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I do not always want to complain, you have to say, in the past decades and years, a lot has become better in the feminist sense. One can no longer publicly claim that women are simply smiling and silently cooking and cleaning, one has to be more selective. Good, you do not have to.
You can think of it as the reader who wrote to me: "In my dream imagination, you are smacking your husband a nice sandwich for lunch, in Poland." Or like the reader who wrote to me, I would write too much about sexism: "And there is always the one idiot who excels as a sexist leek, but over the many normal men who respect their (sic) women and as equals we do not talk, we do not talk, it's a pity. "
These are just two examples, but I could fill many of the numbers of characters that I have here with demands that I - or we feminists, we women in general - should not always complain if something goes wrong, so it goes awry in the sense of: inequality, violence and discrimination against women. As if someone would say to a doctor who is researching diseases: There's a healthy guy over there, you ignorant sow.
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Women are still expected to have other virtues than men, and far more to women who are allowed to speak and be heard publicly: gratitude and humility and the overwhelming joy of being allowed to open their mouths.
One reader wrote to me, "The world has enough bad news and headlines, and enough naggers about any topic, write down what you're grateful for." A person who calls himself Nicole on the internet wrote to me: "In my eyes, the women and especially you should again muster a lot more humility and respect for men, which make your easy lottery life at all possible, before you as before unreflective, venomous and If you express embarrassing statements in public, you should immediately go into a monastery and get in touch again, if you ask them, are we in agreement? "
Feminists as a performative contradiction
People write to me on a regular basis - about every day - that, nobly, they find it unfair when feminists are always so critical and not grateful. Gladly also: Thankful for the supposedly patriarchy personally developed things that we use. (Quote from a reader: "By the way, the hotel room you live in has built patriarchy, as well as the little electronic helpers you love to use.")
Especially grateful should be feminists with a migration background. We should be happy to live in Germany, happy to live in Europe. For those who are not chained to a malnourished goat and flogged, should also see the beauty in the world.
This feedback is often coupled with the working hypothesis that feminists who are allowed to express themselves critically in the media are a performative contradiction.
People ask themselves: how can that be? That speak of discrimination, but on the homepage of my browser? In my TV? In the public law? How does that work? Are not these women proof that women are allowed to do anything today?
"Moral suspect"
The philosopher Kate Manne, whom I have quoted recently when it came to misogyny on the left and right, explains misogynist structures in such a way that those who are involved in them do not necessarily hate or despise all women. They can love and adore single women (like those who take care of them or sleep with them) or even be women.
Instead, misogynist societies have an "asymmetrical moral support relationship" between women and men: "Men (not necessarily all) believe that women (not necessarily all) owe them specific services and abilities, more than the other way round."
These services and abilities are: moral respect, appreciation, admiration, respect and gratitude, as well as moral attention, sympathy and care. Anyone who does not do that as a woman makes some men feel that they are denying them what they are entitled to.
According to Kate Manne, this leads to an attitude that considers women and especially feminists to be "morally suspect": "They are not caring and attentive enough (...), they are forcibly striving for power to which they have no claim, and they are valid because of (... ...) Violations of role expectations as morally untrustworthy. "
Achieved a lot, let it sink for now
The idea that people who repeatedly criticize injustice behave suspiciously is not only a reproach against women, but more generally of reactionaries against the left and minorities. Thea Dorn writes in the current "time" about the fact that now slowly is good. Those who "have traditionally encountered intolerance" are often themselves intolerant today. She asks - and we will probably still be allowed to ask - if we do not want to describe society in such a way, "that many emancipatory successes have been achieved and, first of all, those who have not benefited from these successes and their former ones social certainties and ideas of order have been shattered - that we give these parts of our society time to come to terms with the changes that have taken place so far? "
She is not about extravagant gender spelling or the like. As an example of what should be dropped first, Dorn calls: that homosexuality is no longer punishable in Germany, that homosexuals today have more rights that men are no longer allowed to ban their wives to work, that rape in marriage is now a criminal offense It is true that the children of "guest workers" sometimes have German citizenship, that there is a third option of sex entry. The "emancipation winners," including themselves, "sometimes forget how much we have achieved in a relatively short time, and how little it is natural."
With speed limit towards the future
I do not think homosexuals have forgotten that until recently they did not have all the basic rights. Most of all, I do not think it's an adequate idea of social change and political movements; at some point, there might be a point at which one says, "Pusch, that's enough; first of all, who have minority hostile positions, arrive in peace. In "Tolerance", according to Dorn, the latin "tolerare", "endure", and this must also buckle the "rebellious-self-confident individual" times. Unfortunately, Dorn misses the fact that feminists, homosexuals, people affected by racism, and non-binary people are already on the verge of suffering most of the time, otherwise they would not be able to survive in this society.
"Smarter, because integrating, it would be," writes Thea Dorn, "not to declare citizens with more traditional values than ghost drivers, but to assume that they also drive towards the future, while pleading for a speed limit." Apropos: In the same style Ulf Poschardt submits to "World Online" me and a taz author "Auslöschungs- and punishment fantasies". An original twist that even those who like to write about "feminnazis" want to show who they really are.
In Vienna, a woman wearing a headscarf on the street was recently insulted and spat at. When a video of it was spread and many people criticized the attacker's behavior, there were many comments from those who described themselves as "left-liberal" (often a joke). In the "standard" wrote the head of domestic affairs: "If the mob marches online, he is barely unstoppable."
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The perpetrator - in the popular video anonymized by the way - was "a mentally deranged person": "Since just women are attacked with headscarves, as the mob also falls victim to confused people in the radicalization of the positions are all victims."
It is an old trick of "liberals" to pretend that those who fight against sexism and racism are the real enemies of democracy, the real Nazis. A trick to make her look misguided and morally implausible would be Kate Manne. Embarrassing without end, I would add.