Daniel O’Brien | Opinions Editor
That gender dynamics and societal attitudes toward them can be discussed openly in the public sphere cannot be oversold as a positive development. Better still, these conversations are (mostly) respectful and well intentioned, with the goal of somehow continuing progress against widely observed harms. Many commentators rightly point to sensible legislative changes (such as paternity leave, ‘Yes Means Yes’ laws, etc.) that can go a long way toward treating the symptoms of inequality and abuse. But history tells us that only so much can be accomplished by trying to legislate away what are largely cultural problems.
Struggles for racial equality provide a relevant roadmap for what we can still expect to face in the pursuit of gender equality. In America, slavery was abolished roughly two and a half centuries ago, and in many Western countries it was ended far earlier. It took another hundred years, until Brown v. Board of Education and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to end legalised segregation. Yet today, fifty years removed, it seems self-evident that many serious underlying causes of inequality of opportunities and outcomes for racial minorities remain unresolved. No matter how many battles are won, the war can still feel unwinnable.
Many problematic attitudes, both toward race and gender, are so culturally and institutionally ingrained that legislative change is inadequate. It is necessary but not sufficient. Society, for a number of reasons, will inevitably reach a point past which we are not comfortable sacrificing personal freedoms in the pursuit of equality. Sometimes those concerns are based in principle, such as America’s protection of the use of many hateful slurs as forms of free speech (that such speech is admittedly curbed in many other developed countries is beside the point here). Just as often the concerns are practical. Criminalisation of catcalling, for example, would either require unmitigated, 1984-style police surveillance, or else a judicial system accepting of the premise that an accuser’s word is in itself enough to convict someone.
The gap between what is legal and what constitutes ‘ideal’ behaviour is where hatred flourishes, often unnoticed. We have worryingly seen that, at a certain point in the pursuit of equality, the dominant group can come to view as sufficient the legislative changes they have so benevolently enacted. Affirmative action based on race is vulnerable to many legitimate criticisms, but “shouldn’t they have caught up by now” is not one of them. Similar are the men who hide behind the argument that women who want to be seen as equals can’t act like victims. On that basis they justify complimenting (i.e. harassing/stalking/assaulting) those non-victims in public.
In the above arguments we get the implicit strand of reasoning that ostensibly equal legal rights translate perfectly to equal treatment in society, and that any resultant outcomes are therefore fair and justified. Furthermore, it seems that so long as one does not advocate legally unequal treatments, one cannot be labelled a “racist” or a “misogynist”. The prevalence of this reasoning can lead to forms of abuse that are far more dangerous, in the sense that they are considered more publicly defensible. Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls this culture “racism without racists”, meaning that people can hold subconscious racially biased attitudes while feeling comfortable that they are morally in the right (famously leading to the prefacing of statements with, “I’m not a racist, but…”). Bonilla-Silva fears that, within American society, “the more we assume that the problem of racism is limited to the Klan, the birthers, the tea party or to the Republican Party, the less we understand that racial domination is a collective process and we are all in this game.”
The infamous “NotAllMen” hashtag is simply the “sexism without sexists” variant of myopic racial attitudes. Clearly, no one advancing a ‘feminist’ argument (whether they be male or female) believes that every single male in society explicitly oppresses women (via catcalling, sexual assault, etc.). The point is that those who pat themselves on the back for not being an awful person risk missing the ways in which the most well-meaning individuals can perpetuate cultural and institutional biases. One of those ways is by choosing to ignore the fact that such biases exist.
This won’t be a terribly positive conclusion, because frankly providing one would be misleading and disingenuous. We are not ‘close’ to achieving gender equality for the simple reason that power imbalances will always seek new ways to shield themselves from critique. It once came by disenfranchisement, and today it comes from the false narrative that current progress should be sufficient. The only thing we can say with certainty is that the pursuit of equal rights is related, but not equal, to the pursuit of fair treatment.
