The recent Feminists of Trinity campaign describes itself as “a campaign aimed at destigmatising feminism, and reclaiming the term as an all-inclusive movement to advance gender equality”.
Asking the average Trinity student to give a short summary of what feminism means to them is undoubtedly a well-meaning exercise. The campaign is drawing attention to the likes of female genital mutilation, child brides and forced marriages in the developing world, among other serious matters affecting women at home. It is also almost certain that the feminists featured in the campaign will be at the forefront of the movement to repeal the eighth, which is among the most important issues facing this country at this time.
But regardless of how successful this campaign is in highlighting important issues, its central aim of destigmatising and reclaiming the feminist label is deeply misguided. To see why this is the case, imagine an analogous Catholics of Trinity campaign, in which hundreds of deeply religious students gave emotional testimonials about what their faith meant to them. There would be talk of charity work, of the comfort that faith brings to the sick, the disadvantaged and the bereaved, or of the strong sense of comfort imbued by the belief in the afterlife. It would be just as heartfelt – arguably more so – as any talk about feminism.
But not one word of it would change the problems that many have with Catholicism – that it is a patriarchal ideology that demonises homosexuals and forbids its female adherents from exercising their most basic reproductive rights. Not one impassioned plea that “my” Catholicism is about love, peace and forgiveness through Christ would change the fact that the Catholic Church is responsible for the institutionalisation of the sexual abuse of children or for the proliferation of HIV in the developing world due to its sermonising against the use of condoms.
Keeping with the religious analogy, to paraphrase Matthew 6:3, you cannot make amends with the left hand for what the right hand does.
Those offended at the comparison of a religious ideology to feminism will no doubt claim that the latter is only about equality of the sexes and nothing else. This is not the case, and anyone claiming the contrary is either unwittingly mistaken or deliberately obscurantist. The Merriam-Webster dictionary has a two-part definition for feminism: that it is the theory of the political, economic and social equality of the sexes, and that it is an organised activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests.
Equality is of course mentioned, and so is the obvious fact that feminists are most often mobilised to deal exclusively with problems that face women. There is of course nothing wrong with this. What matters is how this organised activity manifests. Just as there are Catholics, Orthodox Christians, Baptists and Bible-literalists under the Christian banner, so too are there a variety of different groups and sub-ideologies sharing the shade under the feminist umbrella.
There are some exceptionally nasty feminists, including Germaine Greer, who are “trans-exclusionary” – in other words, they do not extend their advocacy to trans women, nor do they even recognise trans women as women.
There are indeed feminists who just consider the label to mean equality in some sense. But they are the minority.
There are the radical feminists – though the ‘radical’ part can be misleading as they are quite mainstream these days – who apply Marxist theory to gender dynamics and conclude that men have created a facsimile of the bourgeoisie-proletariat relationship between men and women known as the patriarchy. There are intersectional feminists who believe that race, sexuality and gender identity must also be accounted for within the feminist framework. There are some feminists who are rather sex-negative and others that are more sex-positive. There are some exceptionally nasty feminists, including Germaine Greer, who are “trans-exclusionary” – in other words, they do not extend their advocacy to trans women, nor do they even recognise trans women as women.
Feminist thought extends far beyond inoffensive platitudes about equality. But perhaps you are thinking what is the harm if it is all just advocating for women in the end? Like all ideologues, feminists love to appeal to the collectivist in all of us by pointing to the achievements of their forbears – suffrage, contraception, equal pay acts and so on – as evidence of their nobility. These are undoubtedly significant achievements and one can also clearly see that a collective movement was necessary in the past in order to make them a reality.
But collectivism is a two-faced gambit. In order to be consistent in its invocation, feminists would also have to acknowledge their collective failings. The perpetuation of the wage gap myth is due mostly to feminist activism. In actuality, it is an earnings gap based mostly on personal choices, not a wage gap based on raw discrimination, and women out-earn men by 17 per cent in this country before having children according to a recent OECD report. The “one in five women on college campuses will be raped” statistic, originating with the dubious research of feminist ideologue Mary Koss, is another mainstay of feminist activism in the US. But, a 2014 US Bureau of Justice statistics report placed the actual figure at six per 1,000 18 to 24-year-old female college students, or 0.6 per cent. Not only is this figure about 30 times smaller than the “one in five” figure, it’s also smaller than the victimisation rate for non-students in an identical time frame, which is 0.76 per cent.
Yet the myths persist – a feature of feminist activism that cannot be attributed to Machiavellian fringe elements of the movement. Our own Ivana Bacik regurgitated the wage gap myth in her Feminists of Trinity statement, and in recent months both the wage gap myth and the “one in five” myth have been affirmed as hard facts by none other than President Barack Obama. In other words, those sceptical of the feminist ideology are not simply put off by the radical pronouncements by Andrea Dworkin, Catherine McKinnon or Mary Daly. They are often treating the ideology in precisely the same way that any ideology caught regularly peddling ahistorical or counterfactual tenets deserves to be treated, regardless of how much equality it calls for.
But what movement doesn’t have a bit of mythology at its core? Why should feminism draw particular ire? Arguably more invidious than claims that the intellectual elites in the wealthiest and most advanced country in the world engage in more rape than Congolese soldiers is the deliberate gendering of serious issues that are emphatically not gendered problems. The work of Erin Pizzey in the very first women’s shelter in the 1970s demonstrated that a significant portion of women in violent relationships were reciprocally violent to their partners.
These works and others from around the world have repeatedly shown that domestic violence is not a fundamentally “male on female” issue.
This is a result that has been replicated in numerous studies here in Ireland by the National Crime Council and the Economic and Social Research Institute and in a 2000 study carried out for the Department of Health. These works and others from around the world have repeatedly shown that domestic violence is not a fundamentally “male on female” issue. Why, then, do both Women’s Aid and Cosc – two prominent anti-domestic violence organisations, one of which self-defines itself as a feminist group – advocate the use of the Duluth model, which posits that domestic violence is a product of a patriarchal desire for men to control and abuse their female partners? And of course all of this is happening in a country where basic domestic violence statistics on men are not even adequately kept.
I have already expounded on the shoddy state of fathers’ rights in this country and the unjust treatment of men in our family court system. The most disturbing pair of statistics in that article were that one in four families in this country are single-parent families, and almost 90 per cent of these families were fatherless. Fathers’ rights are not trivial horizon issues to worry about at some point in the future if the mood is right. They should be a top priority for any movement truly concerned about equality. Dr Warren Farrell, formerly of the New York board of the National Organisation for Women, parted ways with the feminist movement in no small part due to his ostracisation by prominent figures such as Gloria Steinem for his views on shared parenting and fathers’ rights advocacy. He was and still is a true egalitarian.
Disapprobation and ridicule are not just reserved for privileged, white male devotees like Dr Farrell. Feminists have no compunction about haranguing influential women who do not share their ideology. When Meryl Streep famously rejected the feminist label last year, preferring the “humanist” label if she had to take one, the reaction across the media was a curious blend of incredulity, rage and disdain, especially given that this revelation came during the promotion of the film, Suffragette. Streep’s laudable, label-free stance was that she was a woman of “deeds, not words”.
It isn’t enough for her to be a fantastic role model to women – and indeed men – as the most-Oscar-nominated actor of all time
This entirely reasonable outlook simply was not good enough for the indignant progressive types of the internet commentariat. The problem was that feminists needed Ms Streep to take on their label. It isn’t enough for her to be a fantastic role model to women – and indeed men – as the most-Oscar-nominated actor of all time, or as an outspoken advocate for women’s rights, or even as a generous benefactor of the American National Women’s History Museum. No, what matters is that all of her complicated world views as well as all of her advocacy work is labelled for posterity in the correct fashion.
This superficial focus on the espousing of labels also enables appalling behaviour to go unpunished. Hillary Clinton, currently the favourite to secure the Democratic nomination for the US presidency, is the orthodox feminist candidate despite being a Machiavellian corporatist who stood by a man accused by multiple women of being a sexual harasser and predator. Her opponent, Senator Bernie Sanders, is a lifelong civil rights activist with actual progressive credentials. It is telling that feminist icon Gloria Steinem, who once dubbed Sanders an “honorary woman” for his feminist views, recently infantilised young female voters for identifying more with Sanders’s socialist message by claiming on Real Time with Bill Maher that they weren’t supporting Clinton because “the boys are with Bernie”.
Steven Weinberg famously said: “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” He was speaking of the blinkering effect of religious ideologies even on otherwise moral and discerning individuals. It is indeed ideology that compels Catholics to countenance or, perversely, defend the Church’s regressive teachings about women and gays. But once again, secular ideologies are no different in principle: the greatest apologists for Stalinism in the west were communists, and many a war crime has been justified through the destructive lens of nationalism. Feminism is not exempt from this assessment. Its failings can largely be attributed to its permeating dogmas about male oppressors and female victims, and our natural but wholly fallacious belief in what Bertrand Russell called “The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed”.
Feminism does not have the monopoly on equality. Humanists, egalitarians, free-thinkers and even mere individualists have long advocated for equality and fair treatment of all people. There is no need for any gender-canted ideological approach to fixing society’s ills, especially one as myopic and antilogy-leaden as feminism. In her essay collection “Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society”, Dorothy L Sayers approached questions of gender with a sense of deliberate individualism that is entirely at odds with campaigns to reclaim and protect labels.
“What is repugnant to every human being”, wrote Sayers, “is to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person”.
Sayers recognised society’s tendency to categorise and label human beings according to immutable characteristics as tiresome and pathological. Were she around today, she would likely be baffled by Feminists of Trinity and our general fixation on ideologies and the labels that denote them. If, after your own thorough inspection of feminism you still find cause to identify yourself with the label, then that is your prerogative. But even if “feminist” is a crucial part of your own personal identity, give the following social experiment a try: the next time you encounter somebody who doesn’t identify as a feminist, instead of impugning their motivations or arguing semantics, ask them what their opinions are on the issues you are most passionate about. You may be pleasantly surprised at the common ground you find and by how stimulating discourse can be when freed from the constricting grasp of ideology.
