[turns out the boys can use YouTube — uh-oh]
I’ve had this itch recently to pick a fight with feminism, or with particular feminists, or with some aspect of feminism, or something. I’ve also been skeptical of the itch. I consider myself a feminist, after all, and there are way, way, way (3x way) too many guys out there who use feminism as a whipping boy (is that a mixed-metaphor, or just a mixed-gender metaphor?) in order to earn themselves some tough-guy cred. There’s even a species of liberal who picks fights with feminism in order to earn himself or herself a reputation for ballsy political incorrectness (boy, you just can’t avoid the gendered metaphors, can you?).
Still, though, the itch is there, and I thought I’d found my opportunity to scratch it when I came across this man-ifesto from Mr. Shakes, one of the members in good standing of the Shakesville collective. He writes:
Men (and here, I generally mean straight men) are conditioned—by the news media, by the entertainment industry, by religious fundamentalism, by the government, and by other men—to believe that, first of all, they have a more important set of responsibilities and rights than women, and that, not only do they have these things, but that they deserve them and should do everything they can to defend them.
This tendency among men to swallow this bullshit strikes me as being particularly stupid. ? One of the greatest bulwarks against men accepting the feminist movement is that they seem to think that women gaining power must necessarily dilute their own exclusive powers and status. But in so holding onto this erroneous notion, they forget that they themselves are powerless in the face of the corporate plutocracy that now weighs down so heavily upon all of us. If they could get their heads around the fact that they too are powerless and insignificant and ignored, they would stop trying to beat up on the kids they perceive to be weaker and instead acknowledge their own weakness, ally themselves with them, and move forward with them in a new movement that would grant greater freedoms for all of us. It shouldn’t be about trying to maintain some illusory advantage over others. It should be about trying to create concrete advantages for all of us.
If men were smart, they wouldn’t fight against feminism. They would embrace it for what it really is: Humanism. (And stop fretting over whether the term “feminism” is exclusory; its principles aren’t.) They would incorporate the principles of all civil rights movements and collaborate with their proponents on the genesis of a vast humanist movement.
? We need to step out of the paradigm that has been set for us by the powerful few and which only serves to diminish any chance we may have of rectifying the terrible inequities that exist within our society. Instead, we need to define ourselves in a new way, and stick it, as they say, to The Man. If we ever manage to do this, we will have achieved something earth-shattering, something bigger than men or women alone, something worthy of humanity.
So what, you ask, is my problem with this? Men should be feminists, and we absolutely stand to gain, in the long term, from allying with the feminist movement (as an expectant father, for instance, I can easily imagine how nice it would be to live in a society that subsidized people for taking care of their children; this has traditionally been considered as a women’s issue, but really, like many of these issues, it’s a people issue).
What bothers me is the tone of the post. The self-righteousness. The utopianism. The inclination to frame the issues in as stark and simplistic a way as possible in order to stand upon the highest possible moral high ground. The lack of sympathy for the people trying to wrestle with these issues in their day-to-day, complicated lives while a million other things threaten to disrupt whatever emotional and familial equilibrium they’re struggling to maintain.
“This tendency among men to swallow this bullshit strikes me as being particularly stupid,” he writes, and he says that he once thought a lot of sexist things “because I had never stopped to question why I held them.” Really, though, there’s no sense in any of his post that he remembers what it was like to hold such positions or that he went through any real process of growth, which would inevitably have been painful, in order to arrive at his new, highly enlightened state. There’s sympathy, as there for should be, for the women who have to deal with men’s shit, but there’s very little sympathy for the men who haven’t yet crossed over to the light side of the force.
What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that my problem isn’t really with feminism at all. It’s with a certain self-righteous way or talking about politics—the “earth-shattering, bigger than men or women alone, worthy of humanity” kind of writing—and although it pops up in feminist writing, it pops up in all kinds of writing. It just happens to be the case that I’ve been reading a lot of feminists lately.
It also happens to be the case that I’m passionate about this blog because these issues are very present, and often very painful, for me right now, as I’m writing this, and part of me wants to punch in the face a guy who seems to think that letting go of your sexist conditioning is as simple as vomiting up some bad fish. It’s not. It’s years of therapy, and difficult and complicated negotiations with your family, your partner, your work, your sense of self, etc., etc., etc.
Let me give a concrete example. A few nights ago, my wife and I went out to dinner with an old friend of hers. It’s a mildly complicated triangle that exists between the three of us (did I mention that he’s a man, and an ex-friend of her ex-boyfriend?) and let’s just say that while we all like each other, there’s some subtextual tension. There’s also some subtle jockeying for status between the other fellow and me: he owns his own company and makes (much, much) more money than I do. I have the wife, and the kid on the way, and the house. Neither of us is exactly the traditional man’s man, but we each have our points of confidence and insecurity, and each of us has a decent-sized complex about what we don’t have (or fear we don’t have). And then, of course, there’s my wife, with all of her complicated expectations/fantasies/fears about what she wants and doesn’t want in a man/husband/man-friend.
So we go out to dinner. We have a nice dinner. We get some ice cream (yum, ice cream). It’s tasty. We go back to our house, sit around and chat for a while, and then he leaves. My wife and I hang out in the living room for a while, and then at some point I gesticulate enthusiastically (as I’m wont to do) and accidentally knock a water glass off of the side table next to my chair. It clatters to the ground but doesn’t break.
My wife startles as it falls, and then tells me, in a moment of pique, that she’d been wanting to tell me to move the water glass back from the edge of the table but that she hadn’t done it because she knew I’d be annoyed — feel like she thought I couldn’t be trusted to leave the glass un-knocked-over — if she’d said it in front of the other guy. I got annoyed at her for saying it after the fact (I mean, if you’re going to spare my sensitive male ego, then just spare my sensitive male ego; don’t knock it down further after I’ve just made a minor fool of myself by knocking over the glass). She got annoyed with me for making it impossible for her to manage my (universally acknowledged) tendency to knock things over or knock into things. We fought. We made up. And so on.
Now you have to throw into that mix that I’m self-conscious about my clumsiness, and that it plays into a whole complex I have about not being competent, not being good with my hands, not being in control of myself. And then throw in that my wife can be a bit neurotic about being in control of her physical environment, and that she gets frustrated with me for being clumsy, not good with my hands, etc., and that we have general conflicts about control, physicality, money, how we represent ourselves to other people, and that such conflicts are inseparable from issues we both have about men and women and masculinity and femininity.
And all that spills over into a petty litle fight about a water glass!
I believe in living a feminist life, and my wife does too, and one of the reasons we’re lucky to have found each other is that we’re interested in, even excited by, the challenge of working through or with our emotional idiosyncrasies in order to live as fully, intimately, and equally as possible. We’re also a little extreme in our psychologizing and theorizing of these things (we actually have discussions about the feminist implications of the nearly broken water glass). So I’m down with the struggle. But don’t tell me that the struggle is just against "bullshit," and the "powerful few," and the The Forces of Democratic Freedom. It’s also a struggle against human weakness, insecurity, and limits.
I understand why, in a movement, you need people saying things like, "we need to define ourselves in a new way, and stick it, as they say, to The Man. If we ever manage to do this, we will have achieved something earth-shattering, something bigger than men or women alone, something worthy of humanity." But I guess there’s a reason why I’ve always been wary of movements.
In conclusion:
feminism yay
self-righteous, complexity-ignoring boo
and my variation on the famous William Carlos Williams poem:
So much depends
upon
an empty water
glass
on the edge
of the side
table
waiting to fall.
