Dear Anti-Feminists, Your Sexism isn’t Rebellious or Original
There is nothing visionary about parroting millennia-old arguments.
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Being a revolutionary has a certain romance about it.
That is why Che Guevara is printed on everything from T-shirts to condoms, and why teenagers want to rebel, wear all black, get piercings and tattoos and tell their parents they are wrong about everything. Questioning the status quo is cool, it makes you slightly ahead of the crowd, a little different. Teenagers need to feel like that — in fact, we all do.
There is something romantic about the underdog taking on the system, it feeds into our feelings that everything is possible, that we can be brave and live epic lives, whatever the odds. It’s why there are more films about Davids than Goliaths, and why it is tempting to see yourself as the underdog, even when all the evidence points to your being in a position of privilege.
Take Donald Trump, a rich, white guy who was elected president on the premise that he was anti-establishment. He was the candidate of the falsely rebellious vote, stemming from exactly the same mindset as the topic of this rant: anti-feminists thinking they are being oh so creative, clever and anti-mainstream by repeating things that have been said since forever.
People who see themselves as rebels can often be Trumps, rather than Ches.
Actors of the sexist backlash see themselves as avant-garde revolutionaries. They feel like they are being original, telling the hard truths about a feminism they perceive to have taken over the world. They fight against Political Correctness, which they brandish as the proof that equality has been achieved, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
They congratulate themselves on being controversial, while supporting the status quo, and being about as cool as an old rich white guy smoking a cigar in a man’s club in the 50s and pinching the waitress’ bottom when she comes to serve him a whiskey. About as rebellious as a drunk uncle at a wedding going off on a racist tangent. And about as original as sexism has ever been: ie, not at all.
