So, today's thoughts are on Feminism and two memes which I run into increasingly lately.
Before we begin, let's recall that feminist theory commonly calls out men for failing to respect a woman's feelings, or for attempting to suppress a woman's input into any topic of discussion. One gets the impression that to modern feminism, respect for feelings is of the utmost importance.
If that's the case, why the "mansplaining" meme? At what point did the "we must respect everyone's right to have some input" crowd decide it was okay to dismiss anything a man has to say as "mansplaining", which has come to be synonymous with "not worthy of consideration"?
The other meme, even newer (at least to me, I started seeing it in the last month or two) is the "not all men" meme. The idea of this one is that when someone says "Men are (some negative thing in the eyes of feminism)", when a man points out that "not all men are this way", this man is dismissing the problems of women with an irrelevant (to feminists) response and therefore deflecting attention away to the REAL problem, which is the problem the feminists care about. How is this respect for the feelings of the man in question, who has just been tarred in one broad stereotype with a negative brush which does not apply to all (or even most) men? How is this any different than the feminist who, upon running into a negative stereotype about women, loudly lectures the speaker of said stereotype on how not all women are like that?
It seems to me that today it's become perfectly acceptable in feminism circles, even laudable, to treat men the way feminists themselves absolutely demand women not be treated.
And yes, I've heard the common answer to that objection: Women have been so down-trodden for so long, as a class, by all men, that therefore extra protections are warranted.
But let's dissect that a bit, shall we? Has the world historically been all to the benefit of men and all to the detriment of women? Or has there been a gender divide which historically has served (and harmed) both genders, and which perhaps has outgrown it's usefulness (much like the appendix or the tail bone)?
If you really believe that there's this huge patriarchy that was built solely for the benefit of men at the exclusion of women, explain to me why throughout history, men, not women, have been expected to go to war when war was necessary? Why men are traditionally supposed to lay down their lives on a ship that's going down in favor of the women and children? Why men have traditionally done most of the dangerous, life threatening jobs (other than childbirth, in which topic there is no option)?
Childbirth is in fact the answer. The truth is that in any society, from a continuation-of-the-society-or-species standpoint, adult males are more disposable than adult females.
Consider a society with 100 adults, 50 men and 50 women. If a tragedy strikes and 49 of your society is killed, the effect on the next generation of your society is more or less directly proportional to the number of your women killed, but unless you kill ALL of the men, the effect on the size of your next generation is almost negligible compared to the number of your men killed.
Think about it, in the above society, if you lose half of the men and half of the women, the next generation is going to be roughly half the size of the current one. Yes, it's not exact, because in a crises, perhaps the women will choose to have some extra children they might not otherwise have chosen, but you get the idea. In any one year, the number of babies that can be had is halved. Now imagine the 49 people killed were ALL women. Now, in any one year (give or take a month or two), you can have at most one baby.
Now imagine the 49 people killed were all MEN. The birthrate in the society need not change at all, so long as our one exhausted man and all of our 50 women take their responsibility to the needs of the society seriously enough. Granted longer term there may be increased genetic problems due to the next generation consisting entirely of siblings and half-siblings, but at least there IS a next generation.
If you understand this "needs of the species driving even stronger than self-preservation need" drive, you can start to understand a lot of where our historical gender divide came from. It was not akin to slave days, with a batch of white sitting around saying "Hey, I can live pretty well if I own other people and force them to do all of the shit work, leaving me to only have to do the stuff I don't trust them to do". This was a species, having adapted to the realities of the world, not because the species CHOSE to, but because by adapting that particular evolutionary path, they survived when other species (or other branches of the same species) which did NOT adopt the same "species before self" imperative died off.
This, I think, is the problem modern feminism needs to grasp, and the reason why I get upset when I see the men's human rights movement (MHRM) dismissed as a batch of misogynist assholes. The members of the MHRM with whom I've had contact have not in any way been trying to perpetuate the gender distinctions of the past. They've merely been trying to point out that while we're doing away with the traditional gender roles that have been a detriment to women, we must also do away with the ones that have been a detriment to men.
Women want to earn the same money as men for the same job, that's great. And studies I've read have shown that when you correct for all of the variables, not just same job title, but same actual work, same willingness to work long hours, same willingness to travel as needed, same willingness to take risky assignments, the pay differential almost entirely disappears. And women say "Well, that's because we have to take care of the children, too". And to THAT I say "If you hadn't pushed so hard to define in society and the courts that women are the better caretakers and the logical primary guardian of the children, that wouldn't be a problem. But you made that bed, now you get to lie in it."
How, exactly, should that matter to employers? If an employer has two employees in the same position, but one of them works their 40 hours and goes home, and says "I'm sorry, I can't go on that business trip because I have to take care of my children", and says "I'd prefer that safe assignment over this risky one", while the other employee works the long hours, takes the trips, accepts the risky assignments, who do you think is going to get the promotions, the raises, the accolades, regardless of the genders involved?
But anyway, regardless of whether it's true now or not, if we work to equalize pay for the genders, should we not also work to equalize who pays for what on a date? And equalize who pays how much child support to whom?
If women want the right to have sex without assuming any risk of close to 20 years of toil and resource drain of an unwanted resulting pregnancy, should not men have a similar "get out of jail free card"? Is the use of a body as a living gestational vessel for 9 months really all that much greater an imposition than 18 years of the resources and labors of a person's life?
If women want the right to be in combat roles in the military, should they not also have the same responsibilities as men to register for the draft and be subject to it, should the draft ever be activated?
As a society, our job is to figure out whether we want to be a 100% egalitarian society, gender-wise, or whether we're willing to recognize certain inherent differences. Once we decide on that, we can then either decide to do our best to make everything as exactly equal as possible, or we can decide what differences we think are acceptable and attempt to even the scales so that if, for example, one gender gets preferential treatment when it comes to being required to register to go to war if it comes to that, perhaps it's OK if the other one gets preferential treatment in some other area of life, to make up for it.
