Feminism: Mahayana and Hinayana

Posted on May 7, 2004 in Gender Social Justice

This ends my politics Friday

The model that I used to define my views on multi-culturalism can also be used to explain my feelings about Feminism. It saddens me when I see young people, young women in particular, saying that they’re “glad they’re not feminists”. That’s standing on the grave of Elizabeth Cady Stanton wearing your tight levis and saying “I wish this woman never lived.”

There are lesser feminist vehicles and greater feminist vehicles. I reject those which lade all that is bad about the country upon me because I am a man. I laugh at forms which gut the original intentions of the founders which was to make a woman a man’s equal in dignity, not to exalt her as a superior. I am not particularly fond of forms that betray single mothers, that make a new style of female eunuch who sells out her birthing sisters. I reject the idea that only lesbians can be feminists, a motif that appears in a small corner of a subculture and does not reflect the view of the majority of lesbians who I know. I reject those hypocrites, too, who happily send men off to war while fighting against drafting women. (This particular issue crosses boundaries: more nonfeminists support this than feminists.)

On the other hand, I applaud those women who gave their lives to challenging “traditional” (since the late 1940s) sex roles. The majority of feminists who I know — the ones who have lived in the world and struggled with its problems, reject the ideas I describe in the previous paragraph. Real world feminists have changed not only what is possible for women, but what is possible for men. They have liberated not only women but also men and this man is glad they came along.

So, no, I will not pull the pole out from under the big tent of Feminism. I will not return women and men to the 1950s. I will not aid those who would invent a new kind of terrorist society where we are constantly thinking about what other people think about us. I number among my liberators Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan. I will not send them to a Fundamentalist or Materialist Hell just because they questioned women as sex objects or made it harder for jerk males to find a date.

I would say this: not every woman who calls herself a Feminist really is and many who think that they aren’t thrive because of the big steps brave women and men took in the past to change our society.