The problem in this is that we are equating power with equality. Equality and power are like two travellers that have a lot in common, and have agreed to travel alongside each other for certain parts of their journey. But they are not inherently connected. When we talk about equality in this setting we are referring to social equality. Which is the concept that all people in a certain group have the same status in certain respects. "In certain respects" is what we struggle with when it comes to social gender equality.
We can pretty much all agree that sex, gender, race, age, sexual orientation, origin, caste or class, income or property, language, religion, convictions, opinions, health or disability must not result in unequal treatment under the law and should not reduce opportunities unjustifiably. To borrow from Wikipedia. That is not logically contested.
Here is our struggle. We had a hard enough time giving African Americans the same status as other humans in our certain group. And there are no significant differences between us. We are all human. We still haven’t given proper status to Native Americans. And again, that is two man-made separations of the same people.
Now we have reached a point where we are trying to give the same status to two groups of people who are actually significantly, demonstrably different. And that is where we get into trouble with “in certain respects.”
Men and women are not the same. We do not behave in the same way to the same experiences. Some of that is part of our actual nature. Some of that is part of our culture. None of it has anything to do with social equality. Social equality just means, you have the same opportunities, and you get the same treatment under law. It does not mean that men have to become more feminine, or that women have to become more masculine. It does require women to work or men to raise children. Women don’t need to be CEO en masse in order to be equal. Men don’t need to hold a larger percentage in typically female dominated sectors in order to be equal.
When you are arguing about these things, you are not arguing about equality, you are arguing about significant cultural change. And it is not something that can be handled under the banner of social equality.
The idea that our culture is somehow opposed to our nature is erroneous. Our culture is an evolution, controlled by none of us, but yet all of us. It has been adapting and changing for as long as we have been a species. For example, women are not as prevalent in STEM fields because our culture does not encourage young women in that direction as much as it does men. It is not because men are evil or women are evil or men have more power or women have more power. It is because that is where we are. And if we don’t like it we can change it, we just can’t change it under the banner of social equality, because it doesn’t fit. It is like trying to teach physics to someone using only the third law of thermodynamics. Social equality is an aspect of our culture. Our entire culture doesn't fit into it.
Take the Civil Rights movement. That was a movement towards social equality. African Americans wanted to be treated the same way as everyone else. And for the most part they achieved that status under law. But it is still demonstrable that people named with traditional African-American names are less likely to get interviews at certain firms. That African Americans don’t match the percentages of other groups in certain fields. That is because that is an outpouring of our culture, and culture doesn't change because of social equality changing. It is the other way around.
What is my point in all of this? If you think men can be raped by women, and that is just as bad as women being raped by men, then say that. And fight for social equality. But don’t say that the reason this injustice exists is because of some concept like the Patriarchy. It is meaningless. It does nothing. It does less than nothing, it causes harm.
Imagine a machine knitting away, a scarf that continues forever. And at some point it makes an error. And that error leads to threads farther down the line fighting against that error, striving to correct it. They correct it by moving forward, and not making that error again. Nothing gets corrected by some thread saying “hang on, that error should never have happened” and then just lapsing into cyclical hatred of it.
Honestly the fact that we are talking about this means it is going to get fixed. So I sometimes feel like I should just let things go. But I have this fear, that if, as we are fighting for social equality, we begin victim blaming, it is just going to end in the whole thing flipping over. Which I don’t personally want, I would prefer we get rid of this segment altogether.
Let me be very clear about this next part. The fact that males have more immediately apparent power does not mean that males are at fault for this. Or that any collective set is at fault for this.
Let me try to explain. Go back to the endless scarf. Keep following back to when it began. It began long before we as a species became a species, and long before we became self-reflective. We have this bad tendency to think of our frontal lobes as somehow apart from the natural progression of things. But it isn’t. The fact that we have this illusion of perception and controlled destiny does not mean it actually exists outside of the spectrum of nature. Even what I am calling “errors” in the scarf are not really errors. Backing out of our developed sense of morality, these “errors” are just natural progressions of what it takes to survive or not survive. And in fact these “errors” create their own correctors.
Imagine a blue bee and a red bee, both with a collection of marbles. The blue bee tries to take the red bee’s marbles, and the red bee tries to take the blue bee’s marbles. They don’t always do this by force. Sometimes they trade. Sometimes they trick. Then they have children. And those children keep switching. And they have children. So on and so forth. Sometimes they even switch colors, or even become new colors. At any point is it fair for the either bee to declare that the other is evil because they have marbles they want? No. Neither bee is evil. They are simply a progression.
I was born a man, so I am able to do certain things no woman could ever do. Some of those are simply nature. Some of those are cultural. Women can do things I can never do. At this point in time what I have the ability to do is likely more than what they have the ability to do, making it unfair. But that does not mean that me doing these things makes me evil. I’m just doing what I am allowed to do.
There very well might be a cabal of evil men or women that is trying to keep the “power” with one gender or another. So what? A culture is so much more powerful and uncontrolled than any of its constituent parts. Don’t focus on those assholes. You do you and you preach it. Believe it. Teach it to the next generation. Don’t focus on hate. Don’t define yourself with the lines the previous generation drew up. Don’t fight the past or the present. Make the future. And for Deer God's sake, quit simplifying delightfully complex things. That is what anger and hatred does by the way, it makes you want to take enormously complex things and boil them down into something you can attack head on. You can't attack all of humanity head on. You do far more damage and good by steadfastly holding what you believe to be true and fighting for it. Not getting bogged down trying to ant-force a mountain into bending your way.
-Road Out-