Are women turning against feminism? Over on The Spearhead, WF Price sets forth the proposition that “the younger generation of women [is] rejecting ‘feminism’ in stronger terms than I’ve ever witnessed in my life.”
His proof for this? A Tumblr blog called Women Against Feminism, featuring a couple dozen photos of women holding signs denouncing feminism. Or what they think feminism is, anyway.
Some of these women are fairly articulate about the source of their hostility against feminism: they’re traditionalists who don’t like being judged for their choices:
Others seem to be reacting against stereotypical notions of feminism that bear little relation to the real thing:
Still others have somewhat more, well, idiosyncratic reasons:
For whatever reason, quite a few of the women posting these pictures are from Poland.
At least here in the US, it’s not news that a lot of women reject feminism – or at least the feminist label. There are plenty of traditionalist women who reject the central tenets of feminism. And there are many others who may share some feminist beliefs but don’t want to call themselves feminists, in part because of the bad rap feminists get in the media and, these days, online. Anyone who’s been a feminist for any length of time has heard women (and some men) announce that “I’m not a feminist, but …” and then follow that statement with a sentiment that is, by any reasonable definition, feminist.
Now some of these “I’m not a feminist, but” types are posting pictures like this, using what is essentially a feminist analysis to criticize what they see as a central shortcoming of feminism:
Naturally, WF Price has a somewhat different explanation for this alleged trend.
What I think is going on here is that younger women need men more than their older, feminist counterparts did in their heyday.
And why is that? Because times are hard. And so even though men today are struggling, women are struggling even more, and so – in WF Price’s imagination, anyway — they’ve come to appreciate what men can do for them.
The less men have – and the less men there are in general – the more women need them. Without men or without men of means, there can be no surplus, no you-go-grrrrl feminism, no fancy restaurants and no nice houses. Everything just goes to crap.
Heck, Price argues, even men without jobs make better roommates for women than other women, because, you know, they can open jars and stuff:
[W]hat use could a man possibly be if he has no money to speak of? Only someone who has never lived with a woman could find that one hard to answer. A healthy young man with no money can drive, carry things, fix things, protect his mate, solve problems, save money, do chores — the list goes on. And when he gets a job, he will pay his way and do all these things, even if he makes less than his girlfriend. It’s a much, much better deal for a woman than a female roommate.
According to Price, feminism had whatever successes it did have in the past because the economy was booming.
What created this “independent woman” myth was the great prosperity of the baby boomer era, which lasted from roughly the mid 60s to the mid 2000s. Men abounded, and they were flush with cash. Businesses could afford to hire superfluous cute girls and give them nice salaries. Family courts could rob men blind and they’d still have enough left over for a reasonable lifestyle and a chance to start over. Men were harvesting the fat of the land, and there was more than enough to go around.
Huh. I lived through that baby boomer era, and I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t one giant materialistic orgy. There were, I vaguely recall, more than a couple of pretty severe recessions. And back in the heyday of second wave feminism in the seventies there was something called “stagflation.”
But let’s not get in the way of WF Price’s little fairy tale. In the baby boomer era, everyone prospered. Now, everyone is poor. Or at least the young people are:
When you’re poor, life is a lot easier if you can share with someone, and nobody shares more with girls than boys. So merely finding a man to share burdens is a considerable relief to young women. Is a feminist going to fix a car, carry a TV upstairs or take her to the hospital to give birth? Will the feminist voluntarily share any of what she earns with the young woman? Yeah, right…
Apparently in Price’s world “the feminist” is essentially a female version of Scrooge McDuck.
Male scarcity in either numbers or resources effectively prevents feminism. Surplus enables it. In a sense, one could say that feminism’s own downfall is built in to the ideology itself, because it contributes to male scarcity.
Wars between the sexes accomplish nothing in the long run, but they do highlight the complementary, interdependent nature of the sexes: when one sex “beats” the other, both lose. Today’s young women seem to understand that a lot better than their foolish mothers ever did.
In the comments, the Spearhead regulars are less forgiving of “foolish” women than Price is. Regular commenter Geographybeefinalisthimself suggests that antifeminist men should be something less than gracious in their (alleged) victory:
Even if women are in fact rejecting feminism (and I treat this with a lot of suspicion), I don’t see why men should not be vindictive since feminists were pretty damn vindictive to men (myself included, though I am well aware that I am not the only one) when male power was a myth.
Since young men got paid back for discrimination that wasn’t their fault, I don’t see why they shouldn’t turn around and do likewise to a subsequent generation of females. If feminism can come to an end now (and I am not convinced that it is dead yet), it also could have come to an end twenty years ago. I always take the attitude that if something can happen now, it could have happened many years ago as well.
Someone calling himself Lastango, meanwhile, indulges himself in some hypothetical Atlas Shrugging:
[T]he tide is going out and it’s increasingly obvious feminism has been swimming naked, keeping its head above water only because it could float on government money. Unfortunately for feminists, this is happening at the very moment men are increasingly aware of having been demonized and exploited during the past 40 years, and Atlas is starting to shrug… he’ll be staying dry, on the beach, instead of swimming out to rescue a drowning political tribe of privileged, entitled women who have been using him for their own gain.
The misogynists of the manosphere are never quite so happy as when they contemplate women being punished.
The women posting pictures to the Women Against Feminism blog might be surprised by how ungentlemanly these fellows really are.
NOTE: I cropped the pics from Women Against Feminism to save space and highlight the signs.
I used to play a game with horror films called “Who dies first”.
OK, I still do.
If you are not a old school horror fan or you don’t know the tropes you can still play and win. Just bet on every gender, race, sexuality etc. bias you know and you’ll do fine. Just remember that killing disabled people (when they are not the horrible murderous freak and then they still die in the end) is a way for the filmmaker to show how edgy he is. They will not be only minority spared. Don’t ever bet on the disabled person as the survivor unless she is Signorine Weaver. It is known. She can survive anything.
What’s heartbreaking to me is I can play a similar game with the headlines.
Oh art, how you imitate life in the shittiest of ways.
I read them out loud and then say, “What color skin do you think this person has/had?”
If they are dead or grievously harmed by police brutality or in prison on a trumped up charge, do not guess “white”. In fact, just guess like it was the 80’s and you’re still playing “Who dies first”. You’ll win every time*.
Just kidding. no one wins that game. That “game” sucks sewer pipes and makes me hate all the things.
*There is one exception. “Chad” the rich white asshole who is creepily glomming on the white straight cis male underdog’s love interest never get’s his competence. That guy only get’s his in fiction.
Argenti,
I stole that line from Prince of Tides.
(Ick and ew, Barbra fucks her patient.)
“My mother should have raised cobras”. My Nana is fond of using it.
kitteh,
That’s perfect!
I like snakes, but I won’t own a snake for two reasons.
1. We had ice storms here two years in a row that killed several tropical pets, including a school’s beloved Python named Cleopatra. I will only have pets that can endure the cold now.
2. Once while gagging as I cleaned the cage of a snake I was snakesitting a friend said over my shoulder, “I’ll buy you a sour cream burrito if you don’t puke”.
*hurkagurka*
So, no pet snakes for me. Birds are also right out.
Kate — that sounds pre-Victorian era, but not by much. I think the infant mortality rate was down a bit by then, but I could be wrong on when it went from half to a third dying in infancy. In any case, FUCK YES to what you said about pre-antibiotic wound care — keep it clean was really the only thing you could attempt to do. Which, seeing how London had The Great Stink, seems like it’d be harder than it sounds. Even through the Victorian era c-sections were remarkably dangerous and really a last ditch effort to save the baby once the mother was dead or dying, appendicitis? Dead. Congenital rubella…cholera…polio…fucking smallpox!
Not a world anyone with any sense would want to return to.
Katz — “Am I the only one who heard about that mom being arrested and immediately went ‘…She’s black, isn’t she?'”
No, no you are not.
Photoshopped from Project Unbreakable? I want to weep for humanity.
Lea, I used to play that game with bad scifi. Like, really bad scifi. Like dragons and giant sequoia north of the arctic circle bad and head-desk inducing dialogue.
I tend to have the best luck if I guess that “purposefully written as annoying” chick dies first, then “handsome young black man” dies second. Sometimes, though, they’d kill off the token racial minority of the film last, before the ‘aryan ideal’ protagonist killed the evil scifi beastie.
The nice young not-buff-geek-of-the-film seemed like they were almost always third or midpack, while the retired, overweight military dude tended to die towards the end of the pack in a blaze of geriatric machismo after imparting his blazing gun wisdom to the erstwhile young hero of the film.
The pretty “move scriptwriters want this to be a couple” white folks usually were bad ones to pick. They usually got to live.
Ever seen an Assassin bug?
They’re pretty cool.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduviidae
Lea — I was wondering why cobras, only reason to raise them is for their venom => anti-venom. As far as cold intolerant pets…*makes a sweeping gesture* if we ever lose power and heat I’m going to be after every spare scrap of clothe I can muster to insulate my tanks. At least a snake you could cuddle and give it human heat. (And yes, I totally would. Somewhere there’s a picture of me, at maybe four or so, on the ground hugging a python that was easily 12′ — my mother has said that in hindsight letting me play with a constrictor that big may not have been wise, I loved it though!)
Spiders? Stare and point until someone saves me. Snakes? AWW, who’s a cute wittle snake?
Argenti,
Friends of mine kept their parrot alive by using those self heating hand warmers hunters use in the bottom of her cage and keeping it covered, as well as keeping her cage by the fireplace. Most people I knew with tropical fish were not so lucky unless they had a generator.
Nobody though it would happen two years in a row. Now, we’re all ready for it every winter.
Cleo died because no one could get to the school to cuddle her. Too many downed trees and power lines were in the way. There were gas shortages and curfews. The only cool thing was that people in antebellum homes invited everyone to stay with them and cooked in all the old fireplaces. Our old place was tiny but framed from Poplar and had an old gas heating system. The trees fell but did not cave in our house and we had hot water the whole time, even if we did have to put our perishables out in the snow. We had friends living with us and a new dog staying with us. I’ve never house trained a dog so fast in my life.
It changed how I prepare for winter forever. We keep photos of the last storm up on the wall even now. It was beautiful in it’s way.
I’ve always wanted to have a pet reptile (turtle? lizard? snake?) because I’ve always felt a certain kinship with them, but we only heat our house to 54 degrees in winter so it’s not practical.
@Lea: If you are not a old school horror fan or you don’t know the tropes you can still play and win. Just bet on every gender, race, sexuality etc. bias you know and you’ll do fine.
Mind you, I was pleasantly surprised with Deep Blue Sea when Samuel Jackson, the only really name star in the thing (this being before Saffron Burrows started getting better parts) stood up and made his rousing “we’re not going to die, dammit!” speech – and was promptly chomped in two by a huge shark.
Yeah, the black guy died, but the fact that they killed off their only big star halfway through served notice that anyone might get it.
Horror writers are a little better at mixing up their death order these days. However, you can still bet that people of color, gay people, skeptics and sluts will not make it out alive. You can also easily figure out the final girl.
What my child brain took from being allowed to watch Friday the 13th at the age of 8 is that if you have sex someone is going to murder you. This prompted a rather illuminating conversation with my mother, so hey, I guess it was good for something.
Whoot my sign kitty is a gravatar!
Fame, I haz it.
Sign kitty might not be grumpy but at least zie has a very serious expression. 😀
Just go back to the early to mid 50s. So we’ve got vacuum cleaners, washing machines (if not push button automatic ones), refrigerators and antibiotics – sounds OK. My first mother-in-law told me once how she burst into tears when her husband raced into the house one day, happily announcing to all and sundry that he’d bought the house they were renting. They could live there For.Ev.Er!
It was an old house. The image that came to her mind was spending the rest of her life there – polishing the floorboards beside the carpet running down the middle of the very long hall on her hands and knees. A job that took 3 or 4 hours – every week. Beating the carpet on the clothesline every now and again was easy by comparison. (And she had one toddler and a couple of other young children at the time.)
Or all those eras where you mostly had to grow your own food. And usually end up having to give most of it up to the local land owner.
With all these “anti-feminist women” coming out of the woodwork how come the MRA’s still can’t get laid?
Pheonician,
That was the best part of the movie.
LL Cool Jay lived, didn’t he?
So, there’s that.
Oh yeah, that’s right. That’s the one where MEN use their gender to get out of making 77 cents on the dollar, don’t have to face date rape, slut-shaming, etc., etc. Amirite?
Because even the most blithely ignorant of them is still not so blind as to overlook the MRAs’ glaring faults? Just a wild guess.
But, but, won’t they realise they’re oppressing teh menz and succumbing to ebil feminism if they choose who they will and won’t fuck?
RE: LBT –
[RE: Clothesminded
What’s next gays against gay marriage ?
They exist. Quite a lot of them, actually. Check out the g0ys sometimes, if you need a laugh.]
In my activist days, criticism of marriage from the progressive end was quite common. I’m sure some of my old friends, even if they are now pleased that the choice is becoming increasingly available, still think we could come up with something better starting from scratch than trying to assimilate into an institution with such a chequered history.
As a guy who grew up in the 60s, I’ll admit that I was taken by surprise by the idea that gays wouldn’t HATE the idea of marriage — it’s so 50s. But now I have a daughter who’s happily married to her female partner …
I would say that while I support gay marriage, I can’t find any reason to object to people — gay or straight — who hate marriage, just as long as they don’t try to inflict their views on others. There are certainly plenty of reasons to criticize the institution of marriage, but as long as it is a personal choice rather than socially compelled — I think people should have the right to make that choice.
(I tend to think that other sorts of marriage — say, between several individuals of assorted gender — should be allowed too between “consenting adults” — but I think it is better to keep my mouth shut about that until the current marriage equality battle is definitively won. It is probably better not to freak out the homophobes too much.)
Pretty much sums it up, I think. Make the institution available to adults regardless of sexual orientation – available, not mandatory, nor pressured.
There’s a Greebo here now? Do I have to change my icon?