No Need to ‘Fuck the Man’

About a week ago, I opened my inbox to discover an e-mail advertising a “feminist” party titled “Fuck the Man! Let’s Dance!*” The asterisk following the party’s slogan helpfully informed me that “Fuck the Man!” is “not an anti-male slogan.”

Curious as to how this was possible, I looked up “the Man” on urbandictionary.com. Apparently, it is a term used to describe any class of people or an individual person who wields power and uses that power to oppress. I was familiar with this slang—but this was a party specifically addressing gender-related issues.

Of course, a slogan is just a slogan, but it does represent something about certain aspects of modern feminism that doesn’t quite sit well. After all, in portraying a feminist party as opposed to “the Man,” the slogan, like many strands of feminism, seemed to promote a sense women’s “otherness”—a feel-good approach to feminism that ultimately hurts women more than it helps us.

Way back in 1949, the French writer Simone de Beauvoir recognized that because men have traditionally been considered the primary or default model for humanity (wasn’t Eve made of Adam’s rib?), women are judged according to this standard and therefore appear secondary and “inessential.”

Is it only men who perpetuate this way of looking at things? No. Women, too, keep it alive both intentionally and unintentionally. After all, many women accept secondary, passive roles all the time, asking a man to decide things for her, to fix things for her, to tell her who she is. Doing so is often easy because it relieves a woman of the otherwise inevitable weight of making wrong decisions, of not fixing things, of not always being sure of who she is or what she believes in. While that was understandable a hundred years ago (and still is in many less developed parts of the world), modern women have little excuse. We voice awareness of male-female equality, but nonetheless act in ways that perpetuate the conception of a man as “the norm” and a woman as an aberration.

Despite being unconscious, such delays to women’s quest for equality are frustrating to say the least. When women truly realize our dynamism, we will not need to throw “Fuck the Man!” parties—any more than men today feel a need to throw male-empowering “Fuck Women!” ones (although I suppose one might count final club parties among the latter). [see editor's note below]

Because even if “the Man” does represent “the Patriarchy and hegemonic systems of power,” as the invitation said, this tendency to cast women as opposed to “the Man,” instead of having an identity in her own right, only furthers perception of the Man as primary and women as secondary. When women are wholly sure of ourselves, we will not need a women’s center, because we will recognize that the Science Center and the Barker Center are just as much ours as any man’s. We will not rail hysterically against any suggestion of “innate gender differences,” but will rather curiously consider where XY and XX do diverge. Women’s frenzied wailing about our oppression at the hands of men only obscures the fundamental feminist truth: that we are all human beings with more in common than not.

Modern women should consciously reject this age-old inferiority complex regarding men and shoulder the responsibility that equality entails. We need to stop perpetuating the idea of our sex as secondary by forcing a false male-female dichotomy where there isn’t one. It’s time to concentrate on other things—like education, politics, or scientific research. If we truly realize that we are primary and that we are equal to the Man, then it is surely just gratuitous to “Fuck” him.

Justine R. Lescroart ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is a English and American literature and language concentrator in Quincy House.

Editor's Note
Due to an editing error, yesterday’s comment "No Need to ‘Fuck the Man’" by Justine R. Lescroart contained a sentence modified during the editing process that was unapproved by the author. The sentence read: "When women truly realize our dynamism, we will not need to throw ‘Fuck the Man!’ parties—any more than men today feel a need to throw male-empowering ‘Fuck Women!’ ones (although I suppose one might count final club parties among the latter)." The parenthetical was not written by Lescroart and does not reflect her views. The Crimson regrets the error.