Utopian thinking: how to build a truly feminist society

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/06/utopian-thinking-build-truly-feminist-society

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Sometimes over the past few decades it’s seemed as if we’re slowly, inch by inch, getting closer to a gender-equal utopia. And sometimes, as for instance with the election of a “pussy-grabbing” women’s-hotness-rating misogynist as “the leader of the free world”, it does feel as if we’re getting further away from living in a feminist paradise. The worldwide women’s marches against Trump were a way of saying how much of a step back his inauguration feels.

So it might be good to think about where we’re hoping to get to. Here’s what a feminist utopia is for me: a world where your genitals, hormonal arrangements or gender identification matter not a whit. Where no emotions are gendered: everyone gets to be both vulnerable and tough, aggressive and nurturing, effortlessly confident and inclusively consensus-building, compassionate and dominant. Each by turn, just as it exists in us: no part of our rich, human selves cut off or excised because “boys don’t cry” or “girls aren’t funny”.

It’s a world where there are no “boys’ toys” and “girls’ toys”. No women’s jobs and men’s jobs. No insistent drumbeat of culture keeping us in order. No one kicking us if we step out of our assigned lines. It’s a world where – among many many other things – there are no specific men’s clothes or women’s clothes, but everyone gets to play in the dressing-up box exactly as they like. If all you want is to wear overalls: fair enough. If you want to wear a suit one day and a floaty dress another, what’s the problem?

What I want is a world where neither gender nor sex are destiny. Where no child is ever told there’s anything they can’t do, or must do, “because you’re a boy” or “because you’re a girl”. It’s not a world where anything is “taken” from anyone – it’s one where everyone’s possibilities are enlarged.

We are very far from that world today. So how do we get from here to there? A million steps, large and small. But here are a few ideas. We urgently need to address the assumption bound up in our employment laws and custody arrangements that women are the “natural child carers” and men don’t really want much to do with their children. In the UK, it’s possible to share parental leave, but the way the law is framed means that if a heterosexual couple chooses to, the man’s time at home with his baby is deducted from the woman’s. If we take the need for fathers in children’s lives seriously – and I do – we must ringfence time for both parents to spend with their children: at least three months for each parent. Of course the father might choose not to use it, but then it’d be lost, not just shunted over to the mother.

We also need the idea of “shared parenting” after divorce – perhaps one week on, one week off – to become the expected norm, rather than a rarity. And we badly need mandatory creche facilities at large companies – and incentives and resources for smaller companies to set up shared, local childcare for their employees.

Girls and boys wouldn’t grow up with their father a rare visitor while their mother is constantly present – my hunch is that this would make a massive difference in the emotional lives of children and the adults they become, perhaps altering the dynamics of adult relationships profoundly.

And employers would have even less reason to wonder whether they should take on a woman who might be about to start a family – and more of a reason to apply the same thinking to men, improving the gender pay gap. While we’re on that subject, let’s introduce public gender pay audits for larger companies (say, those with over 50 or 100 staff), not revealing individual salaries but aggregating salaries of similar jobs. Then let the conversation surrounding those pay audits do its work.

In discussions in homes across the nation, when perfectly reasonable people have a think about “which of us should go part time to be there for pick-up after school”, that perfectly reasonable conversation will – if women are paid 86% of men’s salaries, as the Fawcett Society has found – go one way almost every time. So men are deprived of time with their children; women are deprived of economic independence. The cycle goes on. Let’s commit to ending it.

And, talking of endless cycles, in the UK men are about 22 times more likely to be sent to prison than women are. Men are more likely than women to both perpetrate, and be a victim of, violence. I don’t happen to think men are “naturally” more criminal or violent. But even if there are some hormonal differences involved, I think we’re failing boys and men: failing to teach them that there are answers that don’t involve violence, that violence says nothing about how “manly” you are, that aggression isn’t the best answer to most situations. We need to change our cultural conversation around that, quickly.

Let’s teach boys at school the personally and economically valuable skills of self-expression and emotional intelligence, of mediation and problem-solving. It would introduce the expectation that disputes are to be solved with words, thinking and kindness, not a half-brick to the head. Men are more often the victims of male violence; sorting this out would benefit more men than women.

Which is not to say it wouldn’t benefit women too. Three women a week are killed by men in England and Wales. Women are given a litany of supposedly “preventive” measures, the effect of which is just that some other woman, not them, is the victim of the wandering sadist on the street: don’t walk on the streets after dark; don’t wear tight clothing. How about this? Teach every girl self-defence at school, from the age of five to 16. It’s infinitely more important than netball. Give these lessons at least some of the time in the curriculum devoted to team sports. The skills of hurting a larger opponent enough to buy you time to get away should be second nature to all women by the time they leave school.

And, on the subject of women being raped, I’ve given up watching any television that includes a posed female corpse or starts with a naked, bruised woman – ruling out a surprisingly large number of shows. I wouldn’t censor; creators must be free to create, and we viewers can make our own choices. But I’ve heard people defend shows such as Game of Thrones for showing women being raped on the grounds that this “would happen” in their pseudo-medieval worlds of constant warfare.

Well, fine. But estimates are that in one in six rapes the victim is a man. If we’re talking about what “just would happen” in war … Jaime, Tyrion and Theon would have been raped, as would many male characters in other shows. Sometimes men have responded to my pointing this out by saying, “Oh but symbolically these characters are raped.” But women don’t get to have “symbolism” in these shows. They get the real thing. Either be “realistic” or don’t. But let’s not pretend that women are always beautiful victims and men can never be.

That’s the essence of it all, really, and why I started by talking about emotions. In so many areas, we still insist that women are “weak” and men “strong”. Men work and women care. Women are kind and men are violent. Personality, inner life and life experiences don’t divide neatly into “boys” and “girls”. Denying that simple truth hurts us all, in a million ways, and we need to meticulously unpick each and every one of them.

• The Power by Naomi Alderman is out now