Feminism and the Need to Treat all Adults as Moral Agents

Recently I was reading an online Feminist article that detailed a website which was promoting sexist, ridiculous and very idiotic views concerning how men ought to treat woman. The article explicitly made the point that the fact that there are men out there who still think in this way is morally contemptible and that work needs to be redoubled to educate these males.

One of the most disturbing things about the article they referred to however was not to be found in the body of the text, but in the comments section that followed it. For the article had lots of supportive comments, with many of them coming from woman. Some of the female commentators were congratulating the author for his “insights” and even adding to his ideas. Of course some of these could have been from men pretending to be woman so I did a web search to see how wide ranging female support of such ideas really were. This sadly confirmed my suspicions that the views that this man held were also echoed by many women across the world (particularly within religious communities). Views that wives should take leadership from their husbands, stay at home, dress in particular ways etc.

My concern with the article was the way that it held the man (and men more generally) as morally responsible for his views while not mentioning the obvious support of many women. My problem however was not that the article thus denigrated men but the very opposite. By mentioning only the man as morally responsible (remaining silent about the large number of female supporters), the article implicitly treated the man as a moral agent who was responsible for his views. More than this, the article spoke about men more generally, thus treating all men as morally responsible beings.

By doing this, the article remained within the traditional patriarchal frame because of the way that it saw men as free agents responsible for their actions while implicitly treating the woman as passive victims to be treated more like children. As we know the views of woman in the West (and beyond) have traditionally not been treated with the respect of being worthy of disagreement. Women were not treated as moral agents with legitimate positions to be engaged with. They were patronized as not really knowing what they were talking about or not being responsible for their thoughts. It was men who were taken seriously enough to be listened to, judged and condoned or condemned.

The problem then with attacking only men who hold sexist views (targeting male-focused magazines and not female focused ones etc.) is that we actually keep supporting a system that sees the man as the primary moral agent and woman as child-like victims of circumstance. In this way any attack that focuses only on sexism that arises from men betrays the wider cause of feminism.

The problem is not that there are still men who comport themselves toward woman in sexist ways, but that there are still people who do. If we believe that we are moral agents (and it would take a different post to argue why I do support a version of that idea) then we must take the bold act of holding all people accountable for what they say. This very act of attacking both men and woman is a key move in feminism, for it treats all adults as responsible and worthy of critique, thus undermining a very deeply embedded ideological support of patriarchy. If we do not do this then we continue to effectively support the patriarchal pattern of treating some people as less than the moral agents they would likely want to be treated as.