What right have we to hate?

Recently I went to a talk debating whether or not feminist campaigns should appeal to men. This was by far one of the most interesting hours of my life spent so far.

I personally believe in complete and utter inclusion of men in feminism. Feminism isn’t a concept that is solely for women: it is defined as ‘advocacy of equality of the sexes’ – note that here sex is described as PLURAL, not singular. Therefore clearly feminism relates to men just as much as it does to women. Everyone can be a feminist if they share feminist values, surely? So I was appalled when certain speakers, who were anti male involvement, came out with this little insight into their mindset: whilst one clearly stated that people should not be defined by their gender, which is a purely ‘social construct’, the other went ahead and made a comment that explicitly separated the genders, claiming in no uncertain terms that all women must hate men, because of the privilege that naturally comes with being a man. What a load of *insert rude word*. Surely this is reinforcing the gender stereotypes that they were, at first, so keen to stamp out? You cannot see things in such black and white terms. If everyone thought that way, I would have to turn to my dad, my brother, my granddad, my uncles, my cousin, my boyfriend, my friends, all who I dearly love and respect, and say “Sorry folks, because of a few differences in our biological make up, as a feminist I must hate you.” See how ridiculous this is? We simply cannot split ourselves into these separate factions, just because all people are naturally different to each other. Just think about so many aspects of society where this has dramatically gone wrong.

Tuesday the 27^th of January marked seventy years since the liberation of Auschwitz. 70 years since the horror of what happened there, and in other parts of Europe, truly came to light. Auschwitz and the many concentration camps like it were full of people who were seen as different, through religion, disability, sexuality, or their political views. It was a bid to stamp all difference out of society. When I was 15 I went to Auschwitz and I will never ever forget it. The image of the message above the gate to the camp, ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (Work sets you free), will stay with me forever, the sheds that people were kept in, as though they were no better than cattle, are still on my mind, and the memory of the path we followed through some woodland to where so many had been mindlessly shot still lingers. They were just people, people like my family, my friends and my community: it could have been us, just in a different time and a different context, with a different small minded person in power. The Holocaust did not succeed in eradicating all difference of belief and opinion in society, but at such a loss to the world. Work did not set them free.

So what right has anyone to turn to a Jewish person, a Sikh, a Muslim, an Atheist, a Christian, a Hindu, and say “we believe in different things, therefore I must hate you”? What right has a heterosexual person to say to a homosexual person, “You share different feelings to me, therefore I must hate you”? And what right does a woman have to say to a man, “You are male, therefore I must hate you”, and vice versa? Out of hatred is born further hatred, and further hatred, and the cycle will just continue, on and on and on. Unless we (finally) start to embrace that people are different, think differently, feel differently and believe in different things. It is natural to be different; it is unnatural to demand that everyone is the same. How boring would the world be if everybody thought the same, looked the same and said all the same things? This brings to mind the final line of The Great Gatsby:

“And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

At this point, the full horror of the events of the novel has passed, and nothing has changed. Life returns to the same repetitive and monotonous horror that it always was, because no one thinks any differently.

Reeling this back in to my first point: feminism can only succeed if everyone in society is included. Creating divisions among humans has been proven time and time again to have catastrophic consequences: therefore creating a hostile divide between genders cannot and must not become a universal train of thought. Of course I know there is deep gender inequality in the 21^st century, which just shouldn’t exist in the modern world. No one can justify female bosses earning 35% less than male bosses. Or that 70% of people in national minimum wage jobs are women. Or that 130 million women and girls across Africa and the Middle East have suffered Female Genital Mutilation. There is nothing that can make that acceptable.

But this enormous inequality and all these problems simply cannot be solved by women, who quite frankly looked a little crazy, telling a room full of people that all women must hate men. Include everyone, don’t discriminate, and maybe the future will look a little brighter.