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Guest post: 'HeForShe - will this actually help the feminist cause?'

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MumsnetGuestPosts · 26/09/2014 11:36

The Onion called it first: "Man finally put in charge of struggling feminist movement." For years we've been muddling along, pretending we could start a revolution without the help of Ryan Gosling, but finally we can drop the act. After all, as Emma Watson said during her UN speech, "how can we effect change in the world when only half of it is invited or feel welcome to participate in the conversation?" (I've no idea, but obviously we should be asking the men - they've been effecting change for millennia without making us feel welcome, so I'm sure they could tell us how it's done.)

I don't wish to be overly dismissive of the HeForShe campaign, nor of its launch. Emma Watson was courageous to offer up a personal account of her route to feminism; in a culture which objectifies young women to an alarming extent, it's invaluable to hear the "object" answer back. That the response to her speech included threats (real or not) to release nude photos is testament to the degree to which people like her are supposed to be seen and not heard, reading someone else's lines but never speaking for themselves. I'm sure Watson knew this before she chose to break the rules, and she did so all the same. For that reason alone, she's a role model.

That said, I have some – well, rather a few – misgivings about the overall theme of HeForShe. To judge by the tone of both Watson’s speech and the website, you'd think that including men in feminism had never been thought of before. This isn't quite true. Feminists have thought long and hard – perhaps too long and too hard – about what our movement should mean to men. We've had to; as Simone de Beauvoir noted in The Second Sex, women do not constitute a separate group with their own physical space, history and culture. Our lives are intertwined with the lives of men; like it or not, we need to work together. But what should that mean? Does it require persuading men that gender hurts them as much as it hurts us? I'm not so sure. If that were the case, I simply don't believe progress would be so slow. If gender were some abstract force weighing down on men as much as it weighs down on women – and not a hierarchy which enables men to dominate women – we wouldn't still be asking men to do something about it.

In 1983 Andrea Dworkin gave a speech to the US National Organisation for Changing Men. In it she sought to define what equality should mean to them:

"Some vague idea about giving up power is useless.[…] Equality is a practice. It is an action. It is a way of life. It is a social practice. It is an economic practice. It is a sexual practice. […] If you love equality, if you believe in it, if it is the way you want to live […] then you have to fight for the institutions that will make it socially real."

Social media timelines clogged with pouting heart-throbs claiming solidarity - using Watson's campaign to brush up their liberal credentials and receive a pat on the back from the media - isn't enough. It's not enough to say "I am a feminist and I stand with women". If anything, it's keeping silent and listening to women because you realise that, in Dworkin’s words, "women are human to precisely the degree and quality that you are", that really makes a difference.

Another feminist who has sought to include men in feminism is bell hooks. In Feminism is for Everybody, published in 2000, she stresses that feminism is anti-sexism:

"A male who has divested of male privilege, who has embraced feminist politics, is a worthy comrade in struggle, in no way a threat to feminism, whereas a female who remains wedded to sexist thinking and behaviour infiltrating feminist movement is a dangerous threat."

Note, however, the 'ifs'; inclusion in the feminist movement does not simply mean a denial of male privilege, a self-serving "yes, I hate patriarchy too!" It's about men recognising that not everything is about them - that we don't need them to legitimise our struggle. It's challenging the perception that women are the other, men are the whole. It's reading what women have written, listening to what women are saying and looking at the world with fresh eyes. It's knowing that your reality is only half of what there is.

Watson claims that gender is a spectrum: "we don't want to talk about men being imprisoned by gender stereotypes but I can see that they are. When they are free, things will change for women as a natural consequence. If men don't have to be aggressive, women won't be compelled to be submissive. If men don't need to control, women won't have to be controlled."

I think this is idealistic and overly simplistic. It is comforting to see female oppression as a basic misapprehension, some random misjudgement in the allocation of universal stereotypes. If that's all it is, education will sort it out. Men will listen to us and then they will say “you mean to say women don't naturally prefer being treated as inferior? Well, why didn't you say so? Of course we'll change our ways!” Yet that's not what happens. Some men might talk the talk, but that’s as far as it goes. And as Dworkin says, we do not have time: "We women. We don't have forever. Some of us don't have another week or another day to take time for you to discuss whatever it is that will enable you to go out into those streets and do something."

I don't want my sons to be feminists when they grow up. I want them to be men who have the courage and humanity to challenge masculinity, right here, right now. If women need a movement to say "I'm human", they don't need men jumping on board to say "yay, I'm human, too". We know that already and men know it, too.

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BuffyBotRebooted · 02/10/2014 13:29

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Huppopapa · 02/10/2014 13:30

YonicScrewdriver you are right that I cannot bear children, but what has that to do with whether my partner should sit on the board of a company or if I should spend all afternoon in a sandpit with children? And where do women who cannot or do not bear children fit?!