I’m almost envious of those women who confidently state that they’re not feminists, because presumably they don’t see much wrong with the state of male/female equality. I, on the other hand, am furious about so many things affecting girls and women that it can get a bit overwhelming.
For example, I watched that Jimmy Savile documentary the other day. It’s absolutely clear as day to me that what happened is what always happens: powerful rich man gets what he wants. Other men shield him. All the wide-eyed disbelief after the event is just total bullshit. Why were people surprised? This is what powerful men and powerful institutions have done forever . Sometimes men are the victims, but more often than not, it’s girls and women who a) suffer and b) know with a deep certainty that they won’t be believed.
Don’t get me wrong- I know there are lots of good men. But girls and women are still at such a colossal disadvantage after centuries of oppression that I find it hard to believe that some women are ok with the way things are. The only way to combat this is to continue the feminist cause - but society has played an absolute blinder on the word ‘feminist’ so that many women believe it to be some sort of weird extremism.
It would be odd, surely, if hardly more than 100 years after getting the vote, following millennia of being officially second-class citizens, women had successfully climbed up to the same status as men in society. Of course they couldn’t undo all that bullshit in one century. Especially with all the pushback.
Off the top of my head, the things that make me furious on a regular basis, in no particular order:
- the leaking of sickening violent, misogynistic porn into mainstream society, so that classes of 15 year olds snigger at the word ‘choke’ (Yes, I’m a teacher)
- the constant unofficial policing of what women and girls can and can’t wear while men can walk around topless as soon as the sun shines because the baseline assumption is that women’s bodies are ‘sexual’ and men’s aren’t
- the way female characters always have to be attractive (real and cartoon) when their male counterparts can be as ugly as you like
- the horror show that is female healthcare, with particular reference to the ‘just get on with it’ school of thought in maternity care, when women have had major surgery etc
- the casual contempt shown by boys towards girls they find unattractive; the assumption that shared space is boys’ space to dominate, either vocally or physically, with the kicking of footballs.
- incels
- the persistence of the sex trade and the loud defence of it by otherwise sensible people
- the bending over backwards to accommodate male sexual kinks
As I said, it’s bonkers to expect millennia of sexism to be undone in a century or so. But what’s disheartening is not that there’s still a way to go, but that so many people literally cannot see that.