Gender, inequality and reality

Gender, you can't get away from it. Today is International Women's Day. The date actually commemorates a strike by women in Russia during the political turbulence that culminated in the Revolution. It had previously been promoted as an idea during the Socialist International meeting in Copenhagen in 1911. The day is provoking a certain amount of soul searching among a couple of female writers. Deborah Orr in the Indie and Zoe Williams in the Guardian.

Zoe Williams bemoans the fact that a day which should commemorate her nominated women's issues has been hijacked by yoga, spices and animals in art. I can sympathise with that in some ways. I sometimes feel that the whole world is being hijacked by counsellors, aromatherapists and amateur psychologists. Anyway, she defines the agenda of real feminist struggle as

women in public life (access to the legislature, education and politics); women in private (health, sexual and other domestic violence); and the point of intersection between these two worlds (rape conviction rates, provision for victims of domestic violence, abortion rights, and government decisions about other health matters).

Astonishingly she fails to mention economic equality, the claimed lack of which has been in the public eye recently due to the self-justifying propaganda emanating from the Equality Commission. This is doubly interesting because the first three issues she highlights, access to the legislature, politics and education, usually claimed to be the result of feminist pressure, came about due to the growing economic influence of women. The result of technological advance and male labour replacement spurred on by two world wars.

What I do find puzzling is why the other issues have anything specifically to do with women. Is a woman's health somehow more important than a man's health? Is breast cancer, which I believe receives a disproportionate amount of the NHS budget, any less damaging, for either the individual sufferer or his/her partner than prostate cancer? The struggle should be to improve health care for all not just for women.

Domestic violence has long been an area which has long been dominated by the feminist viewpoint. The underlying thesis being that women are somehow natural victims and men violent and brutal. That domestic violence is abhorrent is not subject to question. Most violence is. It may well be the case that some men in certain circumstances compensate for their inadequacies by the use of force.

But to argue that this is innate in men is as simplistic and unhelpful as to argue that women always compensate for setbacks by buying another pair of shoes. What we should ask ourselves is what features need to be changed in our society that are currently causing men to feel inadequate.

Low rape conviction rates, held by feminists to be the result of a sinister male plot, are a consequence of the specific circumstances in which rape occurs. Nearly always when only the two protagonists are present. Of course when there is clear evidence of physical force being used there should be a prosecution and subsequent penalty.

So often, however, this is not the situation we are talking about, but the case of sober, morning after, regret. What the feminists champion is a move to the man having to prove that assent was given – no assent meaning it must have been rape. You don't have to be crystal ball gazer to see the earning potential of that particular scenario.

Deborah Orr takes a rather different approach while still casting women as victims.

'Women are more vulnerable than men for a few reasons, but the main one in a neo-liberal society is because we bear children, and want to nurture them....Feminism has to exist because men and women are not equal, and never will be. Feminism is, or at least should be, about real sisterhood: thinking of, and promoting ways of protecting vulnerable women, because without help they are always at the bottom of the heap.'

Why, I wonder, does the fact that women bear children have to be a vulnerability rather than a strength? We're actually back to the question of economic equality here. The only area where women may be classed as more 'vulnerable' than men, other than the matter of physical strength and not always then, is in earning capacity. If a women accepts that there is a return in nurturing children just as great in its way as the return to be had from career fulfilment there is no problem.

The problem only occurs because feminists define female fulfilment in terms of money, economic status and the exercise of power. Of course women and men are not equal. They are different. It's feminists who constantly define those differences in terms of inequality. The real battle to be fought is to ensure that all individuals can make choices over the direction of their lives.

Curtailment of career or sporting achievement is often the price a man has to pay for a commitment to family life. It is up to individuals to decide what they consider their priorities to be and order their lives accordingly. They should realise, however, that the repercussions of their decisions should be born by themselves. They should not be seeking ways of shifting the financial burden of those decisions onto others.

Elsewhere, Ms Kelly was proudly announcing some meaningless, misguided and stupid regulations, concerning the protection of homosexual, lesbian and bi-sexual people from discrimination.

'The overwhelming majority of people in our country want a society where every citizen is treated fairly and with respect.'

she quoth.

Does she never think of what she is saying? Every citizen? Child-abusers, rapists, wife-beaters? She goes on,

'The principles behind these measures are straightforward. It cannot be right in a decent, tolerant society that a shopkeeper or restaurant can refuse to serve a customer because they are gay. It cannot be right for a school to discriminate against a child because of their parents’ sexuality or not to take homophobic bullying as seriously as they should.'

Firstly, all societies discriminate against some of their members in some way or the other. One of Ms Kelly's colleagues over at the Dept. of Health is reckoning on discriminating against would be clients of the NHS by refusing treatment on the basis of their smoking or being considered overweight. Ms Hewitt already discriminates against some sick people on the basis of the treatment they require being too expensive, or because they are considered to be too old.

The government discriminates among field sports by allowing fishermen to hook fish out of lakes, rivers and canals or shooters to blast various birds out of the sky, while denying others the right to chase after foxes. They presumably feel that a partridge doesn't mind being killed while foxes are very opposed to the idea.

In a few years time there is going to be some pretty massive discrimination going on. Various selection committees will discriminate against certain athletes because they can't run fast enough or jump high enough to be included in the UK (if it still exists) football team. Which reminds me that the government discriminates against me by allowing the residents of Scotland to vote for Scottish MPs who sit in Westminster, but not the other way around.

The examples she gives in the press release are too futile for words. I've yet to meet the restaurateur who puts sexual proclivity before filling an empty table. Bullying is bullying is bullying. It matters not a jot whether it is homophobic bullying, misogynist bullying or economic bullying. Mind you, with the government's ambivalent attitudes to obesity possibly that will be allowed.

Of course the examples given in the Kelly press release carefully avoid mention of the rights of various pairs of individuals to adopt children, also a part of this legislation. What matters most is the welfare of the child. Instead of defining by law who can adopt, it would be far better that anybody who can prove to provide an adequate and caring home for a child should be presumed to be a candidate, irrespective of their cultural or racial background or sexual proclivity.

The connecting threads running through all these narratives are the entwined concepts of fairness and rights as perceived by self-defined groups in society. This process is divisive. Government becomes the tool of whoever clamours the loudest or happens to chime with the latest fad of a self-proclaimed intellectual elite, desperately competing to prove their credentials. By pandering to such people the government is causing ever more and deeper divisions. It should be healing society, not dismembering it.