Feminist men on how to gradually make the world a better place.
Fight for equality ceases to be the lot of women exclusively - in Internet discussions, it is increasingly possible to meet men who protect victims of domestic violence, struggle with sexism and dispel gender stereotypes. We talked with such heroes and found out what makes them defend the interests of women on the Internet and in real life.
A man who supports the feminist struggle, still can not call himself a "feminist." The struggle against patriarchy oppressing and discriminating women is the business of women themselves. Men can be in this business only supporters, "fellow travelers", without the right to equal to make strategic decisions and even more so - to lead and manage. I prefer to call myself a "promeminist."
My interest in feminism began with reading theoretical texts (from Simone de Beauvoir to Kate Millet) and analyzing the real facts of the surrounding reality. I was raised by my mother and grandmother, most of my social network are still women. All of them, starting with the mother and ending with close friends, daily faced and face the reality of patriarchy: lower wages, depreciation and objectification, real or potential domestic and sexual violence, and so on.
Of the men I know, at least half of them are gay, this is a characteristic moment. Nevertheless, for men, however frivolous and feminist friendly, sexism and inequality are mostly theoretical problems. And for women, regardless of their political position - the ordinariness in which they are forced to exist. Even if a profeminist man is called “baborab”, this hostility cannot be compared with the fierce hatred that feminists receive.
I try as much as I can to do propaganda - among men, of course. While the feminist revolution is a distant horizon, the main thing that can be done is to recruit supporters and convince the same men to reflex. It is necessary to try to bring up a new type of masculinity - not cruel, but sympathetic, refusing to dominate.
If you go beyond the narrow circle of the left-liberal intelligentsia, it turns out that feminist ideas in Russia are still unpopular. We even have a law on counteracting domestic violence in the minds of many citizens taken hostile. In my opinion, sooner or later there will be a breakthrough, but this requires a general democratization of society.
At one point, I was horrified to realize how many women, including friends to me personally, were being subjected to violence, including sexual violence. I do not want to live in a world where it is in the order of things.
I do not do anything special for feminism and I am interested in this topic superficially. All that I have is a belief system and position, which I adhere to and sometimes voice. If we imagine this as some kind of activity, it turns out that such slakarism is normal. We have recently spent too much time praising ourselves for the "right views", replacing these, in fact, actions.
I adhere to the ideas of love, respect and cooperation of people with each other, and equality in the broadest sense, including gender. At the same time, I believe that some groups suffer from inequality. If we want to live in a world in which people recognize each other’s right to be different, but have equal rights, then it’s probably useful to support these groups in the first place (one of these groups is half of the world's population, the other is LGBT — up to ten percent by some estimates, that is, it "literally applies to everyone").
When I had the opportunity as a lawyer to participate in the project of assistance to the LGBT community, I gladly jumped at it and hope that the chance will be presented again. In addition, I am afraid there is nothing to boast about - I argue arrogantly with people whose opinion is important for me if they are completely cut for sexism or homophobia, I myself try to practice what I preach (I try to preach less, see "slacker" ). I went to pickets at the State Duma when homophobic laws were passed.
Now I really want to help one organization engaged in psychological assistance to victims of sexual violence, which is on the verge of closure. Can I just use the opportunity to do more? There is a center "Sisters", help him, please, otherwise it will close without your donations, and this will be very bad.
I feel the unpopularity of equality ideas in Russia, but I look at it as part of a more general reaction - in general, we don’t live to very vulnerable groups (and to whom is it good?), And those who try to do something about this are traditionally disliked, plus the obvious policy of the authorities to simplify and vulgarize any problem, the archaization and the new Middle Ages, promoted with the use of a media resource unthinkable.
What to do? Just do not try to win by force, bend public opinion, etc. - they will trample on this field due to the obvious inequality of forces. To be smart, not to go ahead, have patience and respect for public opinion, whatever that may be. In general, less branded and use their views for moral elevation over someone, although we all love to do so.
A friend says that feminism is in my blood, and it seems to me that this is not far from the truth. I often found myself thinking that I was somehow subtly different from other men. I myself am a biker, and when friends of motorcycle girls told me that many people do not approve of their hobby and consider it unacceptable for a girl, I was surprised to hear that. At some point, the set of such stories exceeded a critical size, after which I recognized the word "feminism".
It is frustrating that many women do not realize the problem. Even clever, successful and completely independent women, who by their very existence prove every day the irrelevance of patriarchal traditions, still live in the patriarchal framework. My views have an impact on my personal life: it is quite difficult for me to communicate with girls who want to hide from this beautiful world behind a man’s back. Therefore, the choice of friends is quite limited.
In Russia, feminist ideas are now unpopular, but it seems to me to be quite natural: economic prerequisites for feminism (the opportunity for women to earn a living for themselves) appeared relatively recently, and social traditions have not traditionally been in time. We need to tell people about the patterns in their minds, which close them some opportunities, and wait for change.
My interest in feminism is from the pursuit of education. The world of business and government is organized as if the planet is inhabited by exceptionally rich healthy white men, although, of course, they are less than 1% of the population. Accordingly, alternative views on harmonious social order, taking into account the views, preferences and capabilities of other people, seemed to me interesting.
Another simplest thought: in the 21st century we live with a different type of reproduction, the global fertility rate is declining - fertility should not now impede the professional development of women. A society that does not invest enough in equal professional opportunities for both sexes discriminates itself - it becomes less competitive. For this reason, any patriotic patriot should also be a feminist. Realizing such simple things, I became interested in feminist theories in international relations, I went to a course of lectures and public discussions about feminism.
I try to avoid sexist statements in principle, not to allow speculations about appearance, even clothes, colleagues, contractors, candidates for vacancies. I regularly have to argue with several colleagues about whether it is necessary to indicate a person’s appearance in a review of a person’s professional qualities, especially to take gender and appearance factors into account when making professional decisions. It turns out with varying success, because when the head of a huge organization asks for help to find a spokesperson for a “blonde girl”, then the hair color will be taken into account. Everyone treats my views with respect, because I can defend them quite comfortably in well-argued discussions, but this does not mean that they extend to beyond the circle of my close friends, unfortunately. Russian society is certainly less prepared for feminist views than many other societies, but things are changing. Worse, that there is no accentuated modernist-educational position of the state, which would struggle with the current state of things.
Sexism, infringement of rights - these are the things that I have never liked. In this sense, the Western Internet has had a great influence on me. In the entire CIS, things are about the same, and this is very different from what is happening in the West. In Ukraine, the issues of sexism are not a priority at all. I think in Russia too. It seems to me that the older generation is not interested, but there is a positive trend among young people, especially intellectual ones.
I am not an activist of this or that movement. Offline, I rarely encounter the fact that something is wrong and you need to somehow intervene in the situation (perhaps because I’m not specifically looking). But online is another matter, here I try to promote sound ideas and strongly support those who need this support. I had friends who were in a dependent relationship. To some extent, I helped them to get out of them - you can even think that it was successful.
I think that first of all it is necessary to explain transparently to the public what the essence of feminism is. What matters is not that feminists hate men, but a matter of stagnant views about cuisine and borscht, violence, salary levels, retarded flirting on the street, and so on, that all this needs to be eradicated.
Due to my professional activities in this matter, the topic of women in tech is close to me. Unfortunately, many still believe that information technology is a male profession. Annoying, for example, when in the comments on Github developers are engaged in the so-called mansplaining towards girls. Even more terrible is when psychos come to the girls in the responses on Twitter and threaten, for example, with rape. At the same time, improvements in IT are clearly taking place. Recently I saw that according to statistics at one of the major conferences last year there were less than 15% of women, and this year more than 30%.
Not all women are ready for equality. In the CIS, this is a lack of education and a conservative social order. It is necessary to fight including this. At least read about what is happening outside your post-Soviet country, in English. I was lucky in this matter, my girlfriend is a user of Tumblr service for many years.
For me, feminism began with a book-biography of Norman Borlow, a scientist who saved billion people from hunger. Thanks to this book, I had the first and most difficult scrapping of the picture of the world. I doubted my ideas about the environment, began to look around with "new eyes" and notice homophobia, sexism and racism. The irony of the situation: a book about wheat and hunger led to feminism.
I see two problems related to gender inequality: subjective-emotional (this is unfair) and objective (we are losing a lot of professionals who could make the world better and rejoice at their work, and instead go to cook borscht and shift pieces of paper).
There is a suspicion that in Russia, institutional sexism in IT is not very pronounced, but at the same time, household - is unlimited: "Yes, you cho, body art at a professional conference is ok, you can look at the bodies." It seems that this does not stem from the professional context, but from the general atmosphere. At the same time, I admit that there may be professions where, under equal initial conditions, there will be a sexual (namely, sexual, and not gender) imbalance - conditional movers. The problem is in unequal initial conditions, the threshold for entering the profession is different: "A boy is smart, it means she will go to a physical school. A girl is beautiful, it means she will go to a model".
A couple of years ago, I wrote a post in LiveJournal about gender inequality, which unexpectedly hit the top and collected over a thousand comments. It seems to me that we need to talk about such things, even if many people disagree: someone can be persuaded, and someone silently agrees and will not join the discussion.
In the first years of the institute, when I came to anarchism, feminism became part of my anarchist self-consciousness. Now it is difficult for me to consider myself an anarchist, being the general director of a publishing house. But I can call myself a feminist, or at least a feminist, because some feminists are against the presence of men in the movement.
In fact, my views are manifested in the fact that we in the publishing house decided to make books on feminism a part of our publishing policy. We have released books by Naomi Wulf ("The Myth of Beauty" and "Vagina: A New Story of Female Sexuality"), Caitlin Moran ("To be a Woman: Revelations of a notorious feminist"). When we began to engage in popular science, we decided that we would strive to produce more books of interesting female scientists, although men, as in many other fields, are dominant in science. In addition, we strive to ensure that in our publishing house everything is fair to employees — we never tried to dismiss those who are going to go on maternity leave.
My experience with feminists is extremely small, but I have come across the aggression of radical feminists. Say, when discussing the book “The Myth of Beauty” in the CHA during the book festival, some girls said that a man cannot be a feminist and it’s better not to call myself that. Several of my posts on LiveJournal and Facebook about pornography also provoked aggression, although I wrote precisely about feminist pornography (there is such a phenomenon). There, radical feminists convinced me that any pornography is the exploitation of the female body and objectification. Their attacks do not hurt me, I continue to adhere to their views. Different people have different opinions, this is normal. I am friends with other feminists.
I can call myself a feminist, and I think that men who cannot, cause only a smile in the modern world. It seems they are simply not confident and afraid of losing their privileges. Not to be a feminist is like being a racist or a supporter of serfdom.
I became a supporter of gender equality, having a solid life experience in Russia, where women as a whole are still treated as a sexual and domestic servant. If we do not want to be treated as state property, as a “population”, we should not transfer this model of power to relations between the sexes.
A shocking experience of inequality exists in the lower classes of Russian society, and then it is transferred even higher, right up to Putin's anecdotes about grandmother and grandfather. Prison subculture has spread to the whole society. Everyone knows that bosses are those who can "fuck." Accordingly, when a woman has sex, it is always associated with humiliation, her very role is demeaning. Recently, in our seemingly progressive university, I came across a sexist public school "Hens Hens". I had a few students who found this a good joke.
We need to pull such things into the world and explain to people why this is bad and embarrassing. There is a general theory of emancipation, liberal or Marxist, there is a theory of gender equality and there is an archaic Russia. I try to introduce them to each other. In our social circle, we, perhaps, have already achieved something. At least, many understand that the problem is not thoughtless.
Photo: 1, 2, 3, 4 via Shutterstock