Anti-male slogans miss the point

  Nicole Seymour Seymour is a fourth-year
American Literature and Culture student. She loves reruns of
"90210" on FX and hates physical exertion. E-mail comments to
[email protected].

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Last week, while shopping in Ackerman, I spotted a girl wearing
a t-shirt that read, “Boys Lie.” This isn’t the
first time I’ve seen girls or women wearing this t-shirt or
ones like it. Unfortunately, these seem to be just the latest in
the growing trend of shallow pseudo-feminism that started back with
the advent of the Spice Girls.

You’ve seen them ““ bumper stickers, t-shirts and
slogans proclaiming such sentiments as “girls rule, boys
drool.” When they first emerged in the past couple years, I
was excited. Like the Riot Grrrl movement or Sassy magazine before,
it seemed as if feminist ideals were getting through to young
women, and mainstream girls were claiming their right to be spunky
and uppity.

Sadly, though, I realized, this trend has insidious and negative
implications not just for the goals feminism has achieved, but for
young women in general. For one thing, it clearly demonstrates the
breakdown and commodification of feminism by the mainstream.

The women’s movement has been distilled into catch
phrases, pettiness and adolescent anger. “Women’s
rights” are being characterized not as the rights to full
reproductive freedom or to be able to walk the streets safely, but
the right to treat men like boys, to make jokes about men being
ugly/gross/stupid/whatever, and to giggle over the inferiority of
“dumb jocks.” This is a fleeting, misleading and
ultimately harmful mind-set, one that writer Joyce Millman has
labeled “[nyah-nyah] schoolyard feminism.”

For one, it suggests that women are freer than they really are
and that, in fact, women are free enough to now trump men. And for
another, the underlying message of these products and accompanying
attitudes seems to be that, hey, feminism has won all its battles,
and so all we’re left with when it comes to males and females
is a jokey, good-natured battle-of-the-sexes.

  Illustration by RODERICK ROXAS/Daily Bruin Even the
seemingly positive, one-sided messages like “Girls
Rule,” “Girls Kick Ass” and “Girl
Power” that bubblegum girl “bands,” Web sites and
even nail polish companies have promulgated is problematic. For one
thing, these sentiments are often left at that point, barely
scratching the surface of issues about girls and empowerment.

While Ginger Spice railed on and on about “guhl
powa,” it apparently extended as far as her posing in a
snarling stance with her fist pointing at the camera. Where were
her recommendations for young women to fight specific acts and
policies that are taking away their power?

In reality, this concept of “girl power” is a
cheerful badge for the privileged teen or young woman to wear; it
doesn’t seem to care either about concrete empowerment, or
the ugly reality of the forces that work against it. Moreover,
while these messages may be unequivocally positive on the outside,
the unspoken idea often seems to be that if girls rule, then, on
the other hand, boys suck.

Young women need to learn, believe and advocate that everyone is
equal ““ which would make a more profound statement than
simply stating that girls rule. While it’s an admirable act
to try to reclaim female power, to do so by putting down men,
indirectly or not, only makes such a project illogical and
self-defeating.

These would-be feminist ideals, which gleefully gloss over the
reality of today’s young women in favor of
“reverse” sexism, aren’t merely located in youth
pop culture or certain t-shirt wearing individuals.

Speaking from experience, I’d say that the majority of
young women, including myself, have participated or continue to
participate in this kind of mentality in more ways than simple
consumerism. Countless times, I have heard women console their girl
friends by saying, “I know, guys suck,” and even more
frequently I have witnessed friends complain about male
insensitivity, emphatically stating, “Boys are so
dumb.”

These are understandable (but not acceptable) reactions
considering the patriarchal nature of our society. These
thoughtless generalizations, like the “Boys Lie” shirt
and the “Girls Rule, Boys Drool” shirts and stickers,
suggest that sisterhood and solidarity can be formed simply by
having a “girl’s night out” and complaining about
the lying, cheating, slobby ways of men.

The problem with this is not just that it makes male cliches
into firm statements, but that it indirectly does the same with
female cliches. For example, to the outside world, someone who
wears such a t-shirt simply appears bitter and irrational. Unfair
or not, this is a characterization that women in general, and
modern feminists in particular, have been fighting throughout time.
Women, especially ones with complaints about men, have had their
feelings dismissed as mere PMS or typical female hysteria and
jealousy (going way back to Shakespeare’s “Hell hath no
fury like a woman scorned”).

While women by no means deserve these sorts of invalidating
characterizations, why would one want to play into this trap by
buying, espousing or displaying such a sentiment as, essentially,
all men are liars? And why do so with such a blatantly
stereotypical judgment? Girls lie, too. Women lie, too. To
characterize infidelity, unfaithfulness or deception as a solely
male trait does not fight it.

Another historical characterization of women has been that they
are overly sexual objects that cannot not be trusted because they
will tempt and deceive men. So why simply reverse this ideal, which
has harmfully served to make women’s sexuality taboo even to
this day, and point it at someone else, rather than working to
eradicate it?

While it was a fallacy for early feminists to blame all men for
oppression, conversely, it is equally as ignorant,
counterproductive and short-sighted to turn a simple personal
experience (a cheating boyfriend, frustration with men who
don’t listen, etc.) into a universal statement.

These kinds of messages, from “boys lie” and
“boys drool” to “girls kick ass” and
“girls rule” to anti-male criticism as a form of female
bonding are counter to the real aims of feminism, and what should
be the aims of all people. While they may be light-hearted or
well-intentioned, they play into the ideas that we can be grouped
according to our biological sex, and that, in this day and age,
women are (or should be) superior to men.

These are erroneous ideas both in that they are unfair, and
ignore the very real fact that we still exist in a public
patriarchy, wherein women are still stigmatized, controlled, and
not fully represented in politics and the workplace.

If any of these issues are to be overcome, regressing to a
simplistic “pro-female” mode when it comes to
male-female relationships or slapping a shallow motto on a shirt is
not the answer. It might take looking at men and women as equals,
not enemies, and looking at female empowerment as more than a
light-hearted, short-term pop culture project.