The F word

Being a good girl, I’ve always avoided the F word. Feminism. It causes polite people to flinch slightly.

Moreover it seems to create unnecessary argument a lot of the time over a battle already won. I, and many of the women of my generation, are generally happy to inherit the equality of other generations without making too much of it. Instead we’d like to spend our energies working away at other causes yet to be won.

But things aren’t always that easy.

At one point in my life I worked in a situation where there was a man — no, an emotional tyrant — who would zone in on select young women in the office, befriend them as a mentor, and then turn on them in a frightening display of emotional abuse. There would be a stream of detailed emails listing their faults, ridiculous conversations and more, but nothing one could take before a human resources manager, let alone the CCMA. He was very careful to not cross the line into a provable offence. Instead he would maintain a consistent and low-key emotional assault that reduced many young women to tears.

I soon learned that the man in question had a history of this behaviour in the organisation. While I could stand up to him I wasn’t so sure about the other women involved and encouraged one of them to report the matter to our boss. She did so, and I in turn presented my side of the story. My primary reason for doing so was to show that there was a pattern of abuse. I was mostly worried about other young women the man in question was being given authority over.

The results were remarkable — and not in a good way. Yes, our boss was a man, but one I genuinely respected and whose gender didn’t even cross my mind when I made my concerns known. I didn’t expect my complaint to be treated as isolated, robbing it of its point. I received no feedback, except to hear via the grapevine that the man was brought in for a stern talking to.

I didn’t feel much like a good girl then. I felt like a girl — a woman — who very much wanted to use the F word. Both of them.

A well-respected female colleague once encouraged me to take on the patriarchy inherent in the career ladder by using the power relations to our advantage: by negotiating the spaces available to us and doing the work the men wouldn’t do. We could rise in organisations by making ourselves indispensable and by creating key allies. That had not been my modus operandi up to that point. I had merely been myself: idealistic, slightly pushy and determined. Clearly not the deferential qualities necessary to make certain older white men feel secure. Silly me.

But how much of my incident had to do with gender? Or race for that matter? How much of it was produced purely by the situation or people involved, and had nothing to do with these exhausting sociopolitical issues? I’m not sure. It’s hard to tell where paranoia begins or naivety ends.

And articles like this one don’t help either. Like other readers, I was a little nonplussed at the rabidly feminist column “Shut up, woman” from our sister paper the Guardian in the UK. The author describes a new project by famed feminist Gloria Steinem, which allows women to categorise and publish all the derogatory terms they must contend with. A pyramid of nasty words, dubbed the Pyramid of Egregiousness, it encourages readers to slot in their own example anywhere between “Severe Misogyny” right down to “Just plain sexist”. All good and well, but the end of the article gets a little crazy:

“Much as I like and applaud it, I want to see the three-dimensional foldout version of the Pyramid of Egregiousness,” said writer Bidisha. “I want a 3D glow-in-the-dark dodecahedron, a planet-sized Matrix of Misogyny, a Trillion-Faceted Dynamo of Jet Black Turbo Hate. Then I’d heave it aloft and hurl it into the sun, where it would set off a massive chain reaction and shoot out sky-scraping beams of feminist rage which kill anyone, male or female, who’s ever used those words, wiping out (I’d say) 90% of human society, but leaving the non-woman-haters behind.”

It’s a near-parody of feminist rage and I’m not sure it helps its cause.

The problem is the rest of the article has a lot of good points. As does the site it describes. A helpful test when something sounds like feminist paranoia is to imagine if the same thing would have happened to, or been said, of a man. The answer is often no.

The test doesn’t quite hold for my situation though. So I’m left wondering at what was sexist and what was just plain nastiness?

I don’t have the answers but one thing is for sure: This small incident is trivial compared to the massive misogyny and abuse other women suffer every day. Rapes, domestic violence and the continuing disempowerment of girls in many developing countries are issues that show up my middle-class gender preoccupations for what they really are. And they’re definitely reason enough to keep the F word alive and well.