Friday, June 1, 2012

Do you consider yourself to be a feminist, or not?

I continue with an article about feminism vs evolutionary science. And I will focus entirely on a survey from the beginning of the article:

Let’s start with two simple questions:

(1) Do you consider yourself to be a feminist, or not?

(2) A feminist is someone who believes in social, political, and economic equality of the sexes. Do you think of yourself as a feminist or not?

If you’re like many people from a study my RAs and I conducted recently and those polled by CBS News in 2005, then your answer to question one bore little resemblance to your answer to question two. In CBS’s nationwide random sample of 1,150 U.S. adults, 65% of women and 58% of men identified as feminist when an equal-rights definition was provided, but only 24% of women and 14% of men considered themselves feminist in the absence of a definition (Alfano, 2009, February 11).

Regrettably to feminists like myself, far too many other feminists believe that being one means believing in far more than equality for women.

This is pretty interesting and tells me there is a drift in feminism itself which I too regularly encounter. To cite from the feminist definitions I listed earlier:

Feminism as a concept only exists under the assumption that in the large arena of sexual equality, women are behind men. The colloquial definition of feminism is 'equality of the sexes'.

Feminism is about equality. For everyone.

It seems to me the drift is the difference between gynocentric feminism and egalitarian feminism. The good news, a majority of men and women would identify with egalitarian feminism. As a striving egalitarian, those are people I can work with. Maybe it is about time for the egalitarian revolution and to start to fight for equality. For everyone.

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