Response to David Willetts on feminism

David Willetts claimed yesterday that feminism has put men out of work, essentially making the age-old argument that ‘they’re taking our jobs’. 

When I first heard about the story, although not funny enough to be an April Fool, I did wonder if it had originated in the Daily Mash - because the story relies on precisely the reverse logic that characterises their satire.  

With that in mind, let’s see what we get if we make Willietts’s argument backwards:  “Ongoing social and economic gender inequality are manifestations of centuries of patriarchy, the majority of the ill-effects of which are borne by women.  Despite many years of feminist struggle, this imbalance has yet to be redressed.”  Which, far from being Daily Mash material, seems like a bit of a platitude.

Now, let’s invert the wording of Willetts’ argument and see what we get.  “Men should be helped to get more jobs, at the expense of women, who should be encouraged to stay at home as dependents.”  Which doesn’t sound quite as reasonable as his caveat that “It is delicate territory, because it is not a bad thing that women had these opportunities”.

And even this magnanimous caveat isn’t particularly reasonable, indicating as it does that that Willetts doesn’t see women as part of society, but as an external group trying to encroach on it.  

It is significant that Willetts is the Universities Minister, and his views speak volumes about the ideology behind the government’s education cuts.  They’re not about the economy, but about keeping people in their place.  He specifically associates current male unemployment with feminism’s success in broadening women’s access to education in the 1960s.  

It is clear that the Conservative agenda is to use the cuts, particularly those to education, as a tool to roll back the advances in the rights of women and other marginalised groups, which have been made over the last four decades. 

Meanwhile, Christina “I live at the grungy end of the King’s Road in Chelsea” Odone, while actually disagreeing  with Willetts, uses media coverage of his comments as a somewhat flimsy hook on which to hang a totally unrelated attack on feminism, opting for another old favourite - “feminists hate men”.  It is the tenuousness of the link that belies the motive for her attack. 

For all the rhetoric of being ‘In this together’, conservatives across the land continue to expose the real aims of their policies – and they’re unrelated to any exceptional circumstances implied by the language of financial ‘crisis’.  The goal is to protect the status quo – the same as it’s always been.