Two Dogmas Of Feminism

Widespread tendencies among feminists that don't stand up to scrutiny

Introduction

The term feminism is a source of conflict like few other words. Some assert vociferously that all it means is a minimal commitment to the human rights of a large group; others claim that it involves quite contentious commitments, and the second group is right. Despite people largely talking past each other when they argue over the term, they get very exercised about it, treating agreeing with them about the term as a basic test of moral sense.

Feminism is obviously not merely the commitment to equal rights between men and women. Virtually no one denies that men and women should have equal rights, and yet most people don’t call themselves feminists. Feminists’ claim that their position is simply that women should have equal rights is a classic example of a motte and bailey, wherein one wraps a controversial view in the garb of a platitude—so that when criticized, they claim they only affirm the platitude. It’s a tactic that makes the social justice left slippery like little else, except Jell-O and natural law theorists.

In this article, I don’t intend to define feminism, for it’s not the sort of term that’s easily defined. Arguments about definitions tend to devolve to very boring linguistic disputes involving obscure counterexamples (though, for what it’s worth, I think Amos Wollen’s definition is basically right). Rather, here I’ll criticize some things that feminists tend to believe. Whether or not this rebuts feminism in some sense will depend, of course, on what one means by the term.

1 Extreme confidence that women are treated worse than men

Nearly all feminists seem to be extremely confident that in the United States and most other Western countries, women are treated much worse than men. They find this to be so obvious that they rarely see the need to explicitly defend it, often growing quite incredulous when people deny it. When asked to defend it, they generally simply rattle off a laundry list of ways that women are treated badly.

I, in contrast, am very unsure about which sex is treated worse. It seems like a monstrously complicated empirical question, not the sort of thing that can be decided simply by being a woman, any more than spending a few years in Mexico tells you whether its quality of life is, on average, higher than that of Belize. There are, of course, many ways that women are treated worse than men, but there are also many ways that men are treated worse than women. It’s genuinely hard to know which group is treated worse.

Women in the United States live about 6 years longer than men and women tend to be happier than men (strange that egalitarians spend almost all their time focusing on problems that affect the group that’s happier and lives longer). Childless women outearn childless men and women are much likelier to be the victors in custody disputes. Women excel far more in higher education, making up about 60% of college attendees. Men are overwhelmingly more likely to be the victims of murder, and perhaps even more likely to be the victims of sexual assault¹. Men are disproportionately incarcerated, homeless, and the victims of on-the-job injuries. They’re the victims of violence on behalf of their spouse around half as much as women and some studies say even more than that. Despite this, men often have no access to domestic violence helplines, for they operate almost exclusively for women.

No one seems to care much about any of these things—while discussing disproportionate harms to women is a common part of public discourse, discussing problems that disproportionately affect men is taboo. And while women being raped is discussed constantly, the only common mention of men being raped occurs when people joke about dropping the soap—a joke seen regarded as so harmless that it’s even featured in children’s TV shows. Men being viciously raped in prison is seen as a joke to be laughed off, rather than the crisis that it is.

Feminists only see the ways that men are systematically mistreated as being worth mentioning when they need to rebut the charge that feminism focuses only on women. They’ll occasionally, when arguing with someone critical of feminism, say something along the lines of “well, you talk about harms to men, but that’s actually because of patriarchy, so really feminism is the cure.” Then they go back to never mentioning the mistreatment of men again, except to either mock it or rebut the charge that feminism neglects men.

In implicit association tests, people are biased against men (EDIT FROM LIKE 2 MINUTES AFTER I POST THE ARTICLE: TURNS OUT IMPLICIT ASSOCIATION TESTS ARE PRETTY CONTROVERSIAL AND ARGUABLY AREN’T INDICATIVE OF BIAS). This bias, while almost entirely ignored by most of the public, importantly affects public discourse. John Tierney notes:

Numerous studies have shown that both sexes care more about harms to women than to men. Men get punished more severely than women for the same crime, and crimes against women are punished more severely than crimes against men. Institutions openly discriminate against men in hiring and promotion policies—and a majority of men as well as women favor affirmative-action programs for women.

Despite frequent complaints that women are discriminated against in higher education, they have an advantage in getting hired relative to similar men. If men and women have similar resumes, women are more likely to be hired. The gap between earnings between men and women is primarily caused by the fact that women work less, take different jobs, and take more time off to have kids.

Men are openly discriminated against, more likely to be the victims of nearly all crimes, shorter-lived, less happy, subject to demonstrable bias, less likely attend college, and their problems are treated as something of a joke by society, yet feminists find it completely mind-meltingly obvious that they’re treated much better than women. Of course, if any of the above statistics went the other way—if people cared more about harms to men than women, or if there was bias against women in implicit association tests—we’d never hear the end of it.

2 Only caring about harms to women

As the last section showed, men are treated quite badly in lots of ways. While various problems primarily afflict women, others primarily afflict men. Yet the second common error among feminists is focusing exclusively on the problems that afflict women.

As Tierney has noted, feminists spend a great deal of time getting outraged about the paucity of women in STEM. Yet they’re completely indifferent to the fact that in nearly all fields, there are more women than men (this is an inevitable consequence of college being roughly 60% women). No one is outraged that psychology is mostly women, or that the same is true of sociology, gender studies, and nearly every other field. Yet when fields are as male-dominated as the average field is female-dominated, that’s a cause for alarm.

This is part of a broader pattern: disparities only matter to most feminists if they hurt women. While feminists are generally very outraged by those who claim that genetic factors explain why there are fewer women in STEM (despite that explanation demonstrably being the cause of many discrepancies), they embrace those explanations when it comes to explaining why there are so few men in psychology. As John Tierney notes (his piece is one of the best things written on this subject, which is why I’m quoting it a lot):

Gender disparities generally matter only if they work against women. In computing its Global Gender Gap, the much-quoted annual report, the World Economic Forum has explicitly ignored male disadvantages: if men fare worse on a particular dimension, a country still gets a perfect score for equality on that measure. Prodded by the federal Title IX law banning sexual discrimination in schools, educators have concentrated on eliminating disparities in athletics but not in other extracurricular programs, which mostly skew female. The fact that there are now three female college students for every two males is of no concern to the White House Gender Policy Council. Its “National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality” doesn’t even mention boys’ struggles in school, instead focusing exclusively on new ways to help female students get further ahead.

Even though women far exceed men in their success in college, there’s widespread support for affirmative action in favor of women. This would be a bit like supporting affirmative action in favor of whites or Asians.

When studies show discrimination in favor of men, they’re embraced by all of academia and cited many thousands of times. When studies show discrimination in favor of women, they’re totally ignored, perhaps cited once or twice. While about 30% of sexual harassment victims are men, for the entire #METOO movement, the popular slogan was believe women. As Scott Alexander notes:

Is this really that bad? Might the 3:1 ratio justify focusing on women? Our society already has an answer to this, and in every other case, the answer is no.

I mean, for one thing, we’re telling people to stop using the phrase “pregnant mothers” since sometimes transgender men get pregnant. It seems kind of contradictory to think of this as a pressing issue, but also think that the fact that only 30% of harassment victims are men means that we should always use female pronouns for generic harassment victims, and always generically call perpetrators “males in position of power”.

But there’s also a deeper issue. Suppose I write about how we need to do more to support the victims of terrorism. Sounds good. But what if I write about how we need to do more to support the Christian victims of Muslim terrorism? Sounds…like maybe I have an agenda. If I write story after story about how Christians need to be on the watch out for Muslim terrorists, but Muslims need to be on the watch out for other Muslims being terrorists, and if I tell Muslim victims of Christian terrorism to stay silent because that’s not “structural oppression” – then that “maybe” turns to “obviously”. This is true even if the numbers show terrorists are disproportionately Muslim.

Or suppose I write about how we need to do more to help the victims of crime. Again, sounds good. What if I write about how we need to do more to help white victims of black criminals? Again, this does not sound so good, unless you happen to be Richard Spencer. If I write articles like “We Must Challenge All Blacks About Crime” or “Whites Are Attacked By Blacks In Almost Every Neighborhood”, then probably I am Richard Spencer. This is true regardless of whether the statistics show a racial skew in perpetrators. Nobody would accept “yeah, but I’m right about what the ratio is” as an excuse that your motives were pure.

Scott also notes that during METOO, sexual harassment of men was completely ignored. When Mariah Carrey was accused of sexual harassment by her bodyguard, despite her being a much higher profile figure than any of the people at the center of #METOO, her story was completely ignored. Though men make up a sizeable share of victims of sexual harassment, and are less likely to report being harassed or assaulted, when people discuss men not reporting sexual harassment, they’re nearly always discussing men’s failure to report the sexual harassment of women—not themselves.

While politicians and activists extensively claim that various problems will disproportionately affect women, as an attempt to justify the seriousness of those problems, no one says the same about problems that disproportionately affect men. No politician says “this bill will disproportionately help vulnerable minorities and men, who are more likely to be the victims of on-the-job injuries.”

While there’s a movement called the feminist movement that claims a sizeable share of the general public as its members, there’s nothing comparable for men. Movements primarily sticking up for the rights of men are taboo, and widely seen to be the purview of sexist women haters.

When vulnerable men open up about their difficulty finding love, they’re called sexist and creepy. When women do, they’re praised, and men are blamed for their deficiency. While there’s quite a lot of public discourse about the deficiency of men (especially among Gen Z)—as partners, as people—nothing like that exists for women.

Criticizing women based on the way they look is seen as quite taboo. Calling random women ugly or comparing the way women look to rodents is near-universally regarded as completely unacceptable. Yet bashing ugly men is a regular feature of public discourse, and comparing men to rodents is acceptable enough to make its way into the pages of some of the most prestigious newspapers. While women are told that they’re beautiful no matter what they look like, men are routinely mocked for how they look—body shaming is only socially acceptable when directed at men.

I don’t think its particularly concerning that there are disparities between men and women regarding their prevalence in various academic fields. That reflects, I suspect, different interests. Yet if one is concerned about those disparities, they should be similarly concerned when men lag behind. And anyone of decency should be concerned about the fact that across nearly every domain where men are mistreated, their problems are largely ignored. Male rape is laughed at, men being the victims of crime is ignored, men living less long and being less happy than women isn’t treated as at all important. It’s a rather damning indictment of our society that while we regard rape of women as so taboo that even comics won’t dare joke about it, men being raped in prison is seen as sufficiently laughable to occasionally appear in children’s shows.

A movement that claims to be dedicated to gender equality that ignores this—and every other problem that affects men—isn’t really much of a movement for gender equality, any more than a movement dedicated to racial equality that ignored non-whites would be. That is, unfortunately, the modern state of the feminist movement.

1. This one is hard to figure out given how common prison rape is and the data being messy with different ways of reporting, but various studies say rates are similar.