March 9, 2005 Feminism's hits and misses
By Andy Ho
THAT there is an International Women's Day at all shows how mainstream the feminist agenda has become. In fact, today, men more than women would label themselves feminists. If you agree that men and women should be economically, socially and politically equal, you may consider yourself a garden-variety feminist, whether you are male or female. These days, that would seem quite unexceptional.
What is exceptional is that although there are many varieties of feminism, one defining element remains: Feminism posits that the female or feminine is always disadvantaged, or subordinate to the male or masculine. The circumstances of women are unjust in significant respects and ought to be improved. Hence feminism's raison d'etre: To right that wrong through political action - which has led to some excesses, especially in the West.
An example of this political action was a fundamental move by early feminists to distinguish between sex and gender: While sex - male or female - was taken to refer to what was physically different between the sexes, gender - masculine or feminine - was supposed to refer to behaviour, demeanour and matters psychological. The latter, feminists argued, were the outcome of the way people were brought up, acculturated into and conditioned to believe.
In trendy jargon, the differences between males and females were merely 'culturally constructed', which implied that they were arbitrary, rather than grounded in biology. Hence, it was argued, men and women must be freed to the greatest extent possible from their narrowly defined gender roles.
If gender differences were abolished, men and women could live similar lives, perhaps even look quite the same with 'unisex' sartorial fashions. Though feminists have not succeeded in getting the mainstream to accept gender ambiguity, the fact that the term 'gender' has all but supplanted the word 'sex' - except perhaps when there is a need to refer directly to sexual activities - indicates how much they have succeeded.
And here is another index of how successful feminism has been in changing mindset: Younger women now espouse feminist ideas while denying being feminist, and may even find the bra-burning feminism of old to be embarrassing. There is a whole new generation of women that has learnt to adroitly justify what they do non-sexually - and sexually - with feminist terms like 'liberation', 'empowerment' and 'choice', even if they reject the feminist label themselves.
Perhaps that is why sexually themed television shows like Sex And The City and Desperate Housewives, where women are the aggressors in the gender game, are watched mostly by women. These women choose their porn too: Women make up 30 per cent of all online porn visitors. But as one branch of feminism set out to liberate female sexuality, this is not that surprising.
Perhaps this generation of women represents a female backlash against the excesses of the old feminism. Many even wonder why feminism was such a force in the 1970s, when it was not merely anti-male - everything men did was due either to privilege or pathology - but also stood resolutely against marriage, children and family.
The old-time feminists considered the triad to be so burdensome as to approach slavery. Home life was an idiocy the enlightened woman should not be interested in. Betty Frieden, one of the earliest leaders of the feminist movement and well known for her l963 book, The Feminine Mystique, famously pronounced the housewife a 'parasite'. In contrast, a career outside the home was deemed to be a woman's liberation.
Gloria Steinem, another major feminist leader from the late 1960s, came from a dysfunctional family. Her father divorced her mother, who later became mentally ill. Unsurprisingly, Steinem could not see how marriage or family might be good, which led to speculation about life without families.
But most people then, as now, regarded the family as something fundamental to a fulfilling life. Few men went to work for self-fulfilment; few males were doing something necessarily interesting. Men worked to support their families, to pay the bills.
This was because, for men, then as now, the family was always the centre of a meaningful life: One's life was devoted mainly to the building of a unit comprising one's closest relatives. Everything else just worked itself into this purpose. So work was just a means of earning an income for the family.
Yet when feminists came along, they lamented how women had to give up their careers or to sacrifice their earning power in order to have children. Thus the idea of a 'mummy tax', by which was meant depressed job opportunities and salaries for mothers - whose predicaments were not appreciated by other working women.
Yet there was always the 'daddy tax'. Because males worked outside the home, they spent less time with their children. There is no gainsaying whether it is better to pay the mummy tax or the daddy tax. The decision must depend on the jobs and personalities of both parents - not gender.
Yet another measure of how far feminists have come is a legal regime which they promoted in the West. In the 1980s, feminists argued that the law's formal equality effectively masked a woman's disproportionate role in childbearing and childrearing. For true equality, they argued, women required 'special treatment' in such matters as hiring, pay, workplace accommodation and public benefits.
Although the original feminist demand was that a woman should be allowed to do anything she is qualified or able to do, this has slowly shifted to an entitlement mentality that involves attenuating standards to get more women to qualify for a profession. For example, although women only have about 52 per cent of the upper body strength of men, both soldiering and firefighting in the United States have separate physical standards or training to make sure there are more women soldiers and firefighters.
If that is wrong and something the rest of the world should not imitate, the feminist push to change the perception of sexual harassment from a workplace hazard to a form of discrimination (based on gender) is to be applauded. The notion of sexual harassment - that sexual overtures by men towards women in the workplace, including unwelcome sexual speech, are actually hostile acts - is now something firmly fixed in law in most places. But it was Professor Catherine MacKinnon of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who first argued that sexual harassment was a form of discrimination (on the basis of gender).
After this was recognised in US law in 1980, the notion of sexual harassment spread to the European Union and, in 1992, Japan decided its first sexual harassment case using US case law.
For Prof MacKinnon, however, it went even further. She argued that sexual harassment was not just about the exploitation of women's inferior status in the workplace, but sat at the very core of the whole structure of the male-female relationship. This was exemplified in pornography and she is forever tied (with another feminist, Andrea Dworkin) to the argument that all heterosexual intercourse, in a male dominated world, is indistinguishable from rape.
That clearly is over the top. So, like most movements, feminism has not been an unalloyed good. For all the good it has wrought in getting more women into the workforce and rendering them financially independent, feminism has had its fair share of mistakes.
Happily, women and men are now more realistic about their similarities and differences. After all, there is accumulating evidence that differences in behaviour and psychology between the sexes do have a biological basis.
If it is not all nurture, there is some nature involved as well. It serves men and women better to recognise such differences and work with them for our collective benefit.