March 8th, 2007

So I'm still just as busy as I was whingeing about a couple of days ago, but I need to write for fun for a few minutes to steady the ship, so to speak. I think of it like the way I used to vacuum, wash the dishes, do laundry, even clean the curtains back in my university days when I had a paper due.

I was talking about this the other day quickly, but I've been noticing it for some time: Women's rights really are making a return visit to mainstream culture right now. I can't really think when was the last time they were front and centre ... but I guess they sort of fell off the map about the same time as 9/11, though they were already in popularity decline before that. So, let's say the last wave of populist feminism was in the 1990s. Perhaps straddling most of that decade.

But, the aforementioned 9/11, a general shift in public opinion (and, I suppose, that boredom that seems to overcome entire cultures who make things such as feminism into issues-of-the-year) all contributed to drive women's rights back into the marginalia. Most people fell back into the same statements that drove them comfortably through the 1980s: "Women already have more power than men, it's just a different kind" and "feminism isn't necessary any more; women have the rights they fought for" and "men behave like men, women behave like women: it's perfectly natural!"

Well, you know, back in my more radical days I heard all these and more, and had arguments and counter-arguments ready to let fly. I was pretty radically feminist myself. And I am certainly not anti-feminist now ... but there has definitely been a shift in my perceptions of the world since the last pass of this particular horse on the merry-go-round. I can see a little better that radical feminism, which is the bedrock upon which all other "schools" or "flavours" of feminism rest, speaks in absolutes and ultimatums. It is just as black-and-white as "boys-will-be-boys" thinking. It is so far over on the "nurture" end of the spectrum that it blinds itself to some pretty common facts about the way we humans behave—and, indeed, have gravitated towards always.

Feminism may raise women's salaries closer to equal pay for parallel work, and it may raise awareness and (hopefully) reduce the instances of physical and emotional abuse and violence towards women by men ... it may even help women to find a self-respect for themselves as themselves and not merely as sex objects. And those are great, and those are what I want to see too, believe me.

But feminism often ignores such obvious facts, such as: It really is as much an imposition on women to tell them that they should not make dinner and clean house when they want to, as it is to tell them it is their genetic destiny to do so when they don't want to. Or it is as much an imposition to tell a woman she should be getting the same promotion that Ted got, when she didn't want it for her own reasons as it would be to tell her that she'll only reach so far and no farther because she is a woman. It is as much an imposition to tell women they have to be assertive and aggressive when it is their nature not to be, as much as it is an imposition to stifle a person's—any person's—restless nature.

And, you know, men do naturally gravitate towards behaviours that have nothing to do with what they learned from their parents' generation. And so do women. And lest we think that All Man is All Bad, let's not forget that the default female behaviours are Not All Good. Intelligent feminism never really argues that we are all the same anyhow, but it likes to turn as much of a blind eye to the differences between the sexes as it can. There are uncomfortable lessons to be learned from studying our differences. And though feminists are certainly at least partly right when they say that we encourage boy behaviour in boys and girl behaviour in girls, we should never just assume that, left alone, boys and girls would behave any differently.

So, now that I see the feminist movement has endured yet another round of backlashes, and is emerging from hibernation back into the mainstream, let's see how much balance is going to come with it. I expect not very much. Even during its hiatus we were seeing inflammatory T-shirts saying, "Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them" and witnessing the stupefaction of the North American male as seen through the eyes of the marketeers in charge of television advertising. "Dad is Dumb" they seem to cry, and it is a good representation of how unbalanced we seem to embrace everything. We can only gush positive or negative about idealogical movements, so let's just watch as feminism goes from being mainstream evil to mainstream good.

And if you are a man, it would probably be best to keep your dumb blond jokes to yourself for the next decade or so.

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