After hearing comments from people about so-called "Daily Mail Readers" as both racist and sexist... I picked up a copy lying at the lunch table at work. I thought I would try and see whether this might actually be true or not. As I flicked through I found one article about Harriet Harman, the UK's Deputy Prime Minister and her "Womanisfesto". (See link below for full article)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1204657/My-womanifesto-With-Gordon-holiday-Harriet-Harman-launched-anti-male-blitzkrieg--really-like-PM.html
The article makes her out to be a man hater just because she is speaking about woman's rights. No adequate reason for how exactly she is a 'man hater" is given apart from the warped argument that she is standing for women and therefore by default must be against men. This made me think about my own journey through feminism and gender equality. Once upon a time I also felt that to stand for gender equality meant that we had to fight against men. Men also felt that feminists hated them. Of course there were some deep seated issues I had with certain chauvinist men and I thought it meant that I hated men too.
Later I realised that in fact we all have both masculine and feminine energies within us whether we are biologically men or women. I found that many men had been encouraged to express more masculine traits and women were encouraged to take on more feminine traits. Further that many feminine characters were generally referred to has negative. Hence why any boy called a "girl" was taken as an insult. Once I was told I ran like a "girl" and my first reaction was to be offended, followed by a feeling that I shouldn't be, so I answered "that's probably because I AM a girl"!
As a young adult I went off to work for an NGO that worked against sexual exploitation of women. You can imagine the types of male stereotypes we were generally fighting against. I began to learn from men around me in that field, that men did not want to be hated by women. That they needed to be brought onboard and not feel that the notion of equality was to cost them anything. With the increasing understanding of this over the following years, I realised just how true this is. I also better realised how many women also helped to engender the very inequalities they suffered from. An example of this is where a women has suffered prejudice and oppression in her family and on becoming a matriarch later in life, begins to oppress her own daughter-in-laws. This is a common trend in South Asian families.
When any groups of people are discriminated in society, everyone suffers. All communities need all its parts to be strong. By oppressing a group it disadvantages the whole. Such societies miss out on the repressed potential of intelligence, creativity, productiveness and wisdom of the marginalised, in this case, women.
The writer of this article obviously has some fears that by granted more equality to women as men, that men will have to pay and lose out on privileges. He makes Harriet Harman out to be a man-hater because she stands up for issues affecting women. I find it sad that such an article is printed in one of the most popular newspapers in the UK. I find it amazing how people can be so bluntly and explicitly insecure about gender issues, in a way they couldn't be about race equality for example. Does this highlight how endemic gender-based discrimination still is?
David Thomas' article taught me something. It taught me that he is afraid of true equality amongst men and women because he thinks that will cost him. Ultimately, this is why people are afraid of immigration and of other races too.
Wouldn't this world be a better place if only writers played to our strengths rather than our weaknesses.
