For A Girl

There seems to be some basic confusion out there about feminism's latest attempts to advance women. Primarily, this takes the form of either thinking there was never a problem with sexism to begin with or that, at any rate, there is not one anymore. This conclusion is untrue and I feel the need to point that out. The Super Bowl I just watched featured a commercial demonstrating the destructive nature of the common saying, "Like a girl." When used in certain contexts, which are usually athletic ones, it signifies weakness and incompetence. So the ad insists we turn, "Like a girl," into a positive saying. In response, men's rights activists have been promoting, "Like a boy," as a response. To miss the point that badly can only be explained by not believing the problem exists in the first place. Feminism is ultimately about the idea that women have it worse than men in a variety of contexts and what can be done to improve this. If you don't believe this, you will perceive feminism negatively and be wrong.

Women having it worse than men has always seemed a very obvious fact to me, even as a child. When I first learned about childbirth, I vividly remember being grateful for being born male because SCREW THAT. Sex is fertile ground for women having it bad. First of all, men are going to enjoy every time they have sex and women basically have no better than Vegas odds of an orgasm in any given encounter. Second of all, women have to worry about every man that ever crosses their path raping them, something I've never worried about for a moment. There is still pressure for women to choose between career and children, while men experience no such pressure. While some men wish to frame all this as some sort of whiny, "Life's hard. Get a helmut," sort of thing, it's much more than that. From the moment a woman is born, the world tries to frame what her limitations are in every possible context. Being individualistic is hard enough for me as a man. With more expectations to conform, it must be all the harder.

A men's rights activist will say that we need to treat everyone equally and fairly. Where they err is in their assumption that, by changing the way we treat women and girls, we are somehow affording them special rights. Dropping everything you as a man think you know about women is the first step. I will not say I am entirely innocent on these charges, but I've been educated well enough to have improved dramatically in recent years. Any time a little girl feels inferior to a boy, is treated worse than she would be if she were a boy, or is told she cannot do things she could otherwise do were she a boy, she is experiencing something that ought to rouse moral outrage in all us all. All that is not hypothetical, but goes on every day in modern America. Women who succeed do so only after mounting courage and strength enough to overcome the challenges unique to their gender. Life is harder, but it need not be, so remember that as you contemplate a lone advertisement asking us to think of what life is like for a girl.

-Frank