Video Post #3: Feminism Survey: Men on the Street

This video is entitled “Feminism Survey: Men on the Street”

It is quite an enlightening and entertaining video. It opens with a woman talking about how she does not want to talk about feminism on her first date because she is afraid it will turn a man off.

So she arranges for a male friend Steve to interview some men on the streets of New York City while she pretends to be his assistant.

Here are some of his questions and responses to his questions:

Do you know any feminists?

“No”

What do you think feminists are?

“I don’t know what that is”

“Lesbians”

“Got their amendment passed in 1920, why are they still complaining”

“They get everything we (Men) get today… most of the top officials are women”

“Militant angry women trying to get their way in the world”

“We don’t need feminism … The Bible states very clearly that men are the head of the household”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pdbnzFUsXI

This video may be a bit one-sided in terms of the clips they included in the piece. I find it hard to believe that all the people they interviewed on the street, besides one man, were against Feminism. One interviewee said “I’ll support women that know what they want and go after it … “. But it really seemed as if he was joking and using it as a way to get a date. A short clip from a “feminist” who was interviewed in her office stated that people think you can silence women who try to assert their rights by calling them lesbians. People have misconceptions that all feminists are lesbians, are anti-men, and hate children. In fact being a feminist does not define a woman. Many or most are in fact what these people would call “normal” with a husband and children. And the feminists that are lesbians don’t necessarily hate men. As can be seen from this article, people have many different things to say about feminists. Yet most of these statements may have come from their upbringing in a patriarchal time, as was the case with the older man who said that the husband is the head of the family. Also, the young men were quick to say that a woman who wants equal rights and treatment is automatically a lesbian. I believe that men are unaware of the fact that women still are treated as inferior in some aspects of life. They think that since we won the right to vote, we should stop complaining. Yet I am compelled to believe that most of these people have not researched the statistics about how women are paid less working at the same jobs as men and are treated as inferior in other activities, such as sports. Some of these men were making offensive generalizations by calling us angry and aggressive. In my opinion, people should try to understand feminism better and realize that women have a legitimate cause to demand equal pay for equal work and equal rights in all other aspects of everyday life.