A recent story in The Guardian illustrated an interesting trend in the feminism/women’s rights world. That trend, appearing right in the headline, is a new contextualization of the concept of victimhood.
Feminism has traditionally been about empowerment, independence and equal rights for women, and enormous gains have been made in that regard over the decades. A century ago, women won the right to vote. Half a century ago, the advent of “the pill” coincided with and contributed to the women’s liberation movement. Women are increasingly entering the top ranks of politics, of entrepreneurship, and of big business. Women make up the majority of college students and college graduates. By any measure, feminism has made huge strides, and women today have greater reason to feel empowered, confident and independent than at any time in history.
Why, then, does so much of the social debate nowadays portray women as victims in need of third-party protection?
The Guardian article speaks of women being the key to “climate action” and starts by accurately pointing out that women in many lands lack legal and property right protection that would place them on equal footing with men. This is interesting to see from a left-leaning newspaper, because the Left seems to have gone out of its way to avoid criticizing the subordinate treatment of women in many non-Western cultures. There’s also a whole lot to read into the selectiveness of discussing women’s rights in the context of global warming, but lets not go down that road today. I’ll come back to the issue of women’s rights in non-western cultures in a moment.
Lets consider some of the hot women’s rights issues of the day, issues that grab the headlines and shape the language of modern feminism:
First, consider the “yes means yes” movement. It has roots on college campuses and is infiltrating some state legislatures. It has arisen in response to an absurdly skewed statistic that claims 1 in 4 women on college campuses has been the victim of rape or attempted rape. The principle behind “yes means yes” includes the presumption that, during sexual encounters, silence, lack of resistance or unvocalized affirmative participation are insufficient measures of consent. It also incorporates the presumption that having consumed alcohol invalidates a woman’s ability to give consent. In other words, if a college-age (i.e. adult) woman goes to a party, with the intention of drinking and hooking up, any man that hooks up with her must (a) know that she’s sober enough to consent and (b) get her to say “Yes, you can do that” every step of the way. This not only means that college-age men are increasingly susceptible to girls’ next-day or next-week or next-month regrets, but that women need to have these massive external protections put in place. It’s an infantilization and the exact opposite of empowerment.
Next, consider the latest euphemism presented in the eternal battle against the oldest profession: human trafficking. Rarely do you see the issue of prostitution discussed nowadays without this new turn of phrase thrown in. It’s evocative and provocative. It prompts the imagination in the worst possible ways. It suggests young, pretty, helpless girls being carted off to foreign lands to serve as sex slaves for evil wealthy men. It used to be called “white slavery,” but I suppose that’s not politically correct any more, because it might make young women of color feel badly about themselves for not being “white” enough to warrant being kidnapped into sexual slavery. It also has nothing to do with much of the illegal prostitution that takes place in this country, and pre-empts any possibility that some women freely choose to do sex work. In fact, it derails even the chance to discuss whether prostitution should be illegal by falsely conflating it with kidnapping, slavery and rape. It conflates the consensual with the forced, removes the concept of self determination and portrays any woman who trades sex for money as a victim. Progressive women from coast to coast are perfectly happy with that.
We also constantly hear about the pay gap, the magical 77% figure that supposedly reflects systemic bias against women when it comes to salaries and compensation. This number has been widely discredited, but it remains the clarion call for legislative action. Legislative action is a fancy way to say government should force employers to set pay standards that pass bureaucratic muster. The practical effect of such legislation would be a whole lot of litigation i.e. third party white knights riding to the rescue of the poor damsels in distress.
One long-running aspect of feminism is access to jobs that have been historically or traditionally “male,” including such physically demanding ones as firefighting. A proper feminist stance on such would be to remove any barriers based solely on gender, and call it a day. Instead, we are beset with arguments that the physical tests for those jobs are themselves sexist, because women have a lower passing rate than men do. It takes willful blindness to pretend that there aren’t physical differences between men and women. Rather than accepting that a far smaller percentage of women than men will pass the physical qualifying tests for firefighting, we witness challenges to the tests themselves, declarations that the tests are harder than they need to be, and that excessive difficulty is written into the testing standards by sexists. Surrenders to political correctness has followed, and standards have been relaxed. We can figure out who pays, ultimately, for that genuflection to social justice warriors. As in the other examples, the goal isn’t about establishing equal access for individuals – it’s about changing the rules on behalf of “weaker” women.
Finally, there’s the Left’s willful blindness to the treatment of women in some non-Western cultures, Islam in particular. Islam and Sharia subordinate women’s rights and offer them fewer protections than even the least favored women in Western cultures have. In some lands, they can’t drive or be outside unless escorted by a male relative. In some lands, if they are raped, they are considered at fault and can be put to death. In some lands, their husbands can divorce them with a simple declaration, but they have no redress if stuck in a bad or violent marriage. In some lands, they are subject to female circumcision as children. In some lands, they must conform to restrictive clothing guidelines. The American Left has little to say in defense of such women, much less challenge the cultures that mandate such treatment. They accept that second-class “victim” status of and on behalf of those women.
Modern feminism spends a lot of time looking to constrain and alter language. All sorts of new portmanteaus are gushing forth from the feminist language factories. Terms like othering, rape culture, intersectionality and, of course, the derogatory use of privilege, all seem to be about imposing externalized restraint on others. Manspreading, male gazing, mansplaining, and rapey looks, etc. are terms intended to force men to categorically conform to a constrained set of behaviors. The invention of a word suggests it’s to be used in a general sense, to defend all women against all men, no matter whether individual women wish such third party interventions or not.
I suspect that some of this derives from the success of feminism over the past half century. As we’ve seen, women have achieved and surpassed educational parity, the actual wage gap is reaching statistical insignificance, and feminism has achieved equality goals in countless other ways. Feminism is suffering from its own success, and is going the way of so many other movements that have achieved their primary goals. As a movement’s success grows, many within the movement start to find less need to devote time and energy to it. This shrinks the activist ranks and concentrates the most extreme voices, the people who aren’t satisfied with that which has been achieved, the most dedicated and hard-core. They’ll continue to “fight the good fight,” but need new targets and new injustices to fight. It would be incorrect to claim that society has achieved true gender neutrality, but many past inequalities have been diminished greatly, and small differences don’t make for big fights.
Feminism has long been a fight against discrimination and victimization. It’s not supposed to be a celebration and institutionalization of victimhood. Unfortunately, the movement is losing sight of the former in its desire to embrace the latter. The only people this serves are those who profit by selling victimhood.
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