For many in this country, feminism still goes by the name Alice alone, and Alice Schwarzer herself embraced the fiction. Just turned 80, she was on all channels. Energetic and instinctive, she still knows how to stir up her fears and thus prepare them for the media.
For example, says Schwarzer, most women are lied to. It makes sense. Because, first of all, the educated woman, who looks at the glass ceiling and thinks about how to break through it, benefits most from the emancipation of a woman. But even she is under the illusion that she can have everything, a career at McKinsey, passion, love, kids, a box full of Manolo Blahniks, including fatigue. And the social pressure to smile and be nice and beautiful and forever young still seems overwhelming.
What about men? “I’m not a misanthrope,” says Alice Schwarzer. In fact, Alice-esque feminism has almost always insisted that men are people too. And he lied. Since. Because patriarchy has never meant rule by men, but always ruled by a few men. The male majority was just as tamed by this system as the female majority. She was forced to be ruthless to herself and those weaker than her, and used as cannon fodder.
Accordingly, feminism cannot be blamed for the vaunted “male insecurity.” A study by the Global Boyhood Initiative sees the cause of the current crisis in the revival of the old stereotype: “Boys don’t cry”, boys don’t cry, this motto is again relevant for many. Roughness, cruelty, violence will again be positively associated with masculinity, misogynistic Tiktok stars like Andrew Tate will have a big impact: women, Tate says, should “shut up”, they should “have kids, stay at home and make coffee.”
It is these role models that put a lot of pressure on young people. What could help them? Enlightenment. Critical analysis of gender stereotypes. In other words: feminism.
Men need feminism, feminism needs men. Everything will be fine.
Ursula von Arx sometimes thinks that Alice Schwarzer is terribly oversimplifying. And she loves them for this terribly simple slogan: “The goal is the whole person!” Von Arx writes to Bleek every second Monday.