Viva La Dainty

On the occasion of the let's-say-40th anniversary of these songs, and the let's-say-four-day dieversary of someone asserting that, based on the content of my blog, I would probably be right into shaving my face (!?), I feel like I ought to clear up a couple things about feminism.

Feminism is not just women getting to do what men do.  The implicit assumption behind that idea is that what men do--men's work, men's preferences, men's pastimes, men's rights and responsibilities--are the real, genuine human things, so when women do them, they will have achieved complete personhood.  That this is such an easy mistake for feminists and non-feminists alike to make testifies to how strong the idea that women aren't properly people remains, even in this era of lady policemen and men returning home in the evenings.

Now, the other assumption implicit in the discourse of feminists-wish-they-were-men is that men's activities are more desirable in addition to being more authentically human, which is also pretty wrong.  There's a number of (particularly upper-class white Western) traditional female activities which are great fun, such as baking.  You can identify these activities by whether there's an army of men clamoring to redefine them as masculine and deep and life-affirming and meaningful--currently no one is gassing on about how folding laundry is an art and a science, for instance.

Conversely, there are many areas of life where men have drawn the short straw, though I'm pretty sure I'm in danger of losing my F'membership card for saying so.  Criminal prosecution is one I've discussed previously, but things like, oh, trusting you can get the benefit of the doubt about whether you're a sex criminal when you're adjacent to a child, or not having to scrape a blade or series of blades across your vulnerable face all the time, these could reasonably be described as female privileges.

But one is discouraged from making (or ceding) this point in an argument, I guess because it encourages fellows to think that everything already works out to be square in the end, and so the status quo is jim dandy.  All I'll say about this aggressive, dare I say masculinist rhetorical posture is that maximising the points you score in arguments is by no means a foolproof way of winning souls to your side.

That said, I surely would like to grow a real beard one of these days.