*Rolls eyes* “You’re not one of those feminists are you?”
I endorse a world in which this statement is regarded as wildly inappropriate, outrageous even. In ten or twenty years time I hope that this is seen on par with questioning the intermingling of races, its pretense not being entirely dissimilar.
As an anthropology student, you come to learn that your society is just as strange as those ‘exotic’ and isolated ones, that each population’s cosmology and structural hierarchy is as fabricated as the next. It is not then hard to make the leap across to the scrutiny of gender and its hierarchies. To see the discrepancy between men and women as something that is not so much scientifically proven or ‘real’, but instead simultaneously created by each and every one of us in the West in our minds and in our actions.
It is at this point that a lot of people lose focus. “But men are physically stronger than women”, “But it was the natural way for men to assert dominance and the woman to look after the home”. Consider the following: No. You are mixing the biology of animals and the cultural lives of humans. Our ability to accumulate culture puts us in a position to modify and shift these so called biological hierarchies that we are supposedly restricted by.
It was upon reading ‘The Gender Knot’ that it originally came to my attention that this issue of cultural construction is rife in the Western world with regards to gender. Feminine attributes are listed as those that don’t belong to a leader, and the strongest women or most respected women possess attributes associated with ‘maleness’. Think about it, flowery pinkness is seen as weak? And why? Because we have collectively decided it so. If Hillary Clinton stepped out in a flowery dress and drew attention to her nurturing and sympathetic side her authority would hastily be undermined. You believe that masculine attributes are essential for those in power to possess. To be a boss you must be assertive, bold, cold, calculating, logical. You must think with the brain instead of the heart. You must “think like a man”, or what we think a man should be.
And so blame is not to be handed out on the individual level necessarily, although the protesting individual certainly doesn’t help. Instead we must all look at what we believe and why we believe it, we must look at what we deem logical and reassess where we have accumulated this knowledge from.
In addition, I don’t care what you prefer to label it, if you believe in the equality of the sexes, you are (like it or not) a feminist through and through.