During my 2004 campaign for University of Sydney SRC President, I promoted the idea of a gender-neutral Gender Issues and Equal Opportunity Officer to replace our Women's Officer, who would be in a position to deal with the unique issues facing both men and women of different social and economic backgrounds. Central to this idea was an acknowledgement that women's rights equal human rights, but so do men's rights, and for our Women's Office to deny the needs of men in society smacks of reverse discrimination of the worst kind. Not surprisingly, this proposal did not go down so well with my opponents.
Women's Officers actively promote the one-sided view of feminist politics, encouraging their "sisters" in our student body to make a stand against the "evil" men out to oppress women. Their main role is to promote the rights of women - this is all well and good - but they do so by attacking the rights of men. Something women's officers across the country have always failed to realise is that in promoting the rights and achievements of women, they do not need to downplay the rights and achievements of men.
Sometimes I wonder exactly how much of the work of these Women's Officers is motivated by a true desire to achieve equal rights between the genders, and how much of it is motivated by misandrist attitude. It sometimes seems to me that the entire premise behind these Women's Officers is to relegate men to second-class status. These women are betraying the ideals of feminism for social equality and are using their positions to spread the hatred of men as a gender.
Perhaps this is "revenge" for hundreds of years of so-called "oppression". Noted feminists have always thought so: "I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig." - Andrea Dworkin, Ice and Fire.
Then again, none of us were around hundreds of years ago, so why should I, as a 19-year-old Asian male, pay "compensation" through disadvantage for something a bunch of white men did long before any of us were born?
It doesn't end there though. Women's Officers don't just deny men's rights; they're also blind to the values and beliefs of the many women they supposedly represent. Our Women's Officers seem to believe that all women have a shared political interest that all women must support. Identity politics demands that all women should support the Women's Office, and it is on this basis that our student funds continue to maintain this office. At the 2004 University of Sydney Student Representative Council election, one candidate in particular was very vocal about her sole credential to lead - that she's the only woman running, and that people should vote for her for no other reason than the fact that her two opponents were both male. So it doesn't matter about the rest of her policy, as long as we vote for her because she (I assume) doesn't have a Y chromosome. Her party had conveniently overlooked the fact that there were plenty of women on campus who disagreed with their female-friendly policy, so not only had they ignored men's issues, they ignored women's.
