EDWIN LERNER is a tourist guide, freelance writer and father of two children. This will be a weekly blog every Friday looking at issues involving men and feminism.
Now let’s get
one thing straight from the start: if I
had been born a woman I would have been a feminist. Maybe not the bra-burning, man-hating,
men-excluding type as portrayed in popular imagination and and the media who is
pretty rare and largely fictional, but one who campaigned for and expected
equal treatment with men. If I had been
in the right place and time I would have been proud to have joined marches for
racial equality (I never did) and I tick most of the boxes for the middle class
liberal – read the Guardian, vote Labour and donate to the usual suspects –
Amnesty, Oxfam, etc. I do set aside a certain
amount of my income for these causes and put coins in their collections
boxes.
Yet feminism
seems like the party I was not invited to.
And being a well brought up type of person I do not push in without an
invitation. How much fun can it be being
a gate-crasher anyway, helping yourself to someone else’s booze while no-one
talks to you?
Effective
mass movements usually try to foster a sense of togetherness, of people uniting
to help a cause they all believe in.
They all hold hands and sing a song such as We shall Overcome together ending with the slightly downbeat ‘Some
day’, drawn out to postpone the end of the party they are all enjoying. This is when everybody has to go home having
achieved their aim, unable any more to enjoy the sense of being a close
community of outsiders. One of Tony
Blair’s most symbolic acts as leader of the Labour Party was to end their
singing of the Red Flag. It was the musical equivalent of abolishing
Clause Four. The song had little appeal
to the middle England voters he so desperately wanted to win over. Labour was no longer to be a movement of
outsiders singing a song that looked forward to the destruction and rebuilding
of a system but a party of insiders working from within.
The nearest
feminism has got to an anthem of its own is probably Sisters Are Doing it for Themselves not sung ensemble-like as a
good protest song should be but belted out by Annie Lennox or Aretha Franklin
with a catchy chorus everyone can join in.
Everyone? I never felt like it
was my song and would have felt a bit of a prat holding up my arms standing on
my own two feet. It sounds too much like
a song for girls alone. After all they
are doing it for themselves now and don’t need our help.
This is the
thing. While we enjoy the comradeship of
being part of a movement we also like to pat ourselves on the back for being
useful. One of our main motivations for
giving to charity, supporting worthwhile causes and helping the less fortunate is
the feeling of well-being we get from philanthropy. (Cynics would say it’s the only one.) When I am driving along in slow moving
traffic I, like most drivers, often let someone stuck in a side road who does
not have priority out in front of me, sometimes a pedestrian who I could
otherwise safely ignore. There is no
advantage to me in doing so and it means that the other car is ahead of me in
the queue, but I still do it because it gives me a little uptick of benevolence
and, hopefully, a wave of acknowledgement and thanks from the other driver. This makes
a slow, boring journey slightly less irritating, if a few seconds
longer.
People who
run charities know that they will gain better and longer-lasting support if
they make people feel good about giving rather than guilty. They send thank you letters to donors,
spending money they could otherwise use more constructively, because they know
that you are more likely to write another cheque if your first one has been
acknowledged. They send you newsletters
(usually with smiling faces on the front) and invite you to parties, concerts
and meetings where you can bathe in a warm glow of congratulation.
This sounds
like one of those cynics alluded to earlier, yet I not only let other drivers
out in front of me, but write cheques and make out standing orders to all sorts
of charities. I have enough disposable
income to do this without seriously threatening my way of life. It is the act of giving which is important not
the motivation behind it. You can
acknowledge that there is a element of self-congratulation in your giving and
still think that it is right to give. It
is the easiest thing in the world to put a bad motive on a good action and use
that as an excuse to do nothing. That is
merely putting a good motive on a bad action (or
inaction). Judge the action and not the
motive.
What has all
this to do with feminism? My feeling is
that feminism is not an inviting movement for roughly half the human race – the
male half of which I am a member. We do
not get that little uptick of benevolence by supporting feminism that we get
from letting a fellow driver out in front of us or writing a cheque to help
less well-off people than ourselves. To
tell the truth, we (that is men) feel frightened by feminism. If sisters are doing it for themselves, what
use are we?
It is themes
like this which I will be exploring in a series of posts every Friday.
My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com published every Monday. E L
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