When asked whether Barbie is a feminist movie, the film’s star Margot Robbie replied, ‘Anyone who thinks men and women should be equal is a feminist.’ Like other ‘isms’, this definition doesn’t allow for much wiggle room.
In the modern world, anyone who isn’t a feminist is a misogynist, and nobody wants to be a misogynist. This is quite a conundrum for both men and women and doesn’t promote discourse with the aim of finding a happy medium. Rather, it polarises without serving the good of either side.
The problem with ‘isms’ is they are an emotional one way street. Those in the ‘ism’ group don’t have an emotional reverse gear. Those in the opposing group only have a reverse gear with emotion coercively winning out every time. It is Mills’ ‘harm’ principle gone awry – where harm need only consider zero degrees of separation, #me. A healthy equilibrium is sacrificed at the altar of the blame game. At what point does winning a war, even a verbal one, start to do harm to your side?
Perhaps a more realistic way to look at things would be to define people by their priorities in life. Instead of feminist or misogynist we could consider people as being family-focused or career-focused.
‘Barbie changed everything because Barbie can be anything.’ Many have heard the marketing phrase. Even if that was true, which it isn’t, is being able to ‘be anything’ really the answer, or does the tyranny of choice leave us with too little time when we finally figure out what is meaningful in life? By substituting the ‘be anything’ Kool-Aid with words like family or career (that imply choice and sacrifice), social media-induced ‘be everything’ anxiety pushed on young women and the heartbreak of unmet expectations would be lessened.
The pain is real. Only 6 per cent of women who worked full-time considered childlessness to be their ideal, according to a report by the Australian Institute of Family Studies. Yet, about 25 per cent of Australian women will remain childless by the end of their reproductive lives, according to a report by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. That’s one in five women who wanted kids and didn’t have them.
In the distant past, career-focused women were valued lower than family-focused women. Now the opposite is true to the point that tax laws consider family women as a non-entity. A family woman’s tax-free threshold is not considered unless her family owns a business or has a family estate trust to distribute income to her. Further, I’m told the work test means that mums have to get back to work after 6 months if they want their $15,000 maternity leave payment for their next pregnancy. A mum that couldn’t work because they were sick, couldn’t find work, had post-natal depression, or wanted to spend time with their newborn only gets $500. A far cry from feminism’s ideals of equality.
Does that mean family-focused women need to become 60s-style vacuum cleaner ad caricatures, or should we create a new version of pre-industrial revolution femininity, where family-focused women are side-hustle founders and equitably taxed mums? That’s a markedly different image to the prevailing narrative where the pinnacle of female achievement is the boardroom. I’ve been in boardrooms, they aren’t that exciting.
Meanwhile, career-focused men have had their teeth removed and their claws pulled out. Nominally feminist, they are powerless to take the cause of family-focused women for fear of being labelled as a misogynist.
The solution? According to one American psychiatrist, a disarming technique is to agree. The only way to stop someone thinking you are something is to admit, without reservation, that part of their judgment is true. Paradoxically, by finding a grain of truth in the accusation, the assailant immediately stops believing it. Defence is futile. David D Burns’ EAR method steps in:
Empathy: ‘You’re completely right, you must think I am a misogynist because I think women should stay at home with their young ones.’
Assertiveness: ‘I feel like career doesn’t give most people the same life fulfilment as parenthood. I feel like mums miss out by missing their kids’ infant years. I feel like their kids miss out by being in childcare. I feel like society misses out when these kids grow up having missed this time with their mum (and dad). I feel like it takes about 15 years to get to where you want to be career-wise, and by this time, women are running out of time to have kids. I feel like feminism’s recognition of career success and neglect of family success implicitly promotes career and demeans family.’
Respect: ‘I think all women should be totally free to choose and every woman is different, and there is no right path for everyone.’
Contrast this with every man’s natural defensive posture: ‘How could you say I’m a misogynist, I’m not a misogynist. I’m a feminist and don’t have any thoughts beyond completely agreeing with the narrative. I’ll stop talking now.’
Even the language is feminist. We don’t have words like masculinist and misterogynist. While they might even things up, I’m not sure more verbal warfare is what we need.
Imagine that instead of ‘isms’ we had four sub-groups: Family-focused women, career-focused women, family-focused men, and career-focused men, all with an equal say. Family-focused women would need to speak up to the career-focused women and start burning their business suits. Career-focused women would need to admit that being able to be anything hasn’t really been the answer they were searching for. Family-focused men would need to embrace the label of being a misogynist for wanting a wife that stays at home with the kids. Career-focused men would need to stop talking over career-focused women who don’t want to compete with their booming voices. Rather than one group with outright emotional control, it’s a two way street, and each group has checks and balances on each other.
The game has changed. Instead of women taking on masculine traits to compete in the workplace, or men taking on feminine traits to become sensitive new age guys, women now identify as men and men as women.
That might mean that men who don’t identify as women still feel more effeminate than men of previous generations. This stacks up, young men of this generation produce measurably less testosterone than the previous generation at the same age. It would be interesting to know if similar hormonal phenomena were happening with women. If so, it would be interesting to compare hyper PC Australia and Canada with family-focused countries like Spain and Italy.
Do career-focused women and testosterone-depleted men find each other attractive? I’m not aware of any data on this, but anecdotally it doesn’t look good. If so, could ‘isms’ be contributing to spiralling fertility rates?
Arguably, fertility rate has more to do with financial concerns. Rightly or wrongly young people want to be responsible and able to provide for their family before taking the leap. They do pretty well, getting lenient tax treatment on a high surplus income while focusing on their career, but is this a mistake? Most couples figure out their finances together, and the necessity is the mother of invention. The tax system could be set up in such a way that instead of incentivising the highest possible surplus income, it incentivised the highest possible contribution to society. Income tax affects money in and GST affects money out. Parents earn less (combined) and spend more.
Tax brackets and tax laws are remnants of the industrial revolution that attempt to keep people in factories making widgets paying their taxes and paying off their home loans. Rather than taking the short-term view of ‘more kids means more mums not working, means less tax revenue’, the tax office could learn delayed gratification. Long term, more kids means more trade means more work means more tax revenue, it just takes 20 years before the tax office sees a return on investment. They get better, more productive adults thrown into the bargain for free.
