Perspectived: The Equality of the Sexes

The question of what it means to be ‘equal’ has been at the forefront of the (post)modern political landscape, especially with the advent of feminism. It claims to fight for equality with the assumption that advocacy for the betterment of women means an upliftment of the status of equality. However these solutions are often hypothetical and uncontextualized, and criticism is more often mocked than answered. What is the reason behind its advent now? And has this noble fight developed into childish finger-pointing?

The fight for equality is a new, post-Enlightenment ideal. The Enlightenment did carry a few instances of advocacy of the equality of the sexes, for example in the ideas of Charles Fourier, but the Industrial Revolution following it saw little fight to suffocate in factories aside from necessity. The two great wars brought women in masses to traditionally male jobs, which coupled with the innovations of work, resulted in the concept of modern workplaces. Thus began the idealization of feminism as we know it today. The contributions of the Frankfurt (or frustrated) school and thinkers like Foucault in developing complementary ideologies which claim that everything is nothing but a construct that cannot be emphasized enough, which further developed and molded into modern feminist frontrunners’ ideas (for example Judith Butler’s idea of ‘nothing is biological’ or Crenshaw’s doubling down on victimhood or intersectionality). They also borrow very often and very heavily from Marx, the communist half-prophet, and his emphasis on class struggle and privilege. For the lay reader, understand that these individuals affect your own perceptions and opinions far more directly than you might want to think.

An understanding of privilege requires an unadulterated materialistic perspective, without bias. Believing that the world rests on privilege, or alternatively that there is no such thing, both require massive apathy and ignorance of the nuances. The main focus of this write-up is indeed the concept of privilege, and how no one’s definition really does it justice.

Enough ‘intellectual’ gibberish, let’s boil it down to this:

Are men privileged?

Yes.

Are only men privileged?

Hell no.

So, are men at least more privileged than women?

Depends.

What?

The problem lies with the third question itself. What is the necessity of a third question? Why do we absolutely need to make it a problem of ‘us vs them' or 'the other' instead of fighting for universal equality?

A classical feminist response to that question would be ‘because men are MORE privileged.’ And this is exactly where we need to focus on our biases regarding the very understanding of the concept of privilege.

Let us take two examples; the two I think contextualize and explain absolutely the major part of the debate.

1. Boko Haram is a Nigeria-based Islamic terrorist organization. On April 14-15, 2014, they kidnapped 276 (mostly Christian) girls from a Government school at Chivok. Almost immediately the entire world exploded in anger, as they should. There were protests in most of the first world like the USA and UK, with the UN Security Council and President Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, and most of the world leaders getting on with the #Bringbackourgirls outrage. The world leaders were willing to encourage the Nigerian government to fulfill their demand and somehow, some way bring back our girls from the clutches of these monsters.

And they did, almost quite successfully. Around 220 of these girls have been accounted for, the terrorists claimed to have released them all. There was no mass execution of the girls. Still, what happened to these girls is quite horrifying.

An interesting fact about Boko Haram, according to Karen Straughan, who studied the history of Boko Haram, is these kinds of attacks on schools are quite frequent. According to her, Boko haram is not just against westernization, but education itself.

However, the main thing that stands out in her observation is that the many times they have attacked schools before, they would lecture the girls to go home and follow the orthodox Islamic way of life, and murder the boys. Even in the statistically unlikely 2014 event when only girls were targetted, they had been returned safely after their demands were met, but more often than not, boys were simply executed. Yet there had never been any outrage, no international protests, no Michelle Obama, no UNSC condemnation. And do not be in delusion, it is simply because they were boys, and they're seen as expendable, at one level or another.

There are many, many Boko Haram-type cases. In news, when 100 (98 men, 2 women) are killed, the headline goes “100, including two women killed”. 99% of dangerous essential jobs are done by men, with 99% of work-related deaths (keep this in mind while reading point 2). ¾ suicides are men, yet 9/10 of suicide victims are projected as women. Most of the homeless and victims of crimes are men. Men are almost exactly 50% victims of domestic abuse, yet their shelters (government-funded or otherwise) are one in hundreds, and so on. It is simply that men are seen as expendable, so their issues absolutely ignored, or in recent times, preferred to be mocked, regardless of the side.

2. The feminist movement’s major demand was a demand for women’s right to work. The chains that bound them to the houses, while the man went out and witnessed the world had to be shackled. Capitalism worked heavily in its favor, as with invention came comfort and an environment that can accommodate everyone. But could it have had a bigger role than we realize?

A popular feminist narrative is that men simply did not let women work. It is, in fact, true. To a good extent. But why didn’t they? And the answer to that is way more complicated than you might think.

In tribal areas, except for extremely animistic tribes, women do contribute to agriculture substantially. In fact, it is projected that more than half of agriculture workers in India are women.

Tribal men, on the other hand, had almost always exclusively done hunting. Even now, with the big game as restricted as it is, their methods have gotten elaborate yet often lead to failure. This did not use to happen. However, this was ‘work’.

Non-agriculturist manufacturers worked from home, and the Matilda effect can come into play here, but they were few and far between. The major trader section had to continuously deal with some men who were horrible people, and to travel on seas (they were not cruise ships). A deeper psychological analysis is beyond the scope, but it is necessary to understand the most important jobs of laborers and soldiers. Yet these classes were nowhere as significant as laborers or soldiers.

Throughout the ancient times and the dark ages, the world was at war. Still is, yet in no way as sophisticated. Women make the next generation, and this by default has their need for protection on top. In pre-history times when people lived in 4-5 house colonies, it was instrumental that women survived and thus refrained from hunting mammoths and most other big game. In early and medieval history, it was instrumental to keep to tradition. However, the biggest fact is of course the work itself. Being a soldier was never about honor and glory, except if you were close to the king. It was simply a death warrant. It was extremely exploitative, and often ill-maintained (a lack of discipline training was one of the main reasons we Indians so frequently lost to the British). No one wanted to do this, but they often had to do it by force (as they still do). And you guessed it, they were men. Laborers were in a similar situation but tortured far more often.

A few hundred years later and we had the Industrial Revolution, and this is the most important part of this point. Common sense says why didn’t men try to bring women into the workforce then? There were some, but as the coal and steam factories grew, came mass unemployment, destruction of ways of life, and most importantly, death.

See, the thing people most often ignore is just how many men actually died. And they were more often than not, not really ‘men’. They were boys, kids even.

The average life expectancy of a worker during the Industrial Revolution was 17 years of age. Yes, that is SEVEN-TEEN. And this, is contextualization.

Conclusion:

My aim with this write-up is not to fire the most ridiculous modern rivalry. It is to give context to why things are the way they are, not no one is as privileged as they might think. A top 1% rich man is far more privileged than a poor woman (the comparison where the finger-pointing originated exclusively from), but a poor man, both legally, socially, and historically, is usually in a worse position than a poor woman. I have ignored the biological facts due to online hysteria of denial and focused exclusively on the other facts. The hope is that everyone comes to understand that men and women, both have their own and collective problems, and they need to be solved together and not by blaming the other for everything. The idea of the 'other' is rooted in hypocrisy, as its originators, and especially modern propagators come from the same rich and privileged class they claim to struggle against. As much as the self-righteous ‘intellectual’ class would like to make a living off of you believing it, there is no “the other”.