I get the arguments in favour, I really do.  It’s just blowing off steam; it’s a cry of rage; it’s impotent anyway.  Stavvers gives an eloquent argument for it being a “shorthand war cry” and that “we’re not actually advocating killing all men, but what we need is for men to understand why we might.”  I don’t need anyone to explain to me that while women are killed by their partners at the rate of two a week, men are generally not at risk from women, and there is no real threat from #killallmen because it couldn’t happen.  There is no culture of female violence against men, celebrated and joked about, to reinforce as there is in reverse. It’s a shock jock tactic; it’s venting; it’s just banter.

Except that you know when something’s described as ‘banter’ it’s probably unjustifiable.

And this is unjustifiable.  Because “all men” are not homogenous and nor are all women.  So when I saw this tweet:

@londonfeminist @jonanamary from the perspective of a (or at least this) Jewish woman “Kill all anyone (lolz)” is nauseatingly not-clever

— KaisaJaye(@KaisaJaye) May 8, 2013

I thought – yes, THIS.  This is what’s been swishing round my head as I tried to identify exactly what it was that made me so uneasy about it.

This is the entire point of intersectionality.  That sure, a white cis man can probably brush off #killallmen – it’s less likely to cause him harm or fear than a gnat on a warm summer evening.  And likewise, a privileged woman can bandy around terms like that secure in the knowledge that she’s not part of a group which has been threatened with extermination (gender based violence is appallingly bad but it’s not quite at genocide levels.)  But how about a man, or indeed a woman, who has fled the clan-based murders of Somalia or the tribal genocide of Rwanda?  How about a trans person only too aware of the threat of being killed for looking too much or too little like a man?  Someone who has heard the very real threat of “kill the gays” or “kill the Muslims” and known that there are people out there who do, quite genuinely want to kill them?  As KaisaJaye points out, how about Jewish people, for whom the Holocaust is more than just a history lesson?

Those are of course genuine threats to minorities in a  way that #killallmen is not.  But many men will also be Muslim men, gay men, trans men, disabled men, Tutsi men, Benadiri men: they can’t separate their maleness from other characteristics which may not be privileged ones.  Many women will likewise have direct experience of being part of a group which currently or historically has faced oppression to the extent of genocide.  If #killallmen makes someone feel unsafe because of intersecting forms of oppression then #killallmen is the absolute opposite of intersectional feminism.  If you value intersectionality, I would ask you to reconsider just quite how harmless that hashtag really is.

I assume that he is also going to sue them for ageism due to not being able to use the pool during children’s swimming lessons, and for reverse ageism due to not being allowed to join in the over-55s sessions.

There are sound reasons for women only gym time. The main one cited is usually that women are deterred from using the gym when it is dominated by men, because women’s bodies are judged in a way that men’s are not, and many women feel exposed if exercising in front of men, perceiving that the men are assessing their bodies. The chances are that in a gym most men are not checking out the women – but if you are continually told through media messages that your value lies in your sex appeal and specifically your appeal to men, it’s a fair perception. Adverts like the one that popped through my door, showing a man and woman exercising together with him gazing appreciatively at her toned body, probably don’t help.

The second is often religious reasons. There are women from Muslim backgrounds but also from strict Christian sects or orthodox Judaism who will not exercise in a mixed gym. “Tough shit,” one might think, “then exercise at home” – but given that Kentish Town is council funded and therefore is meant to pull in the people who would otherwise not exercise at all, they do have a duty to cater to all.

The third is gender policing. Go to my local gym and there is a clear gender divide: the women on the cardio machines at the front, the men on the weights at the back. Women are not welcome in the weights area. I know. I’ve tried. I don’t know whether women are similarly possessive over the cross-trainers; it would be interesting to find out. Would a “men’s hour” at the gym see groups of men clamouring for their time on the yoga ball?

All of these are symptomatic of a wider issue, which will never be solved by segregation. I would far prefer to see a society which does not judge women on their bodies than be given a single hour and a half out of ninety five available hours in which I can exercise worry-free.

In the meantime, though, it’s clear that without women’s hour some women just won’t go to the gym at all. So here’s my proposed solution for Peter Lloyd: Kentish Town offers ninety five hours a week at the Fitness Centre.  He can have a 1.6% discount, reflecting the hours in which he can’t use it.  However, the women who will only use the centre during women-only times get a 98.4% discount to reflect an equal situation (currently, they would pay the same as anybody else.)  Fair?  Or does the women’s deal suddenly look pretty fucking rubbish, actually, and Lloyd like a whining toddler who wants his friend’s toy as well as his own?

Of course, anybody who genuinely wants to end the current segregation, rather than score points like they’re playing Super MRAio, can join in with campaigns for women to be treated as equals and not sex objects.  That way, at some stage, we may no longer need a women’s gym session.

The implication of this is that men can never win: consent or no consent, allegations of rape can be made and upheld willy-nilly.

Far from it. This was a judgment in a case where consent had been given on a limited basis: the woman consented to sex only if the man agreed to withdraw. He had told her to come off the Pill, a decision about which she was not happy but she had agreed to sex if he used condoms or withdrawal. Despite promising withdrawal he had continued, refused to withdraw, held her down while finishing and said “I’ll do it if I want.”

It should also be noted, and the judgment can be found here, that the man in this case had then sent the victim a text message saying “I am sorry for raping you. I can think of no other word.” This is not a case where he simply got carried away in the moment: he knew perfectly well what he was doing.  The judgment continues [TW]

“On the same day he sent another text message, speaking of “the image of your face in fear, of when I ripped your underwear off”. A few days later he wrote that he had changed, accepting “I degraded you, humiliated you from the first day and you played along because you felt you had to. I know you now and not once did you enjoy it. It was degrading from the first. I am ready to be wholly supporting without the oppressive sexuality. There is no more oppressive sexuality.”

The DPP refused to charge him with rape on the basis that there was no realistic prospect of conviction.  That was judicially reviewed and the High Court have granted the review.  It remains to be seen if the man will indeed be charged.

The headline should have read “consent to one type of sex is not blanket consent to all types of sex and forcing an unwanted type of sex on someone when they had specifically told you not to is indeed rape, as any decent human being should already be aware.” Consent to oral sex is not consent to vaginal sex, and consent to vaginal sex is not consent to anal sex, and consent to protected sex is not consent to unprotected sex. That last was of course previously upheld in the Assange judgment, which is referenced in this one.

This is one of those judgments that should make people who are not rapists go “um, yes, obviously” – a bit like the 1994 judgment that made it possible for a man to rape his wife. Any public outrage should be reserved for the Director of Public Prosecution’s initial decision not to prosecute a man for rape despite him having accepted that what he did was rape. What a pity that the Metro chose to portray it in the way that they did.

@londonfeminist Blog about how intersectionality can be used to obscure issues as well as highlight them.

— Botulinum Toxin (@Beau_Tox) April 14, 2013

I ‘ve written before about intersectionality.  For those who aren’t sure, it’s just the word we use for systems of oppression which intersect with each other.  There is a much fuller explanation of it here.

Applied correctly, intersectionality is a vital thing.  There is no point in being a feminist if you’re not in it for all women, rather than only those who are already privileged in some ways.  And likewise, there is no point critiquing systems of patriarchy if you don’t recognise that within that patriarchy, not all men benefit equally, because there are other axes of oppression which affect men despite their male privilege.

One argument I’ve seen is that using the very term intersectionality is offputting for anybody who is not an academic.  I don’t accept that.  It’s not a particularly difficult term or concept, and if you’re reading this on the internet then you have a Google search function. If you can make an iPhone work, download and play a song, understand what is meant by “wifi” or “jeggings” or “broadband” or “app” or any other term which has entered the language in the last 10 years, then you can understand intersectionality.  Sniffing at feminist terms as “too academic” is just another way of dismissing us as a bunch of bluestockings far removed from the ‘real world.’  Sorry.

Having said that, we should not use accusations of lack of intersectionality as a lazy shorthand for a bad faith argument.  One of the criticisms levelled at non-intersectional feminists is that they are ‘fun feminists,’ women who are only interested in other women like them (see: criticisms of the Vagenda). It goes without saying that if this was the only sort of feminism on offer, it would be a disaster, but there is room for pop-feminism within the wider movement: women and girls who come to feminism through experimenting with body hair or menstruation resources may well be the academic feminists or career politicians of tomorrow.  We all start somewhere, and somewhere is usually with our own experiences and anxieties.

And we should not bully those who haven’t got it yet.  It’s much easier, and much kinder, to ask “And what about <other> women?” than to say “OMG you are SO lacking intersectionality!” which leaves the offender entirely unaware of what she has or hasn’t done.  By way of analogy, I used to have an art teacher who was able to tell me that my work was crap (it was) but not how to make it better.  It put me right off art. Intersectionality is a great concept, which finally requires the white, middle-class face of feminism to see more than just her own face reflected in the mirror, and it should not be reduced to a fashionable buzzword to sneer at others.

To write this post, I went looking on the ‘net for examples of when calls for intersectionality actually have been used to stifle debate or obscure an issue.  Interestingly, despite a call out on Twitter, I’ve been entirely unable to find any.  There are plenty of examples of people worried that they might be accused of being insufficiently intersectional, but nowhere have I found these fears being realised.  Sure, I’ve found criticism of professional journalists like Caitlin Moran or Suzanne Moore when they have trivialised another group of women – but that’s hardly stifling debate.  And I’ve found another woman (whose blog is so terrifying I shan’t link to it) who is obsessed by the idea that even mentioning trans women prevents anybody speaking about cis women – but that’s clearly untrue.  So where is the obfuscation of issues by intersectionality that so many people are talking about?

This makes me think that the problem, if there is one, isn’t intersectionality per se, which is generally accepted to be a good idea whether we use the word intersectionality to describe it or not.  (Among the other suggestions I had for a blog was “how feminism needs to be for all women, not just some” which is pretty much the definition of intersectionality.)  The fear of being ‘called out’ online is what is stifling, not the concept itself, which is and remains pretty awesome and pretty dashed important if feminism is a movement for all women and not just a few.

This is not a problem that is exclusive to feminism.  As pointed out on the Offbeat Empire, it affects all progressive politics.  At the same time, talking politics on the internet is like talking to your best friend in the pub while being broadcast to millions.  If you say something daft in the pub and your friend says “That came across badly, did you mean that?” you’d probably hesitate, realise what you’d said and apologise.  If two hundred total strangers then say exactly the same thing it’s easy to feel persecuted.  So then you tell them to fuck off, and then two hundred more total strangers call you a prick and it’s all downhill from there.  That’s not your voice being stifled: quite the opposite, it’s the result of it being amplified.

I could, at this point, put in a plea for online feminists to treat everyone with total respect and kindness at all times, no matter how bad a day they’ve had, how annoying the other person is or how right they feel.  In reality, the folks at xkcd have it right, and that’s just human nature.

Someone is wrong on the internet

So I think we’re back to one of the drums I’ve been banging for a long time.  Feminists do disagree, sometimes badly, just like all other people do because women are people.  Expecting us to be beacons of sweetness and light purely because it’s a women’s movement is a little bit sexist.  I don’t have an answer to mob rule on the internet, and it’s that, in my view, rather than intersectionality that is used to obscure issues or stifle debate.  If anyone does have the answers, do feel free to comment below.

@londonfeminist I’d like to read about what Thatcher did (if anything) for the cause of women in politics…

— Mrs G (@Mme_G) April 14, 2013

What, if anything?  As I said in my last post, Thatcher did not regard herself as a feminist.  A straightforward bootstrapper, she would not, I feel, have been impressed to think that she had advanced the “women’s movement.”

Her own promotion of women was pretty feeble.  Only one woman, Baroness Young, was promoted to the Cabinet.  She froze child benefit, derided working mothers and their “creche generation,” watched as the gender pay gap increased, and was generally not supportive of, or supported by, the feminist movement of the time.

To get any idea of Thatcher as a pro-feminist, we have to go back a bit, before she was in power.  In 1952 she wrote “Why have so few women in recent years risen to the top of the professions? One reason may be that so many have cut short their careers when they marry. In my view this is a great pity. I hope we shall see more and more women combining marriage and a career.”  What a contrast to her later dismissiveness over calls to make childcare affordable.

In 1967 she voted in favour of legalising abortion, saying that “I happen to think that one of the worst things anyone can do in this world is to bring an unwanted child into it.”  Accessible abortion is arguably one of the most important policies for women which emerged in the 20th century.

So what happened to the feminist Thatcher by the 80s, when she engaged in some antifeminist (or anti woman, one could even say) policies?  I think the answer lies in her 1979 remark: “The battle for women’s rights has largely been won.”  She was impatient with the women’s rights movement, which she regarded as “strident” and unnecessary.

These days, we would never look at 1979 as a time when women’s rights had been won. A man was still entitled to rape his wife without fear of criminal proceedings. Ambitious single women were excluded from the judiciary by rules which said judges must be married. The gender pay gap was astonishing and the casual sexism remarkable by today’s standards.

However, I have a tiny bit of sympathy for Thatcher on this one, if only because it’s such a common fallacy.  As we see things change, it’s easy to say we’ve achieved it all, simply because we’ve achieved what we wanted.  Those who want yet more – more than we ever did – are simply greedy and overambitious, rather than accurately assessing that we should have aimed higher.

By the 80s then, we do not have a feminist agenda, either in the government or in the person of Thatcher.  The gender pay gap increased through her tenure – but then so did the equality gap generally.  Have a look at this:

(The Gini Index is a measure of wage inequality.)

It wasn’t just women’s wage inequality that took a hit: it was everybody’s.  At the same time, proponents of Thatcherism will point out that one of the reasons for the huge hike in inequality is that wages at the upper end of the scale suddenly went skywards, as Britain came out of an economic gloom into the boom-times of the 80s.  Among those were some women – not as many as the men, but enough to make shoulder padded suits an iconic visual image of the 80s.

So what did Thatcher do, if anything, for women in politics?  She represented a figurehead, a possibility of becoming a political leader, albeit one who failed to promote any women to fill that position behind her.  She presided over a society in which some people’s economic outlook became much, much rosier, arguably creating the possibility of the Supermum of the 90s, with her perfect children and powerful job.

Was it enough?  No.  There was a golden opportunity to implement policies like universal childcare which would have given women another step up the ladder, and to do more for those women who did not benefit from the economic upswing.  Thatcher’s Britain could have done much more for minority groups, women included, and chose not to.  But it would be wrong to say that no women benefited.  They did, but by chance rather than design.  A morality tale highlighting the importance of intersectionality, perhaps.

Having said that, her very presence in government contributed to a growing, grudging acceptance that women can be as politically astute and engaged as their male counterparts.  Natasha Walter wrote that she “normalised female success” – I’m not sure I’d go quite that far, since she spectacularly failed to promote more than one other woman to her Cabinet, but she certainly made it less abnormal.

There is an enormous anti-woman reaction to news of her death.  Twitter informed me that she was a “slut” (really, Twitter? the best you can do?) as well as the inevitable cunt, twat, bitch, ugly, mannish – gendered slurs that would never have been aimed at a male equivalent.  Plus the efforts to get Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead onto the charts.  How funny.  Also: witch is a gendered insult, in case you didn’t know.

Which leaves the dilemma of how to greet the news of the death of an iconic anti-feminist in a feminist way.  Julie Bindel had an idea of how to treat women who refuse to call themselves feminists: they “should be paid less than men, have no maternity benefits, no access to refuges and no vote.”  Tongue in cheek perhaps (I hope) and counterproductive: feminists do not wish ill on other women, no matter how annoyingly ill informed those women are.

I will not celebrate Thatcher’s demise and I will not use misogynist slurs to demonise her.  Much of the web’s posthumous discussion has ignored any analysis of the good and bad parts of her political ideology in favour of a superstitious thrill of the Bogeywoman, the Witch, the Terrifying ManWoman of Grantham.

Thatcher felt no solidarity with the feminist movement, but it is solidarity with her as a fellow woman which inhibits any desire I might have to go out partying or even buy a crappy Wizard of Oz song. I know I owe a lot to women’s lib – my vote, my education, the control I have over my reproductive system, my career, and that’s just for starters.  I am not arrogant enough to think I achieved this alone, and I am not isolated enough to feel no solidarity with those women who campaigned before me.  Those qualities of humility and solidarity – which Thatcher spectacularly lacked – means that ironically, some of the voices of dissent against a wave of misogynist attack come from a group whom she openly despised.

As Vicky Pryce prepares to spend the next few months contemplating whether revenge was worth imprisonment, the little known defence of ‘marital coercion’ has been in the papers.  This has created much hubbub on social networking sites as commenters form the conclusion that this is proof positive that the law favours women; by providing them this tailor made defence, does this not demonstrate that the law is a feminist?

The short answer is no.  The defence of marital coercion may be many things, but feminist is not one of them, as it has its roots in legally enshrined misogyny.  Up until 1925, if a woman committed an offence in the presence of her husband, then she was not guilty of it – because there was a presumption that he was responsible for her.  The presumption was rebuttable, but in common law, that was the starting point, and it enshrined male ownership of a wife in the criminal law, much like the laws on out-of-control dogs, or truanting children, exist today.

By 1925 lawmakers had begun to get the idea that perhaps women were people and not pets, and so it was taken out of the common law, but was written into the law as the statutory defence we know today.  The onus is on the defendant to prove coercion by her husband on a balance of probabilities, and the coercion must be real:

In R v Shortland 1996 the Court of Appeal held that coercion went beyond persuasion out of loyalty, but it need not involve physical force or the threat thereof.  To succeed, the woman has to prove that her will was overborne by the wishes of her husband, whether this was as a result of physical force or the threat thereof, or of moral force.  [Archbold]

It is the defence that the “canoe case” defendant Mrs Darwin used unsuccessfully. It is not a frequently used defence: the last occasion I can find of it being successfully used is in the case of Fitton (drink driving in 2000) and before that, the 1974 case of White.

Is there still a place for it? Being able to tell your husband to get knotted, as Ms Pryce should have done, comes with a certain amount of privilege.  Women whose immigration status is dependent on their husband may be more easily compelled to do something against their will, for example.

However, the defence is archaic, rooted in extreme sexism, and is not compliant with modern day equalities legislation.  It was recommended for abolition in 1977 and it is now well past time to be rid of it.  Scrapping it would not prevent a woman who was put in fear of violence by her husband from relying on the general common law defence of duress.  And it would remove from law the concept that in a heterosexual couple, the woman will be obedient to, or powerless before, the will of her husband.

I was listening to the radio this morning and caught his interview.  He was sounding harried, it’s fair to say, while he tried to defend both what he had done (got rid of Lord Rennard) and what he hadn’t done (known about any sexual harassment, definitely), while the interviewer rather smugly pointed out that these two things are unlikely to be simultaneously true.

The problem is that sexual harassment is not taken terribly seriously.  If you are able to persuade an employer to “have a word” with someone and ask them to “tone it down,” you’re doing well.  Most likely, you will be told that the harassment is “banter,” “harmless,” “just flirting,” and that you are “overreacting.”  An entirely unscientific straw poll of my friends indicates that anything short of an actual arse-slap will not result in any action at all.  An employer who sacked someone for what they say is merely ham-fisted flirting would be a rare fish indeed – and there’s also a question over the legality of that in the first place.  So what do we do?  Warn each other:  be careful of Bob downstairs; he’s a bit too friendly.  We complain with each other: you’ll not believe what Bob said this morning!  We ask Bob politely to desist and he tells us he’s only joking, sweetheart.  Which does indeed create a climate where reports of sexual harassment are ‘gossip’ and ‘rumour,’ because there is just no bloody point in reporting it officially; all you’ll get is a sour atmosphere and a reputation as a bitch.

Clegg could have pointed out that since we live in a society which tolerates sexual harassment right up to the point of sexual assault, he was trapped between acting in a way which would have supported the women but lost him support from every other person in the place, by being seen to sack someone who was “just being friendly”, and acting in the way which he did, which was to engineer Lord Rennard’s retirement.  I think it’s fair to say that if he had opened the can of worms in 2008 he would not have become party leader.

This story is about far more than Clegg, Lord Rennard and the women who were [allegedly] sexually harassed.  It’s about a society in which allegations of sexual harassment are routinely ignored or deliberately portrayed as harmless flirtation with which the victims are free to engage or not as they please.  It’s about a society which ignores the power structures involved in sexual harassment, and about a society which is quicker to defend the harasser than the harassed – unless it becomes politically expedient to get pious all of a sudden – and which regards women as public property.  It’s really irritated me watching some of the commentators who are first to deny that “everyday sexism” exists these days also being the first to condemn Clegg for not taking action they would undoubtedly have sneered at as excessive.  If they want to stop it, they can begin by examining their own attitudes towards women: mote, eye, beam and all that.

It would be nice if this particular report led to a wider discussion about the ways in which sexual harassment are tolerated or swept under the carpet.  It would be lovely if, as a result, people reviewed their attitudes towards the casual sexism which enables harassment to take place apparently unnoticed.  But I fear it will only lead to a focus on Clegg, and once again, women will be reduced to extras in a drama which is ultimately about all of us.

NB: This post is written based on what has been revealed so far, i.e. allegations of sexual harassment.  If there are future allegations of sexual assault, which any reasonable person would have dealt with firmly, my Clegg-related sympathy levels will plummet.

I just wanted to drop you a line to say thank you so much for your support for the feminist revolution.  Ever since your boss Rupert tweeted to suggest he might be dropping Page 3, there’s been a slight scent of compromise in the air.  We could see what would happen: the anachronistic Page 3 models get dropped, but the Sun gets in all other regards to remain the bastion of misogyny it has been for so long.  

But well done, Dominic, for spotting this plan and disrupting this lily-livered policy of appeasement to basic decency.  I know that for you, as for me, a mere boob reduction is insufficient.  No, what you want is for the entire press to be compelled to stop treating women as objects and sex toys.

How else do we explain your front page on Friday?  As news rolled in that the athlete Oscar Pistorius had shot his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, and that he had been arrested for her murder, you went for a full shot of her in a bikini, lips slightly parted, come-to-bed eyes.  There’s no doubt that the picture you used is a highly sexualised photo. As one tweet put it: a woman is never too dead to be masturbation fodder.  

I’m sure that you did this with full recollection of Object’s submissions to Leveson, where one of their concerns was the eroticisation of female murder victims.  And I totally agree with you: politicians have been dragging their heels over what to do with the implementation of Leveson, tiptoeing around the balance to strike between a free press and a feral press (I thought, given your coverage of teenagers, you’d appreciate the analogy there.)  

This was a cunning strike in moving regulation of the press forward.  Nobody but a snuff movie director could possibly look at that front page and think that the tabloid press is capable of regulating itself.  You’re right, Dom, it’s got to be all or nothing, and it’s got to be done urgently.  Thank you for making it so clear.

With utmost contempt,

londonfeminist 

And yes, there are some really shitty tweets in there.  Contenders for Bogglingly Astonishing Misogynist Award – subtitled, Don’t You Know Twitter Is Public, You Fool? – include the man who tweeted that when he hits a woman (when, not if) he should be treated equally to a woman who ‘slaps’ a man.  I don’t have an issue with common assault being dealt with equally but “when” he hits a woman? Oof.

However, there are a few serious ones which were more engaging.  However, none of them ‘need masculinism’ – in fact it sounds like what they want is a lot more feminism!  Here are a few:

(The main serious, non-misogynist tweet on this hashtag): because men shouldn’t have to pay for dinner on a date.No, they shouldn’t.  This is entirely true.  Also, we should not live in a society where it is assumed that women are paid less than men, and that men will pay for dinner in exchange for the hope or promise of sex.  This sucks and we call it patriarchy.  Feminism says that women should be paid equally to men, contribute equally to men, and have equal choice in whether the evening ends with a sedate air kiss or frantic wall-shaking neighbour-annoying sex.

Because a male being raped or assaulted is comedy while a woman suffering the same is a tragedy.
This needs to end.  “Don’t drop the soap in the shower” is not funny.  How about we take victims of sexual assault seriously regardless of gender.  At the same time, we need to do something about a society which loves the narrative that men are sexual aggressors, permanently, randily up for it (which by extension means a man being coerced into sex is impossible) and women are passive (which by extension means that if they DO do it they are sluts or gold diggers.)  We’re back to giving men and women equal bodily autonomy.  This isn’t masculinism; this is Feminism 101.

Because men do badly out of the family courtsAt present, men tend not to be the primary carers of children, which in turn leads to them not getting custody of children in the event of divorce.  This is a system in which men – in the blue corner – are the breadwinners, the earners, the high flyers with the long hours and the proper jobs, while women – in the pink corner – are the carers, the nurturers, the housekeepers, and the smiling support to their man’s fevered brow and their kids’ every whim.  We have a word for this set-up.  We call it “patriarchy.”  It’s quite sweet, I suppose, that some men have only just noticed it exists, but I can tell them one thing:  it wasn’t bloody well designed by women.

What the #INeedMascul(in)ism tag tells us is that we need more feminism.  Equality – true equality, where we’re pensioned at the same age as the men, where we do the same work for the same pay as the men, are just as prone to sacking as the men, are as equally represented in Parliament as the men, where we are no more sex objects than the men, where we are no more the victims of gendered violence than the men, where we do the same domestic chores as the men, where we are no more likely to get custody of a child than the men, because we do no more primary caring than the men – is what feminism has called for, over the decades.

What is being criticised is a gendered system.  It’s patriarchy.  And yes, it hurts men nearly as much as it hurts women, and you know what?  Women have been saying that for decades too.  Any system which labels women passive, incapable, weak but caring, is by extension labelling men aggressive, bestial, and uncaring.  That’s patriarchy.  And no matter what some Twitterati may say, patriarchy is not the fault of feminists.