Masculism, Feminism and the Euro Tunnel

Star post

One succinct definition of “feminism” is,

Feminism: The advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.

The complementary definition of “masculism” is,

Masculism: The advocacy of men’s rights on the ground of the equality of the sexes.           

Using the above definitions, masculism and feminism can be seen to be like mirror image twins.  They are equally egalitarian; men’s rights advocacy and women’s rights advocacy, with neither group advocating the infringement of the rights of the gender that isn’t their main focus.

It is in these senses of the two words, that I am both a feminist and a masculist at heart and in deed.

In everyday life, we can easily see just how much masculists and feminists are ultimately on the same side, the side of equality of the sexes, rather than the supremacy of one sex or the other.  We can see this harmonious complementarity in play, by witnessing masculists and feminists having their frequent, amicable, polite, reasonable, and fruitful dialogues, for example when trading good-hearted banter on Twitter.

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It’s like building the Euro tunnel …

Masculism and feminism (as defined above) are just different parts of the same project.  They are analogous to the British and French teams that dug the Euro tunnel, starting from different shores, but eventually meeting in the middle, beneath the sea bed.

Imagine what chaos there might have been, if there had been a single Anglo-French team, instead of two teams doing the digging, in opposite directions. Unless every team member was bilingual, they’d have needed every detail of the project to be explained in two languages. One a dreadful, illogical language that sexualises toddlers as they first learn to talk, because it is a language in which everything (even tables, chairs and cutlery) is gendered!  The other English.

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Imagine that this single, joint Anglo-French team, had started digging from only one of the two shores (selected by tossing a coin), leaving absolutely nobody digging from the other shore!  I doubt the tunnel would have been open even today, with that arrangement in place.

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It would be even more chaotic if the pursuit of gender equality were to left to a single, artificially merged school of thought, half of whose adherents tried to mansplain everything, the other half of whom could understand nothing until it had been femsplained to them.

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And that is why we need both feminism and masculism in the world today, in order to promote gender equality adequately, digging from both “shores”, so-to-speak.

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The former corporate motto of the now-completed construction project for the channel tunnel,

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Two shores.  One English Channel.  Two directions.  One tunnel.

Deux rives.  Une Manche.  Deux directions.  Un tunnel.

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 inspires a new slogan, which expresses perfectly the good-natured co-operation we can see today between masculists and feminists.

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Two sexes.  One equality.

Tu jest!  C’est notre égalité, pas le vôtre!  Vous êtes tous les misogynes!

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Topical relevance

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I was pleased to learn that Mike Buchanan had published the manifesto of the UK’s new masculist political party.

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I am disappointed to have noticed that it has all gone rather quiet. on the other side of la Manche that separates masculists like Mr Buchanan from feminists like Harriet Harman.  Quiet, that is, since Ms Harman mooted her exciting and original idea of forming a feminist political party, in order to put women’s rights onto the political agenda at last.  “About time too,” I thought to myself at the time, “after so many decades of neglect.”

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I do hope that Ms Harman’s plan to start a feminist political party hasn’t quietly been shelved.  It would lead to an imbalance, if Ms Harman did not stick to her excellent Plan A, now that Justice For Men and Boys has published its excellent, scholarly general election manifesto and announced its Prospective Parliamentary Candidates.

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Footnote for Hegelians

Thesis + antithesis becomes synthesis, eventually.  But there is often a nomenclature struggle, even if the resolution is as clumsy as the NASUWT, the merger of NAS (National Association of Schoolmasters) with the UWT (Union of Women Teachers.)

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Footnote for French-speaking people

Your word for a tunnel is “le tunnel”, which you consider to be a masculine inanimate object.  The French word for a thing that thrusts into a tunnel, in order to deliver its load to the other end of the tunnel, which the tunnel was created to receive (in English called a locomotive), is “la locomotive”, a feminine inanimate object, in French.  How do you frenchsplain that?

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It seems kinky enough to us Anglophones that you French people apparently consider that everything in the entire world has to be gendered in the first place.  That is even before we begin to discover how exactly you gender some things, often surprising us, because many of those French decisions about how things are gendered, to your quintessentially French way of thinking, often seems thoroughly counter-intuitive to us, nay perversely unnatural.

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