Stages of feminism

Disclaimer: This isn’t a historical overview, but a process that I think people go through when thinking about gender relations and how we, in the present (in the US at least), interpret and relate to past gender relations. And by “men” and “women” here, I don’t mean all men or women or that feminism is the same as the voice of all women and no men, or that all men and women are straight, or that all people are only men or women. Here, I use “men” and “women” as simplified way to refer to the common, dominant, social narrative and “voice” of groups of men or women in a culture or sub-culture, which can in practice include both men and women who take those particular voices and narratives as their own.

Somewhere in our history, men created the idea that they are horrible rape-monsters. They didn’t see it in that negative light of course - no one believes they’re the bad guy - but they did create it. “Men can’t help themselves,” “men have needs that women have to meet,” “men can’t stop themselves once they start,” “men deserve wives who meet all their needs and will cheat if they don’t get that.” People still teach their children these things today. These kinds of claims may seem to put men in a bad light, as they are little more than excuses for why men don’t respect women’s boundaries, but this isn’t about reputation. Not respecting women’s boundaries, believing and accepting these claims, in practice gives men social power over women, it allows those who believe it to tolerate all kinds of boundary violations and make all kinds of unfair demands and expectations of women. This isn’t just about sex. Even men who say “no, that’s too far, I wouldn’t treat women like that” are still given more leeway in this system to expect too much, to treat women unfairly or disrespectfully when the bar for what’s “too far” to tolerate is that high. People in a system that skewed are going to have a hard time seeing what fairness and respect really looks like, even if they mean well.

So men created the idea that they are horrible rape-monsters, and that benefited them, but eventually people noticed that’s what was created. Women realize this set-up hurts them, realize that they’ve accepted men’s terribleness without defining it as terrible only because they’ve been conditioned by society to not challenge it, to see it as normal. And so they conclude “men may be terrible - even the well-intentioned “nice” ones expect unfair things of me - but we still need to interact, so here are my boundaries, here is what you need to do for me to make up the difference.” And thus we get attitudes like those expressed in songs like “Dear Future Husband,” where Megan Trainor does stereotypical 1950s housewife things that no one really enjoys being expected to do, like cleaning the floor, while laying out how she defines being “treated right” in return for what’s assumed/implied she’ll be doing to treat this future husband “right.” Men who recognize some level of fairness with women often accept this setup in our modern-day impression of “chivalry,” where men believe, perhaps subconsciously, that they “owe” women for what they get from them. Thus they put women on pedestals, claim to protect women, buy women nice things and perform symbolic “polite” gestures like holding doors in exchange for relationships and sex, and get angry or frustrated when things like buying dinner doesn’t lead to sex. They paid their portion of this social arraignment, so they feel cheated and used when the woman doesn’t “pay” their portion. Others see it less in terms of fairness and more in terms of a game that they must win to be a successful representative of their gender.

This should be an obviously unhealthy setup for relationship functioning, and even at its best, women are still expected to sacrifice certain personal boundaries and life choices if they want respect (however it’s defined). And it is obvious, if that particular song’s hatred coming from both feminists and anti-feminists is any indication. Yet this is where many people stop (some having also started here, never moving on). It’s also at this point where the narrative starts to split along gender lines.

Women start to recognize that not only have they been accepting men’s terribleness because they’ve been conditioned to see it as acceptable, but men are conditioned to be terrible. Men’s terribleness is not an inherent state; with everyone just accepting it as “the way it is” and denying the claims in stage one are even truly terrible, men have been afforded the social freedom for their worst tendencies flourish, even if they didn’t mean to indulge that. It’s a freedom women haven’t been allowed, although can come out in stage two as they try to define their own boundaries and needs for the first time. Many men also agree that “no, we are not terrible, just taught terrible ideas about what to expect as and how to be a man.” This is the way to healthy relationships and more equal perceptions of each other, and this, not stage two, is the realm of modern-day feminism. We as individuals may not be at fault for the system’s existence, but we are responsible for seeing it for what it is and not perpetuating it.

Meanwhile, many other male voices also claim “we are not terrible rape monsters,” but not because they refute stage one. Rather, they just don’t see stage one or it’s bleed-over into men’s roles and behaviors in stage two, don’t see it as still having an impact despite those claims and attitudes still existing, or worse, are still in stage one themselves, believing those claims are not terrible at all. They only see stage two, where women attempt to assert their boundaries and needs. Thus, without seeing or understanding what it’s a reaction to, women’s demands for “more” seem unreasonable, and women are at fault for inventing the idea that men are terrible, rather than responsible for recognizing the terribleness that was already there, hidden. These male voices see the moment of revelation of terribleness as the origin of that terribleness itself. They see feminism as tipping the balance attempted in stage two.

And so without seeing the progression of these stages, they can’t see or understand how social norms make unfairness invisible to those who benefit; they can’t see their own social power, instead assuming they don’t have any because they no longer have all of it. By thinking about these issues starting only at stage two, they only see the attempts to balance things, particularly stage two’s poor-but-still-better-than-nothing attempts, as “taking away” from men. And since they individually don’t have all the freedom to behave however they want, since they see everyone as already sacrificing something to interact with the other gender, then it seems to them that things between genders as a whole must be equal. They don’t recognize that there are gradations on the scale of sacrifice, social power, and perceptions of what “respect” means.

So here we are now, with people saying, either implicitly and uncritically or explicitly and knowingly, that stage one was this mythical time of equality, or that there was something in between stage one and two, maybe the early stages of two, where that equality happened, and that everything since then has been “women demanding too much, emasculating and denying men’s true selves.” That stage one’s attitudes were somehow completely erased when people decided that no, men can’t actually have absolutely everything, and so now there’s no more to actually think about here. But there is more to think about, more to understand. And I hope this explains the psychological-history of the motivations of how many feminists got to where we are.