I am not a feminist. But I still hated that shirt.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the “Wise Reader”. Years ago, I was able to attend Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp. It was a fantastic opportunity and I think that I might have learned more in the one week about writing than I had in all two years of my English degree smooshed together. It was phenomenal.

One of the things he talked about was the “Wise Reader”. He advocated finding one or two people who you really trusted and training them to read your work. This wise reader wasn’t looking for grammatical errors or sentence structure. They were simply being trained to react to your story. Did it make sense? Was it believable? Did they enjoy it? It’s a fairly good way to find the big problems in a story that a reader might not be looking for if they’re focused on grammar.

But the number one rule of this process for the writer is that the wise reader is Never Wrong. Ever. They might not have the same reaction to your story as someone else. They might not have understood something that you thought was pretty clear. And they most certainly don’t know how the story should be fixed. But the reader’s reaction, no matter what the cause, Is Not Wrong. And the reason why, is because once you send a story out into the world, you no longer have control of it. It no longer belongs to you. Their reaction is honest and regardless of whether or not you choose to change the story, you just can’t argue with, “That’s how the story made me feel.”

I’ve been running into a lot of talk lately about sexism online. The Hawaiian shirt worn by Matt Taylor at the announcement that we’ve landed on an asteroid has been one of the many focal points of this discussion. It was unprofessional and immature at the very best, sexist and demeaning at the very worst. People have been making claims that it’s incidences like this shirt that are one of the things that are keeping women from entering the sciences.

This whole discussion bothers me. A lot. I do not consider myself a feminist. I am not a social justice warrior. I don’t just stay clear of these discussions, I usually avoid the people having them. I’m not interested in having to pick a side.

I don’t like the angry, defensive men who lash out with sexist blanket statements about women. They feel they are defending themselves and that to preserve their masculinity from the attacks of the feminists, they must lash out. There is a certain percentage of them that are crude, because they simply don’t know how else to be in the face of being accused of crudeness.

But I equally don’t like the feminists who believe that all men are pigs and must be put in their place. Historically, women have had it hard, but with every group who fights for freedom and equality, sometimes it’s hard to know when to stop fighting. Or even which battles are worth fighting. People talk all the time about things like the “wage gap”, but if you actually look at the way the numbers are calculated, the statisticians are comparing nurses and school teachers to doctors and lawyers. When you compare the wages of the sexes in the same fields, there’s almost no gap at all. What small gap exists (7% - not the 45% usually claimed) exists because of life choices women make, like taking time off to raise their children. This, among a great many other things, makes me distrust the label of feminism deeply. I was once told that what I needed was to align myself with the "good feminists" to help defend myself against the "bad feminists". I'd quite frankly like to stay out of those fights altogether.

Which brings me back around to the stupid shirt that started it all. If you follow the arguments about it all, the shirt is being fought over by the men who feel threatened and the feminists who feel they’ve got proof of man’s debauchery. There’s been almost no discussion about the actual issue. The shirt was inappropriate for a professional context. It’s that simple.

Many women, me included, felt that a shirt with half naked women plastered all over it was inappropriate and quite frankly, it made me uncomfortable. I don’t appreciate pictures of g-stringed women showing up in the Facebook feeds of the people I follow either. Does that make me a feminist? Nope. It makes me a mother of young boys who would have liked to have shown her boys (who are being actively encouraged towards the sciences) a video of a great technological achievement of our day. It makes me a mother who doesn’t want to have to hide my Facebook feed from my kids because of other people’s choices. My plan is to teach my sons to be the kind of men who would never consider the half-naked body of a woman to be either an appropriate fashion statement, or an appropriate picture to share. I’m married to the kind of man who would object to that and that’s the kind of men I intend to raise.

Like Scott’s wise reader, it doesn’t matter if the shirt was his favorite made for him by a friend. It doesn’t matter that it was off hours and he came rushing into work to give the press conference. I was made uncomfortable and that isn’t wrong. It also isn’t feminist. It’s my honest reaction. Is his shirt going to keep women out of science? Probably not. There are more women in the fields of science now than there ever have been. Some estimates at the university level are as high as 60%. It’s more likely just to get him fired when all those young women head out into the field and eventually one of them gets hired as his boss.

Mostly I don’t like that I can’t just not like the guys shirt without having to pick a side. I am the mother of two very active little boys and if you want to talk about sexual inequality, I could really go on about the modern education system’s intolerance of normal boy behavior, due to the overly feminine makeup of educators. There is a reason why so many boys are on Ritalin and it isn’t because they’ll all broken. In the long run, is it going to matter if we get our girls into science if we lose ours boys in the process? That’s not going to fix anything. That’s just going to shift it.

I get that men are tired of being accused of being pigs. A great many of them aren’t. I’ve spent many years building my closest friendships with some of the very best men this world has to offer.

But can’t I not like a guy’s shirt without being labeled a hysterical feminist either? There is a whole lot of room in the middle ground called ‘simple decency’ between those two extremes. All I am is a mom who had an honest reaction to a shirt. You might not agree with me, but you can’t tell me that I’m wrong either.

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