‘Women can’t be sexist’ – I’ve rarely heard anything as sexist in my life

Though it isn’t often discussed in great detail, there are different kinds of feminism. Almost all of them function under the same objective – the eradication of bigotry around gender to allow everyone the freedom to live unobstructed.

Most people will agree that it is wrong to sideline or inhibit the progress of women simply because they are women.

If a woman is the best candidate for a job, she should be given the job. She should not be treated with less respect than a man by virtue of her gender, and so on. She should have the same rights as a man to autonomy, bodily and otherwise. In this part of the world at least, we think it’s ludicrous that an adult woman should have to seek permission from a male “guardian” to access medical attention, get an education, or leave the house.

I am what you might call an egalitarian feminist. I think that women and men are inherently equal in value, regardless of arbitrary objects dangling or nestling in their damper areas, and should be treated as such. This means I advocate equal treatment.

I think women should have the same autonomy as men, and that both sexes should have equal responsibility as people and citizens. It is important to note that equality doesn’t mean parity – I don’t believe that we necessarily must have a 50-50 gender split in every job from hairdressing to university lecturing. I believe we should all have unimpeded choice.

Sexist treatment

I was having tea with a friend when we got talking about women and sexism, though not in the way you might think. She relayed an incident at work, where a female colleague had spoken very rudely to an employee in his 30s, and called him “boy”.

I remarked with some distaste that the woman should at least be disciplined for such sexist treatment. My friend looked surprised, “Well it was rude of course, but women can’t be sexist towards men. That’s ridiculous. It was probably a bigoted thing to do, but only men can be sexist”. I’d rarely heard any statement as sexist in my life.

This perspective is increasingly common, and finds its expression in post-structuralist thinking which suggests that individuals aren’t what’s important when looking at inequality.

Rather, structures are. According to this view, because women as a group are structurally disadvantaged (and they are on a global scale), under the thumb of male-dominated and unfair social and economic structures, their individual actions are secondary. It follows that the system keeps women down, and men benefit from that, so how could any behaviour exhibited by a woman ever be sexist when ultimately she doesn’t have the power?

I consider this view one of the most regressive of our era. Feminists have struggled for so long to achieve a level playing field precisely because individual women have suffered – and still suffer – in the billions. We are not a demographic, a faceless collective, but a group of individuals. The purpose of feminism is to allow every woman to pursue her free choice according to her own individual human potential.

Oppressed

It is important to recognise the structures that limit and restrain women, and others. But to casually remove our own agency, and suggest that our individual behaviour towards other people “can’t be sexist” because we are oppressed, is incredibly unprogressive.

I’ve had some women tell me that my disagreement with this outlook indicates that I “clearly haven’t read enough” or that I’m “not a feminist”. This, of course, is nonsense. I’ve done little other than read about theories like this one for over a decade. I simply disagree with it. It is about time we stopped presenting theories (poor, logically indefensible ones at that) as fact.

Women have been kicked about by history, and they still have great and unjust challenges to face, but they are not victims of a structure that robs them of agency.

It robs them of the dignity we all deserve. You can be oppressed and still sexist, and to look at an individual person and reduce them to nothing more than a set of reproductive organs (of any kind) is the very definition of sexism. We don’t have diminished responsibility or less power to damage other individuals through sexist behaviour – to suggest as much would be sexist.