Very thought-provoking post. I tend to agree that “feminism” as a cultural word-of-the-moment is losing momentum, turning outdated. It’s associated now with moms wearing pussy hats and corporate pop-culture social justice, one step behind the priorities of the *real* radicals.
Like you, I’ve bounced a bit between feminism and rejection of (especially more current) feminism. But as a legal aid attorney, I find myself returning to it again and again, because while I don’t subscribe to the idea that “men are trash” and find the smug derision associated with misandry dull and juvenile, I have to keep confronting the fact that most of the women I represent would have, like, 75% fewer problems if not for men.
I’ve never worked in family law. But in eviction defense, in consumer protection, in immigration law, it’s a constant: The women have been brutalized by the men in their lives. The number of low-income female clients I’ve had with an active protection order against a man who has physically hurt them and/or threatened to kill them has got to be over 50%. Women come to me and the fact that they have recently spent the night in the hospital because of something a man did to them is a background detail in a complicated legal story, worth mentioning only as context.
I worked a year in a minimum-wage back-of-house job in a restaurant between law school and my first legal job. Over time, word got around there was an attorney on staff, and women started pulling me aside. Every single one of them wanted to know if I could help them with a problem a man had caused: A recent uptick in domestic violence. A protective order ignored again and again and the cops did nothing. He said he’d take the kids two days and kept them a week and I couldn’t do anything and I can’t afford to go back to court. He said he’d stop helping with rent if I don’t take him back. His brother is stalking me. I went on two dates with a guy and now his friends wait around the corner in a car wherever I go to make sure I’m not seeing anyone else. He found out I’m in school because the court forgot to redact one page of the record and he waited all day in the parking lot of my community college with a gun. A customer follows me home every night ever since he learned I live next to the restaurant. The UPS guy comes in when he knows I’m working alone and follows me around.
I struggle with this. I generally believe that the world, even where men dominate in many spheres, is much more complicated than oppressor ==> oppressed. I know that the representative sample of women ==> women in poverty ==> women in poverty with complex legal problems is smaller than it feels; my job definitely causes significant selection bias. But I really have to work to believe that, whenever I have a week where I see more than an average number of women who live under the thumb of men who expect women to be under their thumb in this brutally physical way. The progress of women’s rights in the U.S. is so deeply bound to class - poor women have the right to divorce and the power to have their own bank accounts, but so often not the ability to live without a second income, to refuse sex (and the ensuing children) to a man who demands it, or the money to make rent.
Of course, not many of these women would know or care what I was talking about if I phrased their situations in the Marxist-feminist framework, them as an oppressed class and men as their oppressors. They’re often leery of educated do-gooders who imply that help is contingent on their leaving the man in question. The idea they *should* leave their relationships would strike many of them as presumptive and naïve. If you want marriage, kids, sex, a relationship, this is how it is - it’s how it is for every single woman in their lives, mothers and aunts and sisters. They don’t think of themselves as oppressed, just as individuals in tough situations handling them as best they can.
In the end I think my personal definition of “feminism” revolves around anything that would make these women able to live without having to depend on a man, for as long and on whatever terms they wished. Childcare, higher wages, a social safety net geared toward supporting mothers, anti-stalking laws, decent health insurance, educational opportunity, protective orders with actual legal teeth, consciousness-raising circles, all-female communes with high walls--I don’t know what makes that happen soonest but whatever it is, that’s my priority.
So is the culture male dominated, male identified, male centered? Sure. Are men monsters? No.
There are some difficult things about being a woman in our society, and those include the familiar complaints.
At work, women (even confident women) are spoken over, interrupted and their ideas dismissed, compared to even really dumb men with bad ideas.
For careers in the same family, it’s almost always the man’s career that comes first; and if the man is offered a better job, well duh, the family moves for that job, and screw the woman’s job or what she might want or aspire to. Women’s jobs are not as important. Even in families with, say, two PhDs, the man usually determines where they move, and the woman has to piece together some adjunct work here and there.
There is really a sense in which women are deeply held by our culture to be “lesser” whether or not anyone holds that view overtly.
At home, while things have been improving for a while, women are still the default parent (doctor’s visits, buying the school clothes, buying the presents, arranging the child care, staying home when the kids are sick), and often the default house cleaner (and various other things). If the family is going out of town, the woman is typically the one who packs everything, arranges pet-sitters and mail pickup, shops for the trip, and often (depending on the destination) cooks and cleans on the trip. On holidays, the woman is typically the one to make sure everyone’s drinks are filled, that everyone’s food preferences are accommodated, who has shopped and cleaned for the occasion and who often cleans up afterward.
There are still these big imbalances in work and home life, even if you’ve got a model husband who treats you well. And…
If you’ve _not_ got a model husband, he comes and goes as he wishes; whereas if the wife wants to go out, she “asks” if he can “watch” his children and then she makes it super easy for him, preparing a dinner ahead of time and bathing the kids early.
So yeah, is our society imbalanced in terms of power and perceived worth? It’s not even a question.
Insofar as feminism says these types of imbalances are wrong and need to be addressed, I’m all for that. I’m not for third wave feminism that decided that work and domestic issues were boring and decided “sex work was empowering.” Yeah no. It’s not. It’s just sad.
And it’s true that men have a raw deal in other ways. They have more learning disabilities. They have shorter life expectancies. (Those are not things that men do for women though, in the same way that women shop and cook and clean and move for men, and make sure they have fun on vacation and at dinner parties.) They are more likely to be shipped off to fight in wars. They are expected to provide for and physically protect their families. They are often the default bug killer and handyman of the household. The status of the family is often determined by the man’s job, so he needs to worry about status, whereas women’s job is often considered extra money (no pressure to be a high earner or have high status).
Things are hard for everyone. I like to see imbalances made less …unbalanced.
I was very involved advocating for maternal leave and helping women with small children to have adequate daycare..and closing the pay gap women experienced when leaving the workforce to care for children. These conversations don't happen anymore. In fact, they seem quaint and not worth discussion. I've lost the thread.
Initially we (women) were trying to establish the reasons we couldn't have pay equity and equal opportunity at work and were pretty much operating w/in a M/F context. Child-bearing seemed to be the key issue.(and getting men to do a fairer share of housework!) As the discussions spread to more various gender issues the initial focus has been diminished. It hasn't disappeared, but it has been sidelined somewhat. (and we still haven't figured out how to get men to do their share of housework).
Very thought-provoking post. I tend to agree that “feminism” as a cultural word-of-the-moment is losing momentum, turning outdated. It’s associated now with moms wearing pussy hats and corporate pop-culture social justice, one step behind the priorities of the *real* radicals.
Like you, I’ve bounced a bit between feminism and rejection of (especially more current) feminism. But as a legal aid attorney, I find myself returning to it again and again, because while I don’t subscribe to the idea that “men are trash” and find the smug derision associated with misandry dull and juvenile, I have to keep confronting the fact that most of the women I represent would have, like, 75% fewer problems if not for men.
I’ve never worked in family law. But in eviction defense, in consumer protection, in immigration law, it’s a constant: The women have been brutalized by the men in their lives. The number of low-income female clients I’ve had with an active protection order against a man who has physically hurt them and/or threatened to kill them has got to be over 50%. Women come to me and the fact that they have recently spent the night in the hospital because of something a man did to them is a background detail in a complicated legal story, worth mentioning only as context.
I worked a year in a minimum-wage back-of-house job in a restaurant between law school and my first legal job. Over time, word got around there was an attorney on staff, and women started pulling me aside. Every single one of them wanted to know if I could help them with a problem a man had caused: A recent uptick in domestic violence. A protective order ignored again and again and the cops did nothing. He said he’d take the kids two days and kept them a week and I couldn’t do anything and I can’t afford to go back to court. He said he’d stop helping with rent if I don’t take him back. His brother is stalking me. I went on two dates with a guy and now his friends wait around the corner in a car wherever I go to make sure I’m not seeing anyone else. He found out I’m in school because the court forgot to redact one page of the record and he waited all day in the parking lot of my community college with a gun. A customer follows me home every night ever since he learned I live next to the restaurant. The UPS guy comes in when he knows I’m working alone and follows me around.
I struggle with this. I generally believe that the world, even where men dominate in many spheres, is much more complicated than oppressor ==> oppressed. I know that the representative sample of women ==> women in poverty ==> women in poverty with complex legal problems is smaller than it feels; my job definitely causes significant selection bias. But I really have to work to believe that, whenever I have a week where I see more than an average number of women who live under the thumb of men who expect women to be under their thumb in this brutally physical way. The progress of women’s rights in the U.S. is so deeply bound to class - poor women have the right to divorce and the power to have their own bank accounts, but so often not the ability to live without a second income, to refuse sex (and the ensuing children) to a man who demands it, or the money to make rent.
Of course, not many of these women would know or care what I was talking about if I phrased their situations in the Marxist-feminist framework, them as an oppressed class and men as their oppressors. They’re often leery of educated do-gooders who imply that help is contingent on their leaving the man in question. The idea they *should* leave their relationships would strike many of them as presumptive and naïve. If you want marriage, kids, sex, a relationship, this is how it is - it’s how it is for every single woman in their lives, mothers and aunts and sisters. They don’t think of themselves as oppressed, just as individuals in tough situations handling them as best they can.
In the end I think my personal definition of “feminism” revolves around anything that would make these women able to live without having to depend on a man, for as long and on whatever terms they wished. Childcare, higher wages, a social safety net geared toward supporting mothers, anti-stalking laws, decent health insurance, educational opportunity, protective orders with actual legal teeth, consciousness-raising circles, all-female communes with high walls--I don’t know what makes that happen soonest but whatever it is, that’s my priority.
So is the culture male dominated, male identified, male centered? Sure. Are men monsters? No.
There are some difficult things about being a woman in our society, and those include the familiar complaints.
At work, women (even confident women) are spoken over, interrupted and their ideas dismissed, compared to even really dumb men with bad ideas.
For careers in the same family, it’s almost always the man’s career that comes first; and if the man is offered a better job, well duh, the family moves for that job, and screw the woman’s job or what she might want or aspire to. Women’s jobs are not as important. Even in families with, say, two PhDs, the man usually determines where they move, and the woman has to piece together some adjunct work here and there.
There is really a sense in which women are deeply held by our culture to be “lesser” whether or not anyone holds that view overtly.
At home, while things have been improving for a while, women are still the default parent (doctor’s visits, buying the school clothes, buying the presents, arranging the child care, staying home when the kids are sick), and often the default house cleaner (and various other things). If the family is going out of town, the woman is typically the one who packs everything, arranges pet-sitters and mail pickup, shops for the trip, and often (depending on the destination) cooks and cleans on the trip. On holidays, the woman is typically the one to make sure everyone’s drinks are filled, that everyone’s food preferences are accommodated, who has shopped and cleaned for the occasion and who often cleans up afterward.
There are still these big imbalances in work and home life, even if you’ve got a model husband who treats you well. And…
If you’ve _not_ got a model husband, he comes and goes as he wishes; whereas if the wife wants to go out, she “asks” if he can “watch” his children and then she makes it super easy for him, preparing a dinner ahead of time and bathing the kids early.
So yeah, is our society imbalanced in terms of power and perceived worth? It’s not even a question.
Insofar as feminism says these types of imbalances are wrong and need to be addressed, I’m all for that. I’m not for third wave feminism that decided that work and domestic issues were boring and decided “sex work was empowering.” Yeah no. It’s not. It’s just sad.
And it’s true that men have a raw deal in other ways. They have more learning disabilities. They have shorter life expectancies. (Those are not things that men do for women though, in the same way that women shop and cook and clean and move for men, and make sure they have fun on vacation and at dinner parties.) They are more likely to be shipped off to fight in wars. They are expected to provide for and physically protect their families. They are often the default bug killer and handyman of the household. The status of the family is often determined by the man’s job, so he needs to worry about status, whereas women’s job is often considered extra money (no pressure to be a high earner or have high status).
Things are hard for everyone. I like to see imbalances made less …unbalanced.
I was very involved advocating for maternal leave and helping women with small children to have adequate daycare..and closing the pay gap women experienced when leaving the workforce to care for children. These conversations don't happen anymore. In fact, they seem quaint and not worth discussion. I've lost the thread.
Initially we (women) were trying to establish the reasons we couldn't have pay equity and equal opportunity at work and were pretty much operating w/in a M/F context. Child-bearing seemed to be the key issue.(and getting men to do a fairer share of housework!) As the discussions spread to more various gender issues the initial focus has been diminished. It hasn't disappeared, but it has been sidelined somewhat. (and we still haven't figured out how to get men to do their share of housework).