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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Clearly Edward Gorey wasn’t really asexual.
FM(Quote) (Reply)
Yeah, I kind of feel bad about my recommendation now (or rather, the tone of my recommendation). I’d only really began the book at that point, and her initial premise was so good that I guess I got a little carried away. :/
I’d love the read the review.
Finbarr Ryan(Quote) (Reply)
You know what bugs me about that whole “werewolves can’t control their violent nature and men dominate and women are submissive” thing?
Werewolves are half-human, half-wolf. But humans are merely highly socialized primates. If wolves had human intelligence, they would likely have the same range of behavior as humans. WE ARE BOTH PACK ANIMALS. The only major difference between the social structure of chimps and wolves is that wolves are predators and chimps mostly aren’t (they do eat tiny animals, but they don’t have lives that revolve around hunting game.)
I would love to do an sf story about the caninoid species who have legends of were-apes.
Alara Rogers(Quote) (Reply)
And since it’s generally women who do the gathering in hunter-gatherer societies, they don’t have much of a leg to stand on when saying that evolution says women shouldn’t go out and work. (And when we factor in that gathering provided 75-80% of the food, our Neolithic ancestors become even less cooperative to the evopsych position).
SunlessNick(Quote) (Reply)
Don’t feel bad! You said you were in the process of reading it, so I didn’t take it as a firm assessment. And I knew it’d be worth reviewing on the site either way. I’ve just gotten to Chapter 6, which seems a bit more promising than the others, so we’ll see.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
“in Germany, we just had some assclown say that due to our immigrants, our country would become less German.”
Ew, someone on YouTube tried to friend me, I didn’t know who he was and when I looked at his channel it turned out he was a FUCKING WHITE NATIONALIST and everything on his favorites list had to do with rhetoric like that, “BAAAW WESTERN EUROPEAN REVERSE-ETHNIC CLEANSING, BAAAWWW!”
Casey(Quote) (Reply)
“Men who said that they were going to make those kinds of speeches to their daughters’ boyfriends were the ones spending their youths as rapists and other sexual predators.”
DAT PROJECTION
I’m glad my dad never acted weird like that with any of my guy-friends/potential romantic interests, I guess I know now that he was probably never a rapist! LOLSOB
Casey(Quote) (Reply)
I always remember feeling this rage when hearing a male relative wax on about how “boys are” and “stay away from my daughter”. Even male friends of mine as a young adult, who had young daughters. I realize now the rage was me realizing these men I thought I knew basically just admitted to being predatory and not sorry about it.
Well, and also treating their daughters as unintelligent subhumans incapable of handling their own decisions.
JT(Quote) (Reply)
I’ve come to notice nowadays that my dad’s REALLY dubious about letting my sister (she’s 13) do stuff like spend the night with guy-friends when he never really gave a shit with me (I guess ‘cuz he “trusted” me or something)…then again, my sister legitimately behaves/acts like an unintelligent subhuman incapable of handling ANY decision she makes. OTL
Casey(Quote) (Reply)
My parents kept a very tight leash on my oldest brother, who was very very hormonally addled there for a few years, but were way more permissive with my other brother, my sister, and me. *shrugs*
The one time I brought home a guy my dad thought was creepy (turned out he was, too) Dad took him aside and said “She’s a red belt, and the daughter of a nurse. You hurt her, you’ll be a bloody smear on the sidewalk, and no jury in the world would convict, understand?” And then my mom introduced him to our chow.
Attackfish(Quote) (Reply)
Meep. That’s one of the books I got for Christmas, and now I am less excited about reading it. On the other hand, I just finished Delusions of Gender, and it is really awesome. I think you would like it a lot.
ninjapenguin(Quote) (Reply)
Here’s something very disturbing on both sides of the situation, my sister does really stupid/oblivious things like put her home/cell phone number (area code and all)/home address/chool and really obvious pictures of where we live online and flirts with creeps over the age of 17 on the internetz for everyone to see, after I “tattled” on her to our parents when I found out she put all that info up on YouTube/MySpace/MyYearbook/Facebook/IMVU, my dad warned her not to do that stuff in a very cryptic, “you gonna get raped” manner…I asked him incredulously “Is that a threat!?”
It’s just bad shit all around. OTL
Casey(Quote) (Reply)
*whistles* Seriously? When I was that age, I’d get into fights with my friends when they mentioned what state we were all in online, because it could connect to me. But then, I had two stalkers at her age.
Yeah, being cryptic about danger is a bad idea. *shakes head*
Attackfish(Quote) (Reply)
I’ve ordered it and am looking forward to it!
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Whenever I see a teenage girl behaving in this way, I realize that she has absorbed that message that her sexuality is her most important currency and that male attention should be her ultimate goal. Mix that with the usual teenage bad judgement and you get some risky attention-getting behavors. I just don’t understand why this behavior is such a mystery to parents, when she has been indoctrinated to believe that this is what women should do/be from the cradle by tv, movies, music and Disney Princesses.
Feminism will solve all these problems.
JT(Quote) (Reply)
Um, no, revealing intimate details of your life online is bad behavior common to teens of all genders. it’s more to do with teen feelings of immortality and omnipotence, and the more privlages they hold the more they feel that way. Feminism will do many good things. Eliminating this type of teen risk taking? not so much.
Attackfish(Quote) (Reply)
Actually…men and women ARE different. I’m not saying men are hardwired to fight and women are hardwired to make children. But what I AM saying is that you can’t say men and women are identical except for anatomy. It doesn’t work that way. Men and women think and relate to each other differently. Yes, culture influences that. Yes, culture often dictates gender roles. But no matter what the culture is those roles are always different. You don’t have to have one gender superior than the other in order for the two to be different. Even if you have a man and a woman doing the exact same job, they will do it differently because they are different people. I recognize your point, and even agree with you on some of it. But I do think we can recognize that men and women are different without being sexist.
FireLord(Quote) (Reply)
Your citation-free, sourceless assertions are not persuasive. Read Pink Brain, Blue Brain by Lise Eliot who totally agrees with you (that there are biological differences between male and female brains), and still finds herself debunking nearly every study she thought would support her thinking. And even those studies that do hold up pinpoint differences so negligible they couldn’t possibly make a difference without culture working to broaden them throughout human lives.
Of course, you shouldn’t have needed to read Eliot – she’s just a good example. I had figured all this out myself years ago by just looking critically at the studies and seeing that most of them are simply bad science (in many cases, appalling science), and those that are at all decent don’t indicate anything substantial. I’m wondering why you didn’t figure it out for yourself. It might be that it suits your worldview, so you didn’t look too hard at it, in which case you are being sexist. Or it could be you just don’t realize the importance of critically questioning sources before embracing their results or interpretations of results.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
If you have any two people doing the same job, they will do it differently because they are different people. Expecting the divide to be along gender lines is sexist and frankly stupid.
Some folks subscribe to the typical ‘feminine’ stereotype. Some of those people happen to be female. Expecting that just because someone is female that are going to fill a particular role is sexist and frankly stupid.
Pretending that there are actual gender roles is sexist and frankly stupid. People are people, and one shouldn’t be expected to conform to a particular role in life just because of what chromosome they happen to be born with. There is no job/role out there that cannot be performed by someone with XX chromosomes with the exception of sperm donor, and with the exception of egg donor, no job/role out there that cannot be performed by someone with XY chromosomes. And when it comes to actual parenting, a man can raise a child just as well as a woman.
GardenGoblin(Quote) (Reply)
Yes, this. Here’s the nutshell version of the whole mess:
–Both culture and biology are acting on us from before we’re capable of thinking. It’s impossible to separate their influence without getting, I dunno, alien robots not programmed by humans to raise some human kids and see what happens. There’s no way to raise kids to survival age without exposing them to human culture, so you really can’t isolate biology in any seriously scientific way.
–This hasn’t stopped neuroscience/evo-psych from trying anyway. Unfortunately, most of the science is just terrible, but the results sell books to sexists. I’m shocked at how continuously this branch of science proclaims unfounded assumptions like our commenter here: “If it starts really early in childhood, it MUST be biological! If it happens in every culture, it MUST be biological!” No one ever bothers to prove those statements, because they think they are self-evident. Well, get a grip, people: every culture we know well is patriarchal because patriarchy is based on violence and domination, so every culture that’s NOT patriarchal will be wiped out or well-hidden. So the fact that all patriarchies have certain things in common says jackshit about biology: it’s a reflection of the power of violence, and perhaps suggests more cross-pollination among earlier cultures than we yet recognize. That’s it. As for stuff that starts early among infants – slightly closer to convincing, even though culture must already be powerfully at work there, but even these studies end up in Bizarro World. For example, some quite decent studies show that girls are slightly more risk tolerant than boys when they’re toddlers, yet women end up generally more risk averse than men. So does neuroscience chuck this one over to culture and let it go? No, they’re determined to find dopamine structures in the brain to explain it! They, um, haven’t yet BUT THEY WILL! (And of course, THAT difference is really insignificant, unlike the ones proving that males are naturally like .0003% more ambitious than females, which must be released to the press urgently!)
That’s not science. That’s a cult.
I don’t have a problem with someone observing that if one gender is typically significantly shorter and physically weaker than the other, that gender might look at the world a little differently. That’s a reasonable supposition. But this determination to find brain differences between men and women that will explain away cultural gender roles only a few decades after science stopped seriously teaching that women are less intelligent than men, couched as science? Not buying it.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
And there’s also the fact that the brain is structurally flexible. Even if some physical difference were found between the brains of (most) men and (most) women, it would be nearly impossible to tell whether they were born genetically pre-programmed for the difference, or whether the needs of their cultural, gender differentiated environment caused their brains to grow that way. This is also what makes biological proof or the origins of transsexuality and non-gender conformity almost impossible.
And for those suspicious as to the influence of the external cultural environment on brain structure, we already have good proof that things like PTSD change brain structure, and that’s purely external and non-biological in origin.
The truly bizarre thing is how the traits associated with each gender is inconsistent across culture and time, and even inconsistent within one culture and time. The only consistent element is that the feminine traits are devalued.
/rant
Attackfish(Quote) (Reply)
But even this bothers me, when men trot it out to “prove” that men are superior and justify keeping women out of certain jobs (and then complain that men HAVE to do all the HARD jobs to protect and provide for our lazy woman asses. LOLHipocracy!)
I look at it this way: from day one women are taught to be small, to be dainty, to take up little space, to be quiet. They must not get dirty or physical or muscular. Boy infants, if they are really big, are “strapping big boys” who are encouraged to eat big whereas big girl infants aren’t praised for that and their families hope they’ll grow into their “baby fat”, and then are encouraged to eat less and stay slim.
All these little differences result in a society were the females ARE physically weaker than the males, because they were trained to be and shamed if they are big and “manly” in any way. If we truly lived in a society were girls being big and strong and taking up space was celebrated, the difference there would not be so large. Like in the book Beauty Bites Beast, the author notes just how thoroughly “domesticated” human females have been for centuries.
I do agree that that is the way it is now, but I highly doubt it is as an “innate” a difference as these guys say.
JT(Quote) (Reply)
I certainly find it hard to believe that back when our ancestors were dodging cave lions, being small and dainty was valued in anyone.
SunlessNick(Quote) (Reply)
@SunlessNick, yeah I think it’s mainly a result of “civilization”, which gave us patriarchy. I too can’t imagine any of my cavewoman ancestors waiting around to be protected by a caveman when the lions attacked!
To bring up Beauty Bites Beast again, the author also notes that, in animals, being female does not make them any less potentially vicious. Sometimes, like with bears, females can be more dangerous! Humanity has done its females a disservice by breeding/training all the viciousness out of the female. And it has resulted in rape culture with a steady stream of victims for the predatory, as well as an excuse to keep females subservient and thought of as “inferior”.
It really burns me up when some douche bloviates all over about womens’ “inherent weakness”. Yeah, like your forefathers had nothing to do with making THAT happen.
JT(Quote) (Reply)
Yes – excellent points!
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Watching the trailer for the in-progress movie version of “Beauty Bites Beast”, I was once again reminded how very much higher rates of rape and abuse are for people, especially women with disabilities. A quick google search of the online copy of the book found no hits for the words “handicapped”, “Handicap”, “Disabled”, or “Disability” as noble as the goal of teaching women to fight is, as amazing as martial arts can be (and I’ve noticed a disproportionate number of martial arts enthusiasts I know have disabilities) not all women can ever physically fight back, which breaks my heart.
I’ve mentioned this before here, but there are a lot of guys who are really turned on by the fact that I’m disabled. Even guys who aren’t disability fetishists dig the fact that my disability leaves me frailer and more vulnerable, and inflicts a certain level of dependence on me. That’s obviously clutural, because there is no way men would have evolved to be particularly attracted to girls who are too weak and sick to even survive without modern medicine and technology, or reproduce even with it. I fit the same archetype as the Victorian idealized consumptive, dying woman, the extreme version of the cultural value of feminine physical weakness. And I get asked out more when I’m at my sickest.
I’m also a weight lifting martial arts practitioner with a five minute mile, but I’m lucky my disability allows that at the moment. It doesn’t always.
Attackfish(Quote) (Reply)
Hmm, I hear what you’re saying and like it, but men and women don’t develop muscles the same way, and that’s down to genetics that can’t be influenced on a case by case basis with diet or anything else cultural. Or so I thought? I totally get that how girls are encouraged to eat and idolize frail little thin bodies makes the difference sharper than it needs to be (there are certainly some strong, strapping women in my line). But I thought the differentiation in how muscles develop was more truly innate than that.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Most definitely, I do not want to be ablist! There are women and men with disabilities that preclude them from getting very strong.
The weakening of women is a symptom of patriarchy and rape culture, and it most definitely needs to be dismantled.
JT(Quote) (Reply)
It’s a fairly recent thing, as well–and not universal. In Zambia, last month, I found out early on that it’s considered a compliment to be called “fat,” which I was called. (I’m about 150lbs and 5’3-4″–i.e. way curvy, I guess.) For many men it’s attractive because it means I have the means or ability to provide for myself. It means I look like I can pull my weight.
And the modern obsession with thin, “underweight” women only came around in the last couple hundred years–so yeah, that’s obviously cultural. Looking at art from earlier than the 16 or 1700′s and I see many, many more women who have bodies looking like mine over, say, Paris Hilton.
The Other Anne(Quote) (Reply)
I will agree that muscle distribution is different. But one has to wonder what a woman would look like growing up in a world where she was encouraged to eat and be big. Where she never did a crash diet; such an idea would be absurd! Where she was encouraged to put on muscle and be fast and strong. Where “girls” weren’t assumed crap at anything physical; indeed, female athletic prowess was celebrated. Where their clothing was designed with comfort in mind and high heels did not exist.
(I am not advocating for the reverse of oppressive masculinity for girls, btw! In my perfect world, those bookish types who do not want to be physical, male and female, would be left alone. And there would still be naturally small/thin men and women. Without patriarchy/rape culture, they would not be victimized or ridiculed!)
Maybe there would still be a gap in the way musculature develops, but would the gap in actual strength be as wide? Or should I say, *perception* of strength?
And then there are also many kinds of strength. Not only “large muscled typical male”, which seems to me the only type these essentialists label as legit. Some people can deadlift 300lbs, but they’d be rubbish at running a marathon. The marathon runners probably couldn’t bench press a bunch of weight.
I also think society OVERestimates general male strength, too. It’s also a part of patriarchy: make your victims believe that men are superhuman supermen who cannot be defeated, so don’t even bother. I’ll never forget one blog I was reading, where some MRA douche was dominating the conversation with all his “men are superior because women would be shit as soldiers and firefighters!” I wish I could remember what it was, but I can’t. Well, this old army sergeant finally posted (or so he claimed) and told this douche to shut his face, because in his time he had whipped MANY a weak, lazy man into shape and seen women who could run circles around them. And even though these guys ended up passing the standards, they remained weak! BUT, it didn’t matter, because the army (and firefighting, too) is about *teamwork*. No one expects a lone man to Arnold Schwarzenegger his way out of any situation. Brute strength actually matters very little. And then the sergeant said if this guy really believed that it did, the army wouldn’t want his entitled, sexist ass who couldn’t be part of a team that might include female soldiers and weaker male soldiers.
JT(Quote) (Reply)
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