stand this. We understand that patriarchy is bad for all of mankind. That’s why feminists have tried to resist it, and have asked for its total annihilation. Feminism is, in principle, a call to end patriarchy.
Why then has the feminist struggle been so concerned with the struggle for women’s rights? It is because women were for hundreds of years made to suffer violence, shame, indignity, humiliation, and often even death for the rules that patriarchy tells us we must live by, and men simply were not. Women, in many instances, continue to suffer violence and discrimination as a result of patriarchy. So, yes, forgive us for having limited our struggle to fighting for the rights of women all these years: while patriarchy says men should not show emotion, it says that if you rape a woman, it’s understandable, because she deserves it. While patriarchy says that a man should provide for his family, it says a woman should not venture outside her kitchen, and if she does, she should be punished. While patriarchy says that a man should always strive to be strong, it says a man can beat his wife as a way of regularly asserting, to himself and others, that strength. While patriarchy says a man cannot cry, it says a woman’s feelings are wild and unpredictable and therefore she is a witch or a nymphomaniac. So: do you see how patriarchy may have been a bit worse for women? Do you see why we had to start from scratch — start with asking for the basic right to life, freedom from fear and violence, dignity, economic independence, fair pay — before we could address how men were also undeniably victims, in many ways, of patriarchy? Sometimes patriarchy can be detrimental and fatal to men, too. No one disputes that. The reason that we have been pitted this way — men vs women and women vs men– is because patriarchy has been known to be enormously beneficial to men, over the years, at the cost of women’s human rights. It necessarily needed to step on women to be beneficial to men. Maybe its benefits are not right for the modern-day, thinking, balanced man, but it must have been hugely so, to the men who put it in place and the men who kept it there. No one can deny that we are all equally vulnerable to violence, the impetus of life and uncontrolled fate. But it is hard to ignore the fact that women — practically on a daily basis — encounter some form of violence, usually pretty unique, because they are women.
Now, what’s the problem with HeForShe? What is the problem with Emma Watson, and the campaign for that matter, asking men to participate in the feminist struggle? Certainly, it is of great importance that they do; immediately. The problem is that she more or less directly says that men have felt ‘unwelcome’ in the feminist corner thus far — by ‘inviting’ men to get involved where they have felt unwelcome before, seemingly righting this wrong, she implies that the feminist movement is to blame for the lack of male participation in the struggle for women’s rights.
Another thing that is the fault of us women! Can’t we get anything right?
I think it should be fairly obvious why men may have not been involved in the women’s movement in a big way over the course of history. It is a direct result of this thing: patriarchy, both the fact that men did not want to get involved, and the fact that early feminists may not have wanted them there. Can you really blame them?
To say that the feminist movement has shut men out and made them feel unwelcome — and to now say ‘I invite men to join us’ — is to completely deny and ignore very important parts of our shared history and context, as men and women. It is to deny the truth that women have indeed been victimised and marginalised, sadly, most often at the hands of men. The feminist movement emerged and continues to emerge as a direct response to this victimisation and marginalisation that women face, at the hands of men, and at the hands of patriarchy, all over the world, though perhaps in varying forms. It is, by nature, a force of opposition and resistance to existing structures of power. You can’t