Question & Answer: Can Women Be Sexist?
Hey, I just read your piece on the friend zone. I wanted to ask you about your use of the term “reverse-sexist.” Couldn’t you just have said sexist? The term can be applied to men just as it can women. I liked your post but as a guy I can’t help but feel (as I do often) that the notion of sexism in 2012 has become entirely one-sided. Do you believe that women are capable of being sexist?
Anonymous
This is a tricky one, because it relates to questions of power, culture and privilege.
Sexism is both a cultural and institutional issue. As a social phenomenon, it reinforces antiquated gender binaries, encouraging us to think of women as this and men as that, to the detriment of both sexes. However, while men do suffer as a result of enforced ideas of masculinity, the majority of instances which provoke social censure for men occur when they transgress by adopting (perceived) feminine behaviours or ideals - when they challenge traditional masculinity. This is because the sexism of our society is geared to see femininity as weak or undesireable: men who act like women, or who are perceived to act like women, are penalised because the idea of men behaving in feminine ways is considered shameful, unnatural, wrong. And this is a very bad thing, and most definitely a consequence of sexism.
However, the same social system that denigrates femininity and femaleness is set up to support masculinity and men. That’s a generalised way of putting it, but what it means, essentially, is that while men receive the vast majority of their social sanctions for behaving in perceived-feminine ways, women are punished for just being women, regardless of whether we do so in a feminine or masculine way. To take just one example of this, women who behave aggressively and confidently in the workplace are seen as castrating, icy and untrustworthy, while men who do the same are seen to be showing leadership; yet if we behave passively, we are passed over for recognition and promotion - and either way, we still earn less than men.
In far too many ways, society presents women with lose-lose scenarios, so that even if we toe the line and behave in traditionally feminine ways, we still end up being belittled and denigrated; whereas men are very clearly and consistently rewarded for particular behaviours.
What this means is that sexism against women is institutional: it never happens in a vacuum, it is more or less non-stop on a societal level, all women will encounter it at some point or another - but most of the time, no one is actively trying to repress us. Instead, the system is so geared to our repression that it occurs by default, as a byproduct of society functioning normally. In order to counteract the effects of sexism, women are constantly having to work twice as hard, not just in terms of battling sexist individuals, but navigating and negating everyday behaviours which the majority of people - both men and women - have been trained to see as neutral, but which in fact are actively detrimental to women.
What this means for your question is that, while men certainly do suffer negative consequences and bad social programming as a result sexism, and while it is definitely possible for men to be discriminated against on the basis of their gender, they also, however unwillingly or unthinkingly, enjoy the benefits of sexism: this is called male privilege. And what it means is that, even when men do transgress against sexist systems, they receive so much innate support and benefit from those systems that, unless they actively choose or are forced to fling themselves headlong against it, they simply cannot experience the daily levels of sexism that are leveled against women.
If we lived in a truly equal society and sexism, rather than being a daily reality, was just one of any number of hypothetical ways in which one individual could hamper another individual, then it genuinely would be one-sided to make any discussion of sexism all about women. But the sad fact is, we don’t live in that world. All too often, men are blinded to their privilege, because it works so subtly and quietly to support them that they tend to assume that women must be experiencing the exact same benefits as they are, when in fact, not only are women missing out on advantages available to men, but are actively suffering penalties that men do not.
So if the discussion of sexism seems one-sided - if feminists like me sometimes seem uninterested in or oblivious to male problems - this is only because the application of sexism is so heavily weighted against women. So, yes, women can be sexist towards men; frequently, in fact, we are sexist towards other women, because that’s something we’re trained to do, too. We cannot, however, be institutionally sexist towards men, because we lack the social power to do so - the only arena in which we can even come close is parenting, and even there, society will still reward active fathers while punishing active mothers. Sexism hasn’t become one-sided: it is one-sided (or at least lopsided), and has been for thousands of years.
I hope that answers your question.
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