My daughter is too clever to become a feminist

My daughter is too clever to become a feminist.  That’s a good sentence.  I like that sentence; it says something, but I suspect it does not say what many will have read in to it.  Modern feminism is bankrupt; morally bankrupt and empty of purpose.  Florence is clever and will see it for what it is, so will not claim to be amongst it.  You’re still not there are you?

I have noticed in many bio’s on social networks a common meme of young women who chirpily say they like this and that, and do a silly pose in their picture, and oh also, they are a feminist.  It’s such an afterthought that I suspect that most of these people are simply women who expect to be treated equally, and not sexualised arbitrarily.  All fair, but also, all normal these days.  Sexism does exist, but that is a personal thing, a personality thing, specific to an individual due to upbringing, and peers.  It is not what it used to be; systematic, or institutional, or a legal framework.  Expect in cleaning product adverts.  Have you ever seen a man using a hoover in any of those ads?  It’s always a woman smiling in her domesticity, who cleans wearing heels.  Personally, I like hoovering, and I have a method for doing my stairs which requires six separate passes, but then I’m an engineer and I think like that.

The current generation of women have rights, and privileges, freedoms and empowerments, that no duchess could have matched a century ago.  Attitudes and expectations of both men and women have changed permanently, at least in this country.  In its formative years feminism, like trade unionism, had very valid and real reasons to exist.  The industrial revolution brought jobs, and wealth, and suffering, and exploitation of a magnitude not seen before or since in Britain.  Thanks to those early days of unionism, I and the rest of the work force, enjoy a great many rights and securities.  These days, as a post industrial economy trying to compete globally, trade unions seem to act as an anchor more often than a way of driving wide spread changes for the future.  Feminism showed us how our society was bias towards the men in it, how our language and grammar, our laws, and our everyday social etiquette, reinforced that bias.  It showed the inequalities that existed, not just because of traditional attitudes, but because the law was structured to promote inequality.  But now it’s all changed, at least here, in the democratic secular west.  The vast majority of women on this planet have nothing in comparison.  Feminism has become women in very comfortable bubbles complaining that someone else might have a slightly more comfortable bubble.  It’s been reduced to picking over amendments to paragraphs of employment law.  The big fight here is over, and it’s not women who have won, it’s everybody.  A fairer society is simply superior to an unfair one.

It’s like animal rights.  Britain has the most ethically driven regulatory framework in the world.  We are the gold standard, but those campaigning for laboratory animals keep going after work done in the UK.  If they really cared they should be saying to the world, ‘why are your standard so low compared to these?  You should match or exceed them’.  That would help a numerically larger group of animals, permanently.  Of course that would require them to think.  Since I’m sure some of them must have been ill at some stage and used some sort of medicine, they are clearly either hypocrites or idiots.

I’m not comparing the rights of women with animals, nor likening feminists to antivivisectionists; it is a simile to highlight that a cause can become so committed to the struggle that it loses all sight of the larger context, until the struggle becomes meaningless.

Yes, it is true that our democratic system, and our boardrooms are unrepresentative of a country where 51% of the population is female, and it needs to be fixed.  But it can’t be done with quotas, or positive discrimination.  That either leaves men thinking a woman is present as a ‘token’, or leaves women thinking they are not there because of their merits.

No matter whether a man or a woman, all of us in Britain can live where we wish, work where we wish, marry whom we choose, including no one.  We can be educated as we choose, express whatever sexuality we choose, and hopefully soon have any type of permanent relationship celebrated as marriage.  Gender is no longer a factor in entitlement to these choices; money is the main factor now, but only here, in the secular democratic west.  For millions of women across the world, where they live is decided by their father, who practically owns them, until it’s time to marry them off, when their new owner takes over the decisions.  They’re not educated because why would you bother educating a woman, and they’re not allowed to work because that’s not what they are for.  Feminists here do nothing about this, because it’s a long way away, and they’re foreign and you can’t expect any more from them can you?  And that is moral bankruptcy.  If you believe it is right for a British woman to have these rights, you believe it is right for all woman to have them.

I’m the father of a daughter and I don’t expect anything to be withheld from her, I think that she will far exceed me.  She will do things I am incapable of, and have opportunities I never got a glimpse of.  I’m a white, middle class, western male; I’m a member of the least oppressed group in human history.  But I don’t expect her to know her place; I expect her to forge her place.  And my society will not be what stands in her way; that will be the limitations that she places on herself, as we all do.

I recently did my first gig as a STEM ambassador, explaining to a group of sixteen year olds why they might like a career in networking.  I think I did ok; they stayed awake, and asked some decent questions.  No one hacked in to my laptop; I had it running Wireshark, on the internet, with no firewall, so I had no exciting demonstration to finish on.  Oh well, you can’t have it all.

I spoke to two groups of twenty, and there was one girl in each.  There needs to be more, but this will come from a change in attitude.  You don’t need to fight for it, you need to encourage it.  And attitudes are changing.  I’ve been in engineering for nearly twenty years, and I’ve met more woman engineers and scientists in the last five than the previous fifteen.  By the time Florence hits university and needs to make choices about her direction, it will be more common still.

We should acknowledge and celebrate the changes that the battle for equality has made to our society, and build on the hard won rights we enjoy, and guard them jealously.  Feminism won because it was right, but fighting the good fight after victory is commonly acknowledged can even be counterproductive.

Instead of hounding a society that agrees with them, to be taken seriously feminism should be going after Catholicism and Islam, the two largest organised abusers of woman on the planet.  But that means banging the atheist drum, which it won’t do as it is afraid of been called racist; despite religion not been a race.  As others have pointed out, anything you can convert to, or from, is not a race.  For a movement that overturned centuries of accepted social norms and conventions, they seem unwilling to overturn the convention that religion is special, and deserves protection, rights, and privileges from society.  People have rights, whether man or woman, but ideas do not.  The societies that reduce the status of women most are the ones that elevate religion most.  The idea that this is acceptable must be challenged, and the faith that inspires the idea must be challenged too.   Religion will of course lash out at such a challenge, as reason is its biggest enemy.  It would be a hard fight, and I would support it, but there is no sign of it.

That is why Florence will not be a feminist, unless she invents a new type of feminism, which she is perfectly entitled to do, and that, in itself, is possibly the point.