False feminism in the male bastion

I'm writing these words out of necessity more than ambition. It was never my intention to have my third note in my witchy blog about feminism but so it happens that some issues have to be addressed.

To simplify the reading I’d like to set from the get-go that when I write the word “men” in this article I’m referring to cisgender men.

A so-called minority

There is a significant shaking happening in the truss of our society when it comes to positioning ourselves in social problems, especially feminism.

Feminism is the cause of a minority that is not such since women are almost equal in quantity to men. Then, why do we call it a cause of a minority? Because in the collective construction of political, social and economic power, our interests are not being represented.

Oppressors don't empathize

I've had this conversation repeatedly with some male acquaintances where they expressed they were convinced that legally we've come a long way and that in a work environment, women's rights are respected as much as men's are. But what men fail to acknowledge is, in the occidental world at least (I understand some other cultures might not have equalitarian laws for all the genders), that the problem doesn't lay on what it is on paper or the narrative we like to state on the surface but the underlying inability for men to recognize us as equal and not relegate us to diminished narratives.

The oppressor doesn't suffer the pain of the oppressed because in order to establish this dynamic they need to see the counterpart of this power play as inferior and we don't tend to land our sensibility to subjects we wish to position psychologically under us (if so everybody would be vegetarian).

But even those men who praised themselves as being "allies" or neutral in this issue are not helping because violence towards women is not a curious conflict invented in a narrative of magic realism, violence toward women is very real and quotidien. I actually had to sit and assent with a smile once to a client who went on and on about how lucky I was to work with such a “good man” as my boss while that very same boss was coercing me into having sex with him when we were alone to not lose my job. I might add he wasn’t the first boss who attempted it but he was the first boss lucky enough to find me in a situation where I couldn’t afford to lose my job.

I was born in a time when women have the same legal rights as men and yet that doesn't protect me because the law can never reflect the equality it intends to if the power executing it is not a true reflection of that equality.

The value between our legs.

It's of common knowledge that the most educated women in ancient Rome and Greece were courtesans because they were the only ones allowed to be present when men talked about politics and so they were the only ones allowed to witness how a paternalist society builds power.

We might feel tempted to think that the kind of mentality that favoured a reality like the above mentioned is no longer present since “women can vote now” but since women keep being underestimated and reduced to men’s tools of hedonism, it’s easy for any women to recognize that the masculine mentality hasn’t changed.

Men often joke about how fortunate we are and that if they could advance in the social ladder by just having sex they wouldn’t complain and consider themselves in a win-win situation. These kinds of comments are for me the epitome of the male privilege in this patriarchal system, not only because it evidences the lack of empathy towards women while being under a perpetual form of oppression that reduces the potentiality of our accomplishment to a mere “favour exchange” unable to stand by itself if not accompanied by this form of trade, but also because it denotes how different the relationship with pleasure is when you have the freedom to own it.

The slut schism

When men suggest that because they are so helpless when it comes to sex, a smart woman is a woman who uses her sensuality as a manipulation tool to get what she wants, I cannot help but think that either they are very stupid or they assume we are because the only parallelism that occurs to exemplify that strategy is to tell us we should become masochists to empowering us through the whip without they having any kind of intention of stop whipping us.

When we are forced to have sex as a way of “professional empowerment” not only are we forced to betray what sexuality originally meant for us but also we are forced to betray our sense of complexity beyond our sexuality, only to then have our morality harshly judged by slut accusations that further advance the displacement of a sense of entitlement of protection and respect from the opposite sex. And yet many of us, with a better sense of pragmatism, are forced to re-own the term “slut” so the dignity that we are deprived of in this rock and hard place we find ourselves in, is not completely lost in this male narrative of convenience.

So no, men, you don't get to usurp the words that took us so long to resignify, to advance furthermore the propaganda that we should be proud of having only our sexuality as a social value in this patriarchal society, you don’t get to take also this from us and frivolously state that is such a fun suit to wear. You are not being an ally, you are just being sadistic.

The broach of the discussion

To go full circle I want to recapture the first intentions of this article, I’m not writing this with the ambition of creating a political manifesto nor the ambition of being able to display literary proficiency. I’m writing this note because I need to. I’m tired of having to explain to men why they are not helping when they take for granted the consequences of their actions and with the hope that these words help make the truss of society less shaky.

Photo by Lindsey LaMont on Unsplash