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A Man’s View on Women’s Liberation

As a man writing an article on women’s liberation, there is a lot of room to get into Alasdair Thompson-style trouble. I am a twenty something, straight, white male. While I have on occasion dated women, dressed as a woman, and spent many hours fantasizing about women, I have never actually been woman. I am no misogynist, in fact I consider myself to be a feminist. I’m an everyday guy with the usual array of views, opinions and misconceptions about a women’s place in society. I hope that when you’ve finished reading this you won’t feel the need to flagellate me. Unless of course you want to…
 
In the immortal lines from Kindergarten Cop, boys have a penis and girls have a vagina. And therein lies the tension. The endless longing to join the two together for a little p-in-v action determines so much of how we view the opposite sex. Men don’t want to sexualize women, but we sure do want to have sex with women. Every time we see a female we consciously or unconsciously size up their potential as a sexual partner. Our basest instincts demand that our immediate conceptions of women are about their ability to bear our children.
 
It is difficult then to differentiate between the desire to have sex with a woman, and our responsibility to treat women as total equals. Much of what we do every day is done to increase our chances of having sex: if sex wasn’t even an option, tooth brushing, doing the dishes, gym sessions and clothes washing would all go right out the window. It’s not that we just want to have sex with you. Eventually we want to be all grown up and play house. But when we do it is usually women who lose out to the pressures and realities of modern life. Incredibly complicated negotiations go on in relationships about what role each person is going to play. Yet it is often a fait accompli that the women’s career will take a back seat when it comes to child rearing and running a household. And when a mother returns to the work force, she will struggle to advance as fast as her male counterparts who stayed on the career fast track.
 
Women have already managed to correct most of the glaring injustices of the past. The feminist and women’s liberation movements of the 1970s secured reproductive rights, universal suffrage, maternity leave, and at least the edifice of equal pay for equal work. However, the movement stalled before fully removing the structural injustices that continue to restrict their opportunities. The more that structural and institutional injustices are less in your face, the harder it is to remove than the glaring inconsistencies of yesteryear. It’s even possible that the gay rights movement sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the room for women’s rights before they could really achieve full equality.
 
Kiwi women continue to earn less than men in NZ, but we need to differentiate that from being paid less. There is still a small difference between men and women who work in identical jobs. But the greatest difference exists because men predominate in jobs that society values more highly; professions like surgeons, airline pilots or corporate lawyers. Professional women move into more caring careers - GPs, family lawyers or social workers - that are not as highly valued by society, or highly paid. According to Gender Studies Associate Professor Annabel Cooper, the status and pay of a profession tends to drop as more women move into it.
 
Regardless of pay, many Kiwis argue that women have already reached a position of parity in NZ, pointing to the prominence of New Zealand women in high profile positions: in 2001 the Governor General, Supreme Court Justice and Prime Minister were all women. However, Associate Professor Cooper suggests that these women may have been a single cohort of professional women who all chose careers over families, women who made huge sacrifices to get where they were; sacrifices that we should not expect women to have to continue to make.
 
So maybe it’s time for men to take on more of the task of fulfilling the promise of women’s liberation. I’m not trying to undercut the ability of women to create their own change, saying that women are unable to achieve justice without a man providing it for them. But men need to join the fight for true and total equality as feverishly as women have been fighting for the past 40 years. Nowadays most men are fully supportive of bra burning. It’s not that we don’t like bras; they’re like really awesome wrapping paper, but eventually you want to see what’s underneath. However the days of bra burning are now behind us; the challenge now is to overcome the structural and institutional forms of gender discrimination that continue to persist. And counter-intuitively it may be men that need to fight for a lot of these things. If men do not demand that they be given more time off to provide childcare, to work around the home, and to allow their partners to continue working, then employers and the government will never provide it for them.
 
Most of the changes that still need to occur are about how men view their role in society, and what they demand from their employers. It probably wouldn’t surprise people that most women who have children want to be mothers, and want to take time out from work or careers to care for their kids. But men need to push their employers to give them more time off to engage in childcare too. Women still perform the majority of the household chores, often as well as being the primary child caregiver and working full time. Men need to take an equal responsibility for household work and childcare. If both partners drop from fulltime work to 75% of full time, many families would be able to manage, while allowing both partners to stay involved in the work force. Men must be willing to do this more, and employers need be willing to accept it. Guys, we’ve had a good run. But it’s long past time that we stepped up to the plate and started acting like real men, dirty diapers and all.