We Can, But Should We?
For the sake of brevity, in this post I limit my discussion to “men/boys” and “women/girls” in the way that they are conceived of under the gender binary because I think that is the way that gender has been presented to most young children until very recently. It is worth noting that the boundaries of gender are far more fluid than this, and that this topic could (and should) be significantly expanded upon to represent a more contemporary understanding of gender identity.
If you’re a woman under a certain age, you almost certainly grew up being fed a specific idea about feminism and womanhood. You were told that girls can do anything that boys can do. Girls are just as tough and smart and capable as boys. Girls can play sports and lift heavy things and run fast. Girls can grow up to be astronauts and scientists and presidents and CEOs. In other words, girls can measure up to boys in all of the ways that really matter. But nobody ever told us that just because we can, doesn’t necessarily mean that we should. Sure, I guess we can do all of the same things as boys, but do we really want to?
To be clear, I'm not against teaching girls that they are as strong and intelligent as their male peers. I want them to grow up and go into the world with the same confidence in themselves and their abilities that men have. Rather, I'm opposed to the idea that men set the bar for how we should live our lives, and women are merely capable of meeting it. This isn’t actually feminist at all, because it's a notion predicated on the idea that the way that men do things is inherently correct but that we can replicate it if we try. Our lives are still centered around men, albeit in a slightly subtler way. We don't tell young boys that they can be as kind, caring, and sensitive as the girls they know or that they should dream of growing up and taking on labor that is traditionally done by women. Why? Because under our current social structure, womanhood is not something to aspire to. The things that women have historically done are not even seen as important, let alone as admirable. Feminism requires a societal recalculation of the importance of qualities typically associated with women, and also a promotion of these values in our boys and men. It's about separating features like intelligence, empathy, and strength from their attachments to specific genders entirely, not encouraging women to move away from “female” attributes.
This kind of “girl power” feminism promotes the idea that the most progressive thing a woman can do is wear a pantsuit and run a company or a country. It doesn’t acknowledge that women could possess traits that are advantageous to us on our journey to building a better world. And it certainly doesn’t accept that femininity is just as important and powerful as masculinity. Instead, we are told we can achieve equality by shedding our femininity and trading it in for power and success so that we might be leaders just like all of the men who came before us. I don't want to see a woman lead the way that men do. I want to see women who lead like women, taking their experiences into account and using them to tailor their approaches to the endless list of issues that men have created and then failed to resolve. We can only try some variation of the same strategy so many times before we have to step back and accept that it isn’t working.
While all of this ideology may not seem particularly harmful on the surface, there is a sinister subtext beneath it. When we say that girls can do everything that boys can do, we are really saying that women are just as capable of upholding the patriarchy as men are. The implication is that women can be trained to be oppressors, as long as our desire for equality is contended with. As liberation movements proliferate, the patriarchy is forced to reevaluate and alter its strategies. The system will not let us go easily. It’s learned that it can market itself to us under the guise of empowerment, by convincing us that equality comes in the form of achieving the same things as men. The role models we are given are politicians who work against women of color and CEOs who amass fortunes from exploiting girls in the Global South and other women who generally promote the same cycle of abuse and destruction that we’ve been living under. They don’t push back, they don’t care for others, and they don’t bring disadvantaged people up with them. There is nothing feminist about imperialism coming from the mouth of a woman instead of a man.
We are not free simply because we have women entering spaces commonly dominated by men, not even in the name of “equality”. The decisions that we make in our life are not inherently progressive or not. Becoming a stay at home mom is not necessarily “oppressive” and working outside of the home is not necessarily “empowering” (and the same can be said for the things we wear, the way we have sex, the media we consume). Rather, releasing ourselves from patriarchy comes by making the decisions that align with our hearts, not those that others have convinced us we should make, and certainly not those pushed onto us because of our gender. As long as our sense of empowerment is reliant on the messages that we receive from external sources, we will never achieve liberation. A truly feminist existence is reliant on 3 things: the freedom to make a choice, the ability to be introspective enough to make the choice that honors our inner self, and the capacity to support others in their decision making, particularly when it differs from our own. As we move through our lives, one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves is separating what we want from what others want for us.
