It's the title of Bryan Caplan's book. The title is taken from the custom of using longest and most prominent essay, especially if it is arresting, but the cover gives away that it is a collection of essays about justice. Feminism is not the main topic of the book. Still...
He starts off with defining which is often boring, bur usually necessary. The preferred definition of feminist by feminists is that it means "men and women should be treated equally" or "women have rights too," and therefore all arguments are over; any opposition to the definition can be treated as opposition to basic equality. They was even a bumper sticker to that effect a couple of decades ago. But it's just a tactic, an attempt to win an argument without having to do anything difficult, just roll one's eyes and otherwise socially signal disapproval.
Because in strict point of fact, not only do feminists believe that men and women should be treated equally, non-feminists largely believe it as well. The numbers are very, very solid on this. The objections that "no they don't, not really, they try to smuggle in all sorts of inequalities" ignores an important reality. They have assented to your premise, so the definition is no longer useful, if it ever was. That men may be cheating is a different matter.
Caplan offers a defintion of how people actually use the word in everyday conversation, which linguists would tell you is always the real definition: a feminist is a person who believes that men are treated more fairly than women. That, certainly, is worth some discussion, and all manner of slyness and cheating by men can still be called out. Yet one will notice that the ground of the discussion has moved greatly. Evidences, proofs, exposures of bad logic and ambiguous data, all these are now in play. Now the thing has to be demonstrated and alternatives refuted.
He does not insist on the definition, only offers it as an improvement on the bumper sticker. He is correct that changing from the manipulative definition does change the ground of discussion. It immediately allows the question "Is there anywhere that men are treated less fairly than women?"
Well, there's family court....
ReplyDeleteAfter long discussion and study, I think the issue is chiefly that "equality" is an equivocal term. What you describe as 'just a tactic' is often an actual inability to realize not that 'everyone really supports equality, as the numbers show' but that in fact no one supports equality simpliciter -- not even the ardent feminists. There are ways in which people want to be equal, and want everyone to be equal; there are other ways in which it would be insane to want everyone to be treated equally, and no one does; and there are still other ways in which there is disagreement about whether equality of treatment is appropriate. Our political discourse keeps trying to treat it as a simple question, and that blows up all the bridges.
ReplyDeleteAn example of the first is in terms of voting rights. There are very few Americans of either sex or any political persuasion who seriously want to restrict voting rights based on sex. If 'equality' means 'having an equal voice in elections,' it's a non-issue.
An example of the second way is in terms of wanting equal treatment regardless of qualification. No one would say, 'There should be an equal number of female surgeons regardless of the sex differential in medical school, and surgeon positions should also be assigned equally regardless of performance in medical school.' Everyone wants a good surgeon if they need a surgeon, and 'attaining equality by sex' in the profession is irrelevant to everyone compared with this other consideration. If it were achieved consonant with that consideration, well and good; but if for any reason it cannot be, it is not worth disrupting good-surgeonhood.
And then there's the third way, in which there are economic considerations as good examples. The most famous one is the claim that women earn $0.77 for each $1 that men make. There's a lot of discussion about that with which we are all familiar; less common, though, is the recognition that women control 85% of retail spending, regardless of who earns the money. This is why our society's retail sector puts women front and center -- a sort of social inequality one never sees discussed. If a man goes into a shoe store wanting shoes, he has to walk to the back of the store and there peruse a tiny selection by comparison; same for any sort of clothing. Whole sectors of the economy exist to provide services to women that aren't paralleled by services to men. Little cafes and boutiques exist in almost every shopping center in the middle class regions of the country; these are not frequented by males. Society is in large part ordered around this provision of comfort and beauty and pleasure, and it is not even close to equal.
There are plenty of things that sort into these categories. Which sort of equality is it that men make up ~90% of the prison population? A similar position of very dangerous jobs? That dangerous and unpleasant jobs such as sewer work are often also not as well compensated as the office jobs where women do in fact make up not merely an equal number of workers, but an increasingly disproportionate one? Does the fact that the super-rich guys like Elon Musk are disproportionately male offset the fact that the bulk of Americans are increasingly-educated women and increasingly-less-so males? Where is the equality we want, versus the kind we wouldn't and shouldn't want, versus the debatable sort?
The equivocal problem makes this very thorny even to discuss.