I am not conflating race and gender. I am going to do so for a hot second, because I need to illustrate a thing that's hard to explain, but I am not saying they are the same thing.
Let's say I believe I'd hire women and men who are equally qualified for the same job at the same rate. I BELIEVE THIS. With all my heart. I also say I believe I'd hire a black man and a white man who are equally qualified for the same job at the same rate. And I say with because I believe it with ALL MY HEART.
I'm not a liar. I'm not racist. I don't hate women. I love my mom and my sisters. I have friends and relatives and neighbors of all races. I believe that I believe this.
But if you took the raw data of my hiring practices...I hire men more than women. I hire white people more than people of color. And then you take a thousand people like me. All of whom would swear the same blood oath I swore about seeing people as equal, all of whom have the same hiring practices.
What the fuck do you do?
Every single individual hire will have a rationale behind it. You hired Steve, not Tyrell (and yeah, that's a little racist) because Steve had more PHP experience. You hired Ken, not Donna, because Ken had more a better background in public speaking. You can justify every individual choice rationally and thoughtfully. What you can't justify is the pattern. And even if your pattern wasn't the problem what about the other 99 people? If 99 people have the same pattern, then we have a problem. With them, with you, with someone, we're not sure, we just know that the pattern exists. Where it comes from, why, from where, how to change it...that we're all pretty confused about.
We aren't fighting for the right to smoke, drive, or vote. Those are concrete ideas. We're still fighting for some of those, don't get me wrong, but a lot of what really belies the problem is small, tiny, unnoticed, subconscious, and ignored. No individual THING is a problem. A man not wanting to crush his testicles on the train isn't bugging me. It's a history, a pattern, a systemic thing that happens over and over and over and over without reason that becomes insidious. And I can take any single instance of it and explain it away. He was in a bad mood. His mom died. His friend got drunk and kicked him in the junk. He's got gonorrhea. He had more PHP experience than I did. The singular can be explained. The pattern can't.
How do you fight a pattern?
One way is to say the pattern doesn't exist. A lot of people do that. They don't experience it, ergo its not real. Both men and women explain things in a condescending tone, right? I have had both happen to me, I know this is true. But I also know the way men do it is differently because that's my lived experience. Both are bad, both are pock marks of bad character and manners, but one is different than the other.
How do I explain that to you? I mean, can I? I can tell you a thousand stories. You can believe some, explain away others, dismiss others as hysterical. Hell...I can do the same damn thing! Not every instance where this happened was insidious. Sometimes I was just a fucking moron. Sometimes I was giving as good as I got. Sometimes I brought on the confrontation and said "Let's go" and got what I asked for (I mean this verbally, not physically, just to be clear). But there's this....pattern. It happens more with men. It happens more from men around other men. It happens more with men around other men they need to impress and when they need me to look 'less than'. The same guy that can be having a civil, blow-for-blow will talk down to me in a meeting with the bosses....why? Why are they taking credit for my work, interrupting my rational explanations to make themselves part of my project, minimizing my input. It isn't like women DON'T do this, but it happens in a pattern. There's the pattern. And if you see it, you can't stop unseeing it.
Then you talk to other people. They are dealing with the same pattern. They thought it was just them! Then you get together and say, "This is a weird thing that's happening, why...where does it come from? When did it start?"
I can't explain a pattern. I can tell you individual instances of a pattern, but not the pattern itself. And the best defense against a pattern is to say well, yeah, maybe, but that ONE TIME was because [insert rational explanation here]. AND YOU WILL BE RIGHT! Which is great, because not everyone who does an ill-mannered thing is doing it oppressively. I can't say why a thing happened. There might be a totally rational reason for every individual thing. But there can't be a rational reason it's happening again and again and again on the categorical bias.
This freaks people out. The reason is because they might be the one having a totally rational reason. I read a post the other day where someone got chewed out for being a racist for asking a black person in a store to help them find something because they though that the polo shirt was a uniform in a store they'd never been to. No one wants to be that guy. No one wants to get tagged with some shit they weren't thinking and didn't mean.
But...what if you don't know you're thinking it?
Isn't this the same bias that says women should have physical custody over men? That men should serve longer jail terms? That physically attractive people get shorter sentences than the ugly in the criminal justice system? We have this data. We know it exists. We think we're being rational, unbiased, judgement free, but we're not. We all want to think we're rational. We all want to think we're free of racial and gendered biases. But every sociological examination says we're dead fucking wrong. We make snap judgments. We apply false metrics. We expect different things. We're human and we're flawed and we're all in it together.
We need feminism because to pretend like we got rid of the gender bias in less than a generation is fucking insane. Equal rights does not equate to equal determination. We don't see races as equal, we don't see genders as equal, even if we WANT to. Wanting to is a great step, the first step, but it isn't the journey.
You are still living under gendered stereotypes. Sorry, you are. I am too. We're both still a little racist. We're working against it, but we are. These things are just true. We can tell because the data tells us. We can tell because we can't always justify every decision. We have a "gut" that says things and we listen.
It's easy to say "You're not being beaten at will" and say it's an improvement. I'm not saying things haven't improved! They have! I am thrilled! But I know every second I'm alive I'm not equal to a man. And you can't know that. Because it would be a pattern. And I'll never really be able to explain it.