Full Frontal Feminism_ A Young Women's Guide to Why Feminism Matters - Jessica Valenti [61]
Feminist Phobia
My first real taste of feminist phobia came when I taught Intro to Feminisms at SUNY Albany in upstate New York. I taught the class as part of a teaching collective program in which undergraduates could teach other undergraduates. So I was pretty psyched, but not so much with all of my students.
One guy, who was my age, took the class just to be disruptive. I knew it wasn’t going to go well when, on the first day of class, we asked everyone to write their names on a piece of paper and hang it from their desks so we could all talk roundtable-style, and the guy wrote WOMAN HATER.
The semester was pretty miserable, with him trying to make me feel like shit at every turn. He wrote “Jessica is a bitch” on every test he handed in. He showed up at the anti-rape rally Take Back the Night to tell me that he had had sex with a girl when she said no (but that she liked it). He even had occasion to wander past my apartment drunk one night, just to yell out not-so-nice things. At the time, I just thought he hated me because he was a fucked-up person. Looking back, I realize that this guy was terrified of what he was being confronted with in class. It was going against everything he had ever learned, and his immediate reaction was to lash out. Plus, he was just a dick. He was acting out and felt he could without consequence because I was a woman his age—not an authority figure.
Since I’ve started Feministing, I’ve seen similar reactions online. We’ve gotten our fair share of hateful comments on the site, but none have compared to the vitriol spewed our way from a group of guys on the Internet who call themselves “men’s rights activists.”
Basically, their deal is that they blame feminism for everything from not being able to get dates to increasing crime rates. Weird stuff. Some of them hated what we were doing so much that they created a parody site modeled after Feministing! They stole our logo (though they made it look like she was fingering herself—classy), our name, and put this tagline on it: “Because women are never sexist. So there.” Uh huh.
A great organization, Men Can Stop Rape, created this awesome website: Masculinities in Media: http://mencanstoprape.org.
They posted articles every day and even talked to each other in comments using female pseudonyms and language they thought feminists would use: “You go grrrl!” Yeah, I know. It was amazing to me that anyone would spend so much time creating and keeping up a site that no one really looked at or read besides their small group of online buddies. Besides, why weren’t they out being active on behalf of men?
Again, it’s the fear of feminism. They are terrified by the idea that women could actually be autonomous people with opinions. Interestingly, they blame feminism for ruining American women; on one of their websites (which has the lovely header “Ameriskanks suck”), they often discuss how Asian women are “real women” because they adhere to traditional gender roles. I won’t even get into how dumb and racist that is, but the idea is that the perfect woman is one who doesn’t, you know, talk back or have opinions.
This kind of misogyny (and yes, I do think a hatred of feminists is based in an overwhelming hatred of women) is unfortunately fairly widespread. There is just something about feminism that really pisses some guys off. Us gals from Feministing have actually received death threats, threats to cuts off our breasts (seriously), and threats of rape. Which is insane. But it’s because feminism is powerful. If these same men who hate feminism so much weren’t threatened by it and its power, they wouldn’t waste their time creating sites, causing disturbances, and emailing threatening letters.
In a way, this fear of feminism is a testament to its strength.
When I had that kid in my Intro to Feminisms class, I used to think that if only he would really try to understand feminism,