Among other things, she exclaimed, “My biggest pet peeve is when people ask if I need help with something. I’ve done more labor-intensive work than anyone here, but people insist that I need help just because I have boobs!”
Needless to say, I haven’t offered her help with manual labor since then.
Let us ignore science for a moment. You know: the empirically proven fact that males, on average, are physically stronger than females. Let’s examine this from a simple human-interaction point of view. One individual tries to do something, another offers help, and the pair usually manages the work more efficiently and effectively as a result. This is the way Neolithic human society has always worked. And although gender roles have traditionally shaped this distribution of labor, they have absolutely no bearing on the communal instinct to help one’s fellow human. I would have made the same offer to a male friend.
There seem to be two major camps of feminists. The members of one group believe in equality and focus on very real modern issues such as disparity in wages between men and women. They serve an essential role in modern society, in which feminism has come under attack because of the irrational and circular arguments made by members of the second group. These individuals, who represent a highly vocal minority of the feminist movement, have learned to extrapolate feminism to every domain of daily life. They are hypersensitive to criticism, actively look for evidence of sexism and find it everywhere.
As one who cares deeply about equality issues, it pains me to see legitimate issues hijacked by those who use the movement as a method of personal vindication, like when my friend felt slighted that I offered her help moving furniture.
She is one of those “feminists” that bandy about the term without demonstrating a true understanding of what it means. On account of their frenzied finger-pointing and paranoia, feminists as a whole have come to be perceived as extremists that eschew showering and relish their armpit hair.
Along with giving real feminists a bad name, the pseudo-feminists alienate men as well. Hypersensitized by the narrative that they have imagined, they are quick to accuse a man of implicitly belittling a woman when he offers to help and ignoring her plight when he refuses. The innocuous act of kindness, generosity or even apathy is interpreted as an intentional and malicious attack on the sovereignty of women everywhere. I’m not saying that a man’s actions are always absent of ulterior motives; I am saying that as adults we should be able to tell the difference.
The irony is that not enough individuals at Princeton are willing to publicly proclaim their feminism, as Caroline Kitchener pointed out in her column “Where have all the feminists gone?,” and I think it’s at least in part because of this vocal minority. The stigma caused by this minority is a real one, as evidenced by many of the comments on past ‘Prince’ articles related to feminism. While varying in content, the general tone of these comments is, “Enough already. There is no conspiracy to put women down. Get over it.” In this way, a very vocal minority of extremists have effectively pushed the issue beyond the sphere of reasonable discourse. In complaining about unimportant issues, they are reducing the urgency of the real ones. No one wants to hear any more about feminism once they’ve learned to associate feminism with complaining. Once this association is made, all bets are off; real feminism has no chance.
Feminism is not a selling point, nor is it a label that automatically legitimizes what you are saying. Feminism is a school of thought and philosophy that must not be used as a street corner soap box, lest everything it stands for be cheapened or destroyed.
It is easy to make a point by shouting the loudest or by inundating your opponent with a mass of statistics that he or she cannot possibly begin to decode. But the fight for race and gender equality is not one that is won by attrition, by wearing your enemies down until they no longer have the energy to fight. It’s a hearts-and-minds campaign in which you aim to turn those who once stood in your way. I understand where they’re coming from. But gender extremists cannot hope to effect real change without first learning to pick their battles.
David Mendelsohn is a psychology major from Rockville Centre, N.Y. He can be reached at dmendels@princeton.edu.
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