Content area
Full Text
David Benatar, in his article "The Second Sexism," argues that men have a claim to discrimination that is sufficiently strong that it entails a further claim to "a second sexism."1 Benatar seems to think that this sexism is a sufficient social injustice that it should be opposed "in the same way that we oppose those sexist attitudes and practices of which women are the primary victims" (205). In this paper I argue that Benatar tries to accomplish by definition what he needs to accomplish by argument. He defines "sexism" as discrimination, and he defines "discrimination" as disadvantaging. Thus, he quickly gets from the fact of discrimination to the claim of sexism. I shall argue, however, that the fact of discrimination is insufficient to establish either disadvantage or a social injustice deserving of the name "sexism."
Before turning to Benatar's claims and his arguments for them, I want to make an historical observation. Virtually every point in Benatar's article has been argued for since the inception of the men's rights movement in the late 1970s.2 According to this perspective on men's lives, men are indeed the victims of widespread discrimination resulting in harms that are as bad as or possibly worse than any that befall women. This movement politically has sought to prove a one-to-one relationship between the discriminations and inequalities that affect women and those that affect men. Thus, the political arms of this movement have lobbied for the kinds of remediation for men that were defended by the women's movement for women: an equal rights amendment for men, men's commissions at state and federal levels, mandatory joint custody in divorce, and men's studies programs at colleges and universities. Warren Farrell, who is perhaps the best known advocate of this perspective, argues from the same kind of examples cited by Benatar that men are "the disposable sex."3
The Argument
Benatar begins his argument with two key definitions. The "second sexism" for him is the same thing as discrimination against males. "Discrimination" is "the unfair disadvantaging of somebody on the basis of some morally irrelevant feature such as a person's sex" (177). Discrimination, Benatar claims, need not be intentional: it can be an effect of law or policy presumably created for some other purpose; and it...