Why I'm Not a Feminist
This post has been brewing for a while. The title determines whether or not this is the sort of thing you will be interested in. If you don’t care for the title, I suggest skipping.
I’ve got to admit, I’m a little annoyed about self-righteous feminists. Feminists who manage to say that theirs is a “fight to be seen as human beings, because so often women (and men) are defined by essentialist visions of gender rather than their human-ness”, while at the same time defining men as being essentially men, not individuals, laying the blame of past injustices on men of today (simply because they are men), and endorsing policies that give special favors or disfavors to people of one gender because they are people of that gender, and not for any independent reason.
First: forget the past. I’m not taking the blame for past discrimination. I didn’t and don’t discriminate based on gender. I’m not going to look kindly on measures designed to make me pay for what men of the past have done. I’m not going to look kindly on measures designed to reduce people to essentially beings of one sex or the other — male or female — either. Women don’t deserve special privileges just because women were discriminated against in the past. Men don’t deserve the blame for the discrimination they don’t commit. There are more than enough men that do partake in gender-based discrimination for feminists to feed the wolves; you don’t need to hit men as a group with the whip.
I’m not a feminist, I’m a humanist. Men, women, black, white, Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or Satanist or atheist, Chinese or Swedish or American: we’re humans. As such, we deserve the same rights, and I do mean the same rights, and we deserve the same responsibilities, and I do mean the same responsibilities, unless there is a relevant reason not to. There’s a fundamental asymmetry in a pregnancy that makes it relevant to treat the genders differently: a woman needs to go through nine months and a birth, a man need only spill some sperm. This makes differential treatment relevant. There is no such asymmetry in the candidate pool when looking, for example, at who to put on a political ballot. Men and women are not, in virtue of being men and women, good politicians. Therefore, it makes no sense to reduce them to gender — an irrelevant attribute — and give special favors to one of those groups.
This is what nearly happened to the Norwegian Foreign Minister, the most popular character in government: because of lame rules about gender equality, he could have lost a secure place in parliament for next fall’s election to a woman because he was a man. No one argued that he wasn’t more qualified for the position than a hypothetical woman he’d be booting out; in fact, everyone seemed to agree he was the most competent person for the position. As it happens, the party reinterpreted their rulebook and gave him a safe spot. But this could have been a horrible example of “essentialist visions of gender.”
Same goes for most jobs and grants. The Norwegian government used to reserve professorships for women in order to bring more women into science, but that was terminated when it was ruled to be illegal by an EFTA court. Now, they’ve pledged to evade these rules by reserving postdoc and PhD positions. This is the kind of institutionalized discrimination that feminists favor and I oppose. It’s belittling women (aren’t they capable of competing on equal terms with men — if not, doesn’t that imply that women aren’t good at science?). It is gender discrimination, and it’s group punishment. I don’t like that triad at all, and it’s common to a lot of feminist thinking.
The best feminists aren’t feminists; they are the ones who see that women should get exactly the same rights and responsibilities as men, no more and no less, unless there is some relevant asymmetry such as when it comes to abortion. They are the only ones who don’t fall into “essentialism”, which I take to be the treatment of people as Men or Women, not as individual Persons who compete with other individual Persons on the basis of their relevant merits. They’re the only feminists who don’t think that women are essentially women and so need protection from the real world, which is too hard for women to tackle. In other words, they are the only feminists with dignity.
So, am I saying that men are oppressed? Certainly not! Men are still dominant if you absolutely have to pit the genders against each other as groups, but I think that is a bullshit line of thinking anyway. I prefer to look at society as a collection of individuals, some of whom are powerful. People fight people, and some men are sexist bastards, but men-as-a-group don’t fight women-as-a-group. Patriarchy? Go to fucking Saudi Arabia, that’s patriarchy. What you got in America and western Europe isn’t patriarchy, it’s scattered sexism. Gender discrimination based on irrelevant attributes is immoral and way more prevalent than it ought to be, but it’s not how society is organized, it’s not how a western democracy “really works”. Sexism should be cracked down on hard. That goes in every direction.
One more thing: equal distribution in every sector is not desirable. I wouldn’t mind 90 percent women in government if I thought they were truly the most capable people that volunteered for the job. The reason large inequalities in some sectors is worrying is that we know it doesn’t represent a fair distribution. There aren’t nine times more capable female politicians than there are men, and there aren’t nine times more capable male politicians than there are capable women. But inequalities could have something to do with nature — maybe certain lines of work come more naturally to one gender or another — or they could have something to do with willingness to do the work: maybe there just are more men who are interested in science than there are science-minded women, and maybe there just are more women who are interested in (say) teaching than men. Maybe the inequalities don’t exist as a reflection of discrimination but as a reflection of natural divisions between the sexes. I don’t care for goals such as “no more than 1.5 men for every woman” or the opposite. I care for goals such as “no more men for every woman than there are capable, willing men for every capable, willing woman.”
