Mette Leonard

Women need to free themselves from permanent victimhood

If there is one thing the reactions to the Harvey Weinstein accusations have confirmed, other than the common knowledge that human beings are corruptible and will sometimes try to exploit their position of superiority, it is feminism’s obsession with men in power.

When confronted with Björk’s accusations of sexual harassment by Danish director Lars von Trier on the set of Dancer in the Dark, Trier’s producer, Peter Aalbæk, rejected the claim, maintaining that if anyone was to be made responsible for harassment it was the singer, who, he claimed, had been bossing the two men around. The online response to this male perspective on Björk as a dominant female was outraged denial: Aalbæk’s statement was seen as intolerable and there was no doubt in the female mind that it must indeed have been von Trier, the male, who had the power and had misused it against a woman. The actual nature of what took place is still not publicly known, but whatever went on, the refusal to acknowledge the possibility that a strong woman could abuse a man is symptomatic of contemporary Western feminism.

The majority of women engaging actively in this movement, and certainly the majority of the women joining in the recent #MeToo campaign, wouldn’t recognise a woman of power and superiority if she was standing right in front of them; they wouldn’t, because they are not looking for strong female figures, but purely for examples of exploitative male power. At least one of the reasons for this is, quite logically, the reliance on the male villain for the rationalisation and validation of the position to which these women are clinging in order to avoid facing the most pressing issue for privileged women when it comes to the lack of gender equality: their own dependency issues.

The resourceful, privileged women who lead and determine feminism today cannot reconcile themselves with being the villain.

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