Why we still need Feminism even with equal rights

This essay will argue that feminism is not merely an ideology or a political theory. It is also a form of socialization. Based on a set of ideas about equality, feminism provides a plan for teaching people how to behave towards women and how to understand women as people who possess the same autonomy, dignity, and freedom as themselves.

This may sound strange. If women already have equal rights under the law, why would we still need feminism to teach people equality?

Because laws do not automatically change people.

A country can make rape illegal without eliminating rape. It can give women the right to vote without eliminating misogyny. It can prohibit discrimination without eliminating people’s unconscious assumptions about what a woman or a man is supposed to be. And it can give a woman the legal right to leave her husband while she remains socially, economically, or physically unable to do so.

The uncomfortable implication is that equality has two different stages. The first is giving people equal rights. The second is making people actually behave as if those rights are real.

That second project is where feminism remains necessary.

1) Equalizing laws is just part of it, but not the main goal

When feminists fought to outlaw rape within marriage, changing the law had several objectives. One was obviously enabling women to seek justice when such a horrible thing happened to them. But there was another objective that is easier to overlook: the law was making a statement about what society believed.

A husband was no longer allowed to claim that marriage itself gave him sexual access to his wife.

That distinction is enormous.

The criminalization of marital rape did not merely create a new category of criminal punishment. It destroyed an old social assumption: that a wife somehow owed her husband sex because she was his wife. The law therefore did not simply regulate behaviour. It changed the meaning of the relationship itself.

This is one reason I think feminism should be understood partly as socialization.

When a society repeatedly tells people that women are autonomous individuals, that consent matters even inside marriage, that women have the same political rights as men, and that controlling a partner is not an expression of love but a violation of autonomy, it is teaching people how to interact with one another.

The law becomes a teacher.

This is also why I find the argument that “women already have equal rights, therefore feminism is unnecessary” so unconvincing. It assumes that legal equality is the end of the process. Historically, it has often been the beginning.

Consider how recently some of these changes occurred. Women gaining the vote, entering professions previously closed to them, gaining control over property, escaping marriages, and having marital rape recognized as a crime are not ancient developments. They happened within living memory.

And we should expect socialization to take longer than legislation.

You can change a paragraph in a legal code in one afternoon. You cannot change the assumptions of millions of people that quickly.

This may also explain why feminist movements can have effects beyond the specific laws they campaign for. When society changes its conception of what women are entitled to expect from men, it changes the behaviour that is socially rewarded and socially condemned.

This is not unique to feminism. Every functioning society socializes people into moral expectations. We teach children not to steal, not to assault people, not to lie, and not to discriminate. Feminism adds another question to this moral education:

Why should the person you are attracted to have less freedom than you?

The fact that this question still needs to be taught is precisely why feminism is not obsolete.

But this raises a much more uncomfortable question.

Why did we need to teach this in the first place?

2) Are men biologically predisposed to sexual aggression or are men socialized into it?

This may be the most controversial claim in this essay.

I do not think it is useful to say simply that “men are predators.” That statement is too crude. Most men do not rape, most men do not sexually assault women, and treating every man as morally suspect would itself be a form of discrimination.

But I also think the opposite extreme is intellectually dishonest: pretending that there are no meaningful sex differences in sexual behaviour, aggression, or the tendency to seek sexual dominance.

There are biological differences between men and women. Testosterone, reproductive strategies, sexual competition, and physical differences all matter to human behaviour to some extent. The difficult question is how much of the behaviour we associate with male sexual aggression comes from biology and how much comes from culture.

And feminism becomes interesting precisely at that boundary.

Suppose there is some biological predisposition among men towards greater sexual risk-taking, sexual competition, or aggression. That would not make rape inevitable any more than a biological predisposition towards aggression makes murder inevitable.

Civilization exists partly to teach people what they must not do with their impulses.

We do not tell an angry person, “You are biologically angry, therefore punching somebody is natural and acceptable.” We teach them self-control.

So even if some forms of male sexual aggression have biological roots, that would not weaken feminism’s argument. It could actually strengthen it.

It would mean that socialization matters even more.

Consider what happens when societies place weak restraints around male sexuality and simultaneously give men substantially more social, economic, or physical power than women.

One example is child marriage.

The disturbing question is not merely why some men marry girls. It is why societies sometimes make this possible, legitimate, or even desirable.

A nine-year-old girl and an adult man do not enter such a relationship with equal bargaining power. The adult has vastly greater physical strength, economic independence, social authority, and psychological development. If the social environment also teaches girls that obedience is a virtue and men that authority over women is normal, the resulting relationship is not merely an unusual romantic preference. It becomes a structure of domination.

And this is where I think feminism has a powerful explanatory advantage over the idea that “some individuals are just bad.”

If the same pattern repeatedly appears where women have less autonomy and men have greater authority, perhaps we should stop looking only for defective individuals and start looking at the social system producing the behaviour.

The same question exists much closer to home.

Growing up in Germany, I have heard many women describe being approached by older men when they were still very young teenagers. Many women remember receiving sexual attention at ages such as twelve, thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen that they would never have received in the same way once they became adult women.

Why?

The obvious answer is not necessarily “because men are evil.”

But another uncomfortable possibility is that some men find very young girls attractive precisely because they are easier to impress, manipulate, dominate, or control than adult women.

And if that is partly true, it tells us something important about power.

A sexually confident adult woman can say no, identify manipulation, have her own money, leave a relationship, challenge a man intellectually, and demand equality.

A twelve-year-old cannot do most of these things.

This is why the sexualization of girls is not simply a question of attraction. It is also a question of power.

And this brings us back to feminism.

Feminism does not have to convince every man that he has no sexual impulses. It has to teach men that their impulses do not create obligations for women.

You can desire someone without being entitled to them.

You can be attracted to someone without approaching them.

You can want sex without being owed sex.

You can be physically stronger without having authority over someone.

And you can love someone without possessing them.

These sound obvious now.

They were not always obvious.

3) People either want to take the rights women fought for away—or behave as though they do not accept them

There is another reason why feminism remains necessary: some people genuinely want to reverse women’s rights.

On social media and elsewhere, there are voices arguing that women should lose the right to vote, return to traditional gender roles, stop working, or surrender control over their reproductive decisions.

These opinions should not be treated as evidence that every man secretly wants to oppress women. But they do demonstrate something important: legal equality is not self-preserving.

Rights that people stop defending can be taken away.

And even when nobody openly proposes removing a woman’s rights, people can behave in ways that effectively deny those rights.

A woman may legally have the right to leave a relationship. A man may nevertheless threaten her when she does.

A woman may legally have the right to work. An employer may nevertheless assume that she will eventually become a mother and therefore be less committed.

A woman may legally have the right to refuse sex. A man may nevertheless interpret her rejection as something to negotiate rather than something to accept.

A woman may legally have control over her own body. Society may nevertheless attempt to impose moral obligations on her that it does not impose on men.

This is why I think there is something misleading about describing violence against women simply as “bad individuals doing bad things.”

Of course individuals are responsible for their actions. A murderer cannot escape responsibility by blaming patriarchy.

But individual responsibility and structural explanation are not mutually exclusive.

We can ask why certain forms of behaviour occur disproportionately within particular social relationships without denying that individuals choose to commit them.

Consider femicide. When a woman is killed because she leaves her partner, refuses to obey him, rejects him, or begins a relationship with somebody else, the violence is not random. The underlying idea is that the woman has violated the man’s perceived entitlement to control her.

The same pattern appears in sexual harassment.

The question is not simply why one particular man decided to harass one particular woman. It is also why certain men believe that a woman’s body, attention, or sexuality is something they are entitled to access.

That is a feminist question.

And it is a question about socialization.

If boys are repeatedly taught that persistence is romantic, that “no” sometimes means “try harder,” that masculinity requires sexual conquest, that women enjoy being pursued even when they reject you, and that controlling a girlfriend is evidence of love, then we should not be surprised when some men eventually behave according to those lessons.

Feminism attempts to replace those lessons.

It teaches that rejection is not humiliation.

That vulnerability is not weakness.

That consent is not an obstacle.

That jealousy is not ownership.

That women are not prizes.

And that masculinity does not require domination.

This is why the feminist project is bigger than legal equality.

It is an attempt to change the scripts people carry inside their heads.

4) Radical feminism is not nearly as radical as other civil rights movements

There is another reason I find the description of feminism as an inherently “radical” movement strange.

Look at what women historically had to demand.

The right to vote.

The right to own property.

The right to work.

The right to receive education.

The right to refuse sex within marriage.

The right to control one’s reproductive life.

The right to leave an abusive relationship.

Today, many people hear these demands and think: obviously.

But that is exactly the point.

Ideas that now seem obvious were once considered radical.

When African Americans fought for civil rights in the United States during the 1960s, the movement contained very different political philosophies. Martin Luther King Jr. advocated nonviolent resistance, while Malcolm X at various points advocated a much more militant politics and emphasized self-defense. The Kurdish movement in Turkey likewise produced organizations such as the PKK that pursued political objectives through armed struggle.

These examples are not morally equivalent movements, and I am not arguing that violence automatically makes a movement legitimate or illegitimate. My point is simply that civil rights movements historically have not been uniformly peaceful or moderate.

Against that background, feminism is remarkable.

Even its most radical branches have generally attempted to transform social relations, institutions, sexuality, family structures, and economic systems through political activism, protest, organizing, scholarship, and cultural change rather than through armed struggle.

And there is another irony.

Feminists are sometimes accused of being anti-free-speech simply because they react strongly to misogynistic speech. But criticizing somebody’s speech is not the same as banning it. Refusing to associate with someone is not censorship. Protesting against a speaker is not automatically suppression of free speech.

A person can have the legal right to say something while other people have the right to tell them that what they said is disgusting.

That distinction matters because feminism is often called “radical” for making demands that, when stripped of their historical context, are extraordinarily ordinary.

Do women deserve to vote?

Should women be able to work?

Should a wife be allowed to refuse sex?

Should a woman be able to leave her husband?

Should women be protected from sexual harassment?

Should a woman be allowed to decide what happens to her own body?

These are not particularly radical questions.

The radical part is perhaps that feminism insists that the answers must apply even when a man dislikes them.

And that may be the deepest reason why we still need feminism.

Equal rights are a legal principle.

Equality as a social reality is a cultural achievement.

A constitution can tell a man that a woman is his equal. A criminal code can tell him that he cannot rape her. An employment law can tell an employer that he cannot discriminate against her. But none of these laws can physically enter somebody’s mind and remove the belief that women are inferior, sexually available, emotionally incapable, or naturally subordinate.

People have to learn equality.

They have to practice it.

They have to teach it to their children.

And they have to defend it when somebody tries to take it away.

That is why feminism is not finished.

Perhaps feminism succeeds precisely when future generations find many of its demands so obvious that they can no longer understand why anyone ever had to fight for them.