Feminist vs. Sociologist

I thought it is about time that people stop hearing my voice , temporarily, and so in this post 2 people are featured.

I asked a sociologist and a feminist 5 questions and here are the responses:

F- Feminist

S- sociologist

1) Why do you think feminism started?

F-I’ve just been reading a really interesting book called ‘Typecasting’ by Elizabeth and Stuart Ewen, and in the first chapter it talks about how the ‘female stereotype’ has emerged and evolved throughout history. I’m completely fascinated by that period in history when women first started to really question how they were perceived – all those flapper girls in the 1920s and 30s for instance – why did it suddenly become possible for women to do that, to question their role? Reading this book, it’s clear how historic and deep rooted all these gender identities are, but also how they have changed over time. I think for feminism to ‘happen’ you need a group of people who are both deeply frustrated, but also perhaps who have enough agency to start to try and make a change. This also brings problems with it – historically it is perhaps true that those people who had the agency to start to make changes, might also have been blind to the specific problems facing people who perhaps didn’t have so much agency. This is why intersectionality is so important – when we look at women’s experiences we have to find the tendency to look at them through our own personal filters, and consider how different our experience might be to other peoples. I’ve also just finished reading where we stand by bell hooks – it’s an incredible series of essays about how class, gender and race intersect – I think that’s really important.

S-Feminism, as I understand it, evolved from the suffragettes, through to women’s liberation in the fifties and sixties to the various branches that emerged in the 80s, 90, and 00s. I think a new perspective was needed as the individual experiences of women began to diverge in a way that meant they could not be automatically expected to empathise with each other and their experiences. At its core is still the notion that the world has been constructed by men in the interests of men and that feminism is essential to highlight and reverse the imbalances that exist between the sexes.

2) Is there a change in feminism today? Why?

F-I worry a bit that it’s becoming a bit superficial, but perhaps that’s also to do with how widely it’s reaching. It feels like a bit of a cliché to say that’s to do with social media, but it simply has to have played a role, because people are able to talk about their own experiences in an unmediated way – reaching out to a really wide audience really quickly. I love how young people are so tuned into it. Working in education, even in the past five years I’ve noticed girls are much more willing and able to talk about their experiences and not be embarrassed about their bodies for instance – that’s got to be a good thing!

S-Yes because as previously mentioned the idea of a universal sisterhood has been called into question because the increasingly different experience of the world that women have according to their class, culture and political beliefs.

3) Why do you think people do not want to call themselves a feminist?

F-I think historically people who don’t agree with the idea of feminism, or are angry about it, create a stereotype of ‘feminism’ that prioritises things like body hair or ‘man hating’ and I think that’s a deliberate tactic to undermine feminists. I also think sometimes people say things like ‘we don’t need feminism, it’s about equality for all people’. That feels intuitively correct – to say that it’s ‘just about equality’ but that misses something really crucial about articulating the specific experiences of women. It’s a bit like the substitution of ‘all lives matter’ for ‘black lives matter’, the point is that movements that address the specific concerns of a specific sector of society that have been targeted or marginalised in specific ways, well if those groups want to consider those issues, then that’s allowed!

S-For many modern women, perhaps, feminism is associated with conflict, and assumed conflict between an oppressive patriarchy and women. This is not the experience of many women who might have extremely positive experiences with males in their lives at all levels. Just as many people, black and white, do not see racism in the same binary terms, many women do not see feminism in the same terms. Also many people might wish to see their lives in terms of merit and determinism divorced from the perceived influences of feminism; I did it on my own.

4) How do you think feminism is presented in the media and why this way?

F-I think it’s changed and it’s a much more accepted thing, but there are still real problems. I was listening to Laura Bates who founded Everyday Sexism the other day on the radio. It was in relation to the #MeToo movement when it was really hitting the headlines. She was being interviewed by a sort of panel, and they were really quite aggressive and dismissive of her – it felt like they ‘sort of got it’ but still weren’t properly listening to what she was saying. That’s really what I mean about the superficiality, there’s maybe a nod towards feminism, but no real discussion of the issues underneath. There’s an advert for a Calvin Klein perfume at the moment that really throws this into perspective – it’s clearly capitalism on the idea of third wave feminism and using it to sell perfume. The line is something like ‘I can be unique, but also part of something – I am women’, something like that, but it just makes me really angry! The visuals are all passive thin ‘beautiful’ women lounging around in expensive clothes and expensive apartments – it’s just completely using the whole movement as an advertising slogan, and that’s annoying!

S- In complex often negative terms. There is no longer one single meaning.

5) Why do you can yourself a feminist?

F-I think there was a time when it was hard to call yourself a feminist, and something I sort of vaguely identified with but it wasn’t part of my identity. Now I read about it, learn about it all the time and every school library I’ve run has talked about directly and built a feminist collection of books within it. I think I can pinpoint the moment when I really sort of switched on to it – there was a video online that was talking about how it was just accepted that for a man to dress up as a woman was ‘funny’ and ‘humiliating’. This would have been about 6 or 7 years ago, and I remember thinking ‘oh yeah! That’s not right!’ After that I definitely thought ‘hang on a minute, I can use this facebook thing to spread the ideas I’m interested in’ – there was a definite epiphany that I think perhaps a lot of people had, which influenced the growth of the movement. I think we’ve come a long way even since then.

5) Do you call yourself a feminist? Why?

S- Yes. I do not talk about fairness, hard work and merit in terms of what is needed to progress in life if you are a woman. There are still barriers and glass ceilings that need to be broken down. It is not simply enough to act or believe that you are acting in a fair and meritocratic way. You should positively attach yourself with a movement that seeks to change things positively; that’s what feminism is