One of my favourite jokes is about a male feminist. He walks into a bar….because it was set so low.
For those out of range of the microphone, the punchline is how quick feminists are to praise men for doing the bare minimum when it comes to supporting gender equality. Is it internalised sexism? Simpering gratitude for even being acknowledged at all? Probably a bit of both. But by Grabthar's Hammer, we've gotta stop handing out medals and cookies and kisses to men whose feminism begins and ends at just showing up.
Case in point: midway through this month, the women's site Hello Giggles (co-founded by Zooey Deschanel) published a fawning love letter to Ashton Kutcher.
In an interview with Marie Claire UK, Kutcher's former co-star Natalie Portman had revealed she was paid three times less than he was for their movie No Strings Attached. Kutcher responded by tweeting a link to the article and telling Portman he was "proud" of her "and all women who stand up for closing the gender pay gap!".
Hello Giggles lost its mind in response, writing an entire piece about how ah-may-zing he is that culminated in this vomitous passage: "As if we needed another reason to love Ashton Kutcher… but seriously, we're so freaking proud of him for supporting his colleague and raising awareness about the shocking gender pay gap that affects so many women."
Oh, and Natalie Portman is cool too, they guess.
This might seem like a tiny detail and I'll no doubt receive another slew of emails telling me I'm a bitter swamp monster who hates men and sunshine and happiness (all correct, obviously). But is it seriously impressive that a man who received three times as much money as a colleague performing the same work, only acknowledged that discrepancy in a tweet?
Where was Kutcher's incredible support when the discovery of the pay gap was made? And why are some women so taken by such pathetic, limp expressions of allegiance?
Of course, more than a few people insist that the pay gap doesn't exist. When evidence is presented to them, they argue that these decisions are made because women make poor long term investments - we have babies, which is gross and wrong and in no way the provision of an essential service that is undervalued to the point of farce.
And besides, there's the inescapable fact that women just don't ask for enough money. It's our own fault, you see.
Can individual men be blamed for the perpetuation of the pay gap? Yes and no. They're only cogs in the wheel (albeit often well-greased cogs) and they don't set the salaries for their colleagues.
But consider this. I have an acquaintance who works in Melbourne as an architect. She was once employed by a firm that was very male dominated, and sexism was rife.
She told me a story about a young man - a recent graduate - who began work at the firm and was placed under her supervision. One day, they were accidentally given each other's payslips. She was enraged to discover he was making a good $10,000 a year more than her, despite being her subordinate and far less experienced.
When I asked her what happened, she told me the man sheepishly came to exchange the payslips. "What did he say about it?" I probed. "Well, he was very embarrassed," she said.
And that's really all he needs to be, isn't it? Just a bit embarrassed about being confronted with the realisation that he's making more money than a woman whose job description included supervising him.
He's probably a nice guy, but that embarrassment will quickly fade until he either forgets it entirely or manages to convince himself that it's his own merit that dictates that wage difference.
It's not that it's unfair," he might start to think. It's just that I have a lot of value. She probably wasn't as good at the job as I am.
Again, it doesn't make someone a bad person to justify things to themselves like this. It's human nature to want to assume that all of our privilege has somehow been the result of our hard work and not our good luck. But if all that we ever ask of people who acknowledge these discrepancies is that they be either a bit embarrassed about them or retrospectively supportive of our decisions to speak out, then we're not really challenging them to be a part of the solution.
As a rule, women don't earn less than men. We are paid less than them. It's a subtle difference in language that actually changes the meaning quite a lot.
And when a woman speaks out about this, even if the work is astronomically paid in the first place, she does it knowing there's some kind of risk to her career. What does a man risk when he does nothing but congratulate her for bearing that burden? He risks nothing.
He hasn't confronted the employer that considers his equal work to be more deserving of remuneration because of his gender. He hasn't demanded that his colleague be paid more and he'll certainly never insist that he be paid less. And I doubt very much that Kutcher offered to split the difference with Portman when he found out.
But sure. He sent out a tweet praising her for doing all the hard work herself and that means he deserves a parade.
No. Challenging the gender pay gap isn't the responsibility of women alone. We need allies, but we need them to actually take some hits in the game too. Otherwise, it's nothing but a bunch of characters strung together to form some meaningless words.
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