
Boys should have the right to say no to feminism
Article here. Excerpt:
'The evangelical drive to teach boys to be feminists reached a new high last week with the news that every 16-year-old in Sweden is to be given a free copy of the book “We Should All Be Feminists”.
The short essay, based on a 2013 TED talk by the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, has become a sacred text for those who share Yvette Cooper’s belief that “we need our sons growing up as confident feminists”.
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However, as a straight, white male from working-class roots living a fairly middle-class lifestyle (a demographic one of my mates describes as “half-classed”), I’m left wondering if there is a stage anywhere in the world where a young man could be applauded for saying:
“I have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my maleness and for my masculinity and I want to respected in all of my maleness because I deserve to be!”
It may sound comical but in a truly egalitarian world we would welcome such declarations of male and female empowerment with parity. And yet my personal experience of the feminist worldview that dominates gender politics, is that rather than encourage the empowerment of men, it expects us to apologise for our maleness, our masculinity and our manhood.
So the day I gave up apologising for being my own man – both to socially-conservative traditionalists and to progressive, liberal feminists – was the day I became an unapologetic, card-carrying non-feminist.'
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