Last week, a friend told me something about a mutual friend who has been generally very supportive of my writing about women. She said he viewed my writing and advocacy on behalf of women as an "overreaction" -- that I was overly emotional about it and that my views on what women really face in our culture is overblown.
As much as I may be frustrated by my friend's opinion and angered that he is so dismissive of what women face, as a man, I don't deal with the same kind of dismissal that women are subject to.
In their case, it's personal.
Women who attempt to address or discuss concerns they have with the men who claim to love them too often get a wave of the hand, and hear "Yeah yeah, women's rights, it's important, I know, whatever."
The men who dismiss these women treat their desire for equality as if it were a hobby or a pet project. But in these moments, men are fundamentally dismissing these women as people.
While I wish my friend had the chutzpah to actually tell me his opinions himself, I understand, but don't accept why he thinks my work is an overreaction.
For men to really understand the obstacles women face on an everyday basis, they are going to have to come out of their comfort zone in order to break the seemingly equitable surface between the genders.
I've written about men and their understanding of what it's really like to be a woman in our culture before, in a piece entitled "Men Will Never Truly Understand A Day In the Life Of Women. But Shouldn't We Try?" In the piece, I write about how men will never truly understand what it's like to be a woman moving about in her day, but that we must make an effort to learn what it's like in order to better understand what they face in order to properly combat gender discrimination.
But I have never really examined why it is that men don't dig deeper into the gender inequality question.
Why is the discussion about gender inequality such an inconvenient and annoying bore to men, especially socially progressive men who would otherwise advocate on behalf of any other oppressed group or population?
What really frustrates me is my male friends' willingness to stand up for women only if the situation involves rape or domestic violence -- and even then, their support is at best tepid and never proactive.
I am not discounting the efforts of men who do advocate for women who are facing or have faced sexual and physical abuse, but if we think that we've done our part to balance the gender scales and can go home after fighting for women on these critical matters, we're fooling ourselves.
The same progressive male friends who accuse me of overreacting when it comes to advocating for women's rights or who say things like, "Oh god, here we go again," (in jest... but not really in jest) when I try to address an issue related to gender inequality, would not dare accuse me of overreaction if I were writing and talking about issues related to race or sexual orientation.
Why?
Because as much as we live in a racist, homophobic culture, gender inequity is a great equalizer in a way -- the hatred for women is universal and knows no race, sexual orientation... or sometimes gender.
Some men seem to believe that gender issues are no longer relevant because most of us are looking at the man/woman balance in terms of statistics, anecdotes and governmental change.
If we look only at statistics, there is lots of evidence that things are better for women (and lots of evidence that we're still in the gutter), especially since the women's movement of the 1960s and 70s. For example, the numbers show that in the United States, more women attend college than men. To be exact: 57 percent of women vs. 43 percent of men.
A recent TIME Magazine cover story outlined that over the past twenty years, the percentage of women who make more than their husbands has risen by 14 percent. This article also pointed out that since 1965, men have tripled their weekly domestic contributions. These are all positive numbers, despite both just being a start, but I fear cover stories such as this one will lead to a relaxation about the perception of gender imbalance.
So while we may have made a great deal of progress in those departments and many others, it doesn't change the fact that women still face a massive amount of discrimination. Despite the recent and very public war on women in America, gender discrimination has been moving deeper and deeper underground, no longer as publicly visible as it was in the past. However, the intensity of that discrimination has not changed at all, it's just become covert rather than overt.
We may look at the people near us as validation and proof that women no longer face any burdens beyond the big issues, but that's all circumstantial. A man can point to his wife or sister and note that she is a company executive as proof that women face no glass ceiling in the corporate world. He can point to the fact that at work, he reports to a woman, or in his particular position, there happens to be a female colleague who is paid more than him. And some men will say, "Well my wife (or girlfriend) tells me what to do, she controls everything"
As if that anecdote, if actually true, speaks to the fact that gender discrimination doesn't really exist.
Finally -- and this is the biggest way in which men misjudge gender imbalance -- we look at the issue of gender discrimination in terms of governmental change as a justification for pushing women's issues into the fog. We can point to many laws that balance the gender scales, from equal pay laws to pregnancy discrimination laws. Over the past 30 years, a great deal of progress has indeed been made in the U.S. and other countries. Besides the obvious, these laws are only useful when discrimination is reported and the laws are enforced.
We can't legislate to protect a woman against many of the nearly invisible issues they face today and have no means of reporting.
We can't make a law to protect women against horrible emotional abuse, we can't make a law that requires parents to instill their daughters with a healthy body image and we can't force a legislature to pass a law that demands husbands to support their wives during menopause.
While it's important to look at the gender imbalance issue through these lenses, the most important and most often forgotten way is to see this issue through empathy. Empathy is about understanding, about being aware, about making attempts to feel what another person feels.
Men can selectively use the statistics, the laws and stories around us to explain away the gender imbalance and deny the subtlety of sexism as a serious issue. But when we work to understand, to empathize, to learn what women face, to ask them how it feels to be a woman... we will soon learn the secret world in which they live in.
It's not that men are less empathetic than women. It's just that we are conditioned not to feel comfortable showing empathy. Being empathetic, taking the energy to emerge from our perfectly comfortable reality is an exercise in exhaustion. Heeding the plight of women requires effort and expending of energy. Perhaps it's just too much work for us.
Looking at gender issues through governmental, statistical or anecdotal lenses is just about logistics. So often discrimination, of any form, does not get borne through these means. Rather, it's about what is felt by the individual being discriminated against. And often with gender discrimination, women simply don't share their feelings of frustration because their claims have been dismissed: "You're just overreacting. You're paranoid."
One shouldn't equate the empathy I speak of as related to pity or feeling sorry for women. Men aren't here to save women from themselves, empathy is something that women practice with men everyday... all I'm saying is, it's time for men to work to provide the same kind of empathy to women that they provide to us.
The question is, do we, as men, have to care about women enough to notice what they are facing, or do we first have to notice what they are dealing with in order to care about their burdens?
It's hard to say which scenario comes first.
I am reminded of a seminal moment that sparked my own awareness of gender imbalances. I was 21 and out with two women friends at an electronics store. As I explored the DVD section, they were seeking to have their questions answered by a male salesperson. After two minutes, they found me and explained their frustration and demanded to leave.
When I asked my friends why they were frustrated, both of them explained that the salesman (this was a store that didn't pay commissions to salespeople) was unhelpful, giving only short and clipped responses to their questions.
My friend Mychelle told me, "It's a woman thing."
I remarked that I was confused by what she meant.
"He doesn't want to deal with two women, he hates women."
To prove their point, they asked me to go up to the man and ask him the same questions they asked him. I did exactly as they suggested and found the man to be helpful and knowledgeable. He could have, seemingly, spent all day with me.
After that moment, I have been witness to many other similar subtle moments of discrimination, only because I was looking at the issue of discrimination through a new lens.
In the case of the salesman, he didn't say to my friends "I don't want to help you because you're women."
He just detached himself, he filtered their normal and pertinent questions through his conditioning and arrived at a point where he saw them as inconvenient, annoying women who knew nothing. But to him, I was a guy who wanted to learn more and make an informed decision.
These were moments that didn't hit me over the head like rape or domestic violence, but they were the discriminatory equivalent of a paper cut: annoying, painful, and persistent.
Our underlying fear and hatred of female equality lives, so often, in private. This space of privacy is largely occupied by women and the only way we are going to solve this problem is if we crack the door open and attempt to join them.
So in my case, through the help of my friends, I noticed, and began to care... much more deeply. But then again, I cared enough about my two friends and for women in general to not tell them that they were overreacting. I cared enough to explore their circumstance with them.
As much as some people want to portray the fight for gender equity/feminism as a niche issue, it's not. Women and gender inequality refer to a reality in which half the world's population faces a tremendous burden put upon them at birth.
And for those men who doubt the realities for women that I write about, I guess the question is, do you not believe your mother, your girlfriend, your sister, your wife, your women friends? If not, then you've got bigger problems.
Another central problem is men who are fundamentally good pretending as if there is no major gender imbalance. These men, like my friend, when asked if women deserve equality, resoundingly respond "yes." But when they are put in a position to support the women in their lives or when they are put in a place where they can directly react to discrimination, they lack any sort of action or assertion -- or, worst yet -- they only offer dismissal.
These men may see this dismissal as a matter of opinion -- almost as if a political issue is being discussed. But in reality, in that moment, they are committing wholesale dismissal of these women. They are failing to show empathy for the unique experience of all women and for the women in their lives, in particular. They are deciding what is valid based on the lens that feels most comfortable to them: one of male comfort and privilege.
But things won't be too comfortable for long, because as long as we leave half our population behind, things will continue to become more and more uncomfortable for all of us. We don't need to do anything but turn on the TV to notice that over the past two months, Rome is burning, and that the position many men hold on gender equality is receding, rather than advancing.
So, until the day comes when things change on the gender equality front, it's our responsibility, as men and human beings to care, and to care enough to ask. And wait and learn from the answer. And god forbid, try to understand what it's like for the women we claim to love.
And that, my friend, is not an overreaction.
It's just the right thing to do.
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I hope you will join me on Facebook and follow me on Twitter.
This piece originally appeared on The Current Conscience.
Follow Yashar Ali on Twitter: www.twitter.com/yashar
it dissapoints me that men have chosen to react to this post in a negative manner. This article did not negatively depict men, it just simply called men to recognise the everyday behaviours that are holding women back and essentially us all back.
I have often put up with dismissive behaviour and condescension from men simply because i'm a female. it has happened too often for it be designated as a people problem but one unique to my gender. I crave respect and in a way that is not specific to my gender. Did not Martin Luther King urge us to judge others on the 'content of our characters'? not superficial things like skin colour and... gender? Late in his life Malcolm X asserted (after travelling) that when women were backwards, everyone was backwards.
Why is this STILL so hard? We women desire not to be less or more than. We want equality.
(...)
Women have contributed to that history as much as men and, more often than not, they did so in much more difficult conditions. I think particularly of those women who loved culture and art, and devoted their lives to them in spite of the fact that they were frequently at a disadvantage from the start, excluded from equal educational opportunities, underestimated, ignored and not given credit for their intellectual contributions. Sadly, very little of women's achievements in history can be registered by the science of history.
(...)
There is an urgent need to achieve real equality in every area: equal pay for equal work, protection for working mothers, fairness in career advancements, equality of spouses with regard to family rights and the recognition of everything that is part of the rights and duties of citizens in a democratic state.
(...)
The time has come to condemn vigorously the types of sexual violence which frequently have women for their object and to pass laws which effectively defend them from such violence."
More from JPII here:
http://www.ewtn.com/library/papaldoc/jp2wom.htm
Thank you, Ms. Ali for bringing this revolution to our attention!
No longer will movie theaters and auto body repair shops be "For Men Only".
And no longer will women be deprived of the right to wear plaid, or the freedom to buy lemon candy.
Hallelujah!
Stop reading the "men's rights" version of history. Learn about the "rule of thumb", or the long history of the women's shelter movement, helping female victims of male violence. Learn about the earliest rulers of Rome, Romulus and Remus. Learn about the many matriarchal goddess based societies that preceded Western civilization.
Learn some herstory, in other words, and learn real facts in the process.
but i love the male trolls that come out and prove the author's point! edtastic and morrisfactor are the worst. they're like clockwork around here. i love it.
I've read at least five of your articles and have loved them all. Thanks again for your courage and compassion. Please, keep doing what you're doing! I will certainly keep reading :).
But there is the question of how great you are? I said it was not in your head, but that could just be in my head, and I don't even know you. I presupposed you were right and the other was wrong without any evidence, assuming a the worst about whoever disappointed you. This is how the feminist game works. Any troubled or insecure female can find refuge in a movement that sees any threat to her self esteem as a gender conspiracy.
It's am not saying everyone is treated fairly, but justice and injustice is not limited to one gender. When only one complains only one can be seen as a victim.
http://tinyurl.com/feministfirst
You were saying...?
It's hard for men to imagine what it's like to face machine gun fire, humping the boonies, or eating C rations for months on end.
It's WOMEN who dig the ditches, clean the sewers, climb the towers,change tires by the side of the road in -40 degree weather while men stay warm in the car with the kids.
My daughter, a car mechanic, says they now have grappling hooks in her shop to pull electrocuted women's bodies away from the new battery powered cars. It USED to be women mechanics died early of cancers from working around petroleum fumes and asbestos, now electrocution from electric cars is a whole NEW danger.
We as a nation owe a debt of gratitude to the thousands of women first responders who saved countless lives in the burning towers during 9/11 and the thousands of women buried in graves overseas defending our freedom.
You men just don't have a clue....
(btw, where is your 75 year old mother employed that she works at hard labor in a freezer? Walmart?)
yeah, women have gone totally overboard! watch out, we took over 16% of congress! and we hold all female panels to make sure viagra and penis pumps aren't covered by insurance companies!
a judge's wife threatens sex for rulings? you sound like a mental patient. more proof of why a man shouldn't have custody of kids. go get help.
Recent events have revealed the truth of the matter, however. Women's rights are under assault today in ways I'd never dreamed possible, even a year ago. Issues that our grandmothers fought for - the right to privacy, birth control - are being relitigated as if those battles had never been one. So much for feminism being obsolete.
And I really thank you for mentioning this: "the hatred for women is universal and knows no race, sexual orientation... or sometimes gender." The universal nature of misogyny, through all of history, across all races and religions and cultures, explains why this is still such a hard problem to solve.
It's time we separate the issues of sexism from racism because although they are both civil rights issues they are very different in the way of long term consequences. Men don't owe women anything but to be equally judged by their abilities. There is no valid claim for reparations between genders which lived in common family units and sharing resources for eons.
Feminist view historic gender roles in terms of men hating women as opposed to men supporting and protecting women. This in itself comes out of a hatred and resentment of men. It causes them to view men in the most negative light possible at every turn. It's better said that the protection and support of women was universal but I'll admit that protection and support came at a steep price. The dissolution of gender roles is only possible in a safe and modern society. It was historically impractical or matriarchies or equality societies would have inherited the earth.
Free societies are quite fragile and most of human history had men and women living under tyrants.
What are the different long term consequences? Eventually racism will disappear because, as we are already seeing, the races are intermingling and will soon mean nothing. But sexism exists outside of race, of religion, of culture, of historic era. Sexism is universal, a constant of all of human history.
"It's better said that the protection and support of women was universal "
No this is just what you want to believe. You want everyone to agree on your personal chosen interpretation of history. But an objective reading of history doesn't bear it out. We have the record - of institutionalized oppression, of violence, of control, of restriction. We KNOW that men didn't treat women so cruelly in order to "protect and support" them. They wanted them as servants, as incubators, as sexual release devices. If they wanted to "protect and support" them, they'd have let them vote, given them rights, let them go to school. There would be no such thing as wife beating and rape.
There were societies like the Iroquois that did respect women and live with them as true equals. Why was it not "historically impractical" for them? What about all other societies made it so "practical" for men to treat women like animals?
the problem is that you are very ignorant of history. and it's not my job to teach you. so please stop playing the victim, ed. you're the the worst male troll i've ever seen. it's really sad.
it's not hatred to tell the truth. the fragile male ego just needs to get used to it, because you're going to hear a lot more. especially since males are fighting to make birth control pills contraband again.
now you can go play call of duty, ed.
What about the men who have no voice? The women who lie about being on birth control? How about the fact that if a woman accuses a man of being the father he's automatically made to pay unless proven otherwise. Yet paternity test aren't mandatory. Studies show for every 10 random people in a room one was fathered by someone who is not who they think the father is.
What about the blind laws that hand custody over to women? How about the fact that a man is more likely to be arrested in domestic incidents even if he is the one to call the cops? What about the men that keep Motel 6 in business every year as they lose their houses, cars and business's to a woman? Or the fact that Politian's are more concerned with earning women's vote than men's suffering?
Ooops...silly me... my concerns would lead to EQUAL rights.
Feminist aren't concerned with equal rights Yasher. It's about male annihilation from the planet. YOU INCLUDED BRO. Do a short internet search/YouTube for my source (or just read women's comments below).
And for the record over the past year REAL women have began speaking out against feminism. Women are beginning to write books on the damage cause to women by feminist who divided men and women, turned them into working mules and ultimately sex objects. Who is going to be the voice for them Yasher?
you don't know anything about feminism. women aren't speaking out AGAINST feminism. we're fighting to get access to birth control, dear.
and thanks for proving the point of the article. the ignorant male troll NEVER dissapoints. men have too many rights. you need to be put in your place.
Because feminists are the knowledge-base for it? Face it, you are marketing to women who are receptive to fluff and hype- here in this part of huff post. You address female discrimination as if it is the single greatest factor in social relations (identifying only gender as a factor). Feminists: how do you distinguish sociopaths who clal themselves feminists just to get in good with you?
Fail.
Qualification path to address these issues is to be found in sociology, social psychology, etc. so that just because one calls ones self "feminist" means less than nothing in terms of speaking authoritatively.
Lol. Fail.
But nice way of revealing your own prejudices. It's funny you can't see that you just destroyed your own argument.
But of course you'll go after his generalizations about women as well--or not, because they fit your agenda.
Feminism is not, nor has it ever been, equivalent to the hatred of men. Further, true feminists do not promote essentialist beliefs that men are born with an innate hostility or hatred of women. This can lead to a form of separatism/extremism that runs completely contrary to what feminism in it's desire for equality between the sexes actually represents. What feminism does do is challenge the social and cultural circumstances/phenomena that create such prejudice and imbalance.
Many men, and sadly many women, do indeed misjudge gender imbalances. Thank you Mr. Ali for a compassionate, thoughtful and much-needed article.
Scientist have a licence to go out and prove their hypothesis. The problem is in social science one can find evidence of many conflicting theories because there are few aspects which can be regarded as LAWS rather than just THEORIES. Social scientist are time and time again confronted with the question of whether or not correlation is in fact causation. Because of this a social scientist with a deep ideological bias can't be seen as objective. There is just too much room to invent a perspective based on personal assumptions backed by correlations that seem to serve those ends.
To say that "real feminist" think one way or another holds no more validity than those who speak of the real man. These nebulous associations are free for anyone to define and redefine at will. We should judge feminism on those who were accepted in the mainstream as it's representatives and it's impact on the culture in the mainstream. In that we see a deeply ingrained culture of fostering male resentment which continues with articles like this.
Beyond Edastic's exccellent response below, I'd challenge you to source that. You'll probably find that most feminists are hoards of followers who scapegoat the disposable man.
You may then find that you go on to generalize my understanding of feminism- which is irrelevant because I stick to the more scientific minded social psychology -which by the way has an emerging "human irrationality" theme. Perhaps feminists like yourself could embrace that and snap out of your irrational views on gender?
"Feminism is not, nor has it ever been, equivalent to the hatred of men"
Because you as the one true leader of the one true religion on the one true lense of social interaction and gender, say so
The experience gave me a unique perspective on discrimination and gender inequality.
I'm sorry you experienced that, SteenyQ. I know just what you mean.
When I faced the judge in a child custody battle, he said:
"I would never grant custody of a child to a male." and proceeded to give custody of my daughter to my ex-wife.
As you say, the experience gave me a unique perspective on discrimination and gender inequality...
when a health insurance company consults all women to see if your viagra is covered, then you can whine. mothers are more important primary care givers. women carry children, give birth, and breastfeed. you didn't do any of that.
now go pay your child support, and tell your fellow men out there to do the same. thanks.