The men of MAID have gotten a bit of a smackdown, over the last day or two, from Amanda Marcotte, the prime mover of Pandagon and former blogmaster for the John Edwards presidential campaign (for those of you who don’t remember, she was basically forced to resign after she became the target of an ugly, hateful, deeply dishonest and hypocritical campaign from Catholic League thug Bill Donahue (who’s not really capable, existentially, of waging any other kind of campaign)).
Amanda was peeved with us (actually, more with Jamie and Tom than with me) for being somewhat blockheaded in our interpretation of the issues surrounding Alison Stokke, the record-breaking high school pole vaulter who, thanks to the general skeeviness of the male world, has become an accidental pin-up girl (i.e. objet d’wank) and the subject of literally thousands of nasty, misogynistic emails, posts and radio call-ins about how much various men would love to [insert your favorite synonym for penetrate] her.
Tom and Jamie, she felt, were willfully misunderstanding the issue, which wasn’t that Stokke and her feminist defenders were upset that men found her attractive or liked to look at her picture, but rather that they weren’t content simply admiring her in the privacy of their own slide shows. She writes:
It’s not the masturbating to the picture that’s the issue. It’s going online and making a big deal about how, despite the fact that she’s a powerful athlete, you’re still a man and therefore can physically penetrate her and "win". I see no reason to brag about masturbating to someone’s image except to intimidate her and/or show other men how you can use you sexuality to intimidate women. I get harassed fairly non-stop both online and off about my penetratability, so I have very little patience for this. It’s not fun to have men make a fuss over how they feel biology has given them physical superiority over women.
She also detects a bit of defensiveness on our part, as if we MAIDsters feel like we’re being accused of woman-hating for finding Stokke attractive and enjoying looking at her picture. She continues:
You might find Stokke attractive; who cares? What pisses women off is the abuse, the stalking, the making a big fucking deal about how you could so rape them if you wanted to, even if you don’t use those words and say, “Oh you’re so pretty, don’t be so mean.” If you don’t stalk, if you don’t harass, if you don’t react to powerful women by immediately reminding those women that you could sexually assault them, then we’re not talking about you. So chill.
Personally, I respond to powerful women by marrying them and then complaining about how hard it is to be married to a powerful woman, but still, point taken. I’ll try to chill.
That said (there’s always a “that said” in Oppenheimer-land), I don’t think it’s quite as simple as Amanda makes it out to be (it’s also, by the way, never quite as simple as anyone makes it out to be in Oppenheimer-land, where everyone’s allergic to simplicity and directness). She’s pretty careful in her writing not to paint with too broad a brush when it comes to blaming all men for being assholes. She blames the assholes, and not the non-assholes.
But what about, for instance, Twisty Faster, the author of I Blame the Patriarchy, who wrote the post about Stokke that originally caught my attention. She’s very clear, in her writing, that “Dude Nation’s automatic assumption is that any woman who flouts paternalistic convention by appearing outside her home is a public toilet.” There’s some ambiguity as to whether, in the Twistyanschauung, most men or only certain men belong to Dude Nation, but I’ve been reading Twisty for long enough to be pretty sure that she means most men.
I’ve also been reading her for long enough to know that there’s an element of her writing which is performative. She’s created a persona for herself—Twisty Faster, the spinster aunt—as a kind of radical feminist superhero, because she’s concluded (correctly, I believe) that the discourse needs some more angry, radical feminist voices. She senses that although there’s certainly a need for the feminists like Amanda, who are passionate but still committed to engaging with the mainstream, there’s also a place for feminists who explore their anger, who don’t care about engaging the mainstream, and who don’t worry too much about whether some well-intentioned men out there are offended by what they say.
As Twisty says, in one of her FAQs:
Q: But seriously, I’m a man and I don’t hate women, so what’s with the “Men Hate You” section?
A: The “men” in “Men Hate You” is shorthand, both for “our male-dominant culture” and for the slightly trickier notion that (a) all men exercise — and benefit from — male privilege whether they want to or not, and (b) that the exercise of male privilege is misogyny. The Twistolution understands that there exist men who don’t actively choose this, but the involuntary nature of their participation in women’s oppression doesn’t make women any less oppressed by them. Sure, it isn’t fair, but if it bums you out, how do you think it makes us feel? Oh, wait, I forgot; you don’t care how women feel.
My point, I think, is that there are feminists out there who, when they J’accuse the patriarchy, are indeed talking about even us non-stalking, non-harassing, non-powerful-woman-fearing men. They believe that we’re complicit too, and that even if we’re not, we should just shut the fuck up about it anyway. And sometimes—in Twisty’s case, for example—I think they’re justified in saying so.
The mistake, however, would be for men such as we (such as us?) to buy too deeply into the Twisty paradigm, to take what is a necessary corrective—a kind of theatrical, and rhetorical, intervention—as a functional worldview. We are, of course, complicit in the patriarchy, but life is complicity. We should struggle against our own complicity, and against the ways that other men degrade women, but we shouldn’t hate ourselves or obsess over our sins. We should be thoughtful and humane in how we talk about women publicly (and privately), but we shouldn’t shut the fuck about it. We shouldn’t be so cautious that we simply repress our possibly paternalistic or misogynistic impulses and buy into utopian, happyhappy fantasies about how we’ll lives our lives as pro-feminist men.
The challenge is to not shut the fuck up about it, but to talk about it in a way that leaves us open to correction and disagreement and revision.
