Why I'm a Feminist

There are two simple responses to binary genders:

-They are effectively equal in a day to day measure.

-They are different in meaningful ways that do not necessarily make either group superior.

As a child I gravitated towards the second response and it's as a response to my environment. While I was told no single group is superior I saw people behave dramatically different to this narrative. Girls were cute, boys were tough, girls were pretty, boys were smart, girls were nice, boys were talented, and so on. This differentiation went beyond simple factors like girls should like dolls, flowers, and the color pink, and boys should like guns, the color blue, and boobs. (I'll get into this another time, but yes, even as children boys are encouraged to like boobs.) Adults referred to girls as "pretty, cute, and nice," and boys as "smart, talented, and tough." There were rare exceptions but for the most part I saw children treated differently on the basis of gender. I knew that believing women were inferior was wrong, so that had to mean that they were simply different.

So I watched my peers and tried to understand who was better at what based on gender. Girls were good at math, art, music, and penmanship. Boys were good at history, sports, science, and writing fiction. Overall this struck me as balanced and fair. Then I started to put together observations about careers, and my entire world view fell apart.

I noticed that women were expected to cook, which was fine if women were just naturally superior at cooking. If anything this was a natural division of labor. Men fixed things around the house and women cooked and cleaned. Both parties were pulling their weight and together the household is maintained. Except women couldn't be professional chefs. Well, they could but those women that were chefs were exceptions to a tradition.

Outlier. One case proved nothing.

I noticed that women were caring and natural nurturers. They care more about animals and helping others. That seemed fair; men protect the family from threats with violence and women provide for internal problems by showing an understanding of medicine. Great, so then women are naturally the ones dominating the field of medicine. Except they couldn't be doctors. Well, they could but those women that were doctors were exceptions to a tradition.

This could be a quirk. Perhaps the act of surgery required more physical fortitude than other aspects of medicine. Maybe Doctors needed a greater separation of empathy so women were bad at making those hard choices.

Then I started looking into the sciences, into art, into music, and even writing. They were all historically male dominated fields. Point of fact, women were considered to be bad at math and rarely entered the STEM careers. I didn't believe it. I had to be told this something like ten times before I finally looked up the statistics that showed women didn't enter the STEM fields. But women were naturally better at math from my observations. How could they not enter a field they were better suited for?

There was no justification for this. Instead the rhetoric suggested that my observations were wrong. Those girls in my classes in grade school who were literally dominating math time didn't count for some reason. Then I grew up and saw the truth. As female children aged they stopped being at the top and settled into the middle around algebra. As I studied math seriously I saw the ratio from trig to calc III drop from nearly 1:1 to 1:8. How could women stop being good at math in such large numbers?

Interest was an argument given: "Women just aren't interested in the STEM fields." Okay, I observed women not having as much of an aptitude for scientific concepts so that could make sense, but there should still be women working with their natural aptitude in mathematics, or at least excelling in their statistics classes they needed to study for their liberal arts majors.

Nope.

I saw women struggling to pass their stats classes. They might be diligent and took good notes, but when it came to the math they were struggling.

Beyond that there were statistics that supported women not going into the STEMs and again not being at the forefront of these liberal art fields. There were some exceptions like feminism, but for the most part those at the top were men. Again and again men were at the top.

The truth is that there isn't an equal division of skills or talents when it comes to careers. Women aren't allowed to exceptional. There is no expectation for them to be exceptional at their field of study or focus and THAT is the true tradition. Women can be kind to pets and maybe even a vet, but they're not going to be the ones writing papers or coming up with new procedures. Women can cook for their family or even a caterer, but they're not going to be the Michelin star rated chefs or culinary artists. THIS is the tradition that's sold to our children. It's not about separate but equal, it's about an exclusion from exceptionalism.

Thankfully there have been amazing women and men who have worked to change this legacy. There have been women who had to work twice as hard just to have anyone acknowledge their talents, and some that achieved such high levels of skill that none could deny them a chance, but the fight isn't over.

Feminism isn't just about women not being afforded the same opportunities, or a social problem that continues an attitude of anti-female exceptionalism. While there aren't fields that directly deny women's entry, systems will deny the same level of exceptionalism through a division based on gender.

I acknowledged that sports were perhaps a field that men were more dominant, so I want to take a second to talk about Serena Williams. She is an exceptional player and her achievements can't be understated, but even she has admitted that women aren't able to compete with men. We could say that this is simply because men are physically more capable than women, but I want to think about this from another perspective.

In the world of chess men and women are also divided by gender. If you've never looked into the Polgars, you should. They're the strangest case of someone trying to prove nurture over nature. Their youngest daughter Judit Polgar was an undeniable badass at the game of chess, with chess legend Garry Kasparov describing her as having the eyes of a tiger. But her story is NOT one of success. She was a pioneer for women in chess because not only was she a child prodigy, she refused to only play women. She knew that the greatest players in the world were men and they kept her from playing in male tournaments for almost an entire decade. She was later given the opportunity and failed to make any headway. So we can use this as proof that Judit wasn't as good as she thought, right?

Not exactly. See, looking at Judit's failure in male tournaments is ignoring key factors about how tournament play works as well as how brains develop. If you want to improve you need to play stronger opponents and you need to do it a lot. Adversity is a great way to test the limitations a player's capabilities and to help them improve. Judit wasn't going to be challenged fighting other women, and she knew this. So why is her failure later in life dismissed? Because young minds are more powerful and more flexible than older minds. The prime years of her life, the years when Judit would've gained the most skill, she was denied the opportunity to play against male players. As good as she is, and she is without a doubt an exceptional player, I don't think she's as good as she could've been if she hadn't been denied opportunities based on gender.

Judit Polgar wasn't given the opportunity to play against opponents equal to or better than her and the same can be said for Serena Williams. Playing a handful of matches against male opponents and mixed battles aren't the same thing as learning how to play with male players, or constantly being tested to stand up against them. Failure is a necessary part of learning and improvement and these women simply weren't given the same challenges as their male counterparts.

There's this attitude that feminism achieved all of its major victories, so they're all fighting for meaningless things or making up problems that are actually a result of other factors.

Let's go back to chess for a second. Someone might argue that Judit's problems were in the past but female chess players are still struggling to be given the opportunity to play against men. In 2017 GM Hou Yifan offered her opponent a fool's mate before resigning on move five because she was frustrated with being matched against 7 women during a ten round mixed gender tournament, and she wasn't the only female player with the complaint. Chess organizations are largely boys clubs at the top and without acts of protest like Hou Yifan's resignation, it won't change. This is only one example in one area of focus.

Big picture time.

Women and men aren't treated the same from birth. These expectations evolve as they grow, pushing women out of male dominated fields. An attitude of separate but equal keeps women from having to tackle the same challenges and prove that they are actually capable of the same level of excellence. The upper echelons of almost every field are male dominated.

I have all of these points without even thinking about the sexual objectification of women -- which is kind of the entire coffin for most people.

When I think of the lives of men and women I can't help but be horrified by how gender roles strangle both groups. But there is a unique problem for women. Men as a gender aren't taught to be content with mediocrity. Men aren't kept from fighting the best opponents. Men don't have to question their role as a man in order to be exceptional.

Yes, there are more problems unique to women revolving around reproductive rights, but to a certain extent I feel like this is dehumanizing. The experience of women is more that having a body with a womb. Women are still women if they never have children. They are people with minds and hopes and dreams and our society makes them fight to be treated this way. I'm an equality feminist at my core. I want women to be treated equal within social, economic, political, and academic spheres. Maybe sometime in the future I'll look into different forms of feminism and how it applies to gender roles as a whole.

I've perceived too much social inequality towards women to subscribe to the belief that feminism was a necessary movement, but it holds no purpose in the modern age. I'm a feminist and I don't see myself letting go of this belief any time soon.