DH believes women have equality and feminism is no longer needed

Thank you so much for the devil's advocate links.

My otherwise lovely DH has tried this on a couple of occasions and I've not been all that articulate in countering it, although I have left him in no doubt that it's a bloody insensitive thing to do.

Kirk, lots of men seem to 'get' the lowest difficulty setting analogy.

Also, could you get him to look at the everyday sexism project maybe it will begin to dawn on him the sheer volume of small (and not so small) shit women have to put up with on a daily basis.

Two tactics:

1. Get him to read everyday sexism

1. Ask him how often he has discussed amongst his male friends incidents of harassment and discrimination they have suffered; how they would react if he became upset and cried whist discussing it. Also ask him how his colleagues at work would react if he came into work wearing makeup and high heels and moaned about having a fat day and bad hair; what they would say if he admitted to liking to watch 'chick flicks' and taking up knitting; how his friends and family would react if he confessed that his real ambition was to give up work and stay at home with the children, and that he thought you were being unfair by not working hard enough to allow him to do this, as babies need their fathers at home.

Patriarchy is not some grand conspiracy, but a neat term for describing how society is ordered. It controls the way men behave in just as many ways as it controls women. It's just that the outcomes for men tend to be better than for women.

I like this and this re: devils advocacy.

My riposte to this kind of remark (which is coming up a lot at work lately, they've realised they have a diversity problem) is as follows...
Observable fact: men are massively over-represented at senior levels of, oh, just about everything
Option 1 to explain this: women are a bit crap at being in charge, and also don't deserve to get paid as much as men. Or they're just a bit lazy and don't want it.
Option 2: there continues to be real discrimination against women.

Anyone who really believes option 1 doesn't get to talk to me any more.

violent male partners/expartners kill 2 women every week. that's more than soldiers killed in Afghanistan
The pay gap - currently 16%

just for starters

Well, he would say that, wouldn't he ?

Thanks, Buffy!
Completely agree, AskBasil. What would we think of the motives of a white spouse who kept asking their black/Asian spouse to prove that racism existed? We'd think it was pretty flipping weird.

You know what, I am beginning to hate men who act as devil's advocate about equality.

It's so fucking smug and entitled. And ivory-tower.

It's easy to play devil's advocate about rape, when you are never going to feel seriously under threat from rape (unless you get found guilty of a crime). It's easy to play the lofty rationalist when you aren't the one on the wrong end of the shit-stick.

I would question the motives of the sort of people who want to do this tbh.

Ask your dh why women still earn less. They generally do better in school and get better degrees but are paid less. Does he think they are not very good?

How often has he had his bum slapped in a public place?

When did anyone suggest his bad temper was because he was on his period.

Why does he think men take up so much room on public transport? Do they feel entitled to take up more space or do they just have huge balls.

The problem with your DH's attitude, OP, is that he is behaving like a climate change denier. All reasonable scientists now agree that climate change is real, and that it is almost certainly connected with human activity. Similarly, all reasonable social scientists, presented with the evidence about male and female access to educational opportunity, economic and political power, along with a host of other indicators, agree that worldwide, females are not equal to males.
However, there is always some idiot who says "Global warming? But it's freezing today!" and the equivalent idiot in the gender debate who says "Women's lib? But girls get better A-levels than boys!". I'm afraid your DH is playing the part of the second idiot. If he really is only doing this to be devil's advocate, he might want to rethink it, as he is actually only being devil's idiot.

A good example is when I was at University they switched to exams being marked anonymously. An unexpected result was women's grades suddenly increased significantly and across the range of subjects, men's grades dropped. Every marker would argue until they were blue in the face that they had not been discriminating by gender but clearly most were.

This was at a top University within the last 10 years. I was reminded of it recently and am going to do a FOI request to the Uni for evidence as it's not the kind of thing that gets publicised.

Does your DH know that his chances of being raped or sexually assaulted are 1 in 4 only if he gets convicted of a crime and gets sent to prison, while your chances of being raped or sexually assaulted are 1 in 4 in your everyday life?

Does that sound very equal to him?

It's also based on the fact that men are more likely to sexually abuse children than women are.

However, he's also more likely to become a headteacher than any of those women on his course. If you look at the percentage of headteachers in the teaching profession, they are disproportionately likely to be male considering the number of males in the profession overall.

Why is that? Because men are better than women at teaching/ being headteachers? Because women "choose" to be lower paid because they prefer not to have as much money as men? Because they "choose" to take more responsibility for childcare and domestic work which takes up more of their energy and time, than men do? And how do men's choices link in with that? Or is it just that we still have systemic sexism which steers both genders towards what looks like choices if it's convenient for them to ignore systemic sexism?

Does your DH also believe there's no such thing as racism anymore btw?

sap.mit.edu/content/pdf/male_privilege.pdf

This might be a good place to start. Every time I read it I find myself nodding along like a Churchill dog!

I am at a bit of a loss to know how anyone could even glance at the names of anyone with status and power and not get it.

All prime ministers, all MPs, all CEOs, all CFOs, all award winners, everyone mentioned in the history books, everyone mentioned on wikipedia....

Or try him on the Bechdel test. Once you start thinking in terms of the Bechdel test you can't get it out of your mind and then you are on to all novels, all prime time tv series, all plays, everything...

I also like to keep a rough count of films/tv shows in which women are the victims - ideally in a sexualised way. Women are routinely the object not the subject in any given fictionalised scenario.