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athena

(4,187 posts)
2. I'm not sure what makes a feminist "serious", but the site seems sexist to me.
Sun Jul 2, 2017, 04:46 PM
Jul 2017

Sexism is not just an action that hurts a specific woman or aims to hurt women in general. Sexism is also a way of thinking that seems innocuous and reasonable to the majority of men and women but ends up hurting both men and women. This is the sense in which the site is sexist.

The site overtly romanticizes the 1950s. The whole idea is that men are supposed to be manly and cultivate those qualities that our sexist society believes should distinguish men from women. (If you want to see why we moved beyond the 1950s, read "The Feminine Mystique" by Betty Friedan. It's a great read. It's one of those books one never forgets.)

The whole idea of "manliness" is that being a man is fundamentally different from being a woman. The reality is that women and men belong to the same species. Beyond physical attributes, there is nothing that distinguishes men from women. Anyone who says men and women are fundamentally different should try saying that about any other two groups: black people and white people, Jews and Christians; homosexuals and heterosexuals, and see how bigoted they sound.

Everything posted is linked to the idea of "manliness" by virtue of the name of the site. Imagine a site that was called "The art of Womanliness" that had articles about things like plumbing, woodworking, war, sports, and surviving in the wilderness. You didn't expect that, did you? You expected a site that had articles about cooking, cleaning, knitting, sewing, fashion, and childcare, right? Well, that tells you all you need to know about why the site you refer to is sexist. I spent quite some time looking through the site, and I didn't see any articles on how to work for a female boss, how to stand up to a coworker who is being sexist, and how to get one's daughter interested in amateur radio. It's all about being a "manly man" in the 1950s sense, marrying a woman who is a "lady" in the 1950s sense, and pretending that one is still living in the 1950s.

Sexism doesn't only hurt women. It hurts men, too. Men are harmed by the restrictions that the 1950s ideal of "manliness" imposes on them. It hurts heterosexual men that they can't display the entire range of human emotions without having to worry about appearing weak; that they can't dress in pinks, yellows, and purples without appearing homosexual; and that even when they have a high-income-earning wife, they can't choose to stay at home and bake cookies without being shamed by society for not being a responsible breadwinner. Every time you tell someone that they cannot live the way they choose, you are hurting them by restricting their options. Telling men they should be "manly" is not so different from telling women they should be "womanly" and stay at home and bake cookies. The site owner may not realize it, but he is inadvertently hurting both men and women with his rigid ideas of how men and women should behave.

Men and women drifting further and further from each other is not going to make us a better society. What is going to make us a better society is the widespread realization that we are all, deep down, similar, regardless of our gender, skin color, and sexual orientation, and that we're all in this together.

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