Cartoon Feminism: Dr. Taylor’s Shirt #Feminism #Pseudofeminism
In the last 100 years, feminists have fought for the rights of women all over the world; they have fought for equality of political voice, wage parity, reproductive health rights, equal access to education and job opportunity, the end of female genital mutilation, rape as a tactic of war, the kidnapping and selling of women into slavery, forced marriage, the legal status of rape victims, the mass extermination of female fetuses in China and India…
These are the laudable causes that feminists have fought for on behalf of ALL humans.
But the attack on Mr. Matt Taylor for wearing a shirt with a print of scantily clad cartoon characters on it is not feminist. It’s lazy, opportunistic, hype- and controversy-garnering manipulation of the media at the expense of ruining a single, accomplished scientist’s career. It’s blatant hacktivism that depreciates the very real cause of feminism.
And if it is feminism’s purview to combat the multiple ways in which women are represented in dehumanizing ways, that’s fine too; start with MTV, and 50% of all the billboard ads, and page three of the Sun, and every variety show with scantily clad women dancing on it. We live in a society inundated with the marketization of sexual imagery involving the objectification of women, and increasingly, the sexual objectification of men. If this offends you, take the fight to the culprits – the entities who’ve been using sex to sell things to us for the last 50 years. To pick on a single scientist’s cartoon shirt is absurd.
This is CARTOON feminism and the people who have applauded it aren’t feminists. They are active and destructive participants in the erosion of a very important movement that concerns itself with the very real and very serious issue of the inequality of women in the world.
What is more, the attack on Dr. Matt Taylor also speaks to a forced ‘norming’ of how science is visually represented in the mainstream, and a reactionary response to a scientist who doesn’t look like a stereotypical scientist.
In my books, that’s Queer shaming.
Rather than attacking the ‘institutions’, modern feminism now seems to attack people, the messengers rather than the message. A form of bullying?
And that shirt was made for Dr Taylor’s birthday by the wife of his tattoo artist.
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This is why I said that this cannot come under the heading of any sort of a feminist cause.
Who made the shirt is sort of irrelevant, because the shirt is irrelevant. Offence, or reading the shirt as ‘sexist’ is ridiculously subjective. It may offend some people, and others may love it.
We have tangible proof that, since the emergence of science, women have not found an equal and comfortable place in that field. There are social modeling reasons, and institutional reasons for this. Shaming a guy for his shirt does NOT even begin to address that issue.
Moreover, for those women who claim that what they have done was a feminist act… what happens when they wear something that offends someone else? Heels too high, dress too short, pattern too loud, make-up too heavy… it’s a very dangerous slope, supporting the rights of a mob to determine what someone wears. Because that is ultimately how it ended up with all women wearing full veils in places like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.
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I replied after I’d read Julie Bindel’s piece in the Graun. She’s not someone I’d normally agree with:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/18/feminism-rosetta-scientist-shirt-dapper-laughs-julien-blanc-inequality
And the information about the origin of the shirt is somewhere in the comments [and if I had a friend who made such shirts, I’d wear it with pride: and if my team had just plonked a washing machine on a comet…]. Yet I’d say that Ms Bindel is right; modern feminism attacks the person, not the institution; something that is easy to do, something that gains headlines but it doesn’t address the real issues. And the real issues include: is this the result of patriarchy, or are they something to do with the “culture”? Where did tolerance and understanding disappear to?
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