but total joykillers who don’t know how to have fun and don’t want anyone else to, while men are irresponsible, goofy, and kind of dumb, but they’re funny and they enjoy life and they’re fun to be around, and that’s what counts.” While the I Love Lucy stereotype may still exist in some people’s minds, what we see reflected in pop culture much more often is the model from Everyone Loves Raymond or Family Guy, where a responsible woman cleans up the messes left made by a funny, irresponsible guy. The only thing that hasn’t changed is that whatever the men do is presented as better than what the women do, even though exactly what they do has undergone a complete reversal.
So this whole “men should act like men” or the idea that there is one natural way to be a man is a crock, as is most so-called “evolutionary psychology”. I did a reductio ad absurdium on one of Steven Pinker’s arguments once, where in response to his argument that men are artists because women are attracted by beautiful things and therefore men create art to attract women, I pointed out that this would suggest that women are uniquely evolved to appreciate art, otherwise women have just as much motivation to create art to attract men… and if women are uniquely evolved to appreciate art, this means that men cannot appreciate art. So when men make art they are just mindlessly trying to attract women, without actual artistic or aesthetic appreciation of their own; only art made by women is made for purely aesthetic reasons, without the factor of trying to sexually attract a mate. This is obviously ridiculous because plainly, men do appreciate art… but it clarifies the point that sexual selection goes both ways and anything men do to attract women, women should be doing to attract men as well, unless there is some reason imposed by culture why it doesn’t work that way.
Alara Rogers(Quote) (Reply)
Alara, your whole comment was wonderful reading, and very informative, but this bit:
Really grabbed me. That’s exactly why the stupidity of Raymond does NOT mitigate any female stereotype, as so many people suggest (“But but but white guys are portrayed as fools, so it’s okay when women are portrayed with stereotypes!”). Because it’s ACCEPTABLE for these guys to be lovable fools, it’s not actually a negative stereotype. It’s like arguing, “But men are portrayed as promiscuous, too!” when you complain about a woman being stereotyped that way. It’s not at all the same, because the standards for each gender differ so much.
Your example about art is awesome too. Also begs the question, where on earth were all the gay artists coming from?
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Yes, Jeff. As a woman who happens to hate ironing, I despise that you can and will do it yourself. A woman doesn’t want a man who can clearly take care of himself and be a true domestic partner. What, then, would be our purpose in his life?
Robin(Quote) (Reply)
Basically, I feel that The Authority is Ellis’ weakest work because it lacks the things that make him great:
1) characters who may be too flawed to actually be heroes, but who are nonetheless humanized and relatable. The Authority is made of up sociopaths who insult people as they murder them. One James Bond is bad enough, I don’t need to read about a team of him.
2) Crazy awesome ridiculousness that you’ve never seen before. See any issue of Transmetropolitan or Nextwave. The Authority just comes across as Dark Age takes on Silver Age tropes. (Ooh, these bad guys are like the Avengers but they’re evil! Never seen that before!)
The title also displays some of Ellis’ weakest efforts at post-modern comics, which I was never very fond of in the first place.
Patrick McGraw(Quote) (Reply)
“Where on earth were all the gay artists coming from?”
WELL GAY ARTISTS DON’T EXIST/WE AREN’T TALKING ABOUT THEM RIGHT NOW BECAUSE HETERONORMATIVITY AND HERP-A-DERP. :p
Casey(Quote) (Reply)
Do you remember Heroes? And how one of the biggest story-lines was how the Glasses Guy (I forget what his nickname was) was SO IN LOVE with his daughter Claire, that he gave up everything for her–and it was hardly mentioned that the guy had a natural son, and was married, and neither his wife nor his son questioned (much) his excessive devotion to little Claire the Cheerleader.
Frankly, as endearing as his love was, it also went too much into obsessive psycho-sexual territory for me, even though the actors tried their darnedest to NOT let that creep into their acting.
I would have been more “okay” with the characters obsessive love if he’d only shown as much for his son and his wife.
Gategrrl(Quote) (Reply)
And isn’t it a disappointment how *valued* those cock-eyed studies of warped captive wolves have become in Urban Fantasy werewolf tropes?
You can hardly find a werewolf based UF that doesn’t feature Alphas, Omegas, submissive females, and all that–all based on those excessively human-filtered reports.
Frankly, I find the delight shown in that model by various genres & writers to be…beyond not to my taste.
Gategrrl(Quote) (Reply)
Well, a professor of mine still said that any artistic endeavor was just sublimation, i.e. caused by a lack of sexual fulfillment
The Other Patrick(Quote) (Reply)
Yeah, and also, it’s generally white guys who are perpetrating the portrayal.
If Sandra McFarlane was making a comedy about an ugly, stupid, insensitive jerk of a man who is cruel to his wife and daughter, who’s friends with a date rapist, whose wife is beautiful, smart, sexy, and came from a wealthy family, that would mean something different than in the real world where Seth McFarlane makes that comedy and plays the man in question. White men make comedy about white men who suck all the time, but part of the reason they’re comfortable with it is that everyone understands that it’s that particular character who’s a jerk, not white men in general.
As for the gay artists, um, uh, plainly their brains are miswired because they have no evolutionary purpose, being that gay men don’t breed, so, uh, actually they don’t exist. Our model doesn’t account for gay men, so there really aren’t any. Hey, we managed to make physically unattractive women disappear in our model and there are a lot more of them than there are gay guys!
Alara Rogers(Quote) (Reply)
…right. That’s coming from an alternate reality where most great artists were totally celibate?
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Something you might like from Lorber + Mencher:
“…In a gender-stratified society, what men do is usually valued more highly than what women do because men do it, even when their activities are very similar or the same, In different regions of southern India, for example, harvesting rice is men’s work, shared work, or woman’s work: ‘Wherever a task is done by women it is considered easy and where it is done by men it is considered difficult’ (Mencher). A gathering and hunting society’s survival usually depends on the nuts, grubs and small animals brought in by the women’s foraging trips but when the men’s hunt is successful it is the occasion for a celebration…”
So…
Nicky P(Quote) (Reply)
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