(Dear Readers, In the name of posting more, I’m trying to edit less. This is my first effort in doing so. -jb)
If I were still writing middling magazine features and this were one of them, I’d probably start with something like, “When Robert Jensen sat down across from me at a crowded Amherst, MA, cafe the other day, he looked tired, and wary. If I were in the midst of a book tour in 2008 preaching not only Andrea-Dworkin-style, anti-porn radical feminism but also proposing an unequivocal end to masculinity, I’d look tired and wary too.”
Jensen and I met to talk with me about his book, and masculinity. And, while I’d forwarded him my posts that were critical of him, especially regarding porn and fantasy, he hadn’t read them yet. But I could tell he was used to being on the defensive and thought I might not be fully on board with his agenda. But I was in no mood to attack. After a few weeks of dealing with the thinly-veiled misogyny and racism in the responses to Dan’s and my posts on men’s rights activist Glenn Sacks’ blog, I really didn’t feel like arguing with someone whose values were, more or less, very similar to mine.
He also turned out to be a nice guy. When he talked about his writing and activism in the areas of race and gender and radical ecology, about our living in the end of an empire, he lacked all the condescension and pedantry that I felt when reading his work. And, as I wrote in my last post for Glenn Sacks, when I talked with him about posting on an MRA site, about trying to communicate with those angry American guys, as opposed to, say, writing a radical feminist manifesto geared more or less toward radical feminists, or at least, as I see it, a book that would alienate almost any reader outside the radical feminist academic world/community in which Jensen exists, he made the argument that he wasn’t just preaching for the converted to listen and nod, to go “right on!” and “mmmmm” at readings, he was/is looking for that miniscule percentage of people within his already tiny fraction of the American public who are willing to start what he called a “cadre,” a small group, from which the kernel of ideas and activism that makes revolutions happen arguably springs. While I’m not going to join that cadre, not yet, at least, I bought the argument, so much so in fact – or maybe I was just thrilled to have a rationale for getting away from the MRA men after so little time and effort – that I decided to stop writing for/to them.
In just a few weeks of posting for Sacks, it really was polluting my day-to-day life. I found myself in the gym, at the supermarket, looking at the men around me, thinking does this guy hate and fear women in general, does that one really believe that men don’t beat up their girlfriends more than vice versa, does that one think that women get all the breaks in the work world while men always get shafted?
I did get into it with Jensen on one topic though: fantasy. I took him to task, as I have here, for what I found to be unhealthy and unproductive self-censorship (that he also recommends for all men). In the book, Jensen talks about trying to censor his own thoughts and fantasies when they don’t match his values. Well, I’ve spent the last ten or so years of my life learning not to do exactly that. To let go of the shame and guilt and shame and guilt . . . because my fantasies didn’t match my values. And only when I let go of my self-recrimination about porn and peeps and my objectifying, nasty lusts, did they start to let go of their grip on me. But many of you have already read plenty about me and that stuff here (and if not and you want to you can do by entering “Robert Jensen” right over there on the right side of the blog, our new search feature!). And while I do buy the argument that spending money on pornographic material, etc., supports a morally unsupportable industry, well, I drink Coca-Cola too. And drive a car. And eat meat. While I question myself about it a lot, I am a decadent end-of-empire man – I often choose to live in and enjoy the world I was conditioned to live in.
And that’s, in two ways, where Jensen and I part. He’s willing to sacrifice more base day-to-day pleasures for a worthy cause than am I, by a long shot. But beyond that, and where he got defensive, I felt, in our conversation, was in asking me whether he thought that men’s sexual fantasies are nature or nurture – he clearly was assuming that I would assert that they were nature alone, that objectification was inevitable. I told him that I didn’t feel they were one way or the other, but that I do believe the cliche that men are, by nature, much more visually-oriented than women, and I’d argue, correspondingly more inherently objectifying.
[Semi-digression: In the latest version of my “Peep Show” manuscript that accompanied my book proposal that [ugh, finally] went back out to my agent last Wednesday, I added this:
Looking vs. Looking: Arguments in defense of/ apologists for male objectification often argue that men are simply much “more visual” than women. In my experience, this is inarguably true, which is not to say it justifies leering or gawking. When I look at naked women in magazines, or even clothed women stealthily on the street, the feeling is incredibly akin to when I look at a classic Porsche or a pair of shoes in a shop window. I am looking, often hopelessly, helplessly at an object of beauty that I would hold, touch, possess, if I could. As a child I nearly ruined a family trip to Italy with my need, it really felt like a need, to have every toy car in every shop window. When I was a teen and young adult the pain of looking at women only to have them disappear from my view was almost unbearable. But when I go to Peep Shows, when I’m looking at an actual naked woman paid to be naked in front of me, while I do indeed go through that objectification process, my experience is infinitely complicated by my intense desire to make some connection to the person in front of me. It’s a connection that not only are strippers not paid to make, but that most of them actively, wisely, refuse to make.]
But I also granted Jensen that I did feel younger and younger men and women are presented with degrading images of women, demean images of the relationship between the genders, and that to a great extent, the fantasies we’re stuck with are chosen for us, fashioned out of images that it’s almost impossible to avoid.
Jensen really wants a revolution, and believes in sacrificing for it. He dreams of a world in which porn doesn’t exist. While part of me has such dreams, another part of me, the part of me that enjoys porn and enjoys living in this world – watching South Park and eating hot dogs and laughing at hypocrisy more than fighting it is stronger – wants to be at peace with itself. (And then there’s the part that wants to live in a world where only porn exist, but, luckily, that’s a small part.) And, as I’ve written before, I could no more train myself out of my fantasies, be they innate or learned, than a gay person can be “deprogrammed.” All I could succeed in doing is resuscitating my guilt and shame, and what good would that do? My answer, of course, is that it would do no good – for the world, for me – at all. Jensen half agrees; he argues that the shame, thinking I’m an inherently bad person for my lusts, is indeed useless, but he also argues that the guilt, thinking “I’ve done something bad” as opposed to “I am bad,” that we as men are responsible for things we have done and men have done for centuries, is something we should feel and act on. And I guess I agree with him. But I am weak; the flesh, indeed, is weak.
Jensen also distinguishes between pleasure and joy, arguing that physical pleasure, the orgasm that one has masturbating to hateful porn, the sex one has with one’s partner while fantasizing about a pornographic image, say, is not only nothing compared to the intimacy, the joy of a deeper relationship with another person and with oneself, but that the fantasizing itself, the pleasuring oneself via such material, actually prevents one from experiencing more transcendent joy. I don’t know if I agree with him, or even if I’m accurately representing his point of view, although I think I’m coming close. All I know is that I’ve come too far on my own path of self-acceptance (Wow, did I just write “my own path of self-acceptance”? It seems that my 14 years in San Francisco did have some effect.) through accepting my “wrong” thoughts to turn back now.
***
The evening after I met him, Jensen gave a lecture at a local bookstore [ins. Amhert Books link]. I found him surprisingly non-doctrinaire. (He made no exception for queer porn although he did say he felt he didn’t have the right to decide what gay people get off on, and told the story of a friend, a gay man from the Midwest who only first found himself validated when he say his first gay porn. He expressed doubts about the legitimacy of sexual reassignment.). But what most struck me was that, while close up, over coffee, I felt as if I was talking to, well, a regular guy, a man – from a distance, Jensen was much more ambiguous, almost ungendered. He was assertive, even aggressive, but neither feminine nor masculine nor typically androgynous in his gestures, his bearing. It was as if he really was trying to practice what he was preaching, to shed “masculinity” itself. (Clearly I’m having a hard time explaining what I saw.)
Jensen’s argument in the book is that what we consider positive about masculinity (strength, resolve, decisiveness . . . ) are characteristics that are positive for all humans, and what we consider negative about masculinity (belligerence, intransigence, domination, oppression) are characteristics that have been largely male and should be abandoned. And while his stage manner did bring back feelings I had when reading his book of an annoying monkish-to-messianic streak in Jensen, it also struck me as a noble pursuit on his part. Perhaps somehow tragic as well, or at least hopeless, as I see it, but somehow noble too.
