DISCLAIMER: I use the second person singular as I am not always comfortable talking of myself as I. I don’t know who you are, or even if you are a woman, which this you is. If you feel like you is too direct and cannot disconnect from it, feel free to take this as an exercise for the imagination.

We all know the stereotypical radical feminist, the woman who thinks all straight cis men are horrible and are actively trying to undermine women everywhere, who is actively enraged by the concept that a man would get a job instead of a woman regardless of the circumstances… As a young girl this didn’t make sense to me, and as I grew up I learned to despise the term feminist due to the extreme behaviours I associated with it. After all I had met enough women who labelled themselves as feminists and they were all somewhere towards the extreme. So why the disparity?

I’ve been reading ‘The idiot brain’ by Dean Burnett recently and my brain started analysing. What if we don’t really have a choice as women? We are either radical feminists or not really feminists at all?

The origin of feminism

Feminism is a movement, which started from the inequality of genders to help with and prevent the adverse effects this had on women. Simple enough right? However if one were never to be discriminated against, and harm brought to them as people through this discrimination were never to occur, the need for feminism would disappear. If we had complete equality between genders we wouldn’t need feminism, or maybe we wouldn’t even record the concept of gender.

So how does one become a feminist? If you’re a single child or only have sisters and have primarily learnt in female dominated schools, as you grew up you were part of the majority, hence less likely to face discrimination based on your gender. And you may take that with you into university, or a male dominated field like tech, and you expect things to stay the same. So when you first encounter feminism, it seems like an exaggeration. You agree with the ideas in principle, but may not see what “the big fuss” is about. But then things start happening to you… and there comes a point where it’s obvious it’s about gender, and you finally understand the need for feminism. That while you were considering yourself equal to the other people in the room, some were deeming you less than you were. I know that’s how it happened to me.

The fight or flight response

The fight or flight response is a well known trope on how humans react to bad things. We either stay and fight or run away in response to a stimulus that our brain distinguishes to be bad. Radical feminists seem to me to have chosen the fight option. I have also met women who would just run away to a different environment to avoid such situations from ever happening again. Both are valid responses. “Having my work diminished because I’m a woman” is a bad experience and whichever way one can guarantee it cannot happen again is a good thing overall.

Now one thing that this book points out that made an impression is that we as humans have developed a fight or flight response that takes a “better safe than sorry” approach. It makes sense. So we develop defence mechanisms to prevent us from bad experiences. We deal with a man who flunks our performance review on the basis of not being a team player, because we hurt his feelings by proving him wrong once, we deal with another man who will refuse to work with us because we may get pregnant and thus are not reliable teammates, or we repeatedly make comments to a man that are ignored until another man comes and repeats your comments. All of these have in common one thing, having to deal with a man. So our brain learns and identifies the threat: dealing with men can lead to bad feelings. So you can either run away and choose to interact less and less with men… or have your brain start to go on fight mode whenever you interact with a man. Because better be prepared than sorry, right? But even if there is nothing to fight about your brain is ready and itching for a fight, so sometimes, you’re inexplicably angry… so you may latch onto the smallest thing he said, or just the fact that he is a man is enough to get you on a rant.

It takes a while to cool down from going on red alert, and sometimes it’s harder to rationally convince one’s brain it’s safe. However we rarely feel just slightly in danger. And all these bad experiences have taught us to recognise danger, right?

The conspiracy

We begin to fear all the bad things that have and might happen to us in the future so we try and predict when it will happen so as to avoid it from happening again. Another thing the book goes over is the brain’s ability to distinguish patterns even when there are none, thus leading to the creation of superstitions and conspiracies. But even when we do not let it affect our lives, as we deal more and more with gender based discrimination, our brain starts seeing the pattern, and then starts interpreting more and more of our interactions with men as potentials for discrimination. So it gets to a point where a man can’t say anything bad to a you, because it’s all part of this conspiracy, after all your brain sees the pattern. You’re a woman, which hurts him as a man. And yes, sometimes it will be discrimination, but maybe not every single time.

As an outsider the whole radical feminism message could seem like a conspiracy. And maybe for a handful of people, like with anything else, it has developed into a conspiracy where the evil patriarchy is actively undermining the wellbeing of women for their own benefit. However if we are to take the facts found by Caroline Criado-Pérez in her book ‘Invisible women’, they likely don’t even notice us in the first place.

However, as the ‘Idiot brain’ aptly points out, sometimes an explanation is a lot better than nothing, pure chance and randomness outside of our control. And thus our brain starts making connections. So it’s a lot easier to get angry at a secret organisation. And it’s a lot harder to change one’s gender just because of the way people treat you.

What we can do about it

I don’t know, the book doesn’t really offer solutions, and neither can I. I may have misunderstood the book in its entirety for the amount of qualifications I have in psychology. But if I’m right and hopefully if we are aware of this, we can start making rational decisions and distinctions about what is and isn’t ok. Maybe we start to notice the world is not as bleak as it is. Maybe when something bad really happens and we point it out people might start listening, as it’s not just crying wolf, at any rumble of leaves in the forest. If there was an easy solution gender equality would have been solved already.