Woman Things

The other day I was talking to someone about feminism in the Netherlands and how it's treated as if it's a settled question here. In the meantime women here either stay home with the kids or work part-time. There are women with careers here, but generally speaking things are still fairly traditional. If you talk to anyone they basically give you a variation on "Men and women are equal here. The subject is closed." Yet there are still job advertisements which all but tell you in so many words that you will not be hired if you are a woman.

Continuing with our conversation, the topic of the feminization of men came up. Evidently there is someone in the public speaking world who spent some time with feminists and now he's an expert on them and gender relations in general. And what does he come up with? "Men are becoming feminized". I'm not even sure who this speaker is, but I can think of a couple of candidates, because there are a couple of them going around at the moment and they're fairly interchangeable. They all say more or less the same thing and present it as their own original idea.

It occurred to me to wonder what was meant exactly by "feminization", and why was it such a terrible thing? It seems to rely on the assumption that the worst thing that could possibly happen to men is to become more like women. It's not really a new idea either. It's the idea that the world is divided up into the strong and the weak. Men are strong. Women are weak. Children are weak. If a man has any softness or gentleness then he is behaving as a woman or a child, because men should have no softness.

It strikes me as fundamentally self-conflicting to have to uphold the traditional masculine role. On the one hand they are taught that they are strong and that the strong have the right to do whatever they want to the weak, and on the other they're taught that because they are strong, they must protect the weak. Which is it? Protect or predate? And this worldview justifies itself by saying that men must be strong or they will not be able to protect their families, the women and children. Ironically it is the same men who claim to be protecting us who do us the most harm. It is not strangers or outsiders killing us or raping us or abusing us. It's usually the very ones who say they're protecting us. It's hard not to suspect that they're really our worst threat.

At the risk of reinforcing the call of "but not all men!", it isn't all men. Do you know which men don't do these things to us? The ones with a bit of softness. The ones with a capacity for empathy and a conscience, because without empathy there can be no conscience. The ones with kindness in their hearts. There is a huge empathy gap between the men who adhere to hard masculine identity and the people they think of as weaker than they are. It enables them to do us harm without feeling bad about it. Their code says they can if we step out of line and fail to appreciate how well they're protecting us. They never seem to stop to think about who or what they're supposed to be protecting us from. They're not really protecting us from anything when they're the ones who hurt us. They're the same ones holding us back from our potential and doing everything they can to keep us in our place and reinforce the "you are weak, I am strong" narrative. Even when they are being chivalrous it reinforces the idea that women are delicate and weak and mustn't be allowed to get splashed by cars or open their own doors...or god forbid open a door for him or pull out his chair, because then the world would be upside-down and all wrong.

Sometimes it's almost as if we believe that the opposite sex is a kind of alien civilization and that there is no hope of ever communicating with each other or finding common ground. We live together. We've been living together for a very, very long time. You'd think that after a few eons we'd understand each other better. Hell, if it were an alien civilization we were dealing with we'd have found a way to communicate by now. It's like we're not trying, we've just given up and fallen back on tradition because we've gotten used to the situation as it is. At least we all know these rules, right? It's not like we could try to come to an understanding or anything because that would be hard and maybe somebody might have to give up the unfair advantage they've built into the system to benefit themselves. I guess if it's all you've got going for you it would feel like losing everything.

So, the feminization of men: I don't understand why this is the worst thing that could happen. Why is having feminine traits such a bad thing? A world where men are allowed to have complex feelings other than rage and laughter? A world where men can be who they are and not have to prove their masculinity all of the time? Because it must be exhausting and stressful having to keep that up. And most of it is all for the benefit of other men, social signalling and challenging. And it seems like most of the men who buy into it never realize that they're all doing it to themselves. They made it like this. They think they have to be like that. Except that we're not animals. We don't have to engage in dominance displays and chest-beating. It's what keeps us in a hierarchy, because it keeps the world divided up into stronger and weaker and uses women and children as currency. For as long as we keep the old ideas of masculinity and what it means to be a man going, women and children will suffer because we will always be at the bottom of that hierarchy. And that is not to suggest that I feel that women should be at the top of the hierarchy, but more that I don't feel that there should be a hierarchy between people based on something decided at birth. That's essentially the problem, that so much of institutionalized sexism is based on birth, and it's mostly binary. You're either born a boy or you're shit out of luck. I can't imagine why women would have a problem with that system. The whole idea of feminization being cause for concern is based on the assertion that women are "less than", and that feminine traits in a man are signs of weakness. And seriously, it's not as if today's men are wearing powdered wigs and rouge and frock-coats. Somehow we survived that phase, we'll manage if the young men decide ruffled sleeves are in fashion again. It's not the end of the world if men lighten up a bit on hyper-masculinity.