For the sake of conciseness, I’ll summarize feminism’s roots in one brief sentence: Feminism began as a means to an end of women receiving equal status in the eyes of the law and, consequently, equal status in the eyes of society as a whole. It stemmed from the denial of women’s rights to vote and work for equal pay, and, from an unbiased standpoint on humanity, it made perfect sense and was a long time coming. Today’s so-called “feminism,” though, is another beast entirely.

Women today march around kicking and screaming in a stubborn refusal to be “subjected to men’s will” any longer. They demand insurance-covered contraceptives, cite statistics of inequality in wages of the genders and claim that putting on heels and earrings for a night out is giving in to our subjugation by men.

Quite frankly, this is all a load of crap. Instead of reflecting our feminist foremothers’ passion around being seen as humans rather than being defined by gender, these displays of animosity toward males do nothing more than destroy the credibility of the equality argument altogether. Feminism has become a clever disguise for the idea that we women, not men, “run this shit.”

Take, for instance, the outrage over the wage gap. My feminist friends will not relent when it comes to the fact that women’s salaries — depending on their age groups — are between 75 and 85 percent of men’s. This statistic, however, is sadly misleading. First of all, women comprise almost 60 percent of the population in both undergraduate tracks and graduate schools. And though I typically hear the argument that this should lead to higher women’s salaries, my fine-feathered friends neglect that the more time spent in school, the less time spent slaving year after year for the same company (and slowly climbing the payscale ladder). Education is definitely a wise investment, but every extra year of school can delay the job search. And though having more degrees may lead to faster, more lucrative promotions, you’ll initially earn less than colleagues of the same age who began working at the company sooner.

Secondly, we women possess the miraculous gift of giving birth to our world’s future generations. It’s somewhat difficult for a company to continually promote an employee who can take three- to four-month (and typically longer, by choice) lapses from the job at really any time. Women can’t expect to take up to 10 years off from their careers and still come back and earn as much as male counterparts of similar ages.

Those who cry complete unfairness in the wage gap seem to forget that men and women lead completely different lives. The natural deviation between the genders’ lives is bound to lead to discrepancies between salaries, which don’t necessarily point to inequality. Though yes, the world isn’t perfect, and yes, various forms of inequality do exist almost everywhere we look, we need to stop placing every issue into gender-versus-gender terms and see that we can be equal without being exactly the same.

The only true feminist in mainstream media anymore is Nicki Minaj. Yes, I said it. Nicki, in all her wig-clad glory, is the prime example of seeing oneself not as a man or woman but as a person. She herself has said, “I’m trying to entertain, and entertaining is more than exuding sex appeal … I’m trying to just show my true personality, and I think that means more than anything else. I think when personality is at the forefront, it’s not about male or female.” Nicki — who also refers to herself as a king and runs in the heavily male-dominated rap industry — is solely out to prove her own worth, not her worth in comparison to a man’s. She represents everything genuine about traditional feminism — in a nontraditional way, that is. We ladies could learn something from her.

So, the next time you’re looking to rail against the “War on Women” and complain about how oppressed we’ve been for far too long, ask yourself: “Am I a real feminist?” Because if you are, you’ll feel no need to worry and whine about everything you’re missing out on that men might have. You’ll simply pursue whatever it is you want to do, expect nothing to be handed to you freely and avoid constantly comparing your situation to someone else’s. You are powerful, and you are equal. And so am I. And so are men.

Contact Claire Chiara at cchiara@dailycal.org.

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As Secretary of Labor under the Clinton administration and the Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at Berkeley’s Goldman School, Reich’s resume has set this scene like clockwork over the years. Yet, unsurprisingly for someone of such political celebrity, what his students experience after settling into their seats is not an objective analysis of poverty in America. Rather, Reich’s economic narrative excludes evidence that counters his redistributionist aims.

Having completed the course last year, I will critique Reich’s central claim that income inequality is widening in America. In doing so, I will demonstrate that things are much more complex than the polarizing picture of “haves versus have-nots” that the professor portrays. I encourage current “Wealth and Poverty” students to similarly supplement Reich’s research with their own to read between the lines of his copious charts.

Last spring, Reich started his course by projecting several graphs showing widening income inequality in America. While the professor is correct that wages for low-income households have stagnated since the 1970s while flourishing for high-income ones, these statistics don’t tell the entire story. First, the bottom fifth of incomeearning households usually only have one working family member while the top fifth have more than one. Moreover, fewer than one-third of households in the lowest quintile have a family member working fulltime, while more than three-fourths of families do in the top quintile. Finally, only one-third of households in the bottom quintile are headed by someone between the ages of 35 and 54 — when workers typically earn their lifetimes’ highest wages.

In plain English, the evidence shows there is a correlation between how hard one works and the amount of money one earns. Unsurprisingly, most people enter the working world with lower incomes and are upwardly mobile until retirement. So unless we want to heed the Communist call to absolute income equality, our system of incentivizing work hardly seems unfair.

Furthermore, a low income is not equivalent to a low living standard. Most Americans have other means of money than simply income, like selling property or redeeming insurance policies. Thus, many economists agree that household consumption is a more accurate measurement of economic well-being than income.

In fact, when analyzing consumption, one sees that the gap between the rich and poor is severely less stark. Whereas the average income of the top fifth compared to the bottom fifth is a ratio of 15 to one, for consumption the ratio is only four to one. Because of the large amounts of economic freedom that Americans enjoy, rich and poor alike have more access to affordable food, shelter and technology today than ever before. Is this really the inegalitarian image that Reich has in mind?

Certainly the professor is correct in one respect: there are fat cats that rig our system to their own economic advantage. But, one must ask how exactly these thieves steal from a marketplace that functions through voluntary exchange between buyer and seller. The answer is found in the institution with the monopoly on violence — the government. Through its countless bailouts and subsidies to big business, the federal government regressively redistributes wealth from poor to rich to the tune of billions every year.

Even worse, the state not only pursues policies that benefit the rich but also continues others that systematically discriminate against the poor. Sin taxes on alcohol and tobacco disproportionately hurt the impoverished. Failing public schools render poor children unequipped with the skills needed to flourish in our competitive economy. The War on Drugs imprisons hundreds of thousands of minorities for nonviolent crimes. This is the work of the state, not the work of the millions of high-income individuals that toil hard and honestly for their paycheck.

Indeed, if we want to reduce poverty in America, we should not persecute the investors that drive the economy forward but rather the government that holds the poor back — and certainly not give it more power! The philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel once noted that “redistribution is in effect far less a redistribution of free income from the richer to the poorer, as we imagined, than a redistribution of power from the individual to the State.” Until redistributionists like Reich understand this, we will continue to live in the very inegalitarian society that they decry.

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