History of Feminism

The problem isn’t so simple as a man-versus-woman frame. Examples of this evaluative pattern are rarely as easy to parse as when a men’s magazine writer treats some women as steaks who’ve gotten tastier with age, Pilates, and feminism. After all, women ran the disciplinary committee that was so quick to dismiss rape charges at Hobart & William Smith. On Tuesday, Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn and other female anti-choice activists testified against the Women’s Health Protection Act, a bill that would ban onerous restrictions on abortion rights and that was sponsored by senators Tammy Baldwin and Richard Blumenthal, a man. Meanwhile, a bill to reverse the Hobby Lobby decision was co-sponsored by senators Patty Murray and Mark Udall, another man. Many of the sharpest take-downs of Junod’s piece came from men, and I want to note that my Twitter-sparrer Jonathan Chait yesterday wrote one of the finest and most astute pieces about the injustice of Harrell’s arrest.

Yay, thanks! No, really, I mean it.

But what all these issues, no matter how gigantically separated an Esquire puff piece and a Tennessee mother’s jailing for meth may seem, reflect back at us: How, in this country, every barometer by which female worth is measured—from the superficial to the life-altering, the appreciative to the punitive—has long been calibrated to “dude,” whether or not those measurements are actually being taken by dudes. Men still run, or at bare minimum have shaped and codified the attitudes of, the churches, the courts, the universities, the police departments, the corporations that so freely determine women’s worth. As Beyoncé observed last year, “Money gives men power to run the show. It gives men the power to define value. They define what’s sexy. And men define what’s feminine. It’s ridiculous.”