The gun is good. The gun is good.
The penis is evil.
Okay so back on planet earth, what actually IS feminism?
Well - it’s the fight for gender justice
Every corner of your life - work, sex, politics, health, law -
is massively shaped by what gender you happen to be.
73% of victims of domestic homicides are women. And just 24.3 per cent of politicians.
Women do more of the work for a small slice of wages and own a tiny fraction of land.
Women have a lot less access to political and economic power
and are left a lot more exposed to all kinds of violence.
We do more than our fair share of work to keep the world going
but we don’t get much of a say in how to run it.
So it’s not surprising we have a system which leaves a lot of women overworked, underpaid,
and sometimes dead.
Feminism is an umbrella term for a bunch of different political theories and movements
that all diagnose the root of these problems as one thing: ‘patriarchy’.
Patriarchy literally means ‘the rule of Fathers’.
But we aren’t talking about a cabal of men gathering together to secretly plot the downfall of women.
It doesn’t mean men’s lives are universally great,
or women’s lives are universally terrible.
Instead - we’re talking about a way of organizing society into a hierarchy
that puts women at the bottom of the pecking order.
This system punishes anyone whose gender falls outside a very particular idea of heterosexual masculinity.
So being ‘feminine’ is painted as being shameful, weak, less valuable -
and more deserving of all the shit that’s flung our way.
Not all men benefit equally from patriarchy –
your class, race and sexuality and things like that all come into play here.
And it doesn’t guarantee men’s happiness – in fact, far from it.
But overall, it’s about taking power, time and resources away from a huge chunk of the population,
and concentrating it in the hands of a few people at the top –
most of whom are men, and all of whom are stinking rich.
It’s pretty much a huge global scam.
Think about it: your average woman spends 2.5 times more time doing unpaid care and
domestic work – which if people had pay for it would be worth
nearly 40 per cent of GDP.
Meanwhile the CEOs who might have to cough
up for those wages lounge around on yachts.
Go away! Have you got a message for–
-Which bit are you not understanding? Go away!
Nice work if you can get it.
So while different versions of patriarchy been around for thousands of years,
one thing has remained consistent: people have not taken this shit lying down.
Because feminism isn’t just an analysis
- it can be a powerful solution.
Some people think feminism is just about replacing men at the top with women.
But that still leaves the scam fundamentally intact
to keep on screwing over the vast majority of women, femmes, non-binary people – everyone.
It’s the same circus, just different ringmasters.
Historically, people have been a lot more ambitious than that –
they use the tools of feminism to build a more just, more equal, less boring world.
In the 20th century Chinese women launched large-scale industrial strikes against the
patriarchy. And Italian feminists in the 1970s demanded
wages for their housework.
And of course, the suffragettes fought for the vote.
And this doesn’t always run smoothly because when you’re trying to change the world,
you have to tangle with different ideas of what that change should look like.
And some strains of feminism
have an ugly tradition of excluding more marginalised groups –
like sex workers, trans women, non-binary people and women of colour.
Case in point: Some suffragette leaders were also supporters of the British Empire,
which disenfranchised and caused a lot of suffering to millions of people.
And a lot of them were women - they just didn’t happen to be the right sort of middle-class-white
British citizen type women.
What?
Yeah so this kind of thinking relies on rigid and arbitrary and – surprise! –
Usually misogynist definitions of what it means to be a ‘real’ woman or a ‘good’
woman – one who deserves to have a share in the gains of feminism.
Ultimately, this just ends up reinforcing sexist stereotypes,
and plays into an old game of divide and conquer.
It doesn’t just weaken the movement – it completely misses the point.
Real feminism – the kind that can transform the world –
is about fighting for and with anyone who gets a raw deal under patriarchy.
Not just people with the right kind of job, the right kind of genitals
or the right kind of passport.
Because whether people say you’re a good woman or a bad woman
or not quite a woman at all - we’re all still being scammed by patriarchy.
Playing by the rules won’t get us far when the game is rigged against us.
So the only way to win is to band together to change those rules for good.
Join us.