John Waters wrote on Monday 18 December 2000 in the Irish Times, “Observe the staggering condescension of a privileged former Oxbridge dame sniping from behind the skirts of working women who have more in common with most working men than with her.”
I loved that quote because I had never thought of it that way before: privileged, middle-class women who have never suffered anything worse in their lives than a clumsy pass or grope from a nervous teenage boy setting themselves up as martyrs in the same league as Bosnian rape victims or African women who have had their genitals mutilated. How were we ever convinced that Penelope from down the lane is somehow in the same group as victims of horrific abuse and oppression? How were we ever convinced to transfer our feelings of sadness and alarm at what happens to other people, sometimes in other places and sometimes in our own cities, to snotty, self-righteous middle-class princesses?
The snotty, self-righteous princesses choose to perpetuate this myth—that they are somehow deeply connected to real female victims simply by virtue of their sex—for an obvious reason: it allows them to swing a club of guilt over everyone else's head. "If you ignore my petty whining it is the same as ignoring the agonized cries of society's victims," they snarl, and we listen. We listen out of a sense of... what? Guilt? Pressure? Stupidity?
The flip side of this myth is what I might call, for the benefit of my fellow Canadians, the "Marc Lepine Myth": the idea that just as all women are in the same group, all men are in the same group. Just as we are supposed to believe that all women deserve our concern because a few women are horribly victimized, we are also supposed to believe that all men deserve our condemnation because a few men are horribly violent.
Is either of these things true? Are all women victims because a few women experience violence? Are all men culpable because a few men are violent?
This logic only works if you accept the idea of dividing the population into the groups, "male" and "female" at the outset, and are willing to accept only that division as your lens on the world's problems.
For another point of view, consider Karl Marx. So far as I know, Marx didn't make any distinction between "bourgeoisie men" and "bourgeoisie women". They were all just "the bourgeoisie". Working class women and working class men were also, for him, interchangeable. He divided society into "working class" and "upper class" and framed all of society's problems, and all of his solutions, in those terms.
The problem with Marx's methods were that they were too simplistic: carving all of the people in a country—or in the world—into two or three groups and generalizing based only on those groups is a flawed strategy. It doesn't matter what groupings you choose: the world is more complex than this, and eventually this shows through.
Feminists assert that the only useful way to view society's problems is to first divide society into "men" and "women" and then proceed from there. There is no substantial difference between this strategy and Marx's strategy. The feminists would claim that "we finally got the groupings right" but they're wrong. The problem is that the whole approach is flawed. Reality is much more complicated than this.
To approach the world on its own terms requires a tricky balance between two truths. First, to treat all people the same regardless of race, ethnic background, sex, or religion is to deny that those things have any impact on who a person is, when they obviously do. Second, to treat all people in a recognizable group as being the same is to deny that people have any individual will, which they obviously do. Whether you try to wallpaper over people's differences and pretend that "deep in side we're all the same" or you try to divide the population into more and more specific groups of "identical" people, you commit the same sin of oversimplifying the situation, and any conclusions you draw will therefore be flawed.
