Am I a Feminist?

During a discussion with my wife, I said to her that I am not a feminist, and therefore “I don’t speak feminist” meaning that I lack the emotional and/or intellectual sophistication to understand some of the issues that I read about. My wife disagreed with me. Her argument was essentially that because I believe that women are equal to men, that I meet the minimal criteria for being a feminist. While that is flattering, I think that there is way more to feminism than equality. Yet, it is a conversation that I am not really invited to participate in. Her counterpoint was that I was only listening to the extremists. While she certainly has a point, that the extremists certainly derail the conversation, it is my opinion that her position is predicated on a definition of feminism that has become outdated.

By outdated, I mean that equality between the sexes is a goal from a different time. My mother is an old-school 80’s feminist. She was a healthcare exec, until she changed careers to education where she moved up from professor to chair of her department. She did her best to balance being my mom with being executive director of… whatever it was. When my mom was working on her Doctorate while I was in High School, sometimes I had to make my own dinner and/or find my own rides to things like Karate class. Sometimes my dad made dinner and picked me up from Karate, his work schedule permitting. I understood that my mom was way more than just a wife or mother. Her career was a big deal, same as my dad’s, maybe even more so.

I have done my best to treat my wife’s career and education with that same respect, and to support it where ever possible. I shuttle the kids around when she needs me to, I cook dinner, and that sort of thing, work schedules permitting. I don’t help around the house as much as I should because even though it’s a responsibility that we both share equally, housework sucks and I hate doing it.

While I might qualify as a feminist by my mom’s definition from the 80’s, this isn’t the 80’s. There are many more women’s issues being discussed today that go way beyond the workplace or family roles. These are issues that my mother probably dealt with, but they weren’t part of the mainstream discussion on women’s issues that I was exposed to. Today the national discussion is more of a debate, and I seem to be on the other side. Maybe that has to do with changes in the media landscape (since broadcast media has taken a back seat to the Internet) but I guess it also has to do with the advancement of the cause of feminism. Getting women the vote is a done deal, a lot of progress has been made in the workplace (the wage gap notwithstanding), and so the leading edge has been directed at additional issues.

The debate, as I understand it, breaks down like this:

• One the one side you have modern feminists, advocating for various forms of positivity, speaking out against various forms of shaming, and trying to expose deep cultural problems in our society. There are also some, the extremists that my wife was referring to, who want men to basically be quiet and let the the feminists do their thing. They want men to “stay in their own lane” so to speak.
• On the the other side, you have men. There are neckbeards who are trying to join the conversation, presumably so that they can get laid, the “nice guys” who can’t get laid, and the Men’s Rights Activists who think that all feminists are just man-hating lesbians who are trying to take away their… freedom I guess? Or maybe their dicks? I don’t really know. Those dudes sound like a bunch of whiny bitches to me 🙂
• For the most part, I try to stay in my lane, but sometimes I feel like that is being silently complicit with the extremists on either side. Maybe that is the problem with the whole debate: there isn’t a place in it for a fairly rational guy.

In her blog post defending Stephen Amell, Chrisha raised a brilliant point, which is that there is no social justice equivalent of a GLBT Ally. In that conversation, straight people don’t have to “stay in their lane.” They are invited to be part of that conversation, but outside of GLBT issues, terms like “white knight”, “mansplaining”, and “cultural appropriation” keep the conversation limited to those who are oppressed. Personally, I think that does little to educate would-be oppressors, but that’s really none of my business 🙂

In the social justice/oppression food chain, I am basically an apex predator. I understand why marginalized people probably don’t care what I have to say, but hey, this is my blog, so I get to do the talking. So my question is this: what -if anything- qualifies a straight male as a feminist? And, if nothing qualifies him to be a feminist, then why doesn’t feminism have its own version of the ‘ally’ designation?