Defending human rights is care work - no wonder women are left carrying the load
A rant.
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Defending human rights is care work - no wonder women are left carrying the load
Trigger warnings: Discusses gender violence and discrimination. Some imagery.
Caring is keeping the world afloat. But the patriarchy doesn’t want men to care. And I’m not sure it really wants women to care either.
Care, they say, is feminine. They say that must be why women are spending an extra 2.3 hours a day globally on unpaid work at home: laundry and childcare and putting away his empty beer-cans and marking the calendar and then putting it in his phone so he remembers too.
They say this is because we are women, that it is a fact of our biology, that a desire to clean counters must be wound into our DNA, our ‘purpose.’ Domestic goddess - the only modern religion where women can be a deity, apparently. Your ex probably told you we were just better at this sort of thing (buying binliners and reminding him to wash his hands).
The patriarchal rhetoric tells us women stay home and men sort the economy out - that’s why it’s doing so well. Women’s unpaid work provides more value to the economy than the entire tech industry combined, 10.8 trillion dollars a year.
But don’t worry, men, I know you don’t care. I know some of you are shrugging it off. Your mum wanted to stay at home. You split things evenly with your partner. You once had a female housemate who never cleaned. The stats must be skewed by Global South countries. I know you want to tell me that I am generalising, that it’s not all men, that specifically it’s not you.
But there you go again. Not caring about the right issue. How is it, men, that none of you have ever exploited or abused women, you don’t know anyone who would, yet every women has a story of being exploited, abused, harassed, managing your temper or organising your appointments and your social commitments? Perhaps it’s difficult to notice when you grew up that way.
An interesting dichotomy in the patriarchy: there are two sides to caring, and the patriarchy only wants one.
The first meaning of care is what we already speak about. Doing the dishes, raising the children, keeping the house in order. Women make up the vast majority of the workforce for paid care roles like nursing, education and childcare - in some roles, up to 90%. Not coincidentally, these are some of the lowest-paid occupations.
The right-wing will leap on this stat to flip the cause-effect and say that women choose to go for the low-paid roles, because we must enjoy being overworked for the sake of Caring About People. But the data shows the opposite: as sectors become women-dominated, the average wages fall for all employees.
Add in structural recruitment bias, gender pay gaps and sexism in the workplace: The economic structure is designed to limit women’s ability to be financially independent and contribute meaningfully to the workforce.
Anyway. The conservative approach tells the story backwards, makes a new false narrative: we do the care work because we “care more”.
But they don’t talk about the second part of caring. The part that can’t be dressed up as a ‘soft feminine’ skill. Caring for people and our homes doesn’t end with hoovering and cooking.
We face a global geopolitical assault on human rights. The Epstein Files shows the utter disregard for the lives and bodies of women and children by the people in power. Gen Z men are holding more extreme sexist views than Boomers. Transgender people are being limited from holding valid driver’s licences. Development aid is being slashed worldwide. The US war machine and Israel is killing girls, babies, families, to ‘liberate’ them. Pollution, oil spills and wildfires destroy even the most cared-for of homesteads.
How do we continue to look after each other in this context? We raise hell.
To defend human rights is to care a great deal about the people around us and reject the pressure to become divided, polarised, scapegoat minorities and follow business as usual. That is the approach suggested to us by patriarchal powers.
Caring means showing up to protest meetings, signing petitions, emailing local politicians, amplifying marginalised groups on social media, rejecting Big Tech, learning to repair, learning to grow seeds. It means setting fire to the things that don’t serve us and our future.
But because caring is a woman’s thing, women are disproportionately taking on this work too. Women are more likely to recycle, women leaders are more likely to ratify environmental treaties and have stricter climate policies. They are far more likely to participate in initiatives for gender equality, in every country in Europe.
But for this kind of care, women risk being penalised, arrested or killed for it by the state. They didn’t mean care like this.
If this is sounding familiar, it’s not the first time I’ve talked about it. The response to my White Guy Chill article - calling out men who are seemingly too busy to be active allies or activists (but not too busy for their videogames or online hate comments) - drove home for me how pervasive the patriarchal ideas sit in our society.
It’s not always men who refuse to engage, refuse to care and show up, but the patriarchy was never about protecting men. It was about protecting power, ultimately in the hands of the 0.1%, and setting society against itself to leave the power structures untouched. It promised men that they too could one day win in this oppressive system, that the threat was [hysterical feminists / woke feminazis / transgender people in bathrooms / children and families seeking refuge in other countries / a secret underground cabal of communists / etc.].
Male passivity kills. Patriarchal passivity, you can call it, if that offends you less. Because you have to give a shit in order to keep other people alive. Women are 14 times more likely to die in a natural disaster because they have fewer means to escape. Even without a weather crisis: a woman dies every 10 minutes at the hands of a partner.
Meanwhile, 61% of Gen Z men think that efforts for gender equality have gone far enough.
This is the narrative peddled by far-right political parties, corporations and thinktanks - the ones driving the widespread social disillusionment, male identity crises and climate crises now place the blame elsewhere. They teach men from childhood, through violent pornography, stereotyped media portrayals, social media algorithms and podcasts, not to care about women. That we have no personhood. That we will clean and smile and if we ask for more, they should kill us or worse.
And then we act shocked at the Epstein Files? When we have seen that half a village will rape an unconscious woman, that thousands of men join Whatsapp groups to discuss tips on violating women, that nearly 50% of men have watched deepfake pornography, and two thirds of them don’t feel guilty about it.
This is not my most coherent article but I don’t care. Women are dying. I am tired. I am reading news every day about women, transgender and non-binary people being stripped of their rights, their lives.
And I feel like I speak into a chamber of other women who are already doing as much as possible to change things and demand change, and still do the laundry at the end of the day. And men who think it’s Great That I Do This but system change isn’t their thing. They wonder if I realise I made a typo in one of the paragraphs. They wonder if I’m a bit hysterical.
Men, I want you to speak to other men. I want you to try being as radical as the feminists you passively support. Talk to other men about women’s rights, call out their sexist joke. Risk losing the status of a chill guy - you could be so many better cooler things. Listen to women, support our work. Swallow the defensiveness, it was never about you or me, it was about the 0.1%. Care. Give a shit.
Women and non-binary and genderqueer folks, I want you to care in all the ways that the state fears. Particularly those of us with privilege. You can be both the oppressor and oppressed and it takes more than a #FutureIsFemale T-shirt (made by a poorer woman) to make ourselves heard. I want angry women, radical women, annoying women, women I disagree with, women who refuse to be dragged into judging and belittling other women. After all, we’re the descendants of the women they tried to burn as witches, the suffragettes, civil rights activists and countless ancestors who didn’t back down.
We are not a monolith but I believe each of us carries a little spark of rage that we think makes us uniquely unstable, that we worry will one day take over. I think we should let it.
What’s Going On?
As Trump bombs Iran, we must reckon with the American war machine.
Gen Z males twice as likely as baby boomers to believe wives should obey husbands.
European Commission recognises the right to safe abortion access.
So Now What Do I Do? Feminist Edition
RESOURCES TO LEARN MORE
Read: How gender became the perfect scapegoat for far-right and authoritarian actors.
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