(And You Probably Shouldn’t Either)

This post is an appeal to feminists, of a particular kind, a kind I support: feminists who want equality for all, who want to see the world improved for everyone, regardless of how many X or Y chromosomes they have, and want people from all walks of life to work together to achieve that.

Feminism has a long and storied past. In some ways, its history gives it strength; in others, it gives it baggage. There have been many waves and changing beliefs within mainstream feminism (and, of course, endless debates about which feminism is “mainstream”…), and some of the people in the movement have put forward brilliant, incisive and inclusive ideas, and some of them have put forward hate-filled, water-muddying and divisive ideas. And progress has been made, and over time, something else has happened: it has evolved into an academic discipline as well as a social/political movement.

The thing about academic disciplines is that they become, themselves, a barrier to entry: new developments are based on previous ones, there are more and more things that it’s assumed everyone in the field already knows, and over time, a field — any field, whether in the humanities or the sciences — can grow arcane. This stuff builds up in layers, like rock strata, until it becomes a cliff.(1)

That barrier has the potential to cause inequality — for example, by denying access to those outside academic circles, in terms of their being able to follow the debates going on within, and also being able to contribute their voices to those debates.

This can apply whether we’re talking about ethnic-minority women, or economically-disadvantaged women — or whether we’re talking about men.

I’ve previously discussed the changing gender-balance in education and the roles of men and boys within it. I don’t think anyone will be stunned to hear that 32 women earn first degrees in the field of “women’s studies”(2) for every one man… and at the higher levels? In 2008-2009, not a single man earned a PhD in the subject.

One of the ways this educational barrier makes itself apparent is through language. Academic feminism has built up a fairly large vocabulary of terminology — “patriarchy” and “privilege” are just two examples — which have particular meanings within academic circles. The thing of it is, those meanings are different from the non-academic understanding of the words. Sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically.

Take “feminism” itself: If you stop 10 random people on the street and ask them what “feminism” means, the majority will answer some variation on “the belief in/fight for women’s rights”. Similarly for other terms: “patriarchy” (if they know the term at all!) meaning “men oppressing women”. Or that “male privilege” means “men have it better than women”, as some kind of blanket statement of universal imbalance.

Now, many people may want to take issue at this point and say:

“but feminism has moved on — feminism stands for the equality of all people! We know the patriarchy isn’t some “boy’s club” plotting together to crush womankind beneath their steel toe-capped boots, it’s a system in which men and women are both complicit and under which both men and women suffer injustice! “Privilege” is about a mixture of self-examination and empathy — about trying to see the world from another’s point of view and so understand both their issues and, from their standpoint, see the advantages you might have benefited from that were lurking in your blind spots — and that this cuts both ways!”

And I personally appreciate the concepts they’re trying to convey, but… unless and until you can change the mainstream perception of the terms, you’re just making the field more jargon-filled.

And unlike unfamiliar, recently-coined words like “kyriarchy”, people aren’t going to stop and think “What does that mean?” and look it up — remember, most people already think they know what the words mean. They’ll just glide smoothly through the text using their existing understandings of the words, not realising that they’ve misunderstood.

I see this happen a lot on comment threads all over The Internets.

It causes a lot of angry arguments.

You might say that best thing to do is to educate people out of those misunderstandings. I would argue that… well, it depends on your intent. Within academia itself? Sure, agree upon and define your technical terms, teach them to people, and use them — all fields of study do this.

But remember, we’re also talking about a social/political movement. If you are trying to change people’s minds, bring about change, and build bridges between camps that currently threaten to just grow more divided? Then you have to be aware that jargon is a barrier to entry, and you need to reach out to the people on the other side of that barrier.

The sciences have created a specialist role of “science communicator”, whose entire job is to bridge the gulf between the scientific community and the general public, so that those of us who don’t know a charmed quark from a strange quark can understand scientific issues that affect us, and make informed decisions about them.

I don’t think feminism needs to go that far, but expecting people to go away

and RTFM before joining the discussion isn’t going to work. People never RTFM.

Especially when many of the terms in question can be… triggery.

Try and put yourself in the shoes of a guy who has no background in academia or gender studies or any of this stuff. He’s a good man. He believes in equal rights — depending on his age, he might still think of it as “women’s lib” — and likes to think of himself as reasonable. But something’s happened, some injustice, and he’s found himself on the wrong side of gender inequality. From an objective viewpoint, it’s almost certainly not the first time. The way society works and the way he’s been brought up, though, mean this is the first time it’s “clicked” that’s what it’s about, and — quite understandably — got pissed off about it.

Maybe he goes looking to try and figure out what to do about it. Or maybe he bottles it up inside, because that’s what society tells him to do, until he stumbles across an article about it.

Now. This is a critical moment, hanging in the balance. What happens next?

One option — in my opinion, the ideal one — is that he starts to understand more about social structure and injustice and how that affects everyone; uses his own experience to understand the plight of others, and their experiences and responses to help understand his own situation and how he can proceed; finds support and understanding and a sort of sense of relief that it’s “not just him”, and joins a movement that is trying to fix the sexism that affects him, and you, and me.

But do you think he’s going to go and read a bunch of FAQs first?

He might be persuaded to — but only after he’s convinced that you’re “on his side”. When you describe yourself as a feminist, he doesn’t yet know what you mean by that. If you say, “Patriarchy Hurts Men Too”, you might believe you’re making a statement that tries to encapsulate the complex interlocking power structures of modern society in which everyone is complicit — but what he hears is, “It’s your own fault”.

To the average person, PHMT can very easily come across as sounding like you think their (remember, legitimate) problem is some kind of ironic self-inflicted accident — like someone with a gun shooting at others and accidentally hitting themselves in

the foot with a ricochet.(3)

Or do you think he’s going to go to a rabid MRA site?(4) Like many a populist movement, they offer up a simplistic black-and-white solution to a difficult problem, and that appeals to people. They have what marketing departments would term “a clear value proposition”. There, he reads “there is a palpable feeling that our legitimate grievances have been ignored even as more and more indignities are heaped on our heads” and thinks: at last, someone who gets it! Doubly so if he feels he’s been told his problems are his own fault!

And then we’ve lost another casualty to the bogus battle of the sexes 😦

So, I’d like to suggest that you let words mean what people think they mean, and find new words to describe the concepts you’re really getting at. I’d like to request that those words not contain gendered language that appears (even accidentally or by misreading) to elevate or diminish, blame or cast as victims, one or another class of people — particularly when more than three billion people are in one of those classes and whose lives and experiences are so dramatically different.

It’s almost like a privilege exercise: train yourself to notice when people use jargon terms, and ask them to clarify what they mean. And this goes for everyone, regardless of whether you consider yourself feminist, masculist, both, neither: Once language barriers have been crossed, you may find that more — or fewer — people agree with you than you previously thought. That people you accepted or rejected, may actually have different views to what you believe.

Footnotes:

Not, strictly speaking, how geology works. Shh! As it’s described in the gender-specific language of the Digest of Education Statistics. Not only that, I suspect some people do mean it that way. It’s hard to tell how widespread a particular use is. Note to MRAs: I’m not saying, “an MRA site, all of which are rabid”. I am saying, “a site inhabited by a subsection of MRAs who happen to be rabid”. You know they exist. Yes you do.(5) Same applies to feminists too, of course — every movement has wingnuts. There is no footnote six.

Advance warning: subjects considered off-topic for the comments section of this post include: Whether we should be working towards equality for all. It’s part of the mission of this site. We’re taking that as read. If you disagree, you’re probably in the wrong place.

What percentage of feminists do/don’t agree with one definition or another. It’s irrelevant to the point of this post, and views are highly subjective depending on which people you personally happen to have encountered.