Women’s Rights – Is Equality Something That Can Be Taken Away?

There is a conversation spreading across parts of the internet that should concern every woman, regardless of her politics, views and beliefs.

In the manosphere, and increasingly among some women who support it, people are openly asking whether women should still have rights.

Not because women have done something collectively wrong.  But because in their eyes, some women have.

Women have spent centuries fighting for the right to make decisions about our own lives.

We wanted to vote. We wanted the right to be educated and to work, gaining our own financial independence. We wanted rights over our own bodies. We wanted to be able to leave an unhappy or abusive marriage without being treated as though we had committed some terrible social crime.

We fought for those rights, and we won them.

But here is the uncomfortable question.

What happens when the freedom we fought for is threatened to be taken away because some men do not agree with the views of some women?

Ultimately, women do not need men to agree with us.  We don’t need other women to agree with us either.

One of the biggest things the women's rights movement achieved was establishing the principle that women are capable, able and allowed to make decisions for ourselves.

This sounds so obvious now.  But it wasn't always.

For the majority of history, women’s roles were expected to be wives, mothers and homemakers. In some cases, particularly among working-class women, they were also expected to work. Unless you had money, women have always worked, but wife, mother and homemaker remained our primary expected roles.  We have always burned the candle at both ends.

Those roles were restricted by law, by money, by societal expectations and, quite often, by our fathers and later, our husbands.

Women knew that we were worth more than the value that had been placed upon us, and we fought against it.

But equality was never supposed to mean that women would be deemed as incapable of making mistakes and if some women did, that that equality would be questioned and taken away.

Freedom includes the freedom to make bad decisions.  And that is where things get complicated.

Because if we say that women should be trusted to make their own choices, we cannot also argue that every choice made by a woman is automatically a good one, simply because she is a woman.  We also cannot argue that if a section of women do not make good choices, that their choices stand against all women.

That isn't equality.  That's infantilisation on the one part and a puppeteer kind of control on the other.

Those two positions might be completely different, but they have something important in common.

Neither of them treats women as fully autonomous adults.

If I am allowed to vote, work, earn my own money, choose whether and whom to marry, choose whether to have children or not, and decide what happens to my own body, then I am also capable of being told that I have made a bad decision.

I am capable of being criticised for that decision.  I am capable of being called out on it.

I don't suddenly require a counsellor and a participation trophy because someone disagrees with me.

Women are adults.  We can deal with disagreement.

At least, we should be able to.

And this is where the manosphere which lurks primarily on the internet comes into it.

There is a second, silent sentence when it comes to women's rights.

“Women want equality? Fine. Give them equality. Let’s see how that works out for them.”

It is the equivalent of handing someone enough rope to hang themselves and seeing what they do with it.

We sometimes talk about “women” as though we all want exactly the same things.  We don't.

Women disagree with each other. A lot.

We disagree about abortion, sex and gender. We disagree about pornography. We disagree about prostitution, sex work and OnlyFans.

We disagree about marriage. We disagree about motherhood. We disagree about whether women should prioritise careers.

We disagree about what equality should actually look like.

That is perfectly normal.  In fact, it is inevitable.

The problem we have is that a movement founded on giving women individual freedom can sometimes become incredibly uncomfortable with individual women who exercise that freedom in the “wrong” way.  The wrong way deemed by some men, but also some women.

You are free to choose.  But please choose correctly.

That's not really freedom.

Women are as capable of participating in the same behaviours that harm people as men are.  But why does that lead to calls online to remove women's voting rights, question whether women should sit on juries, or argue that women taking antidepressants should not be allowed to work?

Women are not infallible and some attack our own sex just as well as some men.

Women can be sexist.  Women can bully other women.  Women can shame other women for their choices.

Women can judge mothers, childfree women, married women, single women, older women, younger women and pretty much anyone else who doesn't fit whatever particular definition of “womanhood” is fashionable at the time.

Some women have decided that men can become women, and other women strongly disagree with that.

But if true equality is the goal, then you have to accept the entire package.

Women are capable of brilliance, courage, leadership and compassion.

We are also capable of selfishness, hypocrisy, cruelty and spectacularly bad judgement.

Just like men.

Equality isn't about women being better, or worse than men.  It is about accepting that we are human too.

Sometimes women simply make a bad decision.  I don't have to respect every decision a woman makes in order to respect her right to make it.

Perhaps the easiest way to demonstrate what I mean is to use myself as an example.

I do not support illegal immigration.

I do not support men who identify as women.

I do not support women who choose to put themselves on OnlyFans.

I do not support the women protesting outside the Lindsay Clancy trial and I certainly don't believe that experiencing motherhood, mental illness or postnatal difficulties makes someone Lindsay Clancy.

Empathy for someone experiencing those struggles is one thing.  Suggesting that her actions somehow represent motherhood or mental illness as a whole is something entirely different.

And this is where the idea of women as a monolith becomes particularly dangerous.  Because some men do see us as such.

They look at women who support certain things and choose to believe that because one group of women believes a thing, this means that all women do and all women are therefore responsible.

And from there, it becomes very easy for them to argue that perhaps women shouldn't have the rights and freedoms we fought so hard to obtain because, apparently, we can’t handle them.

We have seen this most recently in the Clancy case.  There have been calls to take away women’s right to vote.  The right to serve on a jury.  That if a woman is on anti-depressants, she should not be allowed to work.

But here's the thing.

I don't need every person on the planet to agree with me.  I don't even want them to.

If women are more than capable of making their own decisions and forming their own views then you have to accept that they are capable of making those decisions and forming those views that you think are wrong.

That is what autonomy means.

Some men (and women) seem to think that equality is a mere experiment.  That they have given us enough rope to hang ourselves with.  That our actions will somehow prove their point that women did not deserve rights in the first place.

These people have lost sight of what equality is.  Because if we are handed that rope, it now belongs to us too and cannot be taken away.  We are not children. 

We are allowed to be wrong just as we are allowed to be right.  A group of women does not speak for the whole.   They do not represent the whole.

If that was truly the case, then surely the eye would have to turn to men.  Men commit the majority of murders, rapes, assaults.  When a woman is murdered or raped, the questions that rise are “Was she asking for it” – “What did she do to provoke him?” or my favourite, which is not even a question “Women lie”.

But do not look at men this way.  Nor should we.  Because those that commit a crime do not represent the whole.

Perhaps the ultimate victory of women's rights is proving that women are strong enough to get things wrong, learn from bad decisions, disagree with one another, change our minds and carry on making our own choices anyway.

Because equality was never supposed to mean that women would have to live, view and perform under the terms of what men agree.

It was supposed to mean that we were finally allowed to be wrong on our own terms.