just-smith:

Okay. So you’re a child. It’s your birthday. Your parents decide that they are going to take you and nine of your friends out to the zoo for the day.

Now, ten young excitable children are pretty hard to manage, so they decide to split you up into two groups. One group get given blue stickers and they’re told to go with your dad, and one group get given red stickers and they’re told to go with your mum. Unfortunately there is also a time limit, so you can’t go and see everything. Your parents decide that they will take different routes, and so some of your friends will see some exhibits and others will see others.

Let’s say that only the red group are going to get to see the lions, and only the blue group are going to get to see the penguins. You’re in the red group. This creates problems for you, because you wanted to see the penguins pretty badly. So you observe the following:

I want to see the penguins

The system doesn’t allow me to see the penguins

Therefore the system is oppressing me

Yeah, that makes sense. It’s your birthday, so why shouldn’t you be allowed to do what you want to do? Welcome to first-wave feminism. You’ve found your first injustice in the system, and now you want to sort it out. You complain to your mum, and she lets you move to the blue group.

But they’ve already had some time together now, and you feel sort of left out. They don’t really like the way you’ve forced your way into their group, and so your penguin-seeing experience is being tainted by their bias. You complain to your dad, and he tells them to treat you just as they would one another. Welcome to second-wave feminism. In theory first-wave feminism sorted out your problems, but in practice the people in the system carry half of the bias, and so they need to be changed as well as the system itself.

Now, other people in the red group have seen you leave to have fun, and some of them might also have wanted to see the penguins, but they can’t really appeal to your parents like you can so they can’t follow. They think that it’s pretty unfair that you’ve excluded them from your new justice, and that you’ve only thought about how it affects you. You observe the following:

More members of the red group also wanted to see the penguins

The system doesn’t allow them to see the penguins

Therefore the system is oppressing the red group

and

Members of the red group aren’t allowed to see the penguins

Members of the blue group are allowed to see the penguins

Therefore the system privileges the blue group

So you complain to your mum again and she says that all of the red group can see the penguins if they want. Welcome to third-wave feminism. You’re now much more inclusive, but you’re still being quiet selfish and narrow-minded. You don’t even stop to consider that members of the blue group might have wanted to see the lions. You’ve given the choice to yourself and other members of your group, but the others are still as restricted and oppressed by the system as ever. You haven’t stopped to consider that, in their eyes, you are just as privileged by the system in being able to see the lions when they cannot.

At this time, though, you’ve only heard the perspectives of those in the red group, and so you only know that the reds are oppressed and the blues are privileged. You talk about this amongst the reds, and soon you are certain that this is the way the system works. You don’t consider that the blues might want to see the lions, as you personally value seeing the penguins higher, and so you conclude that the system favours blues over reds. You and the other reds become quite angry about this, and you even start attacking the blues. You blame them for the system being unfair on you, when they didn’t choose what group they were put in, let alone create the system in the first place. The system has no favourites, it just seems it to you because these people are being forced to do what you want to be allowed to do. You don’t listen to their protests that you are if anything going against justice and making the inequality worse in only listening to reds and excluding blues, and if they try to point out that things are exactly the same but in reverse for them you accuse them of ‘bluesplaining’ and whining ‘what about the bluez’. You tell them that their experiences of suffering at not being allowed to see the lions don’t exist, as that’s not how the system works. The system only oppresses reds.

Later, in your quiet recollection once you have calmed down and matured, you realise that they may have had a case. Objectively, the system represses both parties. It oppresses those in the blue group who wanted to see the lions as well as those in the red group who wanted to see the penguins. It also oppresses those in either group who wanted to see both. It was only your subjective view which painted you as the only victim, because you were only aware of the suffering which affected you. You realise that the only way to tackle the system is to have both sides reject it, and welcome those from the blue group into your movement. Between you, you come up with a new system for the rest of the day, in which people can choose which group they go in, and what they do within that group. There is a chance for people to swap groups, or temporarily join the other group for a specific activity. You realise that the binary system ruins everybody’s day, not just yours, and so you create a new fair system which allows justice and happiness for all of them. Welcome to fourth-wave feminism. You’ve taken the final step, and now it is clear that you really want justice for everybody, not just for yourself. Up until now you have faced opposition from both groups, which you assumed was because those people didn’t want justice, but now you have given everybody justice you realise that it was because you were excluding and erasing them. Not everything is always about you being the only victim. Sometimes, to be fair and to make progress, you need to look at the bigger picture. Happy birthday, and you’re not a child any more. People might now start to take you seriously.

(Where birthday signifies life, blue group signifies men, red group signifies women, seeing the penguins signifies entering the male gender role, seeing the lions signifies entering the female gender role, the ability to appeal to your parents signifies the ability to have a voice in the gender equality movement, the random labelling system is the unbiased patriarchy, and you are feminism).