The personal lives of "rights-conscious" women are often inextricable from our professional and academic lives. We tend to infuse everyday acts with resistance. One friend of mine refuses to learn how to cook because women are expected to know how to cook. Many of my friends hesitate in the face of acts of modern chivalry. My skin crawls everytime I see an ad on TV where a woman is cooking, cleaning or rushing to get a meal on the table. Such banal acts of resistance, which often take on a life and will of their own, can be exhausting because we are never able to let our guard down. We are constantly under seige, if not by external agents then by our own calculations of justice. Our defensive offensiveness also means that we sometimes fail to take advantage of certain situations to foster greater dialogue and understanding between the sexes.
I have often accused generally well-meaning people of sexism and created situations that have yielded less than optimal results. Once, an older relative complimented me on my sense of direction, saying, "Women don't usually have such good sense of direction." I immediately told him such skills vary from person to person and that we should avoid making gender-wide generalizations. The problem is that I wasn't able to deliver my response in a calm and collected manner. Instead, I raised my voice and probably precluded the possibility of any further discussion. My knee-jerk reaction was to associate him with practitioners of centuries-old patriarchy and condemn his statement. If my goal was to make him critically re-evaluate his statement, the fierce emotion in my voice counterproductively deflected attention away from the substance of my response.
Harvey Mansfield's book, Manliness, has achieved notoriety to charicaturial proportions. His book does, however, remind women's rights activists, feminists and would-be feminists that we do need to address how our decisions and our struggles affect the men in our lives, be they friends, co-workers, or family members. It seems that we often feel alone in our struggles with opponents both real and mythical and forget to forge alliances that may be of great benefit to our own struggles.
While this is often because we are up against robust patriarchy, it may also be because we have alienated well-meaning people who could have been our partners in struggle. The benefits of gender equality to men are often less tangible than those to women. It is difficult for a husband to continue to support the struggle for gender equality if he is continuously accused of not doing enough by his wife on the one hand and ridiculed for being hen-pecked by his male friends on the other. Why should a man choose to give up privileges that most societies still bring him up to expect and value? There are many answers to this question, but clearly they have yet to persuade many human beings. Women are not the only victims of patriarchy. Men who support gender equality at the theoretical level can also become its victims when they try to implement it in their own lives. As women, we need more partners, not fewer, and empathetic diplomacy, not ferocity, seems to be the way to go.
Sarah Shehabuddin (Mount Holyoke College '02) is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at Harvard University.
5 comments:
Great, thought-provoking post.
How to cultivate the feminist in the man? As you suggest, the answer probably doesn't lie in women limiting the scope of their humanity in trying to denounce our sexist world.
Speaking as man who has dated strong feminists, I'd say one of the most important places that a woman can tackle the sexism in the men around her is in consciously and forgivingly mediating conversation between the two of you. No easy task to be sure, but language is a socializer like no other.
This can begin with requesting a total cessation of misogynistic words like "slut", "whore", and "bitch", as well as homophobic words that have been part of a boy's vocabulary since playground days. Equally important is breaking open a man's imagination to all kinds of female possibilities in our male-centric lexicon. Referring to god, doctors, or prime ministers as 'she' will momentarily reframe a man's vision of the world in jarring, beautiful ways.
I really enjoyed your post Huma. By the way, I can just imagine your "knee-jerk" reaction to your uncle and the look he must have had on his face. Thanks for sharing.
My opinion has long been the following: in the thousands of years of human history, we mostly lived in an agrarian and later an industrial age, both in which physical strength was a comparative advantage for the man, hence he was the breadwinner and called the shots. Some men were sweet about it; some were pricks. It makes sense that men had such an advantage given the circumstances of the economic time periods and women's lib likely would not have thrived in such environments. And if it were women and not the men who had the muscles I doubt they would have done things differently than men did. There are plenty of tyrannical and misanthropic women in positions of power. However, now that we live in the information age where services comprise the largest proportion of our economies (and we have mostly machines to do what men used to do!), the playing field has been leveled. Men and women are, of course, equally competent in this information economy. So it is going to take a while to make the sensible adjustment in gender power differentials, and it is a historically awkward place to be for a woman in our generation--our granddaughters will have it far easier. I agree with Huma's point; that is a very smart way of going about it: when attempting to enlighten the thoughts of others, it is critical to take into account their likely response and vantage point. Otherwise we are just venting for personal catharsis while alienating them rather than productively fostering change.
Sarah
This is brilliant. And so true. :) I don't think that men need to become feminists, but we should try to work towards respect and then neutrality...
That would be a great success.
Keep posting!
Farheen
Dhaka, Bangladesh.
I think you are SO right!!!
I've made the emotional outbreak mistake millions of times which ends up backfiring rather than being heard!
I also think that certain aspects must be changed in the way media portrays gender roles. E.g. Paksitani media should for a change start showing some respect to the daughter-in-law since a joint family system still prevails here. Instead it's shown as a norm for the in-laws to gang up against her in the absence of her husband and at times he is also party to the brutality!
Afreina Noor
Pakistan
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