A couple of months ago I wrote a post called, ‘I don’t understand why some women/girls claim they are not feminists’. This article struck a nerve with a girl I know, who wrote a pretty personal attack about it on her own blog, here’s the link: http://totesobliteration.wordpress.com/2012/08/24/why-i-refuse-to-be-bullied-into-being-a-feminist/. I don’t agree with what she has said, and so she told me to write a response. Here it is:
- The first point is that, ‘People who are not feminists do not necessarily believe that women should all be housewives’. This is a fair and true point, however if you look closely at my article, you will see that I recognise this: ‘It’s the radical feminists that think stuff like this - most feminists are just pro-choice.’ So this point is unnecessary as I agree with it.
- Most women ‘in 9 cases out of 10’ only claim to be feminists because they can’t be bothered to do anything about it themselves. Yeah, again, probably vaguely true that only 10% of feminists actually take proper hardcore action about their beliefs. But this is a bigger issue than just feminism, isn’t it? I mean, people say they are against the Iraq war and yet not all of them protested. Many of my friends were against the rise in the tuition fees, yet they didn’t actively protest. People are apathetic, but if feminism didn’t exist then not even this 10% would do anything about their beliefs. Then we wouldn’t have anyone protesting about sexism. And without anyone protesting we definitely wouldn’t have achieved some of the stuff we have e.g. Equal pay, the right to vote etc etc etc.
- ‘When I don’t like something I don’t hide behind my gender’ - this is great for you, seriously. It’s great that you have the opportunity to put your gender behind you and sort problems out as an individual. But this is the problem, isn’t it? Not all women can do this. Sometimes we need people who are stronger than us to represent us and fight for us. Not all of us are as strong as you.
- ‘People who say they are feminists are contributing to the gender divide just as much as misogynists are (not least because there are increasingly more feminists and increasingly less misogynists.)’ - I have to say with this point I have embarrassingly just copied and pasted what was written because I have no idea what it means. I hope it doesn’t mean that pointing out gender differences is making sexism worse, I really hope it doesn’t mean that. If we’re going to follow this, how about we just ignore racism? In fact, this is a great idea, lets ignore ALL problems until they disappear! That’ll definitely happen...
I also have got to mention that it wasn’t first wave feminism that secured equal rights for men and women, it was second wave feminism. First wave feminism was in the early twentieth century with the suffragettes etc. - The divisions are purely social and so we should fix them by (A) dealing with them as individuals - again, this would be great if everyone was brave enough to call people up on sexism and demand to be treated as equals, but not all women are able to do that, and (B) waiting. This kills me. I can’t imagine anyone saying that about how to fix racism! ‘Social attitudes won’t change over night but they will change just as a wound will heal as soon as you stop agitating it and give it a little time.’ - WHAT?! Social attitudes and wounds are being compared?! This could have it’s own article on the aptly named ‘I don’t understand’. See, social attitudes for women have been really crap for centuries and centuries, the fact that proves this argument wrong is that attitudes have only started changing when women started agitating it!!! I am not into counter-factual history but I am very sure that women would not have got the vote in Britain if it had not been for the women’s movements (yes, that’s first wave feminism) which put women’s issues on the radar of the government. And I know, you’re talking about social attitudes and not legal issues, but again with second wave feminism, nothing happened until people started complaining about the situation that women were in!
- This point is a rant about how I, in my ‘woefully inaccurate’ article, ‘seemed to suggest all feminists thought the same way and all anti-feminists thought the same way.’ I am going to reply to this quite simply: no I didn’t. I was talking about people’s personal reasons for disagreeing with feminism. Never did I say that all anti-feminists think this, in fact I don’t think I even used the word ‘anti-feminism’ in it. Actually I just word checked it, and I didn’t.
I have to say, I am a little confused at the end of this article as to what it is actually saying, if anyone wants to enlighten me, that’d be cool.
