Saturday, July 23, 2016

Do Women Want Equality or Autonomy?

en.wikimedia.org
Men typically think it's absurd that women want to be treated like men. I can say that because I am a man, so in typical brutish male thinking, I infer simple images in my mind of tomboyish women asserting themselves in typical male fashion, overflowing with testosterone.

In the wake of legislative progress giving women more legal protections and rights such as voting, the right to inherit property, the right to make personal medical decisions about their own bodies, some men who relied on the state to give them a sense of superiority over someone, anyone, were crushed because they had no other means of attaining superiority.

The backlash against women achieving more rights and more equal treatment has been misogyny, The response to misogyny that arose out of the women's rights movement is feminism. But the definition of feminism should be autonomy instead of equality.

Because women are literally physically different from men, pure equality is practically impossible. The idea using the word "equality" is actually an impediment because it creates the thought of absurdity in the minds of so many men.

If on the other hand, women fought for social and economic autonomy and justice, it wouldn't seem so absurd. Men might even begin to understand why there is feminist activism. They might begin to listen instead of obsessvely trolling Anita Sarkeesian because they feel their institutionally fabricated sense of superiority draining away.

Misogyny is no part of real atheism. One can only arrive at real atheism through fully developed critical thinking skills. You cannot claim to use logic or science and still have bigoted tendencies.

Some will say equality is the correct word to use because the salience of the word is needed in the fight for women to achieve a modicum of fair treatment by men. It's hard to tell where within rhetoric cooperation ends an conflict begins.