Feminism: Estrogen power!!!

"Yes, I am a feminist, but I do not hate men. "

First of all, being a feminist does NOT mean that you are a man-hater. If you were a man-hater, you would very simply call yourself a man-hater, and not a feminist. Simply hating men does not turn you into a feminist, or vice versa. True, there are many women who hate men, and some of these women tend to call themselves feminists. There are feminists that do hate men, but they do so because of their own personal reasons, and do not represent feminism as it stands. Often men tend to get defensive when they meet a woman who calls herself a feminist. There is really no reason to. A feminist does not want to put men down in order to pull women up. What she wants is to create awareness of the fact that women deserve equal rights and opportunity as men.

In fact, my feminism has taught me how to understand the constraints of our cultural definition of masculinity on men, just as I am constrained by expectations of femininity. For example, the negative associations in our culture with behavior construed as female (such as focus on the aesthetic and emotional displays of any kind) has lead to the denigration of those men who demonstrate these qualities, because they resemble the lower, and the feminine. I argue (and this is not my argument alone, by any means) that homophobia is thus derived from a fear and loathing of the female, which is also known as misogyny.

Ironically, although some doors to traditional male roles have opened for women, fewer doors to traditional female roles have opened to men – men who take on artistic or aesthetic professions face pejorative stereotypes of homosexuality, and the number of working moms clearly overwhelms the number of stay-at-home dads. This is because we live in a society so entrenched in misogyny that we devalue the contributions of these traditionally feminine roles of tending, raising and teaching children. The deprecation of these contributions is most obvious in the fact that women’s labor in raising children is excluded from the neoclassical economic analysis of GDP per capita (thanks Jeff!), despite the fact that without accounting for women’s labor in the home, the model explains “less than 16% of the variation in female rates.

One of the fundamental distinctions made in Women and Gender Studies is the distinction between sex- the biological composition of one’s body- and gender- the socially construction and assignment of a role on the basis of sex. In this discussion, we are talking about gender, not sex. Feminism is the belief that men and women should be valued equally, even though they are not the same biologically. However, this is distinct from “equalism” because it recognizes that given the historical, systematic oppression of women, equality can only result from an increase in the cultural value and economic rewards of the feminine.

Dr. King’s dream that “one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’” draws upon the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the founding document of this nation, written by Thomas Jefferson.

Therefore, by this argument, the real feminism must be a deconstruction of these prejudices we have about gender identity, just as real civil rights must be the deconstructions of the prejudices we have about racial identity. This is why I’m not a manhater – because that would be unfeminist and counterproductive.