Feminists don't hate men (and four other stories)

Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism.

It’s Sunday morning, I have coffee — and you have these reads…

1) Study confirms: feminists don’t hate men

The authors of a multi-country study say they have debunked the stereotype that feminists are also misandrists, a stereotype that is very much a function of the backlash against the movement for women’s rights and equality. As per PsyPost:

“We had started to notice a trend in the popularity of feminism among younger women and were interested in this social change given the negative stereotypes associated with feminists in the media,” said study author Aífe Hopkins-Doyle, an assistant professor at the University of Surrey.

The study tested attitudes among feminists and non-feminists in western and non-western countries and among nearly 10,000 participants. Here’s more:

The results from this study revealed that both feminists and nonfeminists held positive attitudes toward men. Contrary to the misandry stereotype, feminists did not exhibit significantly different attitudes toward men compared to nonfeminists. While there was no significant difference in hostility toward men, feminists were found to be less benevolent toward men than nonfeminists.

Hopkins-Doyle and her colleagues also found that feminist collective action, such as participation in the #MeToo movement, was unrelated to explicit attitudes towards men. However, it was positively associated with collective anger about women’s experiences of sexual misconduct.

“Feminism is associated with anger about men’s mistreatment of women, but not with negative overall evaluations of men,” Hopkins-Doyle told PsyPost.

2) Women in Gaza giving birth with no pain relief

Israel’s bombardment of Gaza continues, and women continue to be pregnant and give birth in a war zone with little to no food, water, or healthcare facilities, including pain relief. This BBC report by Yogita Limaye details the circumstances in which women are labouring in the Strip. According to the report:

The WHO says maternal deaths are expected to increase in Gaza given the lack of access to adequate care. It says the hostilities have direct and deadly consequences for pregnancies, with a rise in stress-induced miscarriages, stillbirths and premature births.

Asma is from Gaza City but is now living with her three young children in a tent in the compound of the Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza. She's pregnant and before she was forced to flee her home, she had gone to the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City for a check-up.

"Due to the constant sound of bombings, many women suffered miscarriages at Al-Shifa. The situation is unbearable, especially for pregnant mothers. I'm really worried about my baby and about having a miscarriage," Asma says. "Waking up with aching bones has become a daily reality. We're exposed to unsanitary conditions. And we've repeatedly witnessed distressing sights of dead bodies."

3) Commission collects evidence of sexual violence in Hamas attack

There is evidence, from survivor testimony and from the bodies of people killed in Hamas’ 7th October attack on southern Israel, that women were victims of sexual violence that day. Haaretz’s Allison Kaplan Sommer reports on a new civil commission set up to gather evidence on what happened. Last month, Israeli women’s groups wrote an open letter calling on UN Women to condemn the massacre and its targeting of women and children, including incidents of rape.

On the Haaretz podcast, Kaplan Sommer spoke to Professor Ruth Halperin-Kaddari of Bar-Ilan University, who is a member of the commission. Halperin-Kaddari spent 12 years on the UN Committee on Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. This is from the write-up of the episode:

The UN-affiliated groups Halperin-Kaddari has worked with were founded with the mission of “protecting women from violence, to champion women’s rights, and to acknowledge when harm is done to women. And now, when we Israeli women are faced with the most horrible occurrence of ‘conflict-related sexual violence,’ there is complete silence.

“By being silent here, they’re not only failing us Israeli women, they’re undermining the whole system. They lose credibility. By not referring to the ongoing crime of holding hostages, they are in fact legitimising [it] – and you might even say that they’re complicit in this situation of hostages being kept without a word about their whereabouts, without a word about their condition. They are also providing ammunition to all those who are already engaged in a denial campaign.”

Kaplan-Sommer also spoke to Lili Ben Ami, an advocate on domestic violence, who expressed concern for domestic abuse victims after Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir made it easier for Israelis to get their hands on guns, ostensibly for self-defence.

Her organiation, she says, “is now receiving calls every day from worried women and domestic violence survivors” that their abusers will now get access to a firearm. When her group looked into the matter…they found that the distribution plan did not contain a screening mechanism that would prevent men with criminal records related to domestic violence from obtaining a gun.

Yet another example of the potential for dire unintended consequences when policymakers don’t take women into account.

P.s. A 35-year old Thai migrant worker was heavily pregnant when Hamas kidnapped her on 7th October. She has now given birth in captivity. At the time of writing, the International Red Cross had still had no access to the hostages, but an imminent release deal for women and children was being reported.

4) Scotland adopts feminist foreign policy

Scotland has become the latest country to announce a feminist foreign policy. Sweden, the pioneer on this front, dropped the policy last year. At a forum for women’s leadership in Iceland this week, International Development Minister Christina McKelvie told the press:

“We want a feminist policy that questions colonialism, that's actively anti-racist, that targets patriarchy and in some ways the capitalist, imperialist, male-dominated power structures….One of the things we want to prioritise is peace and how peace can protect the rights of women and marginalised groups."

This piece by Laura Llach has some interesting background on a diplomatic incident that may have led to Sweden abandoning its policy.

5) Incel revealed as inventor of 3D printed gun

I’m a bit late to this, but I had to include the story. It is an example both of the potential for violence in the backlash against feminism, and of how misogynist beliefs overlap with far-right worldviews.

Jacob Duygu, a former member of the German military and incel who died in 2021, was apparently the man behind the world’s most popular 3D printed gun. Rajan Basra, a senior research fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College London, discovered his identity via open source research. According to his report, published last month:

Within the world of 3D-printed guns, one pseudonymous figure has emerged as a symbol for the cause of universal access to firearms: “JStark1809”. He created the world’s most popular 3D-printed gun and established an influential network of 3D-printed gun designers. Since his death in July 2021, he has been memorialised as a martyr for the right to bear arms.

Based on open sources, this report identifies “JStark1809” as Jacob Duygu, a German national born to Kurdish parents who arrived as refugees from Southeast Turkey in the 1990s

From his online comments and activity, Duygu was obsessed with weapons and had far-right, racist and anti-Semitic views, as well as being an incel:

JStark’s “anonymous” comments reveal his life as an incel (involuntarily celibate). He felt his autism, height, looks, and ethnicity would shatter his chances of having a sexual or romantic relationship in Germany. In 2018, he travelled to the Philippines to escape his life as an incel.

He regularly made misogynist comments. He sometimes revelled in female suffering and despaired at his lack of relative power. He varied between condoning incel-motivated violence and seeing it as inevitable. Shortly before his arrest in June 2021, he threatened violence: “I will literally kill , (sic) or kill myself soon if i can’t sleep in a bed with a girl again …”.

Bonus: An archeological find in Spain is evidence of ancient fluidity over gender roles

Thanks so much for reading. See you next time.