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.
@leela, I had been wondering about how much skin these women are showing, or the fact that in some cases aren’t showing their faces.
The most heinous picture I have seen so far is highlighted in this article, where a headless naked women is holding up a sign about the irresponsible-woman-crying-rape-trope. I mean, for real? (I guess probably not).
http://mic.com/articles/94328/9-photos-that-prove-these-women-against-feminism-still-need-feminism#1284232
If they are paying people to pose with these signs, I guess that tells us everything we need to know about the MRA’s support base.
The extreme irony of the traditionalist anti-feminist position is, the original US feminists were not only about voting and women’s right to work for wages outside the home, but also in favor of legal protections for battered housewives, as well as liberalizing the then-terrible divorce laws, and were also for a housewife’s pension, so that if she were ever in need of money (e.g. through spousal abandonment, a common side effect of strict divorce laws), she would not be forced to starve, die of overwork in a horribly underpaid job, or sell her body. Things they never think about in their white-bread bubble universe, assuming those people are sincere…and not just paid to troll us after all.
@grumpycatisagirl
Yeah, you get more money if you show more skin/do sexy poses, and seeing these “supporters” in sexy poses is what first set off the alarm bells.
You can see it in action at this link. Notice how many of the models are out of country and they’re typically the one offering more sexy pictures: http://www.fiverr.com/categories/advertising/holding-a-sign/#layout=auto&page=1
Yes, Bina, if a woman was married and a mother, it was perfectly legal for her husband to drink away his entire paycheck. If she got a job or took in work to buy food for their children, it was perfectly legal for the husband to confiscate her entire pay. People who wanted to help had to be careful to lend – not give – her things, because anything given to her could be legally seized and sold by the husband. Such was life under “feme couvert” and although it was no longer the law when I was young, I can remember when women had a hard time making major purchases if they were married but didn’t bring their husband along.
I meant “feme covert.” Too many years of French. http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/wes/collections/women_law/ While married women may have had some property rights, they were extremely limited and if the women was poor or working class, there would be little or nothing for her to claim in her own right anyway.
This needs to be on a t-shirt, stat!
FTR, I have carpal tunnel syndrome, which means diminished hand strength and pain and I STILL can open most jars myself. As far as spiders go, husband has to eliminate them for me as I’m quite sensitive to spider venom. A tiny California house spider can make me sick for days if it gets a bite in 🙁
I can still remember when women had to have their husband’s permission to open their own bank accounts or credit cards. And a single woman doing that? Perish forbid! That was one of the things feminism abolished in my lifetime alone. (And up here in Canada, we also did away with all anti-abortion laws — ALL of them — in 1988. Another thing we unnecessary feminists were good for!)
If these women are so brave and independent as to seriously claim not to need feminism, I’d invite them to take a step into the Wayback Machine and go back just 40 years or so. And if that’s not enough, I’ll set the dial to 100 or even 150, and see how much REAL tradition appeals to them then. I’ll bet they’d all change their tune pretty fast if they only knew what it was really like…
@Mnemosyne – I’m a SAHM, and I hear a lot of playgroup and school pickup conversations between parents. There are women who’ve chosen to go the full-time mommy track, and some of them really envy the kind of life you’re leading. You’re independent, you have a rich and rewarding career ahead of you. I’m happy with my choices, but I still had a pretty hard couple of days when my best friend graduated from college back in May . She’d had an amazing undergraduate experience at a school that I hadn’t even considered back when I was looking at colleges; she now has a life full of endless possibilities and adventure ahead of her. I’m excited and happy for her, but for a while there was some really unattractive jealousy in my emotional mix. I’d never trade in my life, but still…the grass is always greener and all that.
I take a lot of comfort in something I heard Laurel Thatcher Ulrich say during an interview on The Diane Rehm Show. Somebody called in with a question about women balancing work and family, and she replied “Women can definitely have it all. We just can’t have it all at the same time.” There’s a time for everything in our lives. I chose to have a family a little earlier in my timeline; maybe later I’ll have work and travel. You’ve chosen to devote yourself to your work and scholarly passion. Later there will be your time for love. There’s somebody out there – probably lots of somebodies- who will be delighted by you just as you are. Love happens to people every day. It will come. 🙂
>I remember seeing some of the criticism Agnieszka Radwanska (a Pole) received after appearing in the ESPN The Body issue
Yes, Poles tend to joke that their country is going to end up being ruled by a coalition of churchmen and voters above fifty in the near future. The catholic church apparently has been regaining massive ground ever since the wall came down and is currently well-represented and politically influential via its own set of media channels.
Another use for things like fiverr is to get pics to pretend to be a woman online for things like forums and games. I try to warn people they may be duped and to learn to roll with it, but some people (guys especially) over invest in a relationship with someone they don’t know.
Dammit. I just described a sock puppet sort of.
The women who grow out their body hair feel the same way. That’s probably because no woman actually does that for the purpose of proving that women are equal to men.
“Gentleman” totally isn’t a word whose sole purpose is glorifying masculinity. Nope.
This just in: talking about patriarchal discourse is exactly the same as supporting it!
@daintydougal
Ugh, I know. They terrify me. I’m an arachnophobe so all spiders scare me a little bit, but the giant house spider is the absolute worst.
I’m pretty sure Shelob is based on Tolkien’s familiarity with these. (Book!Shelob, anyway. Peter Jackson made her look and act like a totally different and actually much less horrifying kind of spider.)
In our house spider-killing is cooperative. The first person to spot it keeps their eye on it while the other person goes to get tissue or a vacuum cleaner or something. That’s what it means to have a modern egalitarian marriage.
@Mnemosyne
One strange but pronounced tendency of sexists is that they feel the need to universalize their sexual preferences. It’s not “I like men/women that are like xyz,” it’s “Men/women that are like xyz are objectively attractive and anyone who says they don’t find xyz people attractive is lying or delusional or a filthy deviant.” I’m not sure why this is the case. Are they too insecure to just like what they like without the need for external justification and validation of their choices? They can’t like something unless everyone else does too?
Regardless, pay them no mind. If you talk to people, you’ll find that sexual tastes vary quite widely. Recall the last of the recurrent “sexy men” discussions here on WHTM.
Personally, I really like “unfeminine” women. I just met a woman that has been spending her summer teaching field courses to undergrads while backpacking. Ball cap, farmer tan, no makeup, short nails with a little dirt still under them, lanky, a little bit goofy and awkward and smart as hell. Not sure if I have time for a relationship in gradschool, but we hit it off really well and I don’t think I’d forgive myself if I didn’t at least make a go of it.
So, yeah, don’t let assholes make you feel like you’re unattractive just because you don’t fit into what their insecurity-boners try and dictate as the one true standard of sexiness.
Ah, my own worldview affirmed yet again: human females are indeed really fundamentally opportunistically mercenary. No wonder why they say prostitution is truly the oldest profession. Though it is indeed to be expected, after all if even monkeys do it already, then of course humans would as well too.
Actually, the gene for prostitution was first evolved by penguins.
Unfunny penguins.
Grumpycatisagirl:
Maybe it’s just this particular line of signs? Maybe there’s like, one anti-feminist guy purchasing these signs and he happens to be Polish or Polish-speaking, so he went to Polish fiverr? He may or may not be also the person running the Tumblr.
Although frankly I wouldn’t even know if fiverr is available in Polish or not. Anyway, I’d expect most young Poles to speak at least some English.
@RandomPoster:
You could at least try not sounding like a parody of a troll.
@zoon echon logon:
This annoys me to no end. I feel the urge to scream “God dammit people, haven’t you any sense of anything that other people besides you think??? Don’t you know any culture besides your own? Can’t you see past art and notice how beauty standards change over time? Jesus Christ on a pickup truck!”
Oh joy, the RandomPest is back.
And actually appears to be arguing that impoverished women getting paid $5 to hold up a sign means that all “human females” are “fndamentally opportunistically mercenary” and “prostitution.”
I guess I should be happy that at least ze’s pecifying which species of “female” ze’s talking about.
grumpycatisagirl, that article is so good. Shame about the entirety of the mrm hanging out in the comments. Do they really have nothing better to do?
On the ‘Women had no property-money rights, back when…’
My great-grandma’s still kicking and playing tennis, but she remembers that stuff! Both of them had gender-neutral nicknames, but it sometimes caused a conundrum; her nickname is more commonly male associated, while great grandpa’s legal name was more commonly a female name.
She remembers getting bills sent back to them, because they needed “Willie’s” signature as the man of the house, instead of “Shirley’s”. Or, they’d receive bills for a Mr. Willie (Lastname)”.
They corrected the first few companies, then great-grandma just threw her hands in the air and told my great grandpa she’d do the finances, since they kept asking for her, anyway.
He was totally fine with that.
RandomPest, do you draw non sequiturs out of a hat to decide what to post?
We don’t shame sex workers here. You won’t insult anyone by calling us prostitutes, but there’s nothing written here that suggests women are “mercenaries” (Nor is being paid for a non-violent service equal to being a professional killer. People provide services for money. That does not mean they are all mercenaries.) or that all women are prostitutes. You’re misogynist ravings don’t make any sense. Get a grip, Creepy.
That’s a pretty funny story, contrapangloss. Totally encapsulates how stupid those stupid rules were.
The hat is a fedora, isn’t it?
In other news, I got the cutest little straw trilby a few days ago. My eldest daughter cracked up when I walked in the door wearing it. It’s cute, dammit! It keeps the sun off my noggin.