"All Men Are Pigs" Is Blatantly Sexist
I can't believe it even has to be said...
It is a phrase I have heard surprisingly often, along with stuff like: “I just hate men” and “men are so disgusting” - often in my company during casual conversation. Strangely, I have basically only heard it said by those of my friends/acquaintances who are the most staunchly feminist, that is, who I would think would be most strongly opposed to sexism. And yet I can’t think of many statements that so clearly express sexist sentiments. Even more strangely, if I were to say something like “women are just so stupid” or “I really hate women”, I would probably lose most of my prospects for a career in academia. And yet somehow, the quips about men are totally acceptable, if not applaudable.
I just want to add a little disclaimer: What I am not saying is that we should care less about sexism against women - this is not some weird and contrived way of pushing a male chauvinist agenda. All that I am saying is that we should not be sexist against anyone, which of course includes not being sexist against women (if you were not aware). I should really not have to add this disclaimer, but from previous experience, some people loose all reading comprehension and basic reasoning skills when the words “gender” or “race” are used (or maybe literally saying that it is immoral to express disapproval of transgender identity somehow is transphobic).
Boring Sidenote: What Is Sexism?
Before we get back to the fun stuff, we should probably consider what it even means for a statement to be sexist. I don't think there is some "correct" definition, but I think the rough idea is that a statement is sexist if it in some way expresses an evaluative sentiment towards members of a sex/gender based solely on their membership of that sex/gender. So if I say “women are stupid”,1 that is sexist because I am ascribing a property which I take to be evaluative to members of the group “women”, merely based on their membership of that group. Statements like “women have long hair” may also be considered sexist, since the speech act performed in uttering them is not one of trying to assert a true proposition about the length of hair, but rather a directive about the length of hair women ought to have (and thereby also a negative sentiment towards women who don’t have that hair length). We should also exclude statistical statements, like “murder perpetrators are overwhelmingly male”, since these only express a contingent correlation of certain groupings with certain properties, but don’t indicate a necessary connection between the group membership and evaluative property. This is surely not the best definition we could come up with, but I think it is workable for now.
Turning back to the statement “all men are pigs”, it is clearly and obviously sexist. It expresses a negative sentiment towards members of the group “men” (I assume being a pig is negative here), and does so merely on the basis of their group membership. So how come these sexism-opposed people say it - almost as if it is an anti-sexist slogan?
A Statistical Generalization?
Perhaps I am just misunderstanding the intention with the statement; it is not an expression of contempt for men based solely on their gender, but rather a remark about the amount of men who engage in pig-like behavior. So a more accurate interpretation would be something like: “The majority of men often act like pigs”.
The problem with this interpretation is that it is just ridiculously obvious that that is not what the speaker means to say. Suppose I blurt out some sexist remark like “all women are obnoxious shrews”.2 You rightfully get a bit mad with me, “what the hell, Silas, you sexist man-pig!” Luckily, I have a perfectly good explanation: “No, no, no, you completely misunderstand me; I was simply trying to make the statistical observation that the majority of women are prone to be more vocal about their feelings than the average man.” You would of course either think that I was a complete moron or lying to your face. There is simply no plausible way of taking the first statement to be an attempt to express the second - the first is clearly expressing a sexist sentiment, both in my sexist remark, and in the comparison of men with pigs.
Men Are Evil Oppressors!
Ok fine, so if I were to say that stuff about women, it certainly would be sexist, but saying it about men isn’t sexist. After all, men belong to an oppressor group meaning it is alright to say mean generalizing stuff about them. So you can only be sexist towards people of an oppressed gender (that is women) - even if you can be schmexist towards all people - and only sexism is bad.
I think this response is complete bullshit. Why is it less bad to be schmexist than to be sexist? Surely you hurt someone’s feelings and perpetuate harmful stereotypes just as much when you utter a schmexist statement as when you utter a sexist statement! I think the intuition is that men somehow deserve to be degraded or something, and women somehow deserve to be allowed to degrade men. That is, men have incurred some sort of original sin as a group, and deserve to be punished for it - bad men!
Except that that is a completely ridiculous theory of desert! If any group deserves to be punished in this way, it is surely the group “men who have been sexist and oppressed women” or something, not just the group “men” simpliciter. Imagine that a red-haired person commits an incredibly evil crime, do all red-haired people now deserve to be punished a little more since they share some feature with that person? No, that would be absurd! So why does this logic suddenly apply in the case of gender?
Perhaps it is because “men” is a natural kind in a way that “red-haired people” isn’t. There are two things wrong with this: 1) What, no? Why does that make a difference? I take it that “people with asthma” is also a natural kind, but I don’t deserve to be spanked more because another powdered-medicine-huffer has done something naughty. 2) Most of the people who say that all men are pigs don’t even think that gender is a natural kind - rather it is a social construct or something to that effect. If anything is narrow-minded and tribalistic, it is surely considering roughly half of the population to be evil, disgusting bastards who deserve to be punished or degraded, based not on their actions or character, but their membership in a - by your own lights - contingent group.
But saying “the people (predominantly men) who have seriously wronged women in sexist ways are pigs” just doesn’t have the same generalizing and vengeful ring to it, hence why I don’t think it has caught on as much.
My Uncharitable Take
If I take off my more charitable hat, I think it is pretty clear that the people saying stuff like this are not trying not to be sexist. If you ask them, they will probably say that they think sexism is really bad, but what I think is really going on is that they are rightfully frustrated that women are arbitrarily disadvantaged and have generally been so historically. But instead of actually being consistent in opposing sexism, they funnel their frustration and anger towards the general category of “men”, and satisfy their thirst for vengeance by saying sexist things about them. While I completely understand that urge, it is simply wrong and does nothing more than perpetuate sexist thinking and tribalist scapegoating.
How Not to Change Minds
On a more pragmatic note, saying stuff like “all men are pigs” and “I really hate men” is just completely moronic, if you are hoping that more people (including men) join your cause or take you seriously. You are not going to incentivize me to seriously consider your view of the world and of sexual discrimination, when you make plainly sexist comments in the same breath with which you explain your views. So if you want to make real progress and not just create more polarization, you should probably hold back on the sexism a little.
But what do I know? I am just a simple-minded pig after all.
For those of you who were unable to comprehend the disclaimer I wrote, I think that this is a sexist (and therefore bad) thing to say - I am not endorsing saying stuff like this.
Again, I am not endorsing this statement! Rather, I am using it as an example of a sexist (read: bad) statement.
I take something like, "women have long hair," to be a straightforwardly true statement about the relative average/median/distribution of the hair of women. I think it's a bit uncharitable to ascribe in it an implicit directive about womanhood or an evaluative statement about all women.
Consider someone who says, "White people can't dance," and "Black people can't swim." Surely this person would not have their whole worldview shattered if you showed them a video of Fred Astaire or Simone Manuel. Also, this person is surely not implicitly saying, "true Blackness entails the inability to swim." The person is simply making general statments about differences in distributions across groups.
I take statements like, "men are pigs," and "women are emotional," to be straightforwardly true. Of course, I realize the title of this article includes the modifier *all*, which makes the statement straightforwardly false. However, since "women are emotional," I'll grant (on average) a little more latitude for exaggeration.
Lmao is written by a Republican in 2013? Yeah no shit, feminists hate men, and "antiracists" hate Whites. Great hot take, bud. You should join us in the year 2024. Next you're going to tell me that dEmOcRaTs ArE tHe ReAl RaCiStS.