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"Guilt is a rite of passage for a male feminist but so is transforming that guilt into wonder. Feminist values create a world of emotional transparency. I glimpsed this world at antiwar protests where men and women fought against police, calling each other “sister” and “brother.” But it wasn’t until Burning Man in 2002 that I experienced true gender equality. In the sun-bleached Nevada desert, 30,000 people built a city on the principles of radical self-expression and decommodified immediate experience. Many women walked around nude, topless or in elaborate costumes and for the most part, men did not leer or stalk.
In that free space, women walked with a confidence and power because they weren’t selling themselves to a male gaze but expressing desire in their own language. Surveying the magazines at an airport news stand before my flight back to New York, I was struck by how the female body was used like a sponge to wash down cars or watches or male celebrities."
MORE ROLE MODELS NEEDEDJúlíana Björnsdóttir
04/01/2012 - 10:42am
Reading your column made me both sad and happy. I felt sad for the same reasons you do, that is, the sexist nature of the world we live in, but happy because there are more of us out there who long for equality.
In Iceland where I am currently a resident, feminists are fighting an up-hill battle against sexist sense of "humour". A local "celebrity", a man in his mid-twenties at the time, found it hilarious to subject Icelandic feminists participating in the debate for equality as "hairy lesbians in need of 'a good rape'". When the same individual was later accused of raping an 18 years old, his followers ganged up on the victim in the media's commentary systems, and young female supporters went as far as to say "he could rape them anytime".
In a television series where his humour was celebrated and acknowledged as such, he categorized women into two categories: feminazis and princesses. All future shows have been cancelled due to the charges pressed against him but the humour lives on.
Iceland is supposed to be on the very forefront of gender equality and yet my concerns as well as those of other feminists are made light of, we are overreacting when we ask our society stops subjecting children to gendered toys (pink lego for girls, of course).
I really wish we had more male feminists such as yourself to teach the young generation what feminism is actually about; we have a a few good ones fighting the good fight with us and when they speak, people listen.
It seems to me that if a man declares gender equality to be a problem, the world listens. When I complain, I should be careful not to be so aggressive as to question some of the fundamentals in our society.
Since the financial crisis commenced in 2008, the salary gap has gone from 17% to 25% here in Iceland, a clear sign of how the world perceives a group of individuals who really only want the world to be a place where the individual within is the mark of one's character, not the body we're born in.
Keep up the good fight. I know I will.
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