I really don’t care whether someone identifies as feminist.
A lot of other people seem to, though. That’s what’s behind the otherwise puzzling insistence on redefining feminism to mean “just thinking that men and women are equal!” (Which is ridiculous. If your definition of a gender-related movement includes both me and the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, it is not a very good definition.) It’s behind the surge of pop-feminist adulation every time a celebrity declares herself or himself to be a feminist, regardless of whether they’ve ever shown any interest in anti-sexist activism. It is behind the discourse about how all men should be feminists, and the related discourse about how no men should be feminists because the word ‘feminist’ is somehow women’s private woman-only space or something, because this is totally how language works.
So here’s my opinion: I don’t care.
There are lots of reasons a man might not identify as a feminist. It might be that he is alienated by racism, transphobia, ableism, rape apologism, or whorephobia in the feminist movement. It might be that he is a victim of oppositional sexism or of racism, ableism, or rape apologism influenced by his gender, and thus he finds that male privilege discourse doesn’t reflect his experiences. It might be that he experienced some of the toxic or frankly abusive dynamics that exist in some social justice spheres and now has a flinch reaction to anything remotely feminist-y. It might be that he personally is not particularly sexist, and he assumes that no other men are sexist either, because sexism is clearly awful, and therefore feminists must be blowing things out of proportion. It might be that he doesn’t have strong opinions on gender politics one way or the other. And, yeah, it might be that he’s a sexist dickbag.
So I don’t care about whether a guy calls himself a feminist.
Here are some questions I do care about the answer to: if you organize a big event, do you welcome children or make provisions for childcare? do you divide chores and childcare in a fair and equitable way that both you and your partner(s) are satisfied with? (would your partner agree?) do you consider housework and childcare to ‘not be real work’? have you set yourself up as the Transgender Police who is in charge of who gets to be transgender? are you a dick to sex workers? do you pressure pregnant people into getting abortions or into not getting abortions, or do you support their right to make this decision for themselves? do you respect people’s sexual boundaries? do you think everyone needs to know that you think [insert trait here] is disgusting and you personally would never have sex with someone like that? do you give women you know unsolicited criticism of their appearances? do you assume that women are ignorant about stereotypically male subjects (or that men are ignorant about stereotypically female subjects)? do you assume that a girl wants a doll and a boy wants a truck without asking about their toy preferences? do you understand how uteruses work? do you treat women you know like your mom, your secretary, a baby, or a fragile thing that needs to be protected? do you make fun of men who work in typically female professions or are the primary caregivers of children?
And so on and so forth.
Probably, as a group, men who identify as feminists are more likely than men who don’t identify as feminists to give the right answers to those questions. If nothing else, the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood is probably giving the wrong answers, and thus weighing down the non-feminist side. But there are a lot of men who say all the right words about patriarchy and bell hooks, but in their private life act like the Laundry Fairy magically causes clean clothes to appear in their drawers. There are a lot of men in This Is What A Feminist Looks Like t-shirts who have no problem with guilting a woman into having an abortion she doesn’t want. And there are also a lot of men who don’t think much about feminism one way or the other– or even identify as anti-feminist– who do a lot of the really boring, unrecognized work of fighting sexism. Who make sure there’s childcare at an event. Who listen to expertise regardless of the gender of the expert. Who say “dude, she was talking” when a woman is interrupted.
And that shit’s the stuff that actually matters? Sadly, cute buttons about smashing the patriarchy have very little effect in smashing the patriarchy. What will smash the patriarchy is a bunch of individual people individually making the decision not to be sexist, and then doing that again and again, for the rest of their lives, until it isn’t even a decision anymore it’s just automatic. And that’s not something you have to identify as feminist to do.
Thing of Things 
Do people still do toy drives with “girls’ toys” and “boys’ toys” specified?
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I remember that less than a decade ago, McDonalds was handing out children’s happy meals with a choice of “boy toy” or “girl toy”. That is how they were referred to, although of course parents were free to ask for a boy toy for their little girl and vice versa. I don’t know whether they still do this today.
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I’ve heard that last year, at least some McDonalds’ weren’t. I wouldn’t be that surprised if it varies by franchise, though.
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At least one McDonald’s store just asks “Do you want Hot Wheels or Barbie?” (or whatever.) They have a very obvious strategy of having a set of “boy” toys and a set of “girl” toys, and the cashiers know what people mean when they ask for them like that.
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I was thinking of e.g. purchasing presents for relatives’ children that you don’t see very often.
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Or for that matter, children you DO see very often, but ignore their actual preferences because you assume you know the answer already…
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Oh, I never get anything for the niblings without checking with my siblings first. My own uncles used to buy me gifts with the express purpose of irritating my parents (drums, trumpets, wildly age-inappropriate books) and I don’t want to cause that sort of domestic strife.
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They very much do. At least ’round these here parts, in Southern Baptist Church land.
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So very much agreement.
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I think an argument frequently made by people who think it’s important for privileged people to identify with social justice movements is that in addition to all the things you listed, it’s important that people recognize that bigotry exists in important ways, because if you don’t recognize that, it can mean
– you’re not listening to/believing/trusting marginalized people who tell you about their experience of bigotry
– you’re extremely ignorant about marginalized people’s experience
– you’re blaming marginalized people for problems that are actually due to bigotry
I think as with other strong social justice claims, this makes the most sense when the bigotry in question is really strong.
– I have a family friend who refuses to believe that Jewish people in the USSR were oppressed even when his many Russian Jewish friends tell him their experience of being systematically rejected from top universities for being Jewish. This comes across strongly as “you’re not as smart as you think you are, there must have been a legitimate reason you were rejected” as well as “you must be interpreting your experience incorrectly” and it sort of implies “the reason there were no Jews in top universities is that they’re not good enough”.
– My grandma believes that LGBT people are not oppressed in Russia, which is just a huge inferential gap to try to bridge, and evidence that she doesn’t really know anything about LGBT experiences.
(Side note – when I was talking to my grandma about this, my dad interjected at some point with the classic social justice note that “to know how bad any kind of oppression is, you have to listen to the people who are actually oppressed” (my dad is not a very social justicey person at all). This statement too is, I think, extremely applicable when it comes to like, the situation of LGBT people in Russia, and much less applicable when it comes to the situation of LGBT people in the U.S., because non-LGBT people here are more familiar with LGBT issues. (Though even here you need to listen to LGBT people to learn about e.g. the psychological experience of being closeted.)
In the case of sexism in the U.S., I think it’s very possible for reasonable people to disagree about how much oppression there is, so indeed I am totally fine with people who share my values but disagree on that question. I think if someone thinks sexism against women in the U.S. is obviously extremely pervasive, it makes sense that they would find it frustrating if people disagree and fail to identify at least somewhat with the movement that names the problem & tries to fix it.
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oops, I missed a parenthesis.)
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Thank you. The gods of Lisp have been appeased.
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YMMD.
The best way to tell that a comment was written by a coder is to look for nested parentheses (although I usually draw the line at four).
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@Autolykos
Hey, some of us are pedantic language nerds 🙂
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Funny thing, I (almost) never nest parens in text, and I’m literally a professional Lisp programmer.
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I think part of the issue is that in some situations there’s more than one movement complaining about the same thing, and no movement that complains about this thing without saying that everyone who disagrees with their preferred solution is evil. For example, both Maxists and Objectivists think that the merger of governmental power with large capital is the worst, but they also hate each other, and are more or less the opposites of each other. What’s worse is that there appears to be no movement that complains about how large capital interacts with the government, but doesn’t offer non-negotiable solutions, such as abolishing taxes and social programs or abolishing money and private property.
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This is how I end up wearing a marxist flag and an objectivist flag in a desperate attempt to communicate something like that… (I don’t do that specifically.)
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I’m not the type who wears flags, but Rand and Marx are right next to each other in my bookshelf for much the same reason. As with all hedgehogs, you should pay close attention to their observations, but never follow their advice…
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I think a nuance that is often missed is the distinction between the facts and the interpretation of the facts.
For instance: “Women generally report more hardships, difficulties and obstacles in most aspects of their life than men” is the raw, undeniable fact.
But “Women are opressed and kept down by the sexism of the patriarchy” is an *ideological interpretation* of the above fact. It’s a conceptualisation of the fact that aims to make sense of it and to make a theory emerge from it, which then allows the making of predictions, and hopefully, of solutions.
And this is why I don’t call myself a feminist (or any other political -ist): because feminism is an ideology and as such (like any other ideology) adherence to it entails not just a recognition of certain facts, but the wholesale adoption of a holistic, interpretive set of tools and concepts, of a predefined and largely unquestioned worldview and system of moral values (again, this is true of all ideologies).
This goes against both my rejection of systems and my extreme defiance toward moral constructs (one of the few -ist I accept to label myself as is “moral antirealist”).
In my actual life, I have a strong desire to avoid conflicts and to be left alone, so I try to be aware of any of my biases that could result in me treating people in a way that could create ressentment toward myself. But when it comes to ideas and beliefs, I prefer to keep the ability to pick and chose, which ideology usually denies me.
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Another reason: there’s the endless tussle around male feminist/ally. Should you self-identify? Is that presumptuous, or is it gutless not to do so? Better sidestep the whole debacle and just focus on picking policy points and doing advocacy/not fretting too much about whether or not it’s sexist to hold open doors.
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Per the division of housework: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqQgDwA0BNU
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Although I don’t define myself as a male feminist, I actually answered all the questions you asked that you’d like to hear as a yes. Straight conservative white guy and I think this is just how nice people are. The others are dicks anyway. But I have an visceral aversion to the feminist militancy of today. It’s taken on a level of nastiness that belies the purpose of their points. Hardly any of them are making a cohesive, and maybe worse a comprehensible point. It’s all over the place. That stupid tome of non equal pay for equal work, using figures from literally 30 years ago is utterly ridiculous, and has been proved so , but it’s a good talking with to rule them up. But it’s still a lie.
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I do see myself as a male feminist, assuming what I consider to be a prescriptive definition of feminism (which is slightly more than just “men and women are equal” and includes something about women being the more oppressed gender broadly speaking and enforcement of gender roles being bad). I believe the above, rather than a list of specific behaviors, is a preferable way to define “feminist”. However, labels mean only so much, and I agree with Ozy that specific behaviors matter more.
I can answer with an emphatic “yes” to everything on the list, with slight misgivings about the “mentioning specific traits one finds disgusting” thing, as (1) I’ve known otherwise very feminist-sounding guys who stray uncomfortably close to this (I’ve known myself to proclaim how much I find smoking a turn-off, although I try to be careful about doing this in a tactful way to a non-smoker audience); and (2) it seems to be more a sign of obnoxious over-sharing about sexual preferences than of not respecting women. I’ve seen gay men stray towards this kind of obnoxiousness as well (one very liberal, feminist guy I knew in college liked to go on about how “vaginas are gross”), and I have reason to suspect that this behavior is not rare in groups of women either. But anyway, I agree that taking it to the extreme of acting like “everyone needs to know” these preferences is generally bad behavior.
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I apologize for the pedantry, but (1) some of the questions are supposed to be answered “no” and (2) you two apparently know a lot more about the uterus than I do. (I’m pretty sure I know what it does, but I don’t know how it works. In my arguable defense, I don’t know how the liver works either, or the prostate, just sort of what they do)
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My intent was not a detailed scientific knowledge of the uterus but a more functional “periods last for five to seven days and happen about once a month” sort of knowledge.
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Jossedley, I realized some time after I’d left my computer that I had accidentally disregarded the uterus question, and no, I don’t know very much about how a uterus works either. Although it did occur to me that Ozy might have been dryly implying the question of knowing more about the uterus than Todd Aikin, to which my answer should probably still be yes.
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Everybody who doesn’t know how uteruses work: if you want every question about (not pregnant, not currently on birth control) uteruses answered, Taking Charge of Your Fertility by Toni Weschler is absurdly complete.
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Identity appears to be an effective political tool. I wouldn’t declare identity unimportant just because I lack a clear theory of why it is important. And indeed, it is not to hard to come up with such theories if you set your mind to it.
On the other hand, opting to focus on material issues rather than language issues is usually a fine choice. This is a good approach, even when your intention is to address language issues. For example, if someone questions your right to call yourself a feminist, saying you don’t care, and then switching to material feminist issues is a good strategy.
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Oh, I do recognize identity is an effective political tool. In much the same way as a bulldozer is an effective construction tool. That is why I do my best to stay the hell away from anyone who tries to wield it.
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“Identity appears to be an effective political tool. ”
[Citation needed]
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How about I am woman, I must march
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Growing up, I always loved my dad for patiently showing us how to do stuff, rather than doing it for us. Even if it took twice as long, it’s nice to know you can fix your own flat tire if you have to. And having your family simply raise you with the assumption you can do anything in life, while still being ready to help out? And considering you worth the extra time to make sure you become that competent adult? Talk about empowering.
So while we’re talking male feminists, shout-out to awesome dads.
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Agreed. If you demand equality and independence, it’s trivial to ignore you. If you become equal and independent, there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about it.
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95% of this post would actually still work if one replaces men/male by people, as most women don’t identify as feminist, just like most men. Both men and women also get called out on not identifying as feminist (although that actually seems to happen more for women).
And both men and women can do their part to fight gender norms, regardless of the labels they (don’t) adopt.
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I remember sitting in – not really taking part in it, but being present – at a conversation over lunch in university. It was about one guy, one of “those guys”, the ones whose behaviour towards women ranged, depending on who you asked, from ungentlemanly to sketchy to serial rape. One person was talking about how this guy was someone a lot of women did not want to be around, especially when drinking was involved, because he had a reputation as someone women who were drinking did not want to be around.
The response of another person was essentially “but that’s impossible, he’s active in the college anti-sexual-assault club!” So. Definitely relevant: This guy is smart, witty, and can be quite charming. Exactly the sort of person who gets away with sexual assault.
Far less dramatically, I know two or three guys who will get into online arguments with women who say they don’t need feminism, aren’t oppressed, aren’t discriminated against, to tell them, yes you are, you just don’t know it, men talk down to you and belittle you all the time, etc. They never seem to notice the irony of this.
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Hey, if you can manage it, making your claim true in the course of arguing it is a great way to win a debate.
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But of course! It’s for the same reason as the opposite otherwise puzzling insistence on redefining feminism to mean “holding the Right Progressive Views on Literally All Issues,” just on the other side of the same bait-and-switch: If you can get people to simultaneously (1) believe that “you’re either a feminist or a misogynist” and (2) trust your wild assertions about what is and isn’t “anti-feminist,” then you can get people to adopt (at least in public) any beliefs you want in order to avoid being “misogynist.”
(This same approach is, needless to say, used by propagandists of numerous ideologies; feminist (along with so-called “social justice”) propagandists have just been more disturbingly successful in this regard than most, at least in academia.)
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This is something similar to what I’ve seen antifas do, except that in that case it is 1) you are a fascist sympathizer if you aren’t all in favor of antifa and 2) if you defend anyone who antifa accuses then you aren’t all in favor of antifa.
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While I understand your motivation for saying this and generally believe that when organizing any large event one should try to accommodate as many people as possible it bothers me that you connect up attitudes toward children with attitudes toward women.
For people like my wife and I who have chosen not to have children there are no shortage of events and aspects of life we are asked to pay more for or endure discomfort to subsidize those with children. I could go on ad nausem about the range of social and legal frameworks that implicitly benefit parents and children with the costs born by society at large. While I largely think that those with the resources should pay their fair share in order to consume children (in the economic not cannibal sense) I’m generally pretty sanguine about these traditions as they often seem to give rise to non-zero sum increases in total utility.
However, the idea that in addition to simply tolerating the general bias toward child raising that one has a further moral responsibility to go out of one’s way to subsidize raising children is very disturbing. Particularly when you consider the fact that an accommodation like child care comes at the cost of other potential accommodations for other groups that might need help getting to your event.
—
More broadly, I find it kinda disturbing and dangerous to identify women’s issues with child raising concerns (even if statistically it might be true).
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Meh, given that it’s statistically true, I find it refreshingly pragmatic for feminists to be paying attention to it. Or non-feminists, or whoever. I’m fed up with practical outcomes being trumped by calls for ideological purity.
…I also assign ever-increasing credence to some of these statistical differences that we want oh-so-much to go away once we remove coercion, actually not going away and us being forced to concede that some of them were legit gender differences all along. It would not surprise me if unequal desires to take part in childcare was one of these differences. And if that’s the case, then being accommodating to women long-term means accommodating child carers. In the shorter term, I’d like us to resist the temptation to guess, and help women (and others) in the ways they want to be helped, without imposing ideology on them that has not actually stood the test of empiricism yet.
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@doubleunplussed
Actually, I see a lot of support in the feminist movement for accommodating gender differences, when that is seen to be beneficial to women. However, the same is not done when men are perceived to benefit. So the pragmatism merely benefits one gender, while the other gets to suffer the ideological purity.
I am not a fan of double standards like these.
As for child caring specifically, we have three categories of possible causes:
1. Women have more inherent desire to care for children
2. Women are biologically better suited to care for children
3. Society makes it easier for women to care for children and/or tells women that this is their role
I see 1 as neither proved or disproved, so we should operate on the assumption that it may be true. I see 2 as obviously being somewhat true, due to breast milk. I see 3 as obviously true, both in social norms, as well as the law and how institutions do certain things.
IMO, we should seek to reduce the strength of 2 and 3 and then see where we end up. For 2, technology seems an answer (we already have solutions for this, like formula, breast pumps, etc). For 3, we can make speak out against the social norms, give attention to role models, fix gendered laws like maternity leave, fix institutions like divorce courts, etc.
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I’m not sure what desiring to take part in “childcare” means. In my experience, men tend to enjoy the pleasant parts of childcare as much as women, and I’ve never seen a person of any gender enjoy changing a poopy diaper or dealing with a toddler’s emotional meltdowns. And unfortunately, in practice “unequal desires” tends to turn into “women should do all the dirty / stressful stuff, and men can do some of the fun stuff if they feel like it”.
(Similarly, “men are naturally more motivated to work outside the home” turns into “the husband is responsible for paying all the bills”.)
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>And there are also a lot of men who don’t think much about feminism one way or the other– or even identify as anti-feminist– who do a lot of the really boring, unrecognized work of fighting sexism. Who make sure there’s childcare at an event. Who listen to expertise regardless of the gender of the expert. Who say “dude, she was talking” when a woman is interrupted.
Indeed! Thank you for saying this. A lot of the antifeminist men I’ve known do things like this. In fact, sometimes they respect my expertise through arguing with me about feminism!*
*Note that this is from when I still identified as female and also from when I was significantly more pro-feminist than I am now.
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Interesting post.
I identify internally as a feminist. I spend much of my life trying to make a good world for my daughters. I pass all but two of your tests**. But I no longer publicly identify as one any more, mainly for three reasons:
1) I am a realist, and believe that accurately and acknowledging reality is a predicate to changing it. Not to mention that it’s an obvious requirement before you can accurately allocate limited resources. But the current model of feminism seems to punish the accurate discussion of objective facts, when they would work against a desired short-term outcome. (See., e.g., discussions of wage issues; discussions of college sexual assault; etc.) I don’t like to be associated with that process.
2) Feminism has become super-SJ-ish, and has taken on a lot of issues which go beyond “obtaining gender equality,” and I don’t identify with a lot of those.
3) I can live with a claim that the genders are statistically identical (I don’t think it’s true, but I can live with it as a basis for action.) I can also live with a claim that the genders are statistically different, and that as a result of those differences they will probably have some areas of relative superiority and detriment–which we can work around, provided that we can identify and acknowledge them so they can be properly addressed (see #1.) But either way I feel like folks have to choose one claim or the other up front and stick to it. It is very difficult to publicly identify with a political movement that apparently switches back and forth between “equality” and “inequality,” according to which argument will win at any particular point in a battle.
**a) I don’t think anyone has an obligation to provide childcare for anyone else. This may result in folks having fewer children, at which point we will eventually reach a point of need where society will choose to provide childcare as an incentive for having kids. But until we’re there I think parents should plan for it and deal with it on their own. I do not think that position is “anti-feminist” though–I encourage people to choose to be childless and it’s clear we will be just fine with a smaller population–so I reject that implication.
b) I support abortion rights up through birth, so I’m uber-pro-choice, but I reject the SJ-feminist claim that “abortion, out of the universe of choices, must be free of any economic or personal pressure whatsoever” as inappropriate. Humans have pressure for a ton of choices. Many of those choices have life effects which vastly exceed the life effects of a relatively safe and low-level medical procedure. I support a goal of freer choices for all, but it’s completely bizarre to single out one single special thing which must be Free From All External Inputs.
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And you as someone who has studied rationality and feminis, have you ever considered half of the feminism is not actually about oppresion but maximizing female preferences?
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This is an amazing post. I recommend “Why I Am Not A Feminist: A feminist manifesto” by Jessa Crispin. She is very critical of universal feminism that is marketed as universal and its emphasis on “converting” people to feminism (a feminism which, she thinks, has become nothing more than trendy posing rather than actually being an activist).
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*universal feminism that is marketed as palatable and nonthreatening* (woops I sent that without reading it over)
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the last part of your piece is powerful.it is difficult to walk the talk,but it is easy to call oneself a male feminist.you become a feminist only when you do through actions show respect to all women regardless of their diversity.wonderful piece.
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