Is it permissible for a man to talk about Feminism? In my last post I discussed attitudes towards Islam among liberal commentators and I feel that I had a right to do so even though I am not a Muslim; in the same way I feel that I should be allowed to discuss the current status of the women's movement even though I am not a woman. What I try to be is an observer, someone who looks at the world and draws conclusions about it based on what has happened and what I see to be happening. Feminism under one name or another has been around a long time. The Suffragette movement started more or less at the end of the nineteenth century and the heyday of the Woman's Liberation Movement was the nineteen-seventies. In this post I want to argue that today, in 2017, Feminism has pretty much won.
Of course the view I just expressed is controversial. One hypothesis among many offered for Donald Trump's electoral victory is that it was driven by sexism. Ordinary Americans didn't like the idea of a woman running the country and voted against Hillary Clinton basically because she had ovaries. Several different people I know have offered this opinion, that she lost because of sexism. The idea that the patriarchy actively or passively prevents women from ascending to positions of power is emblematised by the metaphor of "the glass ceiling" – symbolically, because Hillary expected to win, she held her election night party in a convention centre with a glass ceiling. Her win would be final confirmation that the glass ceiling had been broken; her loss conversely was a sign that the glass ceiling still remains intact. Apparently we still live in an irredeemably male chauvinist world.
The problem with the idea that the West is still a patriarchy and that Hillary lost because of sexism is that, although the US may still not have elected a woman leader, very many other Western countries have. Here in New Zealand, we had our first woman Prime Minister, Jenny Shipley, in 1997. Helen Clark, New Zealand's first elected female Prime Minister, came to power in 1999 and held office until 2008. Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister of the UK in 1979 and led it until 1990; Britain currently has a female Prime Minister in the form of Theresa May. If the moment when the glass ceiling breaks is the election of a female leader, it has long since been broken in New Zealand, in Britain, and in many other countries around the world.
Established wisdom has it that women are more left-leaning and liberal than men. Feminism has historically been a left-wing phenomenon; historically right wing conservatives have tended to be anti-women, anti-Feminist. And yet, in France, the leader of the far-right nationalist Front National party, who stands a fair chance of becoming President, is a woman, Marine Le Pen. In 2008, John McCain picked Sarah Palin, a darling of the Tea Party, as his running mate. And of course we can think of the truly odious Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party in Australia. It seems even Far Right Conservative constituencies are embracing woman leaders and this, more than anything else, perversely, shows that Feminism has won – even the fascists are willing to follow female leaders these days.
It would be easy to say that Hillary lost because she was a woman, that her gender was the reason why men voted against her – and why women should have voted for her. But during the Primaries last year politically informed young liberal women turned out in droves not for Hillary, but for Bernie Sanders. In an interview with Gloria Steinem, Bill Maher asked her why she thought this was so and she laughingly replied something like, "I think the girls just want to be where the boys are at." Steinem was immediately subjected to a barrage of liberal condemnation. How dare she suggest that young Democrats could be so shallow? Personally, I liked Steinem's opinion. So what if young people are basically interested in love, sex and having a good time? Is that really so bad? Even if Steinem had strayed a little off-message, the support Sanders received among young women suggests that the fight for gender equality is not as relevant to college students today as it would have been fifty years ago. I don't know for sure why Trump beat Clinton but, although sexism may have played a part, I don't believe it to be the full explanation.
It should be remembered that Hillary was born in 1947 and participated in the Women's Liberation movement of the 'seventies. She is as much a product of her time everyone else. This may seem a sweeping thing to suggest but one could argue that she and many of her supporters are of an older generation who may not have fully recognised that the world has moved on.
I know that proposing that, at least in some key areas and in developed countries, Feminism has won the battle against male chauvinism, I am likely to be saying something quite unpopular. I am of course aware, as female commentators often point out, that there is still a pay gap between men and women, that women on average earn significantly less than men. But I think a pay-gap is unavoidable and may always be the case – for one simple reason. It is women who have children. In a truly post-Feminist world, some argue (including Steinem I think), men will play an equal part in raising infants, but an argument can be made that the most important relationship small children have is with their mothers and that this relationship during infancy is integral to future emotional and psychological well being. And so long as women feel the need to take time out from their careers to raise babies, it is inevitable that there will be a pay gap.
The domain of problems confronted by Feminism is broad. I have focussed on equal employment opportunities and equal pay, issues one could argue are either settled or are being settled, but there are other political issues, such as abortion, which remain still very much current. I want now to consider another issue that seems still very much current, the objectification of women. I know I am digressing but bear with me. Many Feminists feel strongly that men who notice and pass comment on the appearances of women are chauvinist pigs and to some extent they are right. We of course now have such a chauvinist pig in the White House. But it is possible to go too far in this direction, in criticising men simply for having eyes and for reporting on what they see. Rather than making men feel guilty or ashamed for having libidos, an alternative and more empowering Feminist strategy might be to recognise that women also have libidos and often objectify men. This strategy seems better to me because it is sex-positive rather than sex-negative. It seems that there are two types of Feminist, those who basically don't like men and those who, while still fighting for women's rights, still quite like individual men and are generally sex-positive. Gloria Steinem, Virginia Woolf and Penelope Fitzgerald, Feminist writers I am very fond of, fall into the second camp I believe.
The other night, when walking in town, I dropped into a bar to use the bathroom. On the way out of the bar I was accosted by a girl who barred me from exiting for a time, made me dance with her and called me 'cute'. It was humiliating. I immediately filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission.
I joke about my reaction of course. The truth is that I didn't know how to react to a woman coming onto me so strongly and wasn't that night in a positive enough mood to do anything about it. The point though is that there is nothing wrong with men and women noticing that members of the opposite sex are attractive, just so long as one respects the other person's space. Yes, Trump's actions on Howard Stern's radio show where he would rate women on a scale of one to ten were boorish and crass, but perhaps he could have ameliorated the offensiveness of his attitudes by also rating himself out of ten as well – as Jim Jeffries does in some of his comedy routines. If Trump were honest, capable of stepping outside his own narcissistic bubble, he might be forced to admit that in the eyes of most women, I imagine he's a zero.
I think Clinton made a mistake in framing the electoral campaign as a Feminist fight and should have focussed much more on issues. (Perhaps I am wrong in saying this and she did try to focus on issues but, if so, the media didn't cover it.) Hillary and her aides calculated, I think, that a movement to elect America's first woman president would attract as much support, be seen as just as historic a milestone, as the movement to elect America's first black president. But racism and sexism are two different problems. One can argue, as I have in this post, that the U.S. is coming close to defeating sexism but it is not even close to defeating racism. In saying that in many key areas Feminism has won, I feel I need to make clear that I am not diminishing the importance of the struggle. I consider myself a Feminist insofar as men are allowed to be Feminists. Women's reproductive rights, to take a very important example, remain an issue of serious contention in the U.S. if not here in New Zealand or in Britain. But it needs pointing out that many women are Pro-Life rather than Pro-Choice and this suggests that this fight should not be framed as a Feminist issue, as a battle between men and women, but rather as a conflict between secular liberalism and religious fundamentalism.
If Hillary Clinton lost it was not because she was a woman but because she failed to read the mood of the electorate. I don't know precisely why Trump won and I don't think anyone does, although liberals have speculated widely as to the cause of his victory. I suggested in a post ("The End of Capitalism") that the working class turned against the 'liberal elite' in a misdirected reaction to many decades of Neo-Liberal policies –but I might have been wrong. Sam Harris has argued that it was the result of the Left's failure to recognise and tackle the evil that is Islam but I think this is wrong as well. Perhaps Trump simply managed to tap into and speak for an enormous sea of silent resentment and self-loathing just beneath the surface of American society. Whatever its cause Trump's victory was an utter catastrophe. I wish to God that Hillary had won instead.
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