International Equality Day

So, today is International Women's Day. It's all over Twitter. And I object to it. Or I would on principle, but I don't.

I'll explain.

I wouldn't identify myself as a feminist - mostly because of the negative connotations of the word "feminist". Writers who have termed themselves as "feminist" over the years have varied in success - I remember reading an essay TD wrote, focusing on Djuna Barnes and the lesbian and feminist overtones in some of her writing; I also remember an essay I wrote during my degree in which I wrote about Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, crazy French bitch that she is. I didn't like Virginia Woolf, though, and although H claims that modern feminism is less violent than it used to be, I was always disturbed by the kind of "power over men" thing that many people identify with feminism.

Some people take feminism in modern times as favouring women in order to promote diversity. As a straight white male, I have lost out on jobs because of positive discrimination in force. Although I see the reasoning behind positive discrimination (it's better than negative discrimination by several degrees), it is a rather stupid way to consider people for jobs. I'm jobseeking at the moment and am being continually rejected; the only job to offer me a reason for rejection started by saying the word "diversity". That's not how it works!

Feminism should be about equalisation between both sexes - if you make a distinction. Blacksilk and others don't differentiate between genders too much at all! But if it's about equality, why is it called feminism? Why not equalitism or something else which doesn't look right now I've written it down?

I define myself as an egalitarian, because semantics would instil a form of prejudice about me if I called myself a feminist. If we didn't have this silly "male dominance" idea to begin with, there wouldn't be a problem.

Now that we have that out of the way...

Although I both admire and see the point of having an international day for women, isn't that a little sexist... towards women? I mean, does that mean that women are to be ignored on the other 364 days of the year? That's not what feminism is about! Promoting gender equality - yes; indirectly saying that women have one day and that's it? What kind of an idea is that?

And come to think of it, where's International Men's Day? Gender equality, again - not having a day for men the way that a day for women happens indeed suggests one of two things:

i) men are less important so they don't deserve a day
ii) on the other 364 days, women are considered less important so they need this one day

Both of which are terrible.

So. I don't consider today International Women's Day because it can either be construed as sexist towards women or towards men. And to be totally equalitismist, both versions of sexism are just as bad as each other. It's a shame that society seems to have the views which have, effectively, "ruined" perfectly virtuous terms for me, but if one must make distinctions between gender... I'm not entirely comfortable that this is the best way to promote equality.

Because apart from anything else... in a perfect world, it wouldn't be an issue!