If you sit down to play poker and the rest of the players are holding marked cards, you're not going to win, no matter how talented you are.
When we ask men to make changes, it's not a matter of getting them to do our work for us.
- This is another fine mess you've got us into 60,000 years of patriarchy, now get the fucking broom and clean up your own mess. -
We've had all sorts of equality legislation over many decades, but privilege, because it controls things, always manages to find a way around. The fact that 5% of the population control 90% of the world's resources should tell you that.
I think that in a thread about teaching feminism, it would be useful to evidence some understanding of the basic theoretical constructs - particularly if you're fresh out of university.
Using a dictionary definition of feminism and then saying, "I agree with that", is a reductive approach to a rich and complex subject with a deep catalogue of profoundly theoretical thinking.
Sexual politics is a class-analysis. Within the class of "women" or "men", individuals might do better or worse, but overall analysis shows that women as a group suffer disproportionately under patriarchy.
"In 1963, Betty Friedan had called the “feminine mystique” the problem with no name. It was Ms. Millett who gave it a name — sexual politics — and explained its cause: patriarchal society. By introducing the concept of “patriarchy as a political institution,” she equipped her readers to become their own theorists of culture. Ms. Millett revolutionized our thought by helping us to perceive the power structures in what had previously been cast as apolitical terrain: the home; literature; romantic relationships.
It felt so liberating to realize that we could follow her lead. We could take this fundamental insight to our jobs, our schools, our marriages — and to politics itself. Theory mattered. It was capable of propelling real change."
Carol Adams on Kate Millet's Sexual Politics
And Germaine Greer explaining why equality is a proper aim for feminists.
"The feminist and author Germaine Greer has said that aiming for equality is a “profoundly conservative goal” for women, ...
“What everybody has accepted is the idea of equality feminism,” ...
“It will change nothing. War is made against civilian populations where women and children are the principal casualties in places like Syria, whether in collapsing buildings or bombed schools.
“War is now completely made by the rich with their extraordinary killing machines, killing the poor who have no comeback. Women are drawing level with men in this profoundly destructive world that we live in and, as far as I’m concerned, it’s the wrong way. We’re getting nowhere.
“If we’re going to change things I think we’re going to have to start creating a women’s polity that is strong, that has its own way of operating, that makes contact with women in places like Syria, and that challenges the right of destructive nations.”
Women needed to aim higher and achieve more than simply drawing level with men and entering into traditionally male-dominated fields, Greer said.
“If what happens when women discover when they join the army is they discover it’s no place for a sane human being then they’ve learned something,” Greer said. “But right now, things are looking distinctly grim.”
www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/09/equality-is-a-profoundly-conservative-goal-for-women-germaine-greer-says
As to men teaching feminism? It's been said up-thread, that since they're teaching "facts", men as as capable of teaching feminism as women, which is probably true up to a point. Except that knowledge is not constructed in a vacuum, it is created in a political context which is a product of differential power.
A male academic is in a highly privileged position - to have them then teaching the discourse of the oppressed from that position of privilege might be practical, but not necessarily ethical.
There is much sensitivity around cultural appropriation presently with oppressed minorities arguing their right to tell the stories of their own culture. I doubt we'd be comfortable with white academics teaching histories of black America or indigenous peoples. Imagine a chair of African American studies being given to a white academic.
But women's culture is seen as of so little importance that men teaching it aren't see as appropriating culture?
Edward Said wasn't writing about women, but his concept of the domination of culture is applicable to this conversation.
"Said showed that the myth of the Oriental was possible because of European political dominance of the Middle East and Asia. In this aspect of his thought he was strongly influenced by the French philosopher Michel Foucault. The influence from Foucault is wide-ranging and thorough, but it is perhaps most pronounced when Said argues that Orientalism is a full-fledged discourse, not just a simple idea, and when he suggests that all knowledge is produced in situations of unequal relations of power.
In short, a person who dominates another is the only one in a position to write a book about it, to establish it, to define it. It’s not a particular moral failing that the stereotypical failing defined as Orientalism emerged in western thinking, and not somewhere else."
www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/2004/09/introduction-to-edward-said.html