How should feminism respond to growing blame and backlash from men?

[TheywontletmehavethenameIwant]

Whilst we fight to regain the rights we've had taken off us, there are those, and I by that I mean men, who are saying that feminism is to blame for everything, will we soon be fight a rearguard action against this attitude.

It's from the USA, he's a Republican legislator, at the state level I think, but as we all know if it happens in the USA one week, it happens here the following week.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KAoPNNsjRSI

How do we answer this attack, not the Tate brothers specifically, but this 'blame the feminist' game is going to get worse I fear.

I agree - I'm interested too, Manyanamanyana!

Just because there are laws on a statute books saying that men and women should be treated equally doesn't magically make sexism go away.
In fact, the rise of the trans movement has shown how easy it is for men to subvert those laws: men claiming to be women destroys the definition of the two sex-based legal categories and makes a nonsense of sex equality legislation.

Re-interpreting 'sex equality' in law as 'gender equality' makes it about something other than equality between men and women.

But even if there were rock-solid laws that made discrimination against women illegal - how is that lived on a daily basis? Does sexual harassment, child sexual abuse, violence against women, rape, femicide, etc disappear in countries with strong anti-discrimination laws?
Clearly not.

I don't have a perfect definition of 'the patriarchy', it's not a word I use because I think it sounds a bit cartoon-ish, but if pushed to use the term, I'd say it is the thing that ensures the continuation of sexual harassment, child sexual abuse, violence against women, rape, femicide, etc even in countries where 'in law men and women now have equal rights that are well established'.

Furthermore, 'it' is the rocket fuel that continues these attitudes/actions/crimes against women in all cultures, all socio-economic groups, all social classes.

Economic equality would be a good thing in and of itself, but there's no reason to believe that getting rid of economic inequality will make sexism disappear.

The 'stupid women's libbers were asking for it, got what they deserved, and are whinging how' attitude is just one of many lines of attack that just keep coming, time after time, because whatever else 'the patriarchy' is, it sure is persistent, it keeps coming up with new lines of attack to keep women 'in our place'.

Ignore it. It’s the usual bollocks.

As long as sex exists so, most likely, will sexism - which is the habit and practice of making negative or stereotyped judgements and observations based on the sex of the subject . Legal equality does not make sex based differences go away, nor does it over-ride the inclinations, choices and patterns of behaviour which most often lie at their root.

Personally, I feel that transgenderism arose out of certain strands of feminism and 'gay rights': those that propose that there are no essential differences between the sexes, and that any generalised differences which do exist are culturally conditioned. Whereas it is evident to me that there are some generalised differnces at group level between the sexes - and in males that includes a greater propensity for sexual abuse, violence, sexual paraphilia etc.

That these differences persist ( and to the detriment of female people) is not down to patrarchy, as such, but down to the fact that the male sex is pre-disposed to certain types of behaviour or inclination, and that females tend to be vulnerable to these differences - which is why we have single sex spaces and facilities in the sorts of situation in which females are more vulnerable to negative male behaviour or inclination.

100%

1). Americans are Crazy

2). Women will respond in the only way they can respond. By asserting their rights and saying no. Women are always going to require rights that men don't and this will always inconvenience men.

(To be fair, British People are also crazy, but just in different ways).

Indeed.
Cato said in 195BC
”Suffer women once to arrive at an equality with you, and from that moment they will become your superiors”
Didn’t work then, won’t work now.

Actually I've come to believe that there is a small dose of "natural" patriarchy linked to the fact that, like it or not, men are statistically stronger and more power-driven than women. As a feminist, I believe however that we should strive to eliminate all elements of cultural patriarchy and that we are very far from it (gender ideology being a good example, dreadful as it is), though I think we are very close to having removed all elements of legal patriarchy.

Whether we should compensate natural patriarchy by introducing cultural or legal matriarchy is a moral question that I have no definite answer to.

This is a laudable goal on the face of it, but it risks suggesting that feminism gets left until 'after the revolution'.

Women can and should work for their rights regardless of other social issues. We don't have to wait our turn.

Even if it were true that patriarchy doesn't exist in the majority of Western countries¹, do women in the other Western countries - and the rest of the world - not also deserve the same?

¹ https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/global-gender-gap-by-country on this ranking, for example, no country scores 100%. Some you might expect to be pretty high up the 'modern Western country' scale - e.g. Canada, Netherlands - are only around the 75% mark. France, Greece, Italy perhaps less of a surprise to find lagging, but they're still firmly in the 'Western countries' group.

A look through these graphs might be ineresting, too. https://www.oecd.org/en/data/dashboards/gender-dashboard.html There's no country anywhere in the world that has both no pay gap and fully equal political representation. Luxembourg is the only country where women out-earn men; but only 1/3 of their parliamentarians and less than 1/4 of board members in large companies are women. There's country where unpaid labour is equal or male dominated. The very best score for discrimination in social institutions (0 = no discrimination against women, 100 = total discrimination) is Norway's 6.7.

I tend to the belief that if we humans can overcome our animal urge to shit wherever we need in favour of using toilets, we should also be able to overcome whatever animal urge it is that men think excuses their bad "patriarchal" behaviours.

Can you give some examples of "natural" patriachy? I assume you aren't thinking we should give the ok to actual violence and agression, so are you thinking something like "men are more likely to lead companies because they are more likely to be ambitious/single minded"? Because if so I think that is very much an artificial and culturally enabled difference.

OP, have you been living under a rock for the past 10 years? What do you think the Trans Rights movement is? Hasn't that been overtaken by men who are seeking a backlash against feminism?

@FlirtsWithRhinos my best example is the fact that men are stronger than women. They shouldn't use it to terrorize us, and most of them don't, but it doesn't change the fact that if I'm alone in the street and a man wants to physically hurt me, he can. That's patriarchy in the sense that in this situation he wields power over me because of our different sexes, whether or not he chooses to exercise it. And that's, I guess, natural (not good).

I think patriarchy is where the male is seen as the default human, the state, the society and culturally a country see everything through the lens of what men need, and women are just expected to adapt to that, because they don't recognise that women have different needs.

I was troubled by the attitude in the video, because he seem to be throwing 'feminism's' own mantra's back at us, and use them to show how the Tate's behaviours can be seen as 'progressive', which made them modern men, not the vile slimeballs we know they are.
I disagree with what he says but I was monetarily at a loss on how to answer his assertions, he was clearly being sarcastic with his in your face 'feminists' attitude.

If you belonged to one of the many species that are on the verge of extinction because of the spread of human beings, you might feel differently. They have just as much right to be here as we have and we need to respect that and stop crowding them out.

Typo correction to my post above.

There's no country where unpaid labour is equal or male dominated.

@Heggettypeg you are absolutely entitled to your opinion, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with feminism. Being a feminist does not mean having to embrace each and every single "progressive" cause (and I do embrace some of them)

No, not quite, and I love the men in my life and my sons most of all, certainly can't break that attachment... tbh this was a great question and really made me think about what I meant, and I still don't quite know, but I think it has something to do with the terms of the attachment- as in, what do we expect from each other and what does society expect we provide for each other, and do those expectations still hold true in 2026 when a lot of those expectations belong to an era when women were literally forced into dependency on men and so lacked autonomy and input into those terms. Now in wealthier countries less women are getting married and/or having children by choice, and so have more say about the terms of attachment and men are losing that upper hand. But this is just the personal level, and these gains are fragile, because the US legislators for example are trying to pull legal and economic levers that force women back into those dependant arrangements, so, that's where I got too with that thought experiment, would love to hear what others think...

personally id like to give women the chance to rule the world and then see how omg or glorious it would be

I think so to, and I think the protection men recieve socially and legally for the abuses on women and children demonstrate that pretty clearly, men's behaviour is rationalised, and the Epstien case is really a perfect example of this. Also I agree that our rights are fragile in a way that men's rights are not. Reproductive autonomy is constantly under threat in Australia for example, we are not consulted or considered regarding self-ID and these decisions impact us massively. And they are decisions made predominantly by men, whose rights are not under any threat that I can identify.

Women make up 49.6% of Australian parliament so I'd hesitate to suggest these decisions are being made without women's input. Unfortunately a lot of (left-wing) women support gender self-id because they think they are fighting for the underdog (transgender people).

It has nothing to do with being a feminist or not. Just with being aware that a world with around 8.3 billion human beings is not likely to be childless anytime soon, and that time is running out for other species because there are so many of us, affecting so much of the world.
A few thousand or even million childless women won't bring down humanity; a few thousand tigers without offspring (for example; less than 6000 left in the wild now) is likely to mean extinction. There's no comparison.

Thanks @PeachyDaisy I wish I felt as positive as you do. I kind of think of Patriarchy as the air we move through, and like the water fish swim in, we don't notice it, because all the effects and conditions it imposes have always been there and we simply can't imagine a different atmosphere. I read a great line somewhere that said (Im paraphrasing) we women have no idea what or how we could be without the unwritten rules of patriarchy. But I agree that laws are in place which improve how things used to be, there are truly huge improvements in our day to day lives, and a baseline level of acceptance that women should have equal rights. I just think that because we have to continue defending those laws, that indicates there is something that wants to move backwards rather than forward in terms of our freedoms. I think of that something as Patriarchy.

Definately the labour women and greens supporting gender ideology, and they are equally supportive of reproductive rights quality childcare, equal pay, action against violence against women and children etc. The other parties less supportive of reproductive rights (its conceivable that they would trade off some allowances for other gains) or general women's issues are the ones most likely to repeal self-ID for example, but only if it's politically convenient. So, how do women vote? We have to concede our rights to some things to achieve others. And I do think that those labour women are subject to the kinds of activism that is threatening, by the men who have the most to gain from "trans rights" as well so 🤷‍♀️

Thinking all women have to vote the same way (or think the same way) isn't helpful. Nor is suggesting that women who support trans rights only think that way because they've been threatened or pressured into it by men. That feels a bit sexist to me — it assumes women aren't capable of forming their own political views and priorities.

Women aren't a monolith. We all have different priorities, experiences and perspectives, and sometimes those priorities will conflict.

Ultimately, all you can control is your own vote. Other women are entitled to weigh those competing issues differently and vote accordingly. Personally women's rights is far from my number 1 issue I vote.