Being a feminist is boring sometimes, and the principal bore in feminism is having to deal with the same scanty responses over and over again. These can all be contained in one of the following three categories: 1) What About The Men, 2) Ah But What If Women Choose To Be Oppressed, and 3) Some Women Are Bad So Feminism Must Be Wrong. So, for example, if you wanted to raise a discussion about the heinously unrepresentative ratio of men to women in parliament, the responses would go like this: 1) all-women shortlists discriminate against men, 2) if women wanted to go into parliament they’d already be there, and 3) well you already had Margaret Thatcher and that didn’t work out so well, did it?
None of those rhetorical weaselings challenge the underlying injustice of the fact that women make up less than 23 per cent of MPs in a country where we are more than 50 per cent of the population. None of them are supposed to. Instead, they announce respectively that the under-representation can’t be changed, doesn’t matter, and anyway even if it did matter and could be changed, you wouldn’t like the outcome. They are counsels of conservatism, all three. However, there is a criticism to be made of the simple case for increased representation in parliament, and it’s this: simply introducing more women into a male-dominated environment isn’t very likely to make things better for woman on its own.
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