by Josh Marowitz,
a real man, who does not suffer from Kanazawa’s psychologically-crippling penis-insecurity
As a public school teacher, I’m not without patience and understanding for Satoshi Kanazawa. I read Satoshi’s essay, “Why modern feminism is illogical, unnecessary, and evil,” exactly as I read the essays of all of my fifteen year old students’ essays: with the understanding that if a fifteen year old misunderstands and offensively mischaracterizes a particular issue, it is because the student simply wasn’t fully aware of what he was saying; we teachers don’t immediately assume intentional malice on the part of our developing writers. We teachers are encouraged first to congratulate our student on the confidence and organization with which he presents his points, and then to address minor and major concerns. So I will: “Great work, Satoshi! You seem very convinced of your idea! And you did a super job separating paragraphs and ideas with signal phrases such as First, Further, It is also, Another, and Finally!” Indeed, my tenth grade students would do well to take some cues from the fairly solid essay that Satoshi has written.
The minor problem with Satoshi’s essay, however, is that it is not a tenth grader’s essay; it is a piece published on the website of Psychology Today. And etiquette suggests I should refer to Satoshi as Mr. Kanazawa: he is not a tenth grade student in my English class; he is a grown man. The major problem is that, despite the fact that Mr. Kanazawa is a grown man writing confidently for Psychology Today, his essay on feminism provides little evidence that he is any more fully aware of what he is saying than an especially clueless fifteen year old boy.
Mark Twain himself cautions against what I am about to do. “Never argue with a fool,” Twain warns. “Onlookers won’t be able to tell the difference.” Though I may risk great peril by ignoring America’s greatest writer, Twain was also America’s most loving husband and doting father, who tragically outlived his wife and two of his three daughters. He evolved into an outspoken proponent for women’s suffrage, but he died ten years before ratification of the 19th Amendment. When Twain willed his estate to his sole surviving daughter, he did so in such a way as to prevent her husband from gaining control of it. So I believe that Twain would support my ignoring his sage advice. “Argue with a fool if you must,” he might say now, “but only if he is an exceptionally foolish one.”
In my first foray into arguing with a fool, I could not have selected a better opponent than Mr. Kanazawa!
He calls feminism “[i]llogical, unnecessary, and evil.” There is no bigger fool to be found.
Illogical?
Even Before Mr. Kanazawa embarks upon his quest to write the most asinine essay on feminism that I have read in months (perhaps years), I could tell that he had no idea what he was talking about. The colorful button he displays at the top of the essay — “Feminism is the radical notion that women are men” — captures perfectly his complete lack of understanding of what feminism is. This lack of basic understanding results in seven subsequent paragraphs of irrelevant points which he has ineffectively argued. At its most elemental level, feminism simply does not advocate that women are men, does not suggest that women should be men, and does not imagine that women would want to be men. Instead, feminism seeks to provide the conditions in which it is possible for women to enjoy the same rights, privileges, and treatment that men have enjoyed forever. Moreover, feminism does not seek to apply that brand of equality with eyes blind to gender; reasonable sensitivity to the real differences between the genders is central in promoting true feminism.
The feminism portrayed by Mr. Kanazawa is, well, not feminism. It’s what most men decide to hear when they hear a discussion of feminism. So long as this mischaracterization of feminism is tolerated and promulgated, we will continue to read essays and hear debate that is disrespectful and dismissive of the very notion of feminism. And in his own essay disrespectful and dismissive to feminism, Kanazawa writes:
First, modern feminism is illogical because … it is based on the vanilla assumption that, but for lifelong gender socialization and pernicious patriarchy, men and women are on the whole identical. An insurmountable body of evidence by now conclusively demonstrates that the vanilla assumption is false; men and women are inherently,fundamentally, and irreconcilably different. Any political movement based on such a spectacularly incorrect assumption about human nature – that men and women areand should be identical – is doomed to failure.
Again, he misses the point of what feminism is. No true feminist denies the differences between men and women; his italicization of inherently, fundamentally, and irreconcilably are wholly unnecessary. The differences between men and women were concisely summarized for all of us by the proud little boy in Kindergarten Cop: “Boys have penises and girls have vaginas.” There are other differences to be sure — women are typically more in tune with fashion, women are generally more concerned with taking steps to ensure good health, and women are usually more comfortable with expressing emotions — but even those differences should not preclude women from enjoying the same rights, privileges, and treatment as men, nor should the differences subject a woman to any of the countless double standards all women face. I risk repeating myself: Feminists call for equal rights, privileges, and treatment; nobody is calling for men and women to be “identical” except those figures who are mischaracterizing what feminists call for.
Unnecessary?
Kanazawa then spends two full paragraphs ranting that feminism is not necessary because — well, I’m not exactly sure, based on his essay. But if I’m reading his essay correctly, he believes that we don’t need feminism because men don’t own a lot of shoes and because there are an equal number of male and female adults.
He begins to question of the necessity of feminism by questioning “the unquestioned assumption that women are and have historically always been worse off than men.” By all reasonable reckoning, that’s not so much an assumption as it is a fact. Just look at the history of voting rights, to pick just one issue. In 1865, the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution outlawed slavery. For two centuries in America, slaves were treated like animals at best and dirt at worst: Slaves were sold apart from their families, whipped, beaten, and killed. After the ratification of the 13th Amendment, African Americans had their long-deserved freedom, but they didn’t have much else. Bigoted whites created and passed “the Jim Crow laws,” requiring legal separation from African Americans; these laws extended in practice well into the mid-1900s. Yet, it was only five years after the end of slavery, in 1870, that the 15th Amendment guaranteed the recently-freed slaves the right to vote. But only if they were men. Women were not given the right to vote until the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment. That’s fifty years after black males were given suffrage (and seventy-two years since women started asking for suffrage, if you use the 1848 date of the Seneca Falls Convention as a convenient marker). When one considers that women had to wait half a century to vote after men (who were so scorned by white America that they were legally required to use separate water fountains), it’s hard to suggest that women’s being worse off than men is merely an “assumption.”
But Kanazawa wouldn’t know that. He never looks at history. Instead, he questions feminism’s necessity by attempting to measure things whose measurements have no bearing in ensuring equal and fair treatment between men and women. He continues:
The fact that men and women are fundamentally different and want different things makes it difficult to compare their welfare directly, to assess which sex is better off; for example, the fact that women make less money than men cannot by itself be evidence that women are worse off than men, any more than the fact that men own fewer pairs of shoes than women cannot be evidence that men are worse off than women.
Men and women may want different things, but to equate earning ability to the size of a shoe closet is not only insulting, it’s also a false comparison. Our country equates financial power with power (our country does this wrongly and in opposition to our founding principles, but it does this anyway): the politically powerful are the people who have the most money, who can raise the most money, or have connections to the most money. The number of shoes that a man or woman owns, on the other hand, has no bearing on one’s power. The fact that women make less money (especially when they make less compared to what men make for the same work) is strong evidence that women are worse off than men; if it was not, President Obama would not have signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 into law. That Kanazawa denies and belittles this fact calls into question both his agenda and his insecurities in addressing the issue of empowered women.
Kanazawa persists in discussing these false measurements:
[I]n the only two biologically meaningful measures of welfare – longevity and reproductive success – women are and have always been slightly better off than men. In every human society, women live longer than men, and more women attain some reproductive success; many more men end their lives as total reproductive losers, having left no genetic offspring.
Still failing to look at historical, social, or political issues, he distracts us by dealing with arbitrary biology. Women’s life expectancy and ability to make babies does not speak at all to how women themselves are treated while they are alive. In fact, women’s reproductive success relegates them into narrow-minded definitions of what a mother should be, sometimes pressuring them into leaving their jobs or not taking part in other opportunities for the guilt of leaving their children. It’s a dilemma that female politicians encounter far more frequently than most mothers, as questions about a woman’s ability to be “both a mother and a leader” float around the media without anyone ever asking male politicians how they can be “both a father and a leader.” (And if anyone asked, nobody would take the question seriously.)
Evidently, Kanazawa feels that he is doing well with biological measurements, and so he cites more of them.
It is also not true that women are the “weaker sex.” … [B]oys are much more fragile, both physically and psychologically, than girls and hence require greater medical and psychiatric care. Men succumb to a larger number of diseases in much greater numbers than women do throughout their lives. The greater susceptibility of boys and men to diseases explains why more boys die in childhood and fail to reach sexual maturity and why men’s average life expectancy is shorter than women’s. This, incidentally, is the reason why slightly more boys than girls are born – 105 boys to 100 girls – so that there will be roughly 100 boys to 100 girls when they reach puberty.
So feminism is unnecessary, Kanazawa evidently concludes, just because there are an equal number of adult men and women. Such a conclusion is so patently absurd that I am tempted not to take the time to address it. His conclusion would be less absurd, absent part of the “vanilla assumption” Kanazawa so detests: “lifelong gender socialization and pernicious patriarchy.” Kanazawa should understand that no human being is raised in a cultural vacuum; we are all products of our environment to at least some degree. That there are equal numbers of adult males and females is irrelevant to the discussion if males are taught from birth to be powerful and dominant and females are taught from birth to be quiet and submissive.
But Kanazawa himself evidently does not believe that males are taught to be powerful; Kanazawa does not even believe that males are powerful now. Rampant sexism screams from the page when Kanazawa blathers:
Another fallacy on which modern feminism is based is that men have more power than women. Among mammals, the female always has more power than the male, and humans are no exception. It is true that, in all human societies, men largely control all the money, politics, and prestige. They do, because they have to, in order to impress women. Women don’t control these resources, because they don’t have to. What do women control? Men.
In this assertion, Kanazawa sounds most like a fifteen year old boy who wasn’t aware of what he was saying. To Kanazawa, women’s power over men is somehow more impressive and important to women’s control over, well, anything else. Congress makes laws that govern the lives of American men and women alike — and abortion laws especially affect women far more personally and profoundly than they affect men — but Congress is overwhelmingly controlled by males. Only 17 women serve in the United States Senate (out of 100 senators — that’s for you, Mr. Kanazawa; you paid so little attention to history and politics that I thought you could use the quick civics lesson). Since the Senate’s establishment in 1789, only 37 senators have been women, 13 of whom were appointed to serve their deceased husbands’ terms. In the United States House of Representatives, a legislative body of 435 voting representatives and 6 non-voting delegates, 75 women serve; female representatives comprise 17% of the US House, (just as female senators comprise 17% of the US Senate). Historically, there have been only 229 women who served in the US House (and the 37 women in the Senate overlap some; several women moved from the US House to the US Senate). Congress is the body that actually runs the country. Having say in that legislative process is a great deal more power than simply having power over a man.
But Kanazawa’s final declaration in that paragraph was the most asinine of all: “any reasonably attractive young woman exercises as much power over men as the male ruler of the world does over women.” In this absurd proclamation, Kanazawa ignores large groups of women: first, he ignores the reasonably (or very) attractive women who are controlled by dictatorial, abusive partners; second, we must infer that he ignores older women (he points to a “young woman,” after all, suggesting by omission that older women lose the power, a suggestion that our culture overwhelming supports); third, he ignores women who, through no fault of their own, are not attractive and therefore do not have the “power over men” that Kanazawa assigns to women (in lieu of assigning them any actual power); and fourth, he ignores homosexual women, who have no interest in controlling men and therefore receive from Kanazawa no claim to any “power” at all.
Evil?
I was prepared to follow — though not accept — Kanazawa’s reasoning when he “explained” why he felt that feminism was both illogical and unnecessary, but when he proclaimed that feminism was also evil, he lost whatever remnants of credibility he was clinging to. In fact, the following paragraph especially is so riddled with fallacies that it reads more like satire than analysis; it seems better suited for The Onion than it does for a blog hosted by Psychology Today. Jonathan Swift and Stephen Colbert, watch out! Kanazawa seems to encroach on your territory when he writes:
[M]odern feminism is evil because it ultimately makes women (and men) unhappy. In a forthcoming article in the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania show that American women over the last 35 years have steadily become less and less happy, as they have made more and more money relative to men. Women used to be a lot happier than men despite the fact that they made much less money than men. The sex gap in happiness (in women’s favor) has declined in the past 35 years as the sex gap in pay (in men’s favor) narrowed. Now women make as much as, sometimes even more than, men do. As a result, today women are just as unhappy, or even more unhappy than, men are. As I explain in a previous post, money does not make women happy.
Kanazawa has just committed one of the classic fallacies: post hoc ergo propter hoc; in plain language, “If one thing follows another, the first thing caused the second one.” He has been committing this fallacy for his entire piece, but I felt that I risked redundancy if I pointed that fact out in each paragraph. Here, the fallacy truly shines. There is a case to be made for the fact that money makes people less happy: Look at the personal lives of countless people among the rich and famous. They’re no happier than people you know who are neither rich nor famous. However, the fact that both things happened does not mean that women became less happy as they made more money. Perhaps they became less happy because in the past 35 years, models have become thinner and thinner, and women feel more pressure to be unnaturally and unhealthily thin to attain the cultural ideal of “beauty” (an ideal so hollow that it needs sarcastic quotation marks just to hold the word upright). Maybe women weren’t happy at all before but just said they were; maybe women 35 years ago were simply resigned to their role and felt that they couldn’t help their positions by complaining about it; what, after all, do men hate more than women who “bitch” (again, please note the quotation marks) about their lives? Maybe when anti-feminist Santoshi Kanazawa was born, American women just began feeling vaguely more insulted, condescended to, and demeaned, but couldn’t explain why.
Kanazawa’s reasoning that making more money makes women unhappy makes just as much sense as his reasoning that men’s dearth of shoes and women’s reproductive success make feminism both illogical and unnecessary, which is to say that Kanazawa is a stupid douchebag of the highest order. To cement his douchebag status, he suggests “greater incidence of divorce and single motherhood may also contribute to [women’s declining happiness],” as if such conditions occur by themselves. Throughout his seven-paragraph opus, he cited biology when citing biology was, at best, completely nonsensical; here, he ignores the biology of how motherhood is achieved: with a male partner. Women cannot be single mothers unless their male partners leave them (or unless their male partner is a man that she needs to leave, for sanity or safety, and sometimes for the well-being of a child). So if single motherhood is contributing to women’s unhappiness, one would assume that Kanazawa would mention at least some blame for the men who got the women pregnant and left. But he doesn’t.
And why would he? Kanazawa was too busy providing his third piece of evidence to “prove” women’s declining happiness: he claims that men have not become any less happy than they were 35 years ago “because there has not been masculinism” (emphasis mine). Excuse me, but men have not become any less happy than they were 35 years ago because there has never been a NEED for “masculism.” Men have always had every right, privilege, and opportunity available to them. Men’s bodies aren’t constantly scrutinized by the media for imperfections, and their breasts are not stared at instead of their faces. Men don’t have to face the same brand of abuse, both physical and psychological, in romantic relationships. Men don’t have to fear sexual assault with nearly the same frequency or to the same degree (99.5% of rapists are men and 90% of rape victims are women; in parts of the world still today, women are being executed because they have brought dishonor upon their families by being victims of rape while the rapists walk free). Men kill women with far greater regularity than women kill men, despite what the sadistic television program Snapped might suggest.
For the past 35 years, women have watched men and the media (and men in the media, and even some especially self-loathing women) dump on feminism, a movement that wanted the same equality that men enjoyed in our free country. For the past 35 years, women have had to read sanctimonious, repulsive garbage like the piece that Santoshi Kanazawa has written on feminism.
Last week in Pennsylvania, George Sodini murdered three women and tried to murder more. One detestable website suggested that if Sodini had had any “game” (i.e., if he had been better able to manipulate women into having sex with him) then he wouldn’t have gone on his murderous rampage. In response, one commenter wrote something even more terrifying and revolting:
Finally a mass murderer writes a relatively coherent manifesto. Could be better, but at least it is implied that feminism is to blame and he is taking a last stand. I had been waiting for this (almost thinking I had to do it myself) and I am impressed. Kudos.
“Kudos”? George Sodini kills three women and injures nine others, and this subhuman congratulates the murderer on attacking feminism? It wouldn’t have taken much for the scum to say “I may not agree with feminism, [because I do not understand what it actually is] but killing women because of it is really stupid.”
Poorly written hit pieces by men who poorly understand feminism imperils the safety of the women in our country. If “the women in our country” is too vague a concept, think more specifically: your mother is a woman, so is your wife or girlfriend, so are your daughters. You cannot love these women genuinely and not want the best for them. You do not ensure the best for your loved ones by irresponsibly railing against a movement (with a total lack of information) that has made possible opportunities available to them. That is, not unless you are Santoshi Kanazawa and you hate women.
Here’s hoping that Kanazawa does not have a wife or daughters. They must be wholly unloved.
