So, I finally decided to do some research on the UN’s involvement in Feminism and Women’s Rights in their international movement: HeForShe. Spearheaded by Emma Watson (who totally inspired my Pixie Cut, not going to lie), the movement is to get boys and men on board and have everyone working towards creating a perfectly equal society in which men and women co-exist.
I watched her speech to the UN when she accepted the position back in 2014 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-iFl4qhBsE). She’s a tremendous speaker advocating for a great cause, but there is one thing I am hung up on: the totally one-sided name. Emma Watson establishes that feminism is supposed to uplift and liberate both men and women. So, why didn’t she pick a name like HeAndShe. Or hell, SheAndHe, if the order matters.
But that’s a rather minute complaint in the span of things.
Overall, I liked her speech. I like how she mentions “inadvertent feminists,” the people who have helped her along the way and didn’t treat her any differently because she was a girl. I like that she’s getting people to talk about feminism again and to become active.
My only worry is misdirection. Because there are certain statistics and stereotypes circulating within the feminist philosophy that aren’t true (I wanted to do a whole blog post on her later, but I might as well introduce her here now: Christina Hoff Sommers and her wonderful youtube channel Factual Feminist, which in a video debunks 5 widely circulated statistics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TR_YuDFIFI).
My biggest worry is that gender equality has to be quantified when you’re dealing with it on such a large scale, as Emma Watson and the UN are. And quantifications can be easily malleable based on variables and data manipulation. That isn’t to say that I purposefully believe that they would manipulate the data, but instead, to say that success isn’t definite. It’s just a big question mark.
I went to the HeForShe website to try and look up a platform. I found that it focuses on 6 different areas: Education, Health, Identity, Work, Politics, and Violence. For each of these areas is a Project headed by an Impact Champion (either a Head of State, a Corporate Leader, or a University Dean) to create the most impact by 2020. These take place in countries all over the world, such a Rwanda, Indonesia, Romania, Britain, the US, Finland, Uruguay, and more. The leaders have provided somewhat specific action plans (I was almost disappointed that they only had summaries on the website, instead of the in-depth measures they were going to take) of how they were going to make an impact on women’s lives in their countries.
For some reason, I have mixed feelings about this. Of course I admire and applaud their efforts! I really hope they have ground-level initiators making a difference.
But that’s the key-word: ground-level.
I stumbled across this article http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/why-feminists-are-so-cagey-about-class-plan-uk/18761#.V_BuHPArLHp talking about Feminism in the UK. And I thought it was fitting, since one of the world’s largest feminism advocates is from the UK.
Basically, it dissects a study performed that ranks the quality of life for girls in different places in the UK. And, surprise, the poorer the area is, the worse the quality of life is. Of course, the study doesn’t compare girls’ quality of life to boys’ in the same area, but just girls across the board. The author of the article points out how sometimes the feminist movement ignores class and expects women from all backgrounds to be treated equally and have the same opportunity. But it’s just not true, because men from all backgrounds aren’t even treated equally and have the same opportunity!
But it just makes me feel…I don’t know, awful(?) that there are so many people suffering, not necessarily because of their gender, but just because of plain old poverty. Both girls and boys are growing up this abysmal circumstances that no organization is focusing on in the slightest. I just feel like HeForShe is at risk of glossing over the real problems that encompass gender inequality.
Basically, I feel cognitive dissonance because I feel Feminism is too narrow of a label to really help girls. I feel like the whole point of feminism is to be lifting everyone up equally. I am the first to say that there are women in Asia, the Middle East and Africa who deserve our immediate attention because they have practically no human rights incorporated into their daily lifestyle.
But for countries with not so drastic conditions, like the US, and the UK, and Japan, we shouldn’t necessarily be focusing on bettering women, but bettering everyone. Emma Watson mentions this in her speech, the feminism should help men, too. But this goes beyond gender roles. It has to do with the economy, and government, and living conditions, and the impoverished sectors of society nobody likes to look at.
I know this isn’t a complete thought, but it’s just this visceral feeling I’m still wrestling with. I don’t have a solution. And I suppose I’m being too harsh on HeForShe, because at least they’re doing something. But at the same time, I don’t trust their statistics. I don’t know if they’re actually getting the job done, if they’re actually helping and empowering women on the scale that they say they are. I don’t know what the ground-level effects are. Because if poverty is still a problem in these places, then some women just aren’t going to make the cut. So maybe these countries are solving for the wrong problem. I’m not usually this skeptical, I swear. Usually I’m the opposite: completely naive.
But for me, there’s this duality of feminist experience: immediate, and at large. I think HeForShe does a good job at addressing both. It includes questions to post on your social media to stimulate discussion about various different topics, and highlights personal stories of how people have worked to change gender norms in their area. And it also includes the aforementioned projects of the Impact Champions for the “at large” component.
And I feel like, on a personal level, my immediate experience is fine, and that’s why I have felt in the past I haven’t needed the feminism label. But then there are those who really do need that feminism label – both boys and girls -and need a helping hand, and are facing oppression because of their gender, and aren’t able to escape gender roles, and are having doors closed in their face, and I’m afraid that those people who need the label won’t be able to get it. That HeForShe won’t get to them in time, these overlooked people hidden in the masses of first-world countries, suffering from poverty and living in unimaginable conditions.
I think I’m still hung up on Sarah Jessica Parker’s comment from my first post: I’m a humanist, not a feminist.
I don’t know. Maybe I demand too much from the world. I should be happy that HeForShe is making a dent in the world’s problems and helping people! But I have to ask myself…which people? Is it mostly girls? Should it be, when men in the same area might be suffering a similar burden? And where are they? And why do we ignore the cases right under our noses?