Has Feminism Gone Too Far?

Or, why arguing with stupid headlines is a waste of energy

Photo by Tash Guimond on Unsplash

“Womens’ Equality Has Gone Too Far” shouted the angry headline. “Half of Britons Agree”! To be fair I have added the exclamation mark but it was definitely there in tone. The piece looked at a global survey from Ipsos and concluded that the population of the UK had had enough of all this women’s lib madness and wanted out. On reading the headline I felt all of the energy drain out of me, surely we couldn’t still be arguing this rubbish? But as I read on, I realised something - I was being gaslit.

“About half of Britons believe that society has gone too far in promoting women’s equality”, the article stated. And yet, in the next paragraph it became clear that the question asked was not “has equality gone too far” but “when it comes to giving women equal rights with men, things have gone far enough in my country” - 47% of Britons agreed with this. Also, when the countries which had taken part in the survey were ranked in agreement with this statement, the UK was way down the board. The countries which were most likely to think women’s rights had gone too far were Indonesia, China, Thailand, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. When you combined all the countries responses together, suddenly it seemed like two-thirds of the world thinks women’s rights have gone too far when in reality, a small part of the world REALLY thinks this and the rest of the world thinks things are better but could do with some tweaking.

I’m not writing this to dismiss the research. You can read the full report here and there is a lot of interesting research in there, particularly looking at the different generations and how young men see their role in society. (TLDR: young men are more likely to fear women than the older generations. What your children see online matters.) But I do want us all to take a breath before we get angry about the stats in these sorts of reports and here’s why.

First up, anger is tiring. I’m not anti-anger as an emotion, it can be very helpful and motivating in short bursts but long-term it drains us. Constantly getting women angry about the world they’re living in and the ways in which we have to work twice as hard to achieve half as much, is a simple way to wear us out and make us too tired to fight. (NB: this also applies to every other discriminated against minority. If your social media feed is filled with posts that seem designed to upset you, they are.) Remembering that we’re being deliberately triggered every time the world comes out with another “women have enough already, go back to the kitchen” type report, is a form of resistance in itself.

Secondly, the reality is that whatever your view on women’s rights is, there will be people out there who disagree with you. Learning to sit with this disagreement without letting it disturb your emotional health is incredibly important. It’s also important to know which battles are worth fighting and which you can afford to let go. Do I want to get into a heated discussion with every person who disagrees with me about the levels of bias that women face in the workplace? No, I don’t. Not just because I don’t have time but also because those people don’t want to change their minds. They’re listening to debate, not listening to understand. And if I engage with them, I’ll do the same. That doesn’t mean I only want to talk to people who agree with me, but I have set a boundary that says I only want to discuss this with people who can be open to hearing a different opinion without shutting it down. Not least because talking to someone who can hold that space really forces me to do the same, it makes me a better person.

Finally, the reality is that feminism hasn’t gone too far but we might have confused “equal rights” with “equal lives”. What I mean by this is, in the UK we have human rights which are enshrined in law. Both men and women have the right to equal work, equal pay, equal levels of education, to a promise of safety when walking home at night etc. The problem is not a lack of equal rights, it is that those rights are not enacted equally. We might have a right to equal work and equal pay but you cannot tell me that the ongoing pay-gap in the UK (or the fact that only 10% of the FTSE 100 have female CEOs) is down to women’s completely free choice to opt out of wealth and power. Nor can you tell me that a rape conviction rate of less than 2% is due to the perfect application of the law rather than the fact that most of us fear “ruining a man’s life” more than we fear letting women down. And, to be fair, I can’t tell you that an increase in women attending university and men dropping out of education earlier isn’t due to the messages we give young boys around what we value in men.

Creating a perfectly fair society is probably impossible but if we just stop and say, “ok, things are good enough now”, we miss out on the chance to improve, to finesse. I have some sympathy for that 47% of Britons who think women’s equality has gone far enough in the UK. For the older generations, they’ve seen the big shifts and are scared of what will happen if we continue at that pace. For the younger ones, they’re realising that they’re facing a future that men before them haven’t navigated. They have to do things differently and that’s scary, wouldn’t it be easier for things to stay as they are?

I can understand that and that’s why I won’t buy into anger at that 47%, why I won’t allow myself to be gaslit and emotionally manipulated into thinking that this is a fight that requires my fury to in order to be won. Fury isn’t what’s needed here but empathy, understanding and a commitment to finding new ways of being. That’s not the same as accepting the status quo but nor is it about screaming into the void. The reality is that in comparison to some parts of the world, we’re doing ok AND we can do better. That pace of continual improvement requires gentle determination every single day, so that is where I will be focussing my energy from now on. And I’ll be avoiding badly written reports in order to do that.

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