I’ve been feeling too andro-centric recently, so I thought I would devote today’s post to highlighting some of the work our feminist peers are doing on the masculine condition.
At Feministing, which seems to be the place to go for young, hip feminist-blogging, there’s a small item on the new Milwaukee’s Best advertising campaign, which, as the Feministing-ists write, can be summed up as follows: "Accept masculinity standards or be killed by beer."
While perusing BlackFeminism, I found a post on black masculinity and its discontents. The Black Feminist writes:
I read somewhere once that black women and men have different attitudes towards marriage. Where black women (generally) believe in marital / domestic / gender equality, black men adhere to a more traditional man-as-head-of-household belief. Or as it’s more conventionally put, black women “don’t let a man be a man.”
It’s something I hear quite often from black men, especially black leaders and self-proclaimed “relationship experts.” The Million Man March of 1995 was designed, in no small way, to “return” black men to their “rightful place” as “head of the household.”
The idea that head of the household is the black man’s “rightful place,” however, is what I like to call the “Mythology of Black Manhood.”
A male-centered, male-dominant family model has never existed for black families in this country. The economics of slavery, Jim Crow and industrialization prevented it. It is, however, the traditional model for white families. As I see it, then, this myth that black men need to be “returned” to the head role of their family is really a call for black men to be extended the privileges of white American manhood.
And, finally for today, I enjoyed this recent post, from I Blame The Patriarchy, on the idiocies of celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain and his apparent compulsion to compare the forced feeding of ducks to the cum-swallowing of female porn stars. The Patriarchy-Blamer writes:
In order to impress the many-elbowed throng with one’s edgy hipster cred, a dude must boo-ya unto the hills his allegiance to porn. Some dudes accomplish this critically important posturing by incessantly likening everything to hottt sexxx with horny chixxx. Bourdain, Bourdain. So dudely.
You see how apt the similarity between porn and foie gras? For instance, when I say “respectable adult film ingenue,” your incisive young mind immediately leaps to an image of jolly Strasbourgiens shoving funnels down the craws of happy captive waterfowl who will later be slaughtered for their tasty livers. Right?
