That microcosmic moment (and four other stories)
Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism.
Happy Saturday. I have somehow managed to write this while my daughter, expressing various levels of boredom, potters and bangs about the living room. I think it’s good to be bored sometimes, though. Don’t you?
Now to the reads….
1. Luis Rubiales peels back pretense — and still hasn’t resigned
In a sign that we are yet to treat women’s football with the same esteem as men’s, Spain’s World Cup win — and the tournament as a whole — is still being overshadowed by the kiss that Luis Rubiales, the president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation, planted on the lips of Spanish forward Jenni Hermoso.
Since the final, Rubiales has been suspended by Fifa, football’s global governing body, while it investigates the incident, which Hermoso said was non-consensual. To protect Rubiales, who at the time of writing still refused to resign and blamed “false feminism” for the whole debacle, Spain’s football federation released a statement and photos claiming that it was Hermoso who instigated the kiss. Now, the federation’s regional leaders are calling on him to step down, and the coach of the Spanish men’s national team is reportedly “begging for forgiveness” for initially supporting Rubiales. Prosecutors in Spain are yet to decide whether the incident is a crime of sexual assault. And in the meantime, Rubiales’ mother, Angeles Bejar, locked herself inside a church and announced she was going on hunger strike in support of her son. She has since been hospitalised and discharged. Yesterday, Rubiales spoke out again, saying he was “advancing feminism”.
As with everything, these events are both symbol and reality. There are the facts (a woman doing her job — being a footballer and winning the World Cup, no less — and being touched inappropriately by her boss in front of the entire world while at the apex of her professional achievement), and then there is what the facts signify. This was a microcosmic moment that peeled back the pretense that men take women as seriously as they take men.
Annabel Crabb has written a piece that places the kiss in the context of other examples around the tournament that also demonstrate this (e.g. the world leaders who didn’t bother attending the final). Here is a snippet:
All this woman has done is be good at her job. All she has done is display merit. All she wants to do right now, presumably, is dance around with her colleagues and pour cava over her head, while basking in the love and pride of her country.
But no: Now her moment of triumph will forever be marred, not just by her boss disrespecting her in front of a global audience, but by that same boss's decision that his personal status is more important than the achievement of his team.
If merit is so important, then why won't the future King of England fly to a Commonwealth country to witness it? Why won't football writers acknowledge it? Why don't vast, wealthy football behemoths pay for it? Why don't male media executives think viewers will watch it?
How meritorious, exactly, do you have to be as a woman in order to render yourself invulnerable to the marauding incompetence of men who are paid better than you are?
And, just in case you missed it, last month the president of Fifa, Gianni Infantino, irritated a lot of people with tone-deaf comments on gender equality, including telling women footballers that they “have the power to convince us men what we have to do.” The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say.
2) An evolutionary puzzle
What can evolutionary biology tell us about sex and gender? This extract from a new book by Prosanta Chakrabaty explains the limits and possibilities of trying to understand these in evolutionary terms. Chakrabaty writes:
“Sex” is complicated, much more so in the expression of physical traits than of the physical act. It is perhaps even more complicated than “race,” and, as we have done with human “races,” we have historically pigeonholed the spectrum of sex into discrete categories that don’t actually fit reality.
The piece also has some interesting comparisons with the animal kingdom, where gender doesn’t exist in the same way it does for us humans. For example:
We can observe and have observed same-sex mating in sexually reproducing animals across the animal kingdom, but gender is not so “straightforward” as sexuality in animals. An evolutionary biologist colleague, Jeremy Yoder, once told me, “You’re really not going to find a clear analogue to human transgender identity in the nonhuman world, because animals really only have gender in the sense that they have social behaviors and signals involved in mating.” That is, it would be a lot easier to infer gender expression in animals if all you had to do is notice, for instance, that a male elephant is acting like a female elephant, but most of the time elephants are, well, just acting like elephants, and you can’t tell them apart by their behavior. Anyway, there really is no need to impose a gender on animals that clearly don’t have one. Which leads me to wonder: Do humans need genders? I’m not sure we gain anything from these restrictive labels. If elephants don’t need them, maybe we don’t either? Certainly, I can’t think of why we need genders in an evolutionary context.
3) Anti-Semitism and the manosphere
What do misogyny and the oldest hatred have in common?
(author of the highly recommended newsletter ) explains why influencers of the manosphere are dabbling in anti-Semitism.She writes:Media Matters’ Justin Horowitz, who reported on this embrace of antisemitism by many in the manosphere, has theorized that these podcasters and influencers are pushing out antisemitism because extremism is popular. It is on the rise globally, including in the United States, sometimes with deadly consequences.
But there is another element at play, too. Offering listeners and viewers of the manosphere a dose of antisemitism offers them the same thing as misogyny does: an easy explanation. It might not be true, but it is simple and comforting. In a sense, the impulse behind misogyny and antisemitism, and their appeal, are the same.
4) Listening to silences
My very brilliant sister-in-law Revital Madar has published an article examining the claim that, aside from the 1948 war, sexual violence and rape are virtually absent from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with the Israeli military hardly committing such crimes. As part of the premise of her analysis, she cites this intriguing idea from a 2007 paper by Susan Slyomovics:
Silence is also informative: if no confirmation exists in archival sources that something did or did not happen, such silences merely inform about a lack in the documentation and not that the information does not exist.
The article reminded me how easy it can be not to question assumed knowledge, and how important it is to do so. In this case, Madar uncovers evidence of sexual violence and outlines problematic comparisons in the academic literature between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other wars. Regarding the “silence” of the archives, she also makes a salient point about the women and victims more generally (in this case, Palestinians) who are not heard in particular contexts. She writes:
In certain situations, it is not enough to rely on women's testimonies to bypass the positivistic constraints of the law. Sometimes, it is not enough to “believe women” to avoid silencing them. For some women, for some people, their subordination, and their dependence on certain institutions, relegates them to spaces of invisibility and silence. As researchers, we must render these spaces and experiences visible while keeping them safe. We cannot consider silence as conclusive proof that a crime has not taken place. Instead, we should be attentive to more than clear-cut testimonies of legally constructed sexual offenses, precisely in cases of sexual abuses in the context of ongoing colonial and settler-colonial occupation. In these spaces, collective fear of rape can, in itself, be indicative (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 1993). It may not serve us in court (although I believe it should), but it should be enough to prevent us from deeming the content of these fears a rarity.
5) Liberal feminist nostalgia
Lucinda Rosenfeld reflects on what she sees as the hankering of contemporary feminism for a past of simpler struggles. Her essay on feminist popular culture takes in Taylor Swift, the Barbie movie (of course!), and two novels about women in Stem. She writes:
The popularity of these books, like that of the “Barbie” movie, raises the uncomfortable question of whether today’s feminist currents are too much the province of the already lucky and privileged. For in the end, it’s women who haven’t gone to elite universities—and who don’t look like Margot Robbie or have her Hollywood lifestyle—who are most in need of protection from harassment on the job, as well as access to affordable child care and healthcare.
And also:
Maybe the greatest irony of Barbie-style feminism is that it’s on the ascent at the same time as the very concept of woman is in dispute. “It has always been a central goal of feminism to repudiate the very idea of womanhood, as a form of coercive control that means the end of freedom,” wrote the British cultural critic Jacqueline Rose in a recent essay—which might come as a surprise to all the women clad in hot pink at the cineplex this summer. It’s impossible to know which side will win—those rooting for the triumph of womanhood and the vindication of the feminine, or those hoping to do away with the very idea of sexual difference, seeing it as a trap for regressive ideas about how we should live.
Bonus: Gwyneth Paltrow says her vagina candle is feminist (sorry, I had to) |
with possibly the only article on the internet that doesn’t take the Barbie movie overly seriously as a feminist totem | Are you offended by this urinal?Thank you for reading. See you next week.