By Ryan Johnson
Editors, the Gauntlet,
Re: "I’ll be a feminist until…" March 15, 2001
I’m not writing as an anti-feminist. I am writing as a realist that values logical reasoning over unsupported shock-motivated statements. Hopefully this letter will serve to help define your cause, which is to get at the real roots of our human problems. I feel the authors of this feminism piece are being intellectually dishonest, or else they are severely deluded and confused. The conditions that follow "this piece" are presented in a cause-and-effect structure that belies a limited, one-dimensional view of our complex world’s issues. Many of these problems are not directly contingent upon feminism.
I’ll address three of the issues you assert feminism can remedy:
1. "the homeless [lacking] shelter and the hungry [lacking] food." Human greed, abnormal psychology and the drive for "survival of the fittest" have better claims to the origin of this problem.
2. "No woman or child dies at the hands of a man." The reasons for violence against everyone include racism, religious differences and material jealousy. It’s not as simple as anti-woman.
3. "Body size, shape, weight, hair colour don’t matter."
In the human species there are qualities that are attractive because of natural selection. These include body and facial symmetry, eye, mouth and chin size, skin tone and muscular fitness. These are universal criteria that transcend culture. They are not socialized. They are natural. Is this something that can be/should be "solved" by feminism?
I plead with you and all readers to critically examine world views that are pressed upon you. Don’t just look at the world from a feminist viewpoint. There are spiritual, psychological, racial and biological realities that factor into the human experience. To extend feminism’s superiority over these issues discredits its own territory. It is diluted when misused. It is sad when a faulty ship sinks and valuable treasures with it. If none of my meandering prose makes sense, perhaps a closing example will: I’ll be an electrician until… all of the world’s plumbing problems are solved.