#man-shaming

In case you misses it, I wrote a piece for the Guardian about man-shaming portmanteaus – they're not feminist and they need to die

I wrote a thingy for the Guardian about man-shaming portmanteaus – mansplaining, manslamming, manterrupting, manspreading, etc. They’re stupid, stop it – men are people too, I suppose. Male entitlement is an issue. Derogatory words highlight the problem (and are fun, let’s be honest), but fuelling gender-squabbling isn’t doing equality any favours. Funnily enough, this seemed to be a popular…

When you type "feminism" into the search bar on tumblr you get a mix of feminist quotes/memes/literature, a bunch of completely unrelated stuff people think is feminism, and also anti-feminist posts. Well I just did this.. like 10 minutes ago and it made me do this: ಠ_ಠ... because I clicked on the blog called women against feminism. On this blog there is a collection of photos of women holding signs with reasons for why they are not a feminist.. Here are some excerpts: "[Feminism] has turned into a war against men" "I am not a delusional, disgusting, hypocritical man-hater" "I am his equal, not his superior" Even after all of the media hype over feminism (a lot of which I don't necessarily agree with but I'll talk about that later) there are still women (and men) out there who really think that feminism is about hating men. --like seriously why do you still think this is a thing?-- And if you ever hear a man hater claiming to be a feminist, well that just isn't possible because those two things are mutually exclusive.

Feminism is not about hating men. I repeat: it is not about hating men. It's not about thinking women are better than men... how could that be when the first and most essential pillar of feminism is the absolute and unequivocal equality of women and men? Yes! That is the essential base of feminism! ..what? You thought that women and men were already equal in the eyes of society? Well, unfortunately when we take a deeper look at the society we live in, it just isn't true.

Feminism is, however, about disliking and deconstructing the patriarchy.. be aware that the patriarchy and men are not synonymous!!! With a quick google search we see that Patriarchy is a social system in which males hold primary power, and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property, and in the domain of the family (wikipedia). And after learning this we can clearly see that it completely goes against our first pillar of feminism, which is, of course, absolute equality between the two genders (and all genders/non genders for that matter). Everything feminism preaches is about equality.. If you've heard something else you've been misinformed. On that note, there are indeed men who are feminists out there and they believe the same principle as women feminists: that women and men should be equal politically, economically, culturally, and socially (and any other way you could possibly come up with).

"We've got to dismantle the patriarchy!" - something you may have heard a feminist say. Well, dismantling the patriarchy doesn't mean man-shaming.. it means breaking down sociocultural structures that disadvantage women and privilege men so that we can create new structures where we're all equal and happy. What are these structures that disadvantage women you say? Well, there are actually a lot of them.. but I'll save that for another time.

Feminism is a very complex subject and here, only the surface has been scratched.. and it gets pretty crazy when we add things like race and class into the mix but we can talk about that later.

Feminsts don't hate men. I hope you understand why now.

And remember this: if someone claims to be a feminists and is man-shaming they are not a feminist.

If we're supposed to all be feminists who fight for equality between men and women in society and fight back against slut-shaming and judgment and whatnot, why is the "matriarchy," as it's called, calling men stupid and making fun of them all of the time?

I mean, I get that people all have an opinion, but isn't it sort of, for lack of a better word, hypocritical to become immensely upset by a frank opinion made by a man about a woman's intelligence level or whatever, and then just turn it around? You're fighting for equality. People make jokes about feminists everyday, about how they're raging man-haters who can't be taken seriously. And feminists get angry because they (most of them) claim to be supporters of equality because that's what the feminist movement is all about, and GRR, how DARE you insult me like that, you obviously don't understand feminism.

And then I see things on Tumblr insulting a man, and I think, "There's making a statement in response to an oppressive patriarchy, and then there's taking it a bit too far and retaliating."