Andrew Nolch and Anti-feminists

Andrew Nolch is the man arrested for defacing Eurydice Dixon’s memorial. This caused a lot of pain, and a lot of anger. And Nolch has told The Age that he defaced the memorial as a sort of protest, in his words:

“I was upset, and I want to make this clear, this was not a personal attack at all...this was purely an attack on feminism, on mainstream media for hijacking a vaccine-causing issue and turning it into a men are bad, women’s rights issue”

As the autism vaccine “theory” has been debunked so many times it’s been turned into a meme, I’m just going to focus on Notch’s anti-feminist angle, and the idea that he was angry about how men are being portrayed in the media.

His statement made me wonder which type of feminism Nolch was attacking. Was it liberal feminism? Eco-feminism? Radical feminism? I mean, these can have differing aims, sometimes at odds with one another (see: the feminist discourse around porn) so I wonder which he was protesting? 

Ok, I know I’m being facetious, but when I talk to anti-feminists about why they hate feminism (hate is a strong word but one aptly describing the act of defacing the memorial of a murder victim in my opinion) I get some confused responses. They don’t seem to understand feminists aren’t a homogenous group.

Patriarchy doesn’t exist, is a common answer, and there is no wage gap. Perfectly fine.  You don’t have to believe in the wage gap. There’s copious evidence that it exists in various ways, but if you believe feminists have a stranglehold on the government (another theory I hear) then you probably wouldn’t believe the evidence anyway. You don’t have to believe what I believe. I believe the earth is a globe, that astronauts have actually been into space, and there’s demonstrable evidence for this, but you don’t have to believe that either.  

Screenshot of an article in The Age

Another common response is well if you believe in equality, you should be a humanist, you should care for men and women. I’d like to wryly point out some feminists don’t want equality within the status quo, they’d like to smash the current system and demand liberation from it, but I understand what’s being said. Why focus on women? Why not focus on programs for men as well, why not talk about problems that men have? Well besides the fact many feminists do all these things, my answer would be: why don’t you ask anti-feminists? The meninists? And Men’s Rights Activists? What are they doing? Why aren’t they doing their own work for men? If anti feminists/ Men’s Rights Activists care about supporting men, where were they with their support for Terry Crews, for example?

I don’t have a problem with men who want to solve problems for other men. I encourage them. For example, many men have discussed with me that there should be domestic violence shelters for men. If someone believes this should be a priority: they should go and start them. That’s what feminists did. We funded women-focused charities. A lot of us give our money, or our time or emotional labour, to help contribute to or provide previously-lacking services for women, or emotional labour to discuss issues that affect women and girls. Go do that for men. Feminists can help if they choose, but there’s no requirement for us to do this work, or any work for that matter. We choose what we’re going to focus on.

Funnily enough, I see many anti-feminists whose main purpose seems to be harassing feminists online. I’m not sure how that helps achieve anything. But then, I wouldn’t deface a murder victim’s memorial in protest, either.

In theory, I agree with Chimamanda: that we should all be feminists. But not in practice. To me, feminism is linked to activism and I don’t think you can force anyone to be an activist. You don’t have to call yourself a feminist. I’m not trying to convert anyone. No one has to believe what I believe.

Nolch defaced Eurydice Dixon’s memorial in an act of protest against feminism, against what I would call a changing tide in terms of male culpability for their actions. In reality, all he’s done is bolster a longstanding feminist concept (common throughout the differing theories): that males in our society can be socialised to act entitled and aggressive, to the detriment of females who are socialised to submit to it.

And it makes me wonder why if you didn’t like men looking bad in the media, you would make a choice to be a man who defaces a murder victim’s memorial? I doubt many people are going to read this as a positive example of manhood…

 By: Tee Linden