Photo by Flickr user Ol.v!er, shared under a creative commons licence.

Much has been said about his words, but a lot of the online discussion focuses on “I now think he’s a douche” and not on why the post should be regarded as offensive. Well, I’m pretty clear on why I find it offensive.

In my posts for BadRep I have often expressed the sentiment that men have unique problems in society, and that those problems are just as invisible as some feminist issues. I believe it’s true. I’ve also recently written a post which stated my feelings on the constant cry of “but what about the men?” in response to feminist discussion. Short answer: if you look at the world and don’t see massive gender inequality harming women a lot more than men, and don’t think that reducing the gap (and aiming to eliminate these issues for everyone) would be a good thing, then I don’t want to know you.

Scott Adams didn’t say that feminism was no longer needed, or that men have bigger problems than women. His post can be summed up in two parts:

“Now I would like to speak directly to my male readers who feel unjustly treated by the widespread suppression of men’s rights:

Get over it, you bunch of pussies.”

Why would he say that – because he sees women’s rights as far more under attack? Er… no. He has this advice instead:

“The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.”

Scott states that he’s not comparing ‘women’ directly to ‘people with disabilities’ or children, but does advise his (male) audience to treat them all the same way – to take into account the “emotional realities of other people”.

And this is where most online discussion is only just starting to get it. It doesn’t MATTER if he’s right, or if he’s a realist. Either way this is shitty, inhumane advice.

It puts the reader in the group taking action, and puts women (and other humans with inconvenient ’emotional realities’) in a group marked “Other”. And as we all know, that’s classic 101 to dehumanising your target and making it easier to see them as objects who don’t need to be considered. It’s also bollocks. He’s giving instructions for how to manipulate others for your own success, without looking at any possibility of finding any common ground, sharing boundaries, or viewing them as real people who could be talked to. They’re just there to be made to go away with the least stress to him. Adams is dismissing the idea that his current views could be wrong and that he might learn something from women, because dialogue is not an option. He’d rather choose the path of least resistance. That’s a pretty closed mind right there.

It’s not easier for “everyone”, Scott. Just you.

It’s not easier for women, for example. Also: women, children and “the mentally handicapped”(!) are together a majority, which makes you sitting inside your privileged minority and dismissing them like this all the more craptastic. The majority of the human race are more emotional than you, Scott, and as you’ve just demonstrated probably have more empathy too.

Towards the end of the post he says:

“Fairness is an illusion. It’s unobtainable in the real world.”

For someone who has spent decades writing about the inhumanity of big business, that’s a surprising quote. And my inner Hopeless Idealist rejects it totally. Yes, men face different inequalities: in the divorce courts, in countries with a military draft, in society’s ancient ideas of what ‘masculine’ behaviour is. But even if I felt that these somehow matched the towering mountain of (frequently lethal) inequality facing women (which I don’t by several miles), I would never give up on seeking fairness. It’s an instinctive, empathic, humane response which shows that you’re a decent human being.

So yeah, I now think Scott Adams is a douche as well. Several additional words spring to mind (the lovely Miranda put in a vote for “ableist asshat” at this juncture). If you want to read his justifications (that he often takes the point of view on his blog which is most difficult to defend, that his readers know he often doesn’t even believe the argument he’s making, that we’re all devoid of “reading comprehension”) then you can wander over to where he’s currently trolling the comment thread at Feministe. Yes, seriously. At no time does he back down from the opinion he stated, or acknowledge how the act of grouping 51% of the planet and more into an ‘overly emotional’ box to be safely ignored for his own mental peace of mind is in any way douche-worthy.

We are better than his exclusionary, patronising bullshit, people. There’s an alternative where we keep talking, and learning, and looking for ways to make a society we can be proud of. Together. Because women are human beings, and the fact that this still needs saying means that all men should be jumping aboard the feminism boat for joint rock n’ roll pirate adventures. The alternative is a land run by people as ignorant, reactionary and self-absorbed as the boss in the Dilbert comics, and no-one wins when that happens.

– Steve B.
White, mid-thirties cis male who used to work for a giant American corporation and buy Dilbert calendars.

International Women’s Day on the 8th of March turned Twitter into an amazing parade of support for women, delight in their progress towards equality and celebration of the women in each of our lives.

Elsewhere, it was business as usual. If you could have hashtagged “Why don’t men get a day, EH?” then it’d have been the global number one tag all over the internet. (They do get a day – November 19th – but that’s not my point here.) I’m writing this post so that next year I can just link it every time someone tells me feminism “isn’t needed” or is unfair to men in some way.

To the people (all of whom were men) who had to ask me what the title of this post meant: look at almost any online article about women’s rights or feminism. Chances are within the first few comments you will have a man asking “What about men’s rights?”

As the James Bond clip which did the rounds quotes: “Women perform 66% of the world’s work, earn 10% of world’s income and own 1% of the world’s property.” What about the men? Fine. Let’s reverse that for a new quote:

Men perform 33% of the world’s work, earn 90% of world’s income and own 99% of the world’s property.

They also suffer much less domestic violence, rape, genital mutilation, sexual shame, sex trafficking, and have far more control over their lives and bodies. Their options for work aren’t limited, they are not considered to automatically have a duty to represent their whole gender if they reach the top of a profession or political office, and aren’t scrutinised as mercilessly if their partner does.

They don’t face becoming part of the epidemic of rape during war, having their testimony count for half a man’s in court, legal challenges on precisely how much they are allowed to be beaten before it’s not acceptable, they’re far less likely to face being property, victims of honour killings and acid attacks, or living under social or legal pressure to hide their bodies from sight (or the more familiar pressure in the UK to expose them, provided they’re the ‘correct’ shape, if they want to be successful).

Speaking as a white cis male in a first world country, if you can’t see why feminism ‘is still needed’ globally then you haven’t tried looking for even a second. We may have a different set of inequalities at home, but that doesn’t mean they’re not just as pervasive and damaging in society. Is the UK some amazing bastion of freedom where women have no problems anymore? The Equality and Human Rights Commission says a BIG no.

Other people raised a much more valid secondary point during International Women’s Day, which was the hesitation a lot of men have about the word ‘feminism’. Even though the movement is about seeking equality, the term suggests seeking female superiority to a lot of people. It’s been debated constantly in feminist circles, but we sometimes forget that this instinctive mis-definition hasn’t changed in the minds of many of the mainstream. The argument about reclaiming it (and then making the version we want actually take root in the general public) is a whole post on its own, and not what I want to do here. We know that feminism has an image problem.

For our readers (of any gender) who may be in doubt, here is my personal definition: feminism is about womens’ right to live as human beings. To make choices about their own lives and bodies. Things which we would consider imprisonment or torture on ‘a person’ are inflicted on women every day, and equality is not going to happen without a lot of effort to fight that status quo. Reaching equality doesn’t take anything away from men that we should not be ashamed of and glad to lose anyway.

We haven’t gained this balance yet in the UK, and we’re catastrophically nowhere near it internationally.

This is an Otter eating Snowflakes. It has nothing to do with men or women, but Steve needed a calming picture at this point. Image from http://unizoo.exblog.jp/12102064

It’s not just the men who need to learn this. I have several stories from female friends where it is women who are enforcing the partriachal norms on other women most harshly. Everyone has a long way to go before we get a situation which is more equal.

Can you seriously ask “What about the men?” Get the depressing stats on inequality: that 92% of our judges in the UK are white men from Oxford / Cambridge, that… look, this could go on forever.

In Egypt (where they recently had a revolution, with women very much involved at the front of it) they had the parades for International Women’s Day which have become traditional in many parts of the world. The women in the parade were heckled and threatened by men chanting anti-female slogans.

Men chanting against us were very furious. It offended them that we were calling for equal rights. … They were chanting “Down with Women”.
– @Egyptocracy on twitter

There are reports of violence, including sexual assaults. A comment from Equality Now‘s Facebook page: “That Egyptian women … grow up *expecting* to be fondled in public as a form of intimidation is just gut-wrenching.”

The main direction of this post will not be new to most feminists, and every area I’ve mentioned deserves a huge amount of debate, but I wanted to write something specifically for those people who can in all seriousness still ask “What about the men?”

Forget that question. There are very valid problems which are uniquely facing men in modern society, and I think some of them must be solved if we are to make progress in feminism, but really, my response to the people who seriously typed that line on International Women’s Day: stop hijacking every single goddamn thread about real issues with this inane question, there’s work to do!

We not only have to survive, we have to deserve to survive.
– Joss Whedon

Whedon was talking about how characters make hard decisions in Battlestar Galactica, but the same sentiment is reflected in lines from his “Equality Now” speech:

Equality is not a concept. It’s not something we should be striving for. It’s a necessity. Equality is like gravity, we need it to stand on this earth as men and women – and the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who’s confronted with it.

These two quotes sum up why I’m a feminist. Equality is not optional. I’m intelligent enough, and live in a society educated enough, that there is no excuse for me not to aim for it. Without equality, we fail as human beings.

From Planet of the Apes, 1968. (Stop complaining about spoilers, you've had 40 years.)

This type of “equality” is not some iron-clad regulation of behaviour, but an equal chance to live as you choose to: not to be disadvantaged because assumptions are made about one of two categories (which don’t match the multiple physical or mental possibilities anyway). Not pressured to act a certain way, or locked out from having power over your life. And it’s not some unimportant dream of abstract perfection but the most fundamental part of the lives of millions.

Reaching this fabled Equality won’t solve many problems. Those people lucky enough to escape poverty will still need to work every day, death is still inevitable, resources are still finite. If we had a much-reduced need for feminism, we’d only be starting on the struggle for a better society – but we wouldn’t be dooming over half our population to lesser chances and consideration because they don’t have man-parts.

Of course, aiming for true equality and overcoming the prejudices which are deeply ingrained in our (somewhat twisted) upbringings is difficult even for feminists. I wonder whether giving up my seat on the train for a woman is deeply offensive and sexist, because it’s based on the idea that women are weak creatures to be treasured and looked after by big strong men. I start to examine every single decision I make that is based on the line “because she’s a woman”. In a society where equality was real, that reason would virtually never apply.

For most roles, if gender is the only difference between two people then they should be interchangeable. A decision should immediately be about the positives and negatives of the individual instead. By having true equality, you would be free to see the person for who they are – at the very least, THEY would be free to choose who they are without having it dictated because of what society thinks “women” are/deserve this year.

But instead girls still get pink dolls and boys get blue trucks.

It’s not unrealistic to have true equality as the eventual aim. In fact, it makes identifying the current inequality all the easier: endless shelves of women’s magazines full of airbrushed anorexics, and also full shelves of men’s mags featuring topless women all with identical body shapes… if we were surrounded by constant images of perfectly-toned half naked men with impossible airbrushed bodies on every second billboard and magazine cover instead, you have to wonder how long this shit would last.

Mark Thomas (the political comedian) released a “People’s Manifesto” earlier this year. It was made by his audiences volunteering their ideas for new British laws. My favourite reads:“Models to be selected at random from the electoral register”.

Male, female, young, old. Large, small. All races, all shoes sizes, glasses-wearing NORMAL PEOPLE modelling clothes for normal people.

Of course, his show is supposed to be a comedy.

Going this far into the idea of a culture where we truly don’t dictate gender roles is not Joss Whedon’s point at all, and not really my main one either. We’re not there. We’re not even 10% of the way there. We’re in a world where we still have to campaign to stop female genital mutilation in England. Where large parts of the planet treat over 50% of human beings as property, or as unclean, dangerous sexual objects.

A feminist, yesterday. (Photo of Bill Bailey from http://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk)

The term ‘Feminism’ has a bad rep with a lot of men. When I linked to this site from my blog, one of the commenters said they found the idea of male feminists “somewhat absurd”. That’s light compared to the reception they receive in some places online.

Bad Rep believes that we’re not going to make much change by refusing to engage with 49% of the population on principle, so this last bit is aimed at male readers:

Men! Do not be afraid! Not only are you welcome here, but you probably already agree with everything feminism stands for:

A feminist is a person who answers “yes” to the question, “Are women human?” Feminism is not about whether women are better than, worse than or identical with men. … It’s about women having intrinsic value as persons rather than contingent value as a means to an end for others: fetuses, children, the “family,” men.
– Katha Pollitt

Or more succinctly:

Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
– Cheris Kramarae, Paula A. Treichler, Ann Russo: A Feminist Dictionary.

Equality is not optional. It is the only way we can get to the very first step of the ladder that creates a society to be proud of, and leave a record of the human race which doesn’t mark us as worse than the apes we came from. It’s not ‘absurd’ to have everyone involved – men need female equality to be in place before we can truthfully call ourselves men.