Objectify This

I recently conducted a series of interviews for a sociology project here at my college. I surveyed my female peers’ ideas about their perceptions of the likelihood of rape, and, as an afterthought, their views on feminism. Over and over, I heard, “Well, I think of myself as a feminist in the sense that I think that women are equal to men in most capacities, but I dunno, I think it’s taken on a bad connotation in the past, that I don’t agree with, and I’m not a man hater.”

No, I wanted to say, I’m not asking if you’re a man hater! Feminism, to me, does not have to do with attacking men any more than the Civil Rights Movement had to do with attacking white people. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. did not get up there on the pulpit and say, “I have a dream, that one day you will hate white people indiscriminately.”

What’s a manhater? UrbanDictionary says 1) A person who dislikes men; The girls get together every Monday Night for Manhater Night to bitch and moan about men and then post them on the internet. 2) A person, usually female, who despises, hates, and loathes the entire male population for no valid reason. The person, again usually female, belives that all men are scum no matter what and that all men are all lying, cheating, no good assholes. This idea is usually formed at birth, or because of a bad relationship with one particular male. After what Rob did to Brandi, she has been a complete manhater!

In fact, my feminism has taught me how to understand the constraints of our cultural definition of masculinity on men, just as I am constrained by expectations of femininity. For example, the negative associations in our culture with behavior construed as female (such as focus on the aesthetic and emotional displays of any kind) has lead to the denigration of those men who demonstrate these qualities, because they resemble the lower, and the feminine. I argue (and this is not my argument alone, by any means) that homophobia is thus derived from a fear and loathing of the female, which is also known as misogyny.

Ironically, although some doors to traditional male roles have opened for women, fewer doors to traditional female roles have opened to men – men who take on artistic or aesthetic professions face pejorative stereotypes of homosexuality, and the number of working moms clearly overwhelms the number of stay-at-home dads.

This is because we live in a society so entrenched in misogyny that we devalue the contributions of these traditionally feminine roles of tending, raising and teaching children. The deprecation of these contributions is most obvious in the fact that women’s labor in raising children is excluded from the neoclassical economic analysis of GDP per capita (thanks Jeff!), despite the fact that without accounting for women’s labor in the home, the model explains “less than 16% of the variation in female rates.”

One of the fundamental distinctions made in Women and Gender Studies is the distinction between sex- the biological composition of one’s body- and gender- the socially construction and assignment of a role on the basis of sex. In this discussion, we are talking about gender, not sex. Feminism is the belief that men and women should be valued equally, even though they are not the same biologically. However, this is distinct from “equalism” because it recognizes that given the historical, systematic oppression of women, equality can only result from an increase in the cultural value and economic rewards of the feminine.

Dr. King’s dream that “one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’” draws upon the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the founding document of this nation, written by Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson argued that government was only legitimate if it received the consent of the people and protected natural rights of life, liberty, and property, while he owned slaves. Jefferson also wrote a treatise on why the U.S. should “not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state“: because of the “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”

Therefore, by this argument, the real feminism must be a deconstruction of these prejudices we have about gender identity, just as real civil rights must be the deconstructions of the prejudices we have about racial identity. This is why I’m not a manhater – because that would be unfeminist and counterproductive.

As Big Pun puts it,