UPDATED 1/17/2010, 1/18/2010
About two years ago, HughRistik wrote a series of posts discussing the issue of moderate or mainstream feminist complicity with radical feminist bigotry. In the third part of that series, Hugh looked at the case of Mary Daly.
Well, Mary Daly recently died, and a number of feminist blogs looked at her legacy. Melissa at Shakesville gave her an (initially) laudatory eulogy (or, at a minimum, an uncritical one), but then Sady at Feministe and Sungold at Kittywampus delved into Daly’s transphobia (prompting Melissa to modify her original post). Mandolin at Alas and Daisy Deadhead seconded Sungold’s and Sady’s critiques.
The transphobia charge seems, frankly, incontestable, and kudos to all the blogs for pointing it out. I haven’t read every comment on these blogs, but — with the exception of a few commenters at Alas — I’ve yet to find an acknowledgment of another not-insignificant aspect of Daly’s legacy: Mary Daly hated men. She was an anti-male bigot, as evidenced by interviews Hugh highlighted here and here.
I don’t subscribe to the “one strike and you’re out” philosophy espoused by many bloggers & commenters (most egregiously exemplified by Jeff Fecke). A person may have made a mistake — or even be deeply flawed — in one area, but that doesn’t necessarily mean their contributions in other areas are therefore automatically devoid of merit. I’m not familiar with Daly’s canon of work, and it’s conceivable that she made positive contributions to humanity despite her antipathy towards half the population. (It’s also conceivable that her bigotry completely marred her ability to objectively assess gender relations and that her writings are in fact far more poisonous than enlightening.) Without that familiarity, I’m reluctant to render judgment about people who may have found aspects of Daly’s work inspirational (although it is, at a minimum, disconcerting).
Nevertheless, Daly’s oeuvre was the field of gender relations, and overlooking her hatred of one gender appears to be glaring oversight.
UPDATE: In response to my comment, Kittywampus explained she had actually started a post about Daly’s misandry but hasn’t finished it which she has now posted. She did, however, point me to an excellent post by figleaf on the topic.
This comment thread is the “No Hostility” thread. Please read this for the ground rules.
She definitely was transphobic, just as Germain Greer is.
Melissa quoted a eulogy. She did not give her one. She later udpated the post to indicate that the eulogy she had quoted wasn’t as complete or thoughtful as it should have been.
Yeah, she probably should have realized that earlier, as she admitted herself. But she did not actually write the eulogy, and that’s misinformation that should probably stop being passed around.
The notion that my post misrepresents what Melissa did in any way (much less any significant way) is, IMHO, silly, Mandolin. Frankly, my post isn’t even particularly critical of Melissa’s post.
This is something that I pointed out as well, of course. And strictly speaking, your wording here — though technically accurate — artfully omits an important aspect of what Melissa actually did, which was to acknowledge Daly’s transphobia and racism and still glaringly ignore the fact that Daly was an anti-male bigot. In addition, Melissa’s addenda also says that “we want to honor [Daly's] contributions to feminist thought,” which I think completely undermines your notion that Melissa was just passively quoting some news article (and passively posting a large photo of Daly smiling and wielding an axe) and not giving Daly a eulogy.
Trust me when I say I didn’t like Mary Daly. Not least because she tacitly advocated killing me and allowing half my children to perish unfed.
That said, it’s also the case that the people least likely to enjoy the 50′s and 60′s era pre-feminism status quo (say for instance deeply misandryous, gay, or separatist women) are the ones most likely to start banging the cage first.
Daly was very well situated to analyze the problem. Where she, um, fell down was her proposed solutions. Which weren’t exactly inclusive.
As I mentioned in the linked-to post this made her an ideal counterpart, if also a perfect foil for, the deep, deep misogyny that drives the majority of anti-feminism.
Something else worth pondering: as far as I know none of the mainstream feminist sites, including Shakesville, indicated that Daly was anything but a historical figure or more than representative of a branch of feminism that’s largely been replaced by a feminism based on common humanity rather than separate and unequal “battle of the sexes” essences. (Again, the majority of people arguing for the superiority of one of the genders are conservative anti-feminists.)
In other words, to the extent Daly’s followers are important today they’re important in the way Lyndon LaRouche’s are important to conservatives or Ralph Nader’s have become to progressives: not. Unless you count the disappointment and embarrassment.
Mary Daly’s gone, man. She’s gone. As I said in the linked-to post the only person who’s really going to miss her is Rush Limbaugh. Which is just one of the reasons I there was as much energy put into pushing back at anti-feminism as some people still seem to have at pushing back at feminism.
figleaf
Welcome to the blog, figleaf. I appreciate your stopping by, but the way you use words makes it difficult at times for me to understand what you are saying.
OK. I will trust you on that point.
I don’t know what you mean by “start banging the cage first.”
I don’t know what you mean by “situated.” I’m not well versed in Daly’s gender analysis — although the little I’ve read suggests to me that “analysis” overestimates the intellectual heft of her contributions, but hey, maybe I just haven’t stumbled on the humane, insightful parts of her work yet — but as a matter of principal, it seems likely that a person who believes that an entire gender is inherently defective would produce “gender analysis” that would be fatally compromised by this bigotry.
I don’t know what you mean by “anti-feminism,” figleaf. If you mean, “opposition to the notion of the full humanity of all genders,” then I suppose your assertion (that misogyny drives most anti-feminism) is plausible albeit unprovable (and somewhat Bulveristic).
But if by “anti-feminism” you mean “anyone who criticizes mainstream feminist orthodoxy” then your assertion strikes me as awfully similar to the self-serving ad hominem attacks used by gynocentric feminists as a substitute for good faith intellectually rigorous exchanges with feminist critics. Perhaps I misconstrue your meaning — I hope I am, and please let me know — but it is something we’ve had to deal with on a repeated basis here at Feminist Critics, so I think we can be forgiven if we’re a bit sensitive on this point. Indeed, “You’re a misogynist!” would likely occupy several squares of gynocentric feminist bingo card.
I don’t think that’s as important to ponder as the fact that Daly is still honored as being a feminist, despite her blatant sexism. I think people like, well, me and Christina Hoff Sommers* are probably better feminists than Daly, yet major gynocentric feminist bloggers will apply the “anti-feminist” label to Sommers and I, while allowing it to stay on someone like Daly. I think there’s something seriously wrong with that picture. Don’t you?
I don’t know, you’d have to show me some statistics, figleaf. There are an awful lot of gynocentric feminists out there who ignore or marginalize gender issues facing men. Plus, ordinary mainstream culture sees women as being more important than men in some ways (“women and children first”, “mothers are more important than fathers,” etc.). So … color me skeptical.
As an aside, I think Nader has gotten a bum rap from the Democratic establishment and its supporters. Certainly he’s politically tone-deaf, but his insights into what is going wrong with this country are generally above reproach.
And maybe I’m wrong — I don’t read conservative or right wing publications as a rule — but I find it hard to believe that most of them would run eulogies to LaRouche saying that “we should honor LaRouche’s contributions to the conservative movement.”
The question isn’t strictly speaking about Mary Daly, ultimately. The question is whether critiques pushing back at the misandry which still underlies a significant amount of today’s feminist movement will be acknowledged and incorporated, or whether mainstream feminism will remain largely gynocentric and egalitarian feminism marginalized. (And once again, I can’t say whether I agree or disagree with your remark about pushing back against anti-feminism until I know how you define the term.)
I’m encouraged when someone like Kittywampus acknowledges Daly’s misandry, and doesn’t see someone pointing it out as somehow an anti-feminist assault. I’m discouraged when someone like Melissa McEwan doesn’t acknowledge it (either out of ignorance or indifference). The relative size of their respective feminist followings says something about the state of mainstream feminism, I think.
*FTR, I vehemently disagree with Sommers’ somewhat right wing or conservative take on non-gender issues.
Ballgame, my (hopefully final) post on Daly is up. I’ve spent more time reading her stuff in the past two weeks than I ever did when she was alive.
Just to set the record straight: Melissa McEwan wasn’t responding to me or Sady. The comment thread to her post quickly became a shitstorm, with some transgender folks civilly pointing out her omission, and a few attacking her in a pretty nasty way.
I do agree that there was an awful lot of uncritical eulogizing within various feminist communities, including an email list for women’s and gender studies instructors that I lurk on. I chalk this up partly to the feeling that one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, partly to a sense of uncritical “sisterhood” that some feminists still embrace, and partly to generational ignorance.
On that last point, I think a lot of people younger than me – I’m on the cusp between second- and third-wave feminism – just have not read Daly at all! And for good reason! Her later work (by which I mean most of her career, everything from Gyn/Ecology onward) becomes increasingly far out and well-nigh unreadable. Beyond God the Father has some pretty cool stuff in it. Her hard turn toward separatism, and all that it entailed, deprived feminism of some potentially great thinking.
This is not to say it’s OK to paper over the omissions in the laudatory eulogies to Daly. But I do want to contextualize them. Among feminists younger than, say, fifty, Daly has become relatively marginalized except for a few hardcore separatists who still vocally embrace “man hating.”
Those people do exist, but I don’t know any of them in real life. They are a loud contingent on the internet, though, and they do a certain amount of harm to the broader cause of feminism. They certainly give fodder to the MRAs (and vice versa).
I’m troubled by your setting up an opposition between me and Melissa McEwan. I agree with her on a great many things. I admire her writing. I am uncomfortable with the way “safe space” functions at Shakesville, and I don’t comment there as a result, but that doesn’t invalidate the fact that she and I share a great many principles. In addition, I’m not a full-time blogger. I’m a teacher, a researcher, and a parent. Blogging is an outgrowth of those larger commitments. I’ve got a scholars love of nuance, which will never appeal to the broadest possible audience – not that I always achieve nuance, mind you, but it’s something I value. And sometimes I’m just plain nerdy. I’m not looking for a big following, at any rate; I’m perfectly happy with a manageable number of thoughtful and civil commenters and readers.
Finally, I’d also reject an opposition between “gynocentric” feminism (which I assume you apply to folks like Daly, but I’m not sure where you’d draw the line) and “egalitarian” feminism. I think the world is still complicated and unjust enough that merely pursuing egalitarian solutions isn’t enough. Witness, for instance, the continued inequality in the job market, where women are systematically disadvantaged, despite having formal legal equality for years. But being critical toward straight-on egalitarianism doesn’t mean I embrace a doctrine of female superiority, either. There are lots of positions in between – or perhaps off that spectrum altogether – and most of the feminists I know in real life occupy those positions.
ballgame: I’m discouraged when someone like Melissa McEwan doesn’t acknowledge it (either out of ignorance or indifference).
Chalking it up to “ignorance” is generous to the point of being naive, ballgame. When a feminist accepts that bigotry against men should be paid little heed (and if I’m not mistaken, that IS the accepted feminist orthodoxy on the matter), then they are choosing indifference. And if Melissa is as intelligent as you seem to think that she is, I would posit that she knows of the dirty laundry but calculated that it wasn’t a good idea to air it.
If she’s truly ignorant in the way you suggest, then she’s wandering around in a happy little daze. Please credit her brain with some sophistication.
Sungold: Thanks for your comment. Your points about the evolution in Daly’s thinking are interesting.
I’m not sure I understand your point about “opposition” to Melissa. I was not saying there was any relationship between the two of you or even between your respective posts on Daly (other than the shared subject). I was merely pointing out that I appreciated your acknowledgment of Daly’s misandry, and think McEwan’s failure to do so is problematic.
I know you and I don’t agree on everything. (Like, for example, the job market, where men are still systematically killed on the job at a rate eight times that of women, despite having formal equality with women for years.) Nevertheless, I appreciate the good faith way you approach gender issues, and I endeavor to do the same. I definitely believe that there are people out there who don’t want “people who are concerned with gender issues affecting men” making common cause with “people who are concerned with gender issues affecting women” and I hope you and I are on the same page in opposing those people.
W: Melissa said she was unaware of the transphobic nature of some of Daly’s writing, and I see no reason not to believe her. So I also see no reason to presume her understanding of Daly’s writing is deep enough that she knows about her misandry (though it’s certainly possible).
“Certainly [Nader's] politically tone-deaf, but his insights into what is going wrong with this country are generally above reproach.”
Which was precisely my point about Daly. Just because you acknowledge that doesn’t mean you believe or agree with Nader’s position on the 2000 election. Heck, when he dies I’ll write him a eulogy recognizing his insights into what was going wrong with the country. In particular I’ll recognize him for helping to launch an effective movement for social change, even though by the end of his useful career most people in that movement felt embarrassed to have admired him in their youths.
As for Christina Hoff Summers, crap like “many will be offended by its old-fashioned claim that the virtues of men and women are different and complementary” suggests she’s far more like Mary Daly than most of the feminists I know. Because unlike Daly and Sommers most feminists these days believe the virtues of men and women are actually pretty similar. And also, not to put too fine a point on it, because unlike either Daily or Sommers or a heck of a lot of anti-feminist men and women most feminists these days don’t think a woman walking out of a guy’s place the next morning is “doing the walk of shame.”
figleaf
When I’ve heard feminists say, without irony, that women are equally good at any job as men AND better at nurturing children then men, then how can I conclude anything but female superiority advocacy?
Really, figleaf? Because it seems to me that someone’s analysis that says there’s something wrong with men (and not simply male-dominated institutions or whatever … see the quote extracted in Kittywampus’s post), and castigates others for not embracing being “Anti-male” is very much deserving of reproach.
… but the defects of men and women are uniquely male (i.e. propensity to rape, propensity to commit domestic violence, actually propensity to commit violence of all kinds, etc. etc.). Can you think of any serious defects in human behavior that feminists believe are uniquely female, figleaf? If not, doesn’t this tend to support the notion that mainstream feminists do, in fact, view women as superior to men (i.e. women have all of the virtues of men, but aren’t burdened with certain glaring defects)?
I would need to see Sommers’s quote in context in order to assess whether she was a) saying that it was shameful in her view for a woman to have a one night stand, or b) saying that it was still shameful in society’s view for a woman to have a one night stand, or c) using the phrase in a droll way. If it was “a” I certainly wouldn’t agree with her, FTR.
[Note to other commenters: Please give figleaf 12 hours before posting any other responses addressing his latest comment, as per the NoH rules.]
“If not, doesn’t this tend to support the notion that mainstream feminists do, in fact, view women as superior to men…”
Excellent question. As luck would have it I’ve just been reading bell hook’s “Feminism is for Everyone,” in particular her chapter “Ending Violence.” She says
Hooks also makes the (blindingly obvious to me) point that it’s not that the ills of men are innate to men, which is… pretty much what you’d have to claim if you were going to say women were “superior.” Instead she says they’re largely socialized behaviors that — as she implies in the quote, above, are just as visible in women in circumstances when they’ve got the upper hand. With the main difference being that historically women haven’t had the upper hand.
If I can get a little meta here I notice there’s a sort of syllogism in the superiority argument that I think might be the source of our disagreement. You say “but the defects of men and women are uniquely male (i.e. propensity to rape, propensity to commit domestic violence, actually propensity to commit violence of all kinds, etc. etc.)” and then extrapolate this to “doesn’t this tend to support the notion that mainstream feminists do, in fact, view women as superior to men?”
To which I’d like to point out that a) the idea that men are violent potential rapists who’ll screw any animal, vegetable, or mineral they can get the drop on is a general belief that predates feminism and b) that in order for that to indicate feminists believe in women’s superiority it must also follow that (since well before the emergence of feminism) general society has also believed in women’s superiority.
So that’s problem #1: there are people inside and outside of feminism who believe women are superior (Mary Daly, say, on the inside, the absolutely 100% non-feminist authors of The Rules, say, on the outside.) Overall, though, there are more people who believe in The Rules version than in Mary Daly’s version.
Problem #2 is that most feminists today don’t believe any sex is superior. And a darn good many of them will point out that the whole idea that one sex must logically be superior to the other, or that if one sex is not superior then the other must be, is a patriarchal/hierarchical fallacy. A lesson brought down hard, incidentally, in a women’s studies 101 course I took a couple years ago, by an unapologetically mainstream feminist professor. There were a bunch of women athletes who took the course to fulfill a humanities requirement who thought they’d be able to skate through. After the third or fourth snarky comment about how women are just better at this or the other (emotions I think) than the men taking the class the prof just clotheslined them for it. And I gotta say that made a lot of the young men in the classroom sit up and start taking notes.
And yes, you could possibly argue that freshmen jocks in a women’s studies class who believed women were better than men would be all the proof you’d need that feminists think women are superior and men are inferior. Except there’s the bit about how a) the jocks were clueless, b) the women’s studies professor clued them in, and c) by the end of the course most of the men and the women in the class walked out feeling pretty good about themselves… without feeling better than anyone else. Not least because d) we had a pretty solid grounding in contemporary gender studies.
Problem #3 with men-bad => women-must-be-superior syllogism is that it mistakes the fairly common feminist point that society creates a number of problems for men with the fairly common non-feminist belief that men are inherently flawed, inferior, or otherwise less-valuable human beings.
For an example of the latter see, for instance, the distinctly and aggressively anti-feminist Leon Kass on men eating in public:
The fucking asshole thinks men are dog-like!
An even better example of anti-feminist attitudes towards men? Here’s Kass again on why women “giving in” to their own sexual desire is bad, bad, bad.
Elsewhere Kass claims it’s women’s responsibility to society to give up all ambition and personal agency in order to basically gain control of otherwise dangerous and uncontrollable men.
Lest you think Kass is just one flyweight compared to Mary Daly: By then Daly was in a retirement home; Leon Kass was chairman of the White House Commission on Bioethics when he made his pronouncements.
Which ultimately cycles back to why all things considered I prefer feminism to anti-feminism: most feminists disagree with Kass not only about what he imagines the role of women are in society but also the role he imagines for men. I prefer feminism because in my experience over the last ten years, including reading mainstream bloggers, reading mainstream feminists like bell hooks, from taking mainstream women’s studies programs and in communication with feminists on my blog and elsewhere, is that mainstream feminists believe two things: First “the radical proposition that women are people, and (as bell hooks puts it) “feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.” The latter, incidentally, requiring extension of the former to “the radical proposition that men are people too.”
That’s pretty close to what you say you believe too, ballgame!
Meanwhile, over on the other side we see… Leon Kass, Dr. Phil, the authors of The Rules, all the asshats who claim men have to “earn” sex and love by… effectively being expendable, being wallets, being deserving of women’s “favors”, blah, blah, blah. And please don’t forget all the sexist, anti-feminist assholes who say things like “men only want one thing” and “women should get custody because that’s what ‘nature’ intended.”
Call me a rebel, here, but I’m pretty sure that like most feminists you disagree with all that too.
Which is why I wonder why so many people, especially guys, spend so much time worrying about feminism, especially the rump contingent of “gynocentric” (I assume you mean 70′s-style “difference,” a.k.a. “cultural” a.k.a. “radfem”) feminists instead of going shoulder to shoulder with them against the mainstream mainstream men and women who hate both feminism and men.
I mean, seriously, why keep charging the cape when the real danger is the matador?
figleaf
Thanks for your thoughtful comment, figleaf. It deserves a more in-depth answer than I’m able to provide at the moment, but let me briefly address the points you raise.
I certainly believe that “feminism should be the movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression” and absolutely should include the “the radical proposition that men are people too.” But I don’t think mainstream feminism actually adheres to this standard.
Most of the things I’ve read by and about bell hooks indicate that she’s more understanding of the male side of the gender equation than a great many other mainstream feminists. My experience with the most popular blogfeminists suggest that most mainstream feminists — assuming blogfeminism is loosely representative of mainstream feminism — fall far short of bell hooks standard. My experience has been that they are, in fact, gynocentric feminists who believe that males are, in a sense, ‘foreigners’ in the ‘land of gender’. They rarely even acknowledge the existence of female privilege, much less devote energy discussing it or fixing it (assuming that any particular female or male privilege is, indeed, ‘fixable’).
Males who raise gender issues which affect men are often placed in a rhetorical double bind: if they raise those issues on a feminist blog, they are accused of interfering with the discussion of women’s issues; while if they organize separately, they are vilified as MRAs and spoken of with contempt. (It is certainly true that there are obnoxious anti-feminists within the MRA contingent … but among gynocentric feminists there is often no effort to distinguish thoughtful and reasonable critiques of feminist orthodoxy from actual anti-feminist screed.)
The feminist movement as it currently exists, in my view, treats male issues as secondary and often produces an extremely distorted and biased analysis of reality. (How many feminists do you know — other than me — point out that men are killed on the job at a rate eight times that of women, when they talk about the pay discrepancies between men and women?) So the criticism that we at FC provide is badly needed for its own sake. In addition, I think there is a real risk that males will see the distorted gender picture that gynocentric feminism produces and be alienated by it, and will be drawn to the only group which appears (superficially) to be on their side: namely, right wing MRAs. Progressives’ efforts to demonstrate that right wing policies are ultimately not in the men’s best interests will be fatally compromised if our gender analysis is biased against them.
OK, so that’s me being “brief.”
*sigh*
Anyway, thanks for your comments, figleaf. I’d certainly be interested in your further responses if you have more thoughts. I would ask a favor, though: if you do comment further, could you please provide a definition of what you mean by “anti-feminism”?
So the primary problem with man-hating within feminism is that it gives ammo to Rush Limbaugh et al, figleaf? Is that a concise summary of your argument?
[W originally posed this question in response to figleaf's original comment. In one way, it's a fair enough question, but in another, it comes across as a somewhat hostile "gotcha" type question, which in my experience isn't usually conducive to respectful, good faith discussions. I pulled it into moderation because I don't want the first impression of feminist newcomers to this blog to be that this is hostile territory. I'm approving now with some misgivings. —ballgame]
W: Although figleaf would be more suited to answer your question, my guess is that his argument can be concisely summarized as “In the last few years, only anti-feminists took Daly (and other like-minded anti-male feminists) seriously/considered them typical of feminism.”
This is not a bad line of argument, although this particular instance seems to be refuted by Hugh’s article linked in the article above.
W:
Yes, figleaf’s clarification would be good. I have yet to see any evidence that any substantial amount of feminists with power (e.g activists, professors, and organizational representatives) really has any care for men’s issue. I also very conspicously see them fail to repudiate those like Daly.
“For an example of the latter see, for instance, the distinctly and aggressively anti-feminist Leon Kass on men eating in public: ”
Figleaf, this is a good point that needs to be reiterated over and over – traditionalist patriarchal thinking is deeply misandrist. Male disposability is at the core of the modern form of chivalry. This is why it is so distressing and damning to see any feminist speak from the same assumptions.
The question really is how much of mainstream feminist theory and doctrine and political advocacy is based on those assumptions. That entails another question – what constitutes mainstream in feminsist doctrine, theory and political advocacy? Can we agree to take what is expresed in popular media and in major legislation as mainstream?
My problem with feminism is where it doesn’t challenge ‘patriarchial’ notions of male disposability, responsibility and moral inferiority. Additionally, it’s very obvious to me that ‘patriarchal’ notions of male disposability lead to a situations in which a woman is valued far, far, far more for her femaleness then her personhood; which I find profoundly offensive.
I also have no interest in any system of thought that whitewashes women’s culpability or responsibility either through pedistalizing or blaming men exclusively; this includes women’s role in shaping society.
I also find the notion of ‘patriarchy’ incoherent. There has never been a culture with a preponderance of women in power therefore all cultures are ‘patriarchies’ yet there have been vast differences in how women are treated. Calling every culture a ‘patriarchy’ is vacuous. In fact it only seems to serve as a shaming term towards men in cultures that are female-valuing.
In short, I don’t dismiss feminism because it’s too radical; I dismiss it because it’s too conservative.
@Clarence: Funny, just in this post and comment thread ball there’ve been two tenured womens-studies professors mentioned who care directly about men’s issues. One of whom not only lectured about the negative impact gender expectations have on men but also in front of the whole class put down a group of women who thought they were better than men by virtue of their chromosome mix. The other wasn’t just mentioned but also left a comment. Also mentioned in comments (by ballgame and me) is another professor, author, activist who’s both popular, influential, and radical who also writes thoughtfully about men’s issues. So wouldn’t it be more accurate to say you just haven’t seen enough evidence that any substantial amount of feminists with power… has any care for men’s issues? Because there’s some evidence right here on this page.
@W: The problem with man-hating feminists isn’t that he gives ammo to Rush Limbaugh per se. It’s that he’s able to point at them and say “all feminists are genocidal nazis like Mary Daly.” When, in fact they’re not. Any more than, say, David Duke is representative of all political conservatives. Or, for that matter, that David Duke is representative of all men’s rights activists! Are there people like that? You bet! Are they represent the mainstream/center of their respective causes? Of course not. More to the point do their views represent the future of their respective causes? In Mary Daly’s case at least, no. The $64,000 question, though: do they get plenty of air time whenever they open their festering pie holes? You bet! Mary Daly or one of her descendants says anything six to ten million Rush Limbaugh listeners hear about it eight minutes later. David Duke or one of his followers tries to bring an assault rifle to an Obama speech and it’s wall-to-wall on CNN (disapprovingly) and FOX (ecstatic.) Meanwhile countless women “in power” (none of whom are billionaires with seven and eight figure Nielson or Arbitron ratings) do things like stand up for men, point out how the system hurts men, or correct mistaken impressions about what feminism actually means and no one will put it on TV because it’s not what everyone “knows” about feminists.
It’s actually worse than that — see Clarence’s “yet to see any evidence” comment. It’s not that there’s no evidence, it’s that in sort of a reverse of the “no true scotsman” argument that any feminist who goes against the stereotype can’t be a “true feminist” because “no true feminist” would do such a thing.
Which brings me to @elementary_watson’s point and the point I raised in the post ballgame pointed to in the original post: The Rush Limbaughs and the Mary Dalys of the world benefit from the “no true feminist” meme — no matter how many real-world feminists they leave hanging out to dry.
But to get back to my main point: anti-feminists with real, make-a-difference power like Leon Kass, and Anthony Scalia and John Roberts, or Phyllis Schlafly all believe women should be used as sexual levers to control men’s behavior. Worse, they believe women should want their sexuality to be used to control men. Feminists don’t want to be used as sexual levers against men, nor do they want to use their sexuality that way.** You don’t want women to be used as sexual levers against you. And so you conclude… that feminists are the problem?
(** Most feminists prefer to use their sexuality for, y’know, sex! With their sex partners. And since 90-95% of feminists are heterosexual, just like 90-95% of the general population, that means sex with men. Which as you know perfectly well disturbs and angers far, far more people who don’t like feminism than there are feminists who don’t like men.)
A few comments on definitions: I have little patience for saying “all feminists” do or believe x, y, or z. Feminists are a pretty diverse bunch. I have great respect for bell hooks. I find most of Mary Daly’s work highly problematic. There are many, many positions in between. Ballgame’s distinction between egalitarian and gynocentric feminism is not terribly helpful in capturing that diversity. I like hooks’ definition of feminism as a struggle against sexism. It’s big enough to include men and gendered problems affecting them. It includes men as allies, if they want to be. This isn’t surprising, because black feminist and womanists have virtually always seen the need for solidarity with the men in their communities, rather then posing men as an enemy.
Anyway, comments about “all feminists” very quickly set up a straw feminist. It’s happening in parts of this thread, not just on Limbaughs show. I find it much more useful to discuss particular feminists and ideas.
And just as there’s no consensus on what constitutes a “feminist,” it may be hard to define “anti-feminist,” too. It’s an interesting question. I know Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson fit the bill because they’ve made nasty sweeping statements about feminists. Robertson said feminism is “a socialist, anti-family, political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.” Amazingly, my children have survived me so far! But where do you draw the line? Leon Kass and Phyllis Schlafly clearly fit the bill. Myself, much as I loathe Sarah Palin, I’d still call her a feminist because she embraces the idea that women can succeed in any sphere, and she has claimed the label for herself. Others could reasonably disagree. I’d also consider her anti-feminist (but not necessarily *an* anti-feminist) for opposing the right to abortion.
@Figleaf: Only two women’s studies professors in this thread? Don’t I count anymore?
Because I definitely do discuss issues that affect men, and I do it in a pretty sympathetic way, I think. My colleagues are pretty similar, so that makes nearly a dozen feminists who think men and masculinity matter.
@Clarence: I don’t have a massive amount of power as a professor – in fact I may not have a job next year, thanks to the financial crisis! – but I try to Not Be Evil. And no, I don’t teach about masculinity just to bash it. Tomorrow in my grad class we’re discussing whether the idea of hegemonic masculinity is useful, or whether masculinities are so manifold that the concept becomes meaningless. The following week we’re reading a book called “Dude, You’re a Fag,” on the pressure on school kids – especially boys – to conform to narrow norms.
@Ballgame: I don’t think you and I are on opposite sides of the issue at all when it comes to men’s high mortality rates at work. I’d extend the problem to men’s lower life expectancies. I live in Appalachia, and I see how poor and working-class men are ground down by their work. My home is just a few miles from Millfield, Ohio, site of one of the worst mining disasters in history. I’d argue that these things matter very much, and that a gendered analysis – of why men are expected to assume high risk in the name of being manly, for instance – can help us understand and ideally remedy the harm done to men.
@elementary watson: Hugh’s post is interesting to me because I can’t imagine any of my colleagues wanting to invite Mary Daly to campus. Most scholars don’t take her very seriously.
TB:
There has never been a culture with a preponderance of women in power therefore all cultures are ‘patriarchies’ yet there have been vast differences in how women are treated. Calling every culture a ‘patriarchy’ is vacuous. In fact it only seems to serve as a shaming term towards men in cultures that are female-valuing.
What do you expect when someone comes up with a word that allows one to say, “All cultures were/are ruled by men therefore eveything that happens in them is the responsibility of men.” in such an indirect way that allows one to dodge when called out on patriarchy being shorthand for just that?
Off-topic:
TB:
My problem with feminism is where it doesn’t challenge ‘patriarchial’ notions of male disposability, responsibility and moral inferiority.
I’d be okay if it were just that. My problem is that it doesn’t challenge those notions despite members of that movement telling everyone it does and should therefore embrace feminism as The Way.
Sungold:
I see feminism as a spectrum, ranging from the most extreme separatist radical feminists on one end to the most egalitarian on the other, with gynocentric feminists occupying the bulk of the middle. Daran, I believe, put up a very good description of the differing ‘layers’ of feminism that I think also has a lot of merit. (Unfortunately I don’t have time to dig up the link today.) He makes the point — with some merit, I believe — that genuinely egalitarian feminists often don’t pass his definition of “a feminist is someone who is recognized as being a feminist by other feminists.”
Interesting. How about Christina Hoff Sommers? And me?
If not, why not? If so, are people who say nasty things about Sommers (and me) anti-feminists?
That’s good to hear.
I thought you lived in Germany. Do I have you confused with someone else? Did you used to live in Germany?
[All: I know Sungold appears to have 'opened the door' by responding to many commenters, but I will still enforce the 'no more than two responses within 12 hours' rule here. After the next response to Sungold, others will be able to respond but will have to wait a bit. Thanks. —ballgame]
“But to get back to my main point: anti-feminists with real, make-a-difference power like Leon Kass, and Anthony Scalia and John Roberts, or Phyllis Schlafly all believe women should be used as sexual levers to control men’s behavior. Worse, they believe women should want their sexuality to be used to control men. Feminists don’t want to be used as sexual levers against men, nor do they want to use their sexuality that way.** You don’t want women to be used as sexual levers against you. And so you conclude… that feminists are the problem?”
Only when they come down on the same side as those people. some do, I suppose. I could never find the link, it was some years ago, but I swear I saw an article in a print publication where some writer at least posing as a feminist opined that all this gay stuff was really just a dodge on the part of men to escape their rightful place under women’s sexual power. I guess it was MGTOW before there was MGTOW. Thank God it was rare enough that probably no one here has ever seen anything like it, but it was really creepy-revealing about the attitude of at least this one writer
“It’s actually worse than that — see Clarence’s “yet to see any evidence” comment. It’s not that there’s no evidence, it’s that in sort of a reverse of the “no true scotsman” argument that any feminist who goes against the stereotype can’t be a “true feminist” because “no true feminist” would do such a thing. ”
Well, ok lets see:
So far we have one claimed feminist professor on the internet *Sungold* who might sometimes defend men/boys from absolute hate such as that spewed by such as Daly. But we don’t have any examples of male friendly legislation proposed or pushed by feminist groups. We don’t have any big petitions or statements signed by dozens of feminist professors or other notibles concerning issues where men are disadvantaged by their gender roles. We have feminist groups such as NOW acting in opposition , for example , to any reform of family law while at the same time consistently trying to push new procedural limits and expand definitions of sexual behavior so as to criminalize more and more male sexual expression. “Yes, means yes” sounds like such a nice concept for example. Then you go to the blog and discover a post wherein wearing a leprachaun hat at Halloween to get *uncoerced* kisses is held up as an example of “rape culture” in action.
Sungold, I can appreciate that you are trying to be fair. But in my opinion the movement of which you are a part has a very very very long way to go before it can even begin to stake any claims about being relevent or helpful in the lives of most men in any kind of positive way.
Figleaf:
Thank you for replying. However, I’ve been on the internet (and read books and magazines too) for ten years on the subject of feminism. It’s self-identified (and not repudiated) feminists who :
A. Worked hard, as the West Virginia Coalition against domestic violence to make sure that no men or boys were allowed to use the services in the shelters and that anyone who disagreed with their Duluth Model based training on the subject wouldn’t be certified. A judge slapped them down.
B. Consistently (NOW, activists such as Trish Wilson) work to oppose any shared parenting legislation.
C. Worked for both the VAWA (instead of a more gender neutral bill) and the insulting and unconstitutional IMBRA.
And that’s just a small sample. I’m not going to pay attention to pretty words (which have been very rare indeed by a “mainstream” feminist in the mainstream media) but I will and do pay attention to what is done. The modern movement is predicated on assigning to all men the blame for what a few do and making laws and policies that will uphold that. I’ve seen a big major dollip of NOTHING from any of the major organizations (including feminist lawyers groups), bloggers, or personalities to show me different. This latest flap with the death of Daly does nothing to dissaude me from that view.
@Clarence: Good news about West Virginia then. I know it’s been a real bugaboo for men’s groups that shelters for battered women don’t let men in. Of course it would as insane to actually bring men who’ve been battered by women into a space with other women as it would be to bring battered women into a space with other men, but I’m sure now the ruling’s settled the activist men who helped overturn the former policy are now helping to organize, fund, train for, and volunteer for facilities to help West Virginia’s battered men.
Send me a link to one of those direct-assistance organizations — preferably one you’ve supported with either time or money since I know it’s important to you too — and, even though I don’t have a lot of money I’ll send a $100 donation tonight. Even better, for every other reader here who’s donated time or money to an organization providing direct assistance to male victims of domestic violence, or at least the first 10, I’ll donate an additional $10.
I know domestic violence against men is a very big issue for you and a lot of other readers, and you know as well as I do that you can’t just talk the talk you have to walk the walk or else we’d all sound like resentful whiners. So let me know and they’ll have my money by tomorrow afternoon at the latest.
It obviously needs to be an organization you yourself have given money or time to, and I’d want to verify that they really do case work with actual male victims of sexual assault or domestic violence and don’t just talk about it or, even less productively, just complain about support services for women. Other than that the money’s theirs.
@sungold: Uh oh, did I miscount? The two I’m certain are women’s studies professors I was thinking about are my women’s studies 101 professor and you. I mentioned bell hooks separately because while I know she’s an author and activist I wasn’t sure she’s a working professor.
figleaf
figleaf, frankly your whole tone in that last post sounds like the segregationist *stuff* we had to listen to back in the 60′s, and that you can still find floating around some backwaters of the internet. And what an ironic sense of timing you have too.
“I know it’s been a real bugaboo for men’s groups that shelters for battered women don’t let men in.”
Yeah, what an affront that men should expect access to services they pay for in their taxes. Well, too bad for your position that it’s settled law. See Brown v. Board of Education.
The rest of that post is insulting as well, except for the part where you miss Clarence’s point entirely, that this or that academic who happens to say something that resembles an interest in equality does not in any way begin to balance the real world effect of decades of feminist political advocacy to discriminate against men.
figleaf,
I worked for some time at an organization that provided direct services to male and female survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. I won’t direct you to them because frankly the work they do is too important to be interrupted by an online pissing contest, so you’ll either have to take my word for it or not. Either way, your portrayal of advocates for male services as “do-nothing whiners” is both inaccurate and insulting.
@UnderAnAssumedName and @Jim
Sorry if I sounded brittle. For childhood and early-relationship reasons I take the issue of support for men very seriously and the slapped-down domestic-violence crack didn’t sound very serious.
Rather than cause any more fuss I’ve located two agencies in my area that offer direct service and do outreach for men. After speaking with one agency representative, and hearing their endorsement of the second (where hotline people were available but no directors) I’ll just send my donations to them.
I know by now this is totally off topic but it may not surprise you to learn that such groups don’t get a lot of support from women’s groups, but they also get very little support from mainstream/hetero men’s groups. What might surprise you (it surprised me) is that in addition to needing money and volunteer hours they also need donations of materials such as shoes and clothing.
Final word @Jim “…balance the real world effect of decades of feminist political advocacy to discriminate against men.” I guess here’s my real question, going all the way back to my beginning comment about concern about anti-feminist and non-feminist attitudes towards men. If feminism just completely vanished tomorrow would that end all, some, or no discrimination against men? No, because feminism didn’t invent male disposability, it didn’t invent alimony, it didn’t invent women-go-with-children-in-divorce, it sure as heck didn’t invent domestic or sexual violence against men nor were they the ones who refused to address or even acknowledge it when they saw it with their own eyes. They didn’t invent the philosophy that we men are just “wallets on legs.” They sure as heck didn’t invent, or support, or promote the idea that women should use sex to either “civilize” us or to “gold-dig” us. They didn’t invent the idea that we’ll penetrate anything that moves, or even after they stop moving. So in other words if feminism disappeared tomorrow men would still be massively, massively discriminated against. Discriminated against, incidentally, in ways that bother feminists either directly (“mars/venus”style gender assumptions hurt everybody) or indirectly (using women to control men implies women must be used) but don’t appear to bother mainstream non- or anti-feminists at all.
What I want to know is where the outrage is when mainstream non-feminists, from St. Augustine in the middle-ages to Leon Kass a couple of years ago, to whenever Dr. Phil goes on the air today, drop their loads on men? Considering where the majority of discrimination comes from does it make sense to object only to a very real but relatively insignificant source? Especially when there’s more likelihood of sympathy and common cause from growing factions inside the minority group?
@ballgame, sorry for any disruption I’ve created here.
figleaf
figleaf:
http://mensnewsdaily.com/glenn.....er-biased/
As for the rest of your post there are plenty of posts here and on sites such The Spearhead (an MRA site) that critique chivalry and decry the unholy alliance of gender feminists and chivalrous idiots that has resulted in most of the laws that have hurt men so much.
I think I’ll link you to an essay that explains the complicity of your feminist allies in all this.
http://www.the-spearhead.com/2.....ity-redux/
Now because this is NOH thread that has rules about piling on, don’t take it as personal if you make a good faith effort to respond and I don’t reply right away. I can only make so many posts in a 48 hour period.
I don’t know if that was meant as an “I’m outta here” or not, figleaf, but I certainly don’t see your participation here as a “disruption.” Dialoguing with feminists is ultimately one of the main purposes of this site, and up until your 11:37 comment I thought your comments were productive, and I appreciate your having taken the time to participate as much as you have.
If you do participate further, I would greatly appreciate your clarifying how you define the term “anti-feminist.” You’ve used the term frequently enough, and I can’t gauge how much I agree or disagree with many of your points without guessing at your meaning when you use that key term. It’s impossible to answer your repeated question of, essentially, ‘Why aren’t you fighting the anti-feminists?’ without knowing who you think those are. (Yes, Kass and Schlafly, but … Sommers? McElroy? Farrell?)
figleaf: The problem with man-hating feminists isn’t that he gives ammo to Rush Limbaugh per se. It’s that he’s [Rush?] able to point at them and say “all feminists are genocidal nazis like Mary Daly.” When, in fact they’re not.
That *IS* what I meant by “giving Rush ammo”! Thanks for confirming my point.
Man-hating is bad for feminism because it makes feminists look bad. Not that man-hating is inherently wrong or shameful. Maybe it’s tasteless, so it’s not a great form of advertising. Man-hating is a poor marketing strategy, but it’s not inherently wrong. It’s sort of like having cheap-looking commercials promoting your brand of tobacco: it might cause potential consumers to doubt its smooth taste.
It’s been said that feminists don’t hate men, but last I checked nobody ever said that Mary Daly wasn’t a feminist because she hated men. Good follow-up questions are: What is it about feminism that attracts the likes of Mary Daly and her strikingly anti-equality message and allows them space without much rebuke? And why does man-hating not disqualify someone from being a feminist?
@figleaf: bell hooks was a professor at City College of New York for a long time. I can’t find her on the university’s website, however. It’s possible she’s now on her own, possibly living from lecture fees. (We should all be so lucky! I learned today that Atul Gawande gets $30 K per lecture.) I’d still consider hooks basically a professor, since that’s what she did for so long. She became prominent as a writer, scholar, and teacher, not as an in-the-trenches activist.
@ballgame: I lived in Germany from 1991 to 2000, then relocated to southeast Ohio. Before that, I grew up in North Dakota and lived in California (Sierra foothills, then the Bay Area) and upstate New York before Germany.
I’m inclined to consider McElroy a feminist. She definitely self-identifies as one. I don’t dig her libertarianism, but she and I agree on not censoring porn (as long as it involves consenting adults). Farrell and Sommers are a tougher call. Do they call themselves feminists? That’s certainly one of my criteria. I do share Sommers’ concerns about how education is failing boys in some respects; I don’t agree that we should view this as a zero-sum game, though. Smart educational policy (like not abolishing recess!) benefits both boys and girls.
Do you consider yourself a feminist, ballgame? If you don’t, then it’s settled – I wouldn’t consider you a feminist. We can still agree on some issues. If you do, that’s lovely. I’d accept your self-description – and we can still disagree on some issues.
I don’t think there’s endless elasticity in the category of feminism, but if someone cares about fighting sexist oppression and they claim the label for themselves, I’m comfortable regarding them as a feminist. That might not be enough for me to make common cause with them … and that goes equally for Palin and for Mary Daly, who was the topic of this thread once upon a time.
Sungold said:
I was also quite surprised to find out how many speaking invitations Mary Daly had gotten. My critical investigation of feminism agrees that her views are way off the charts of what the vast majority of feminists believe. So then which campus feminists were inviting her to speak, and why? I’m open to any theories.
Yes. And thanks.
Sungold said:
This statement makes me want to call myself a feminist, but simultaneously reminds me of why I don’t.
I do care about fighting “sexist oppression,” and I acknowledge that women are subject to it in various ways. Yet the terms “sexism” and “oppression” in feminist discourse often have a construction that is highly exclusionary towards men.
In feminist language, I often see “sexism” used as virtual synonym for misogyny. “Male oppression” is often used to mean both “oppression of women,” and “oppression by men,” not “oppression of men.” It is common for academic feminists to deny that men are oppressed on the dimension of gender. Sociologist of gender Caroline New proposes an alternative view—that both women and men are oppressed by the current gender order in asymmetrical ways—but sees her work as breaking new ground in feminist thought.
While a common feminist view conceptualizes oppression and sexism flowing primarily from men (or “male-dominated” / male-benefitting social structures) towards women, I see oppression and sexism flowing from sociocultural structures towards both men and women. The oppression and sexism the sexes are subject to is not necessarily equal or symmetrical, or even comparable on a unidimensional scale.
So, while I might want to ally with feminists in fighting sexist oppression, I have to pause, because so many feminists have a conceptualization of those notions that seems premature, and which marginalizes and linguistically erases the concerns of men. I’m all for analysis of sexism and oppression, I just can’t get on board with the whole “women have it worse” train that those words are written on. I think we should have an analysis of sexism and oppression towards both men and women, and only later should we proceed to the question of who has it “worse,” if that question is even answerable.
Yet my experience with feminism online and in college courses is that I don’t get to legitimately play with the cool feminist tools unless I agree with a whole host of feminist assumptions (embedded in their constructions of oppression, privilege, sexism, and patriarchy) that seem to sum up to “women have it worse.”
“Final word @Jim “…balance the real world effect of decades of feminist political advocacy to discriminate against men.” I guess here’s my real question, going all the way back to my beginning comment about concern about anti-feminist and non-feminist attitudes towards men. If feminism just completely vanished tomorrow would that end all, some, or no discrimination against men? No, because feminism didn’t invent male disposability, it didn’t invent alimony, it didn’t invent women-go-with-children-in-divorce, it sure as heck didn’t invent domestic or sexual violence against men nor were they the ones who refused to address or even acknowledge it when they saw it with their own eyes. …”
YES! YES! YES! I absolutely agree with you here. Where we disagree is that you seem to think feminism opposes these views when in fact so much feminist discource is built on the same presuppositions as inform those harms and so much feminist advocacy takes advantage of thse social structures. As far as I can see most feminism is simply the White Daddy’s Little Girl wing of the Patriarchy. We can discuss particulars if you care to.
To add to what Jim said:
Considering men as unsatiable sexual beasts who can’t control themselves, who fight often, who can’t cooperate and are always competing (either inherently or by socialization – which comes to the same conclusion -> men are tainted)…is a Victorian era artifact of Western society. Same origin as the one that says women are more cooperative, more emotional, empathic, better with children and more morally virtuous (again, either inherently or by socialization).
Feminists built upon those notions when the DV and rape shelters and organizations came into existence. They didn’t attempt to refute those notions, at least not in public policy, the Duluth model, or shelter/organization funding. Organizations that keep saying things like “95% of DV victims are male vs female”, and deny that average heterosexual men could be a very sizeable portion of victims (33% of injuries, about 50% of victims), allowing the government to easily ignore the problem. Feminists are considered the de-facto authority on DV and sexual assault/rape, and if they say men aren’t victim enough to have shelters, the government won’t look.
It’s only since the 90s that lesbian DV has been recognized as even existing, and it’s still treated as anomalous (this particular woman is tainted) rather than a generalization (all men are potentially violent rapists).
I wish feminists broke the male = bad, female = good myth from the Victorian era, acknowledge that male victims exist and are not anomalous.
Sidenote: I read recently about hotels having female-only amenities on certain floors of certain hotels, giving more to their female clients, and attempting to over-protect them in what I could only describe as a chivalresque attempt to look good.
That’s because men have a much higher ratio of being assaulted for any reason, even considering their lower sexual assault rate, the violent assaults are much more commonplace than sexual assaults. Yet we protect the women, tell them not to go out alone at night, let them stop between bus stops…but not the men who could be victims.
I don’t go out of my way to be alone or out at night, but I also never really made a big deal of it, either pre or post transition. I also wasn’t socialized being told I was going to get beaten, raped or killed every time I set foot outside though.
I don’t see how “feminism didn’t invent unfairness against men” gets feminism off the hook for its current unfairness against men.
If I were to be booked for arson, complete with gasoline can and matches in hand, I couldn’t very well protest “but I didn’t invent arson!”
What makes that defense even more odd W is that they have no problem calling me out for acting as if the “I’m not like them” excuse is a valid way of dismissing the things that men (the so called “them”) do to women.
So on one hand me not being a rapist does not excuse me from not trying to stop men from raping women but on the other one feminist not being a man hater excuses them addressing the hatred of men among feminists.
Oh FFS, seriously people, look beyond the end of your nose.
Every single hint of progress that has ever been made, has been made on compromise and politics, and blood, sweat and tears.
Feminism gained a toe-hold, because it was (and in most areas still is) impossible for society to see how gender roles constrict. Even some of the most avowed “progressives” insist that womans place is “naturally” subservient.
(I would hang my head and weep, but where would be the fun?)
For every woman “looking for a rich man” is an equal and opposite counterpart.
“Oh dear! Some shit has been done, but it ain’t been done ‘just right.’”
Okay, goldy-locks. Get out of bed!
In what bizarre alternate reality is it the fault of any faction of a progressive movement that it didn’t fucking meet your exact personal needs?!
Oh wait, feminism is the only part left. Guess y’all m*f* dudes dropped the ball.
Sorry, can I pick that up for you? If I do will you say so? Publicly?
How dare people demand inclusion in what just DID NOT EXIST! prior to the blood sweat and tears of those that FORCED IT INTO EXISTENCE?
Please, by all means, state your business, but do not, for one second, expect feminism to wash your socks.
(Hey, as a booby prize, I won’t even ever…. ever, ever, ever … ask a dude to pay for dinner)
In what bizarre alternate reality is it the fault of any faction of a progressive movement that it didn’t fucking meet your exact personal needs?!
That would be the reality in which said faction of progressive movement claims to meet those needs.
I have no problem with feminists who simply do no talk about men and the things that harm them, even if its because they hate men. I like the idea of them leaving men’s issues to men so that way any walk of life among men actually have some chance of bringing their issues to the table. What I do have a problem with are so called “progressive” people who will on one hand say they are the ones that are fixing _____’s problems and therefore _____ should join them but when the _____ start to speak up they are told to go fix their problems themselves because they aren’t going to do it for them.
With the way many feminists operate:
they talk about male privilege while denying the existence (not to be confused with simply not talking about it) female privilege.
they will call out men on their behaviour towards women but will gloss over women’s behavior towards men.
In short they seem to think that all that needs to be done for gender equality to be achieved to do something about the way men treat women. Just BAM!!! and it will be all fixed.
You can’t posture yourselves as addressing someone else’s issues but then turn your nose up at them when they try to interact with you.
Please, by all means, state your business, but do not, for one second, expect feminism to wash your socks.
So to put it so colorfully don’t advertise that you are washing my socks but then tell me to go wash them myself when I come to you and you most certainly have no business asking me why I’m washing them myself afterwards. Oh and one more thing after I do wash them myself please be nice enough to acknowledge that I washed themself instead of trying to claim the credit yourself.
Why, in the world, would I acknowledge that you’d washed your own socks. that simply has nothing to do with me.
I wash my own socks all the time. Shall we arrange a parade?
And I do get that a lot of men are saying that some feminists (not me, last I checked) will claim credit for mens’ advancements. Last I checked, as well, having my “honor” “championed” (rare as the case may be) does very little to benefit me.
So, let’s look at this. “Feminism” isn’t for you. Great!
I mentioned the phrase “Gender Egalitarianism” to someone the other day. Well, pictures are worth 1,000 words, but I’m sure we can all imagine a blank stare.
What is wrong with “egalitarianism”
Does it have cooties?
“What is wrong with “egalitarianism”
Does it have cooties?”
Ask Scarlet O’Hara, ZoBabe. She has lots of reasons to think it does, because it means the end of her world.
Let’s review th bidding. This post is was about criticizing eulogies for a gender bigot, and then about criticizing [mainstream] feminism in general for tolerating gender bigots. And the thread has been mainly on-topic.
So what’s your beef? We can’t throw blood on a statue of Stalin if we want? Who gives a shit how much good he did; does that brinhg any of his victims back to life?
And by the way, this problem of bigotry is nothing new for feminism. Feminism has always had and still has a deep problem with racial bigotry, starting with that odious, vile racist Susan B. Anthony who demanded to know why soft, priviged, rich parasite white women were not getting the vote as soon as black Union Army veterans were. The probelm continues with the way white feminists claim to speak for all women and then go on to devote all thier attention to their on parochial problems.
So what’s the beef?
So your point is that “egalitarian” would be fine, were it not coming from my pampered, white personage?
Just to be clear.
That I think I messed up in what I was saying there.
should have been….
But as you soon followed with:
I see you get precisely what I was saying.
And this:
If you’re talking about that damn code of chivalry then I agree fully. For me to champion a woman’s honor like that is extremely destructive. The idea that by virtue of me being a man and you being a woman I must stand up for you is garbage. It’s putting an unfair burden on me as a man it stripping you of your agency as a woman. Sure if something goes down and you actually ask me for assistance I got your back. But thinking that our gender difference somehow translates into me owing you assistance is lazy and arrogant on your part and burdensome and arrogant on mine.
Oof, step away from my computer for a day or two! I haven’t answered ballgame’s question but I think I can speak to Jim, ZoBabe and Danny’s exchange.
This is going to seem like a total non sequitur but did you know that it was only just the other day I discovered that Catholic Christians venerate the Virgin mary almost as highly as they do Jesus? That they actually pray to her for stuff? That’s like the 4th Dimension in the mostly-Protestant denominations I was raised in, from my grandparent’s fundamentalist Plymouth Brethren and Southern Baptists to my parents Presbyterianism and later Unitarianism.
If you’d asked me I’d have said all Christians everywhere believed exactly the same thing. Especially since with only very minor translation differences they all read exactly the same Bible.
And yet that’s just not so at all. In fact, it’s evidently some kind of mortal sin for a Catholic not to believe in the divinity of Mary whereas that self-same belief is evidently almost equally blasphemous to some fundamentalist denominations.
I bring this up because there seems to be this notion that feminism is a monolithic movement with only minor differences. Instead since almost the dawn of modern feminism in around the 1850s there have been denominations within it that philosophically and politically are bitterly at odds.
The biggest difference between feminism and, say, Christian denominations is that modern feminism is scarcely more than 40 years old, with the result that many or most of its founders and original followers of its original divisions are largely still around. See, for instance Alice Walker and her very different daughter Rebecca. See also Catharine Mackinnon and the very, very different Courtney Martin. For almost polar opposites see the only very-recently deceased Mary Daly and Betty Dodson! They’re all feminists to the core but none of those people are just like the other ones.
Which is why it drives me nuts when someone says something like “feminists just want…” Because whereas, say, Mary Daly might want me dead, Amanda Marcotte can’t stand it that a guy who wants to have sex with her calls her a “bitch” if she doesn’t want to have sex with him and… a “slut” or “whore” if she does!
I mean, bloody hell, inside feminism there are people who think women should do a “sex strike,” using the promise of resuming sex as a transactional tool for altering men’s behavior (cough, see also Leon Kass and “The Rules,” cough) and meanwhile there are others who see the the literal source of patriarchal oppression is idea of women using sex for anything, period, at all, except their own personal enjoyment.
That they’re all still around seems to confuse the point that successive developments and refinements tend to be moving away from the idea that a) it’s all always men’s fault, that b) women are inevitable victims, that especially c) feminism is necessarily a zero-sum game where men must necessarily lose in order for women to gain.
—
Quick note: I’m… pretty awfully sure neither Scarlett O’Hara or the people who are putting up those “pink” women’s-only hotels fall under any of the generally-recognized categories of “feminism.” At all. Which I think might be a really, really, really important point some people who don’t like feminism miss (though I’ve probably repeated it too many times here): not all people, and definitely not all women who hate men, or fear them, or seem to go out of their way to control or work against them are feminists. Nor, as I tried to explain above, do all feminists hate, fear, or want to control or work against men.
figleaf
figleaf:
I bring this up because there seems to be this notion that feminism is a monolithic movement with only minor differences. Instead since almost the dawn of modern feminism in around the 1850s there have been denominations within it that philosophically and politically are bitterly at odds.
True. And now that you bring up this point let me ask. How is it that a movement that as you say is comprised of many schools thought seem to have members who are not be able to practice what it preaches when dealing with men and MRAs?
There are many schools of thought in feminism and when when you point out the problems of one you often get the “that’s not MY feminism” defense….just to have them turn around and make generalizations about men/MRAs and other groups. Your larger time and more well known feminists don’t represent the entire movement meaning its unfair to take the conclusion you draw about a small sample and pin it on all of them. Fair enough. By chance then why is it fair game for them to draw conclusions about a small portion of the male population and pin them on all of us?
Earlier this week I had a bit of a spat over Womanist Musings and despite me not being an MRA the first or second comment was a paragraph rant about how MRAs all are and brought things that had nothing to do with the topic at hand (pretty much meaning that rant was just all prepare spew and no actual commentary). And mind you this is from a person who evidently didn’t even read my page or else they would not have made that conclusion.
So why is it that its unfair to make generalizations about feminists despite time and time again they make generalizations about men and MRAs? I would say it would be wrong to generalize about either one myself.
I’ve had to get over the notion that feminists are a monolith but for some reason a lot of them seem to have a hard time practicing their own wisdom.
Okay, I’ll play.
My ‘feminism’ looks like this:
1) Recognizes the equality between the sexes, not just in goodness but badness. Thus does not shirk from and deny evidence of women’s;
1A) Equal rates of DV perpetration.
1B) Equal rates of sexual aggression.
1C) Equal rates of child abuse.*
2) Recognizes that seeing women as victims and men as aggressors is an old formula based on old stereotypes that not only unfairly deprive men of their vulnerability but also, unfairly, hobble women’s agency by removing their sense of responsibility and thus teaching them to see their locus of control as external.
3) Recognizes that you better damn well have good reason for swinging around a loaded term like ‘patriarchy’ and that damn good reason better explain why a ‘patriarchy’ like the US has a fundamentally different outcome for women then, oh, a patriarchy like Saudi Arabia.
4) Is willing to look honestly at both sides of the gender divide, both the pros and CONS of being male, before coming to any conclusions about ‘who has it worse’ if, indeed, there is a ‘worse’.
So, yeah. Is my ‘feminism’ acceptable in feminism or am I going to get a bunch of boos and hisses? And if I am going to get a bunch of boos and hisses, then, conversely, that’s why I think feminism is archaic and sexist.
*I know that, currently, women perpetuate greater rates of child abuse but I believe this is due to their greater involvement in child rearing.
“So your point is that “egalitarian” would be fine, were it not coming from my pampered, white personage?
Just to be clear.”
Yes, because you actually mena it when oyu say it. That’s the big, big diffenrece. Pampering – dear , you deserve it, and frankly we all have it in one form or another. Again, the difference is bewtween those that admit to it and those that don’t, and only see it in others.
Figleaf,
“This is going to seem like a total non sequitur ….”
You are going to fit in fine here – we actually used exactly that analogy about two years ago. The point was that the Church has had an absolute litnmus test for who is and isn’t a Christian – communion. If a church admits you to communion with it, it thinks you are a christian. If not, then no. So it’s a huge huge deal when the Vatican admited Lutherans back inot communion about 20 years ago, and an even bigger deal when they and the Greek Orthodox did the same five years before. This saves Christinas the question of “who is a Jew” – except when they don’t “intercommunicate”. Feminism doesn’t have this mechanism. But anyway, there was nothing nonsequitur about your use of that analogy.
And you larger point holds, but my point is that even without hereticating Mary Daly, feminists could have denounced her man-hatred publicly, and if the majority of feminists had, they and mainstream feminism would be off the hook for that. No one throws Stalin’s atrocities up in the Trots’ faces these days for just reason.
“I mean, bloody hell, ….”
The whole paragraph is full of win. See what I mean about (some) feminists aping the patriarchy?
ZoBabe says:
January 22, 2010 at 11:28 am
Are you refering to feminists demanding inclusion in the industrial system?
Oh dear, Patrick:
You’ve caught me out. I’m not all that down with that.
Z
Really? Dude, I’m not even christian and I knew that.
figleaf: But it’s okay to treat feminists as all being alike when we wish to say good things about them, yes? That seems awfully convenient.
figleaf: Which is why it drives me nuts when someone says something like “feminists just want…” Because whereas, say, Mary Daly might want me dead, Amanda Marcotte can’t stand it that a guy who wants to have sex with her calls her a “bitch” if she doesn’t want to have sex with him and… a “slut” or “whore” if she does!
This characterization has always seemed like something of a big, phony caricature which makes women look hapless and men look schitzophrenic. But just for the sake of argument: I’ve never called a woman I’ve slept with a slut or a whore, not once. So why on earth, then, should all men routinely get tarred with the same, broad brush (and that is frequently the kind of rhetorical sloppiness that happens on many feminists’ web sites) if we’re going to be up in arms about “generalizing” feminists? And this is only ONE example of why the protest of “generalizing feminists” rings hollow.
Danny: In short they seem to think that all that needs to be done for gender equality to be achieved to do something about the way men treat women. Just BAM!!! and it will be all fixed.
This statement deserves to be framed and hung on the wall because it very succinctly captures a deeply, deeply flawed and naive way of looking at things.
(PS- I thought this was a NoH thread?)
“Why, in the world, would I acknowledge that you’d washed your own socks. that simply has nothing to do with me.”
Wait what’s all that about the personal is the political?
I don’t know about other people, but I seem to remember that article by Leon Kass (or at least something very similar) being mocked openly and extensively at the time of its publication. I don’t think it entered my recollection because it seemed like a one off hatred of eating in public.
By contrast I have been exposed to a large number of self identified feminists who have voiced their belief that men are evil, and acted upon it. So when I see Leon Kass’s work it doesn’t fit into a broader picture for me. While, when there are feminists saying similar it does fit into that broader picture.
Now if were not simply talking about Leon Kass’s bizarre eating hangups, but social conservatives in general, then yes, on many occasions I have objected to them. Merely not on this site in particular.
This comes down to a matter of opinion unless either of us have statistics. I do not think that feminists writ large are an insignificant source of discrimination. I actually think they have far more power then they claim to. Now to the extent that the radical feminists reflect mainstream feminist views they are a small number. But radicals who have a fringe view still have a tendency to find their way into leadership positions*. Even if they do not they often have a tendency of framing the debate towards more radical propositions which contributes to biased decisions.
This is part of the reason why Rush Limbaugh (and similar) is important to the republican party, because he frames the debate as more radical giving them more room to negotiate. Mary Daly and similar are important to feminism because it broadens the discourse, so that a position which would have been radical looks more moderate.
*Alright not a comparison but an example: one of the subjects which I’ve done research on is counterinsurgency and a fringe radical running an insurrection which doesn’t really agree with him, is not particularly uncommon.
“What I want to know is where the outrage is when mainstream non-feminists, from St. Augustine in the middle-ages to Leon Kass a couple of years ago, to whenever Dr. Phil goes on the air today, drop their loads on men?”
Very good point. 1 Fortunately the MRM is gathering steam on that one, and attacking the men who engage in it. This along with the hatred being directed at White Knights is what is opening a crack in the MRM betwen progressives and traditionalists.
1. Except the bit about St. Augustine. He was a Scorpio, so when he talks about the utter depravity of human nature, he’s just projecting.
@ThematicDevice: “By contrast I have been exposed to a large number of self identified feminists who have voiced their belief that men are evil, and acted upon it. So when I see Leon Kass’s work it doesn’t fit into a broader picture for me. While, when there are feminists saying similar it does fit into that broader picture.”
Which would be a perfectly legitimate claim. Except that when I originally mentioned him in this tread I said this: “Lest you think Kass is just one flyweight compared to Mary Daly: By then Daly was in a retirement home; Leon Kass was chairman of the White House Commission on Bioethics when he made his pronouncements.” In other words while I acknowledge your perceptions the reality is exactly the reverse: the President of the United States thought Leon Kass’s ideas about social organization were important enough that he put him in charge of setting major slices of official United States social policy. Mary Daly couldn’t keep a job at a minor college!
One other thing, way back on the 19th W said “So the primary problem with man-hating within feminism is that it gives ammo to Rush Limbaugh et al, figleaf? Is that a concise summary of your argument?”
I said yes, meaning I thought the biggest problem with Mary Daly’s brand of man-hating is it gave Rush Limbaugh ammunition to tar all feminists with it.
@W took that to mean I thought the only problem was that it gave Limbaugh ammunition. Which I think he took to mean I didn’t think Daly’s actual man-hating was a problem at all. Heh. No. It’s just that Daly-style man-haters are approximately to mainstream feminism as snake-handlers or FLDS polygamists are to mainstream religion or the Young Socialist Alliance is to progressive politics: there; highly visible; counterproductive due to their separate agendas; otherwise not terrifically influential because they’re not at all part of their respective mainstream. So consequently, yes, I meant exactly what I said: the primary problem with man-hating in feminism is that it gives ammunition to Rush Limbaugh types. If it was my experience that man-hating was the dominant viewpoint in feminism then I’d say that would be the primary problem instead. In my experience, however, it isn’t.
figleaf
No Figleaf, the primary problem with feminism is that it is indeed the manhaters and female chauvinists who set the political agendas.
Let me know when the “good” non-manhating feminists in the movement get around to supporting shared parenting or other issues -any other issues- that descriminate against men, or start passing laws in the name of equality that disadvantage the many women who are content to hang on to their traditional privileges.
I’ll be sleeping till then. I expect a good long nap.
“there; highly visible; counterproductive due to their separate agendas; otherwise not terrifically influential because they’re not at all part of their respective mainstream.”
Well that’s a mouthful in a nutshell. That’s a very good summation of what happnes in so many movements that you have probably identiifed a universal.
Here’s a question on how influential these fringe lelements are : of course they are leess than influential inside the movement,because inside the movement people know what they are about and where they want the movement to go. But outside the movement, which is the real arena for progess, the fringe elements capture public attention and get to dictate how the movementis percieved,. That is real influence. It’s not inside the movement.
figleaf: No, I think I understand you perfectly. So everyone ought to condemn woman-hating in all its forms, but when feminist bigotry directed at men pops-up, however infrequently, we should all chuckle good-naturedly at such cute foot-stompings and forget that it happened because it’s not particularly harmful. Why should anyone care about or condemn her transphobia, then? We’ve already concluded that her bigotry isn’t harmful, right? Why condemn one and not the other? Ahh, because one target is acceptable while the other is not. I see.
If a Republican says “I don’t condemn racism within our own ranks because I know it doesn’t reflect what the vast majority of us believe”, you’d accept that explanation without hesitation, I suppose. Because that’s what you’re expecting me to swallow.
It seems to me that if we should treat women as adults, we ought to, well, treat women as adults, instead of infantilizing them and making endless excuses for them. And, yes, that requires even-handedly rebuking them instead of accepting the mindless idea that “women have been oppressed for many thousands of years so it’s acceptable for them to hate their oppressors.”
If you honestly have problems accepting that principle, it makes your “feminism is about equality” schtick seem a bit phony.
@W: No, when man-hating comes up everyone should confront it. But if you’re going to confront it you should confront the people doing it and not, necessarily, people standing near them.
I know I have more rambling anecdotes than Ronald Reagan but I grew up in the south. When I first left home I had a thick Gomer-Pyle accent. The week I left home I hitch-hiked north towards Boston, which at the time was dealing with a bunch of violence about school desegregation and bussing. I got picked up by this guy who… I dunno what he was thinking but he just started unloading on my with all this ridiculous crap like didn’t I know black people were human too, and how could I go around horse-whipping them and burning crosses on their lawns and… sheesh, like I say it was pretty over the top. So anyway right in the middle of all that there was a news report on the radio that some white protesters from South Boston had just stabbed an African American guy in the chest. With the spear-point on an American Flag. And get this, the guy I was with just simon-pure simplicity tries to explain to me how that’s different.
Point being that in that case neither he nor I were participants in violence of any sort, and in both our cases we were appalled by the whole situation. And yet there we were in August of 1974 telling each other off about how “you people” need to stop committing all that violence.
Which is sort of how a lot of mainstream feminists are going to feel when you take off on them for something Mary Daly, or Justice Walking, or Twisty Faster, or Catharine MacKinnon says that they don’t!
—
Here’s another way to look at it (and I promise this isn’t rhetorical table-turning.) Should you be held accountable for women-bashing that goes on in a lot of comment threads online? No. Should you even be held accountable for not confronting woman-bashing when you’re not part of it? No. Do a bunch of guys unloading on women somewhere else, who you don’t even agree with, or necessarily even like, reflect on what you’re trying to do or say? Do you maybe even get frustrated or embarrassed about it?
Sure, maybe it would be great if we spent all our time policing our respective tinfoil brigades. But, them being tinfoilers, it really would take all our time. Instead we just tend to be embarrassed and say “he/she isn’t with me.”
That’s not just what feminists do, that’s what pretty much everybody involved in a broad cause has to do.
Anyway, does it seem like that could be a big source of the disconnect? And I mean general disconnect? I mean, except maybe for George Bush (who’s no longer president) most people don’t scoop up their tinfoilers and elevate them to chairmanships of the White House Commission on Bioethics and other prominent spots. Instead most people just wish their tinfoilers would go away.
And most of them really, really wish people would quit carrying on as if their tinfoil fringers were the “real” mainstream.
Or at least they wish critics wouldn’t label their fringers as mainstream while dismissing their own fringers as, well, fringers.
figleaf
And now for something completely different, back on the 19th I mentioned looking into shelters in my area that have programs for men. I sent a donation to one group I talked to that does a lot of support but only has a limited, emergency hotel-voucher program for anyone, men included, who really need to escape their current situation.
So this afternoon I finally got a callback from a director at another shelter and DV-assistance program, a big one, and got just an earful of really cool stuff. First of all over the last two years they’ve really committed themselves to establishing a full-fledged shelter system for men. They just had their first man in their system although obviously as with all protection programs she wasn’t about to disclose any more than that.
She said the trick has been finding a way to create safe spaces for increasingly diverse groups of people who need shelter but who for various reasons (not all gender related) don’t necessarily do well in mixed company. And the way they worked it has been to create a series of individual “mini” shelters scattered through one or more apartment complexes. There are obviously numerous benefits, one of which is it permits (trusted) children of any sex to stay with the sheltering adult, another is it reduces the kind of situational friction that can come up when otherwise really different people end up together in the same space.
She said they’ve been heavily recruiting men to the board of directors and it’s now almost exactly 50/50 men and women. She said they’re getting more and more men working as volunteers as well.
It was really weird hearing her talk about sheltering under “lethality” situations. Which isn’t a concern in every case but is obviously a concern when it does.
She said that for decades 85% of cases coming through their crisis lines have involved women fleeing men but that they think it’s in part because a lot of men aren’t willing to, or don’t even consider, calling. So they’re planning to do more outreach.
And finally, she said they’re trying to move towards the position that domestic violence is a universal human rights issue rather than a this type against that type issue.
I’d said I’d send money to groups anyone else here had given money or support to. I didn’t get any takers, I think because I sounded really nettled when I made the offer. Anyway, instead I sent the donation I promised to make to that agency instead.
figleaf
Fair enough.
However, from where I’m sitting, feminist theories of ‘patriarchy’ sound like unsubstantiated tinfoilery*. Unsubstantiated tinfoilery that encourages a minority to justify man-hating extremes.
*Until the feminist theory of ‘patriarchy’ can explain why the situation for women is vastly different in North America vs. the Middle East then it’s a phrase devoid of any scientific worth. Further, does the feminist theory of ‘patriarchy’ demonstrated predictive value(so far the only experiments I know about that have made a prediction based on the theory have failed to support it)? What is the causal mechanism of ‘patriarchy’? (ie. How are men teaching and motivating other men to benefit men(as a group) over women as a group?)
About feminism not being a monolith: this is true. Yet it seems that virtually all forms of feminism use certain terms (oppression, privilege, patriarchy) that are prejudicially conceptualized.
Figleaf said:
Feminists have a tinfoil hat brigade, because they identify as feminists. Many of us here don’t have a a tinfoil hat brigade, because we don’t identify as part of a gender-political movement.
figleaf:
Should you even be held accountable for not confronting woman-bashing when you’re not part of it? No.
According to some feminists the answer to that is yes. By their failing to do so is to exercise the male privilege of not having to confront and thus supporting the patriarchy. If you do indeed think not then let me say thanks for not trying to hold each of us responsible for the actions of other men.
And speaking of monolithing I find it odd that feminists say they are not a monolith yet some of them act as if men are a monolith.
figleaf: First of all, in case it hasn’t been said adequately before, the mods and frequenters of this blog are heartily glad that you’ve been coming here and they welcome your presence and your patience, although it might feel as if you’re in a hot-seat of sorts. The exchange of ideas which takes place here can sometimes create a lot of heat, and FC is truly the only place I’ve seen on the Internet which tries to facilitate it honestly.
So that being said: I don’t understand how feminists can expect– nay, demand– more male support given that: 1. quite a few feminists seem to go out of their way to be dismissive, obnoxious and gratuitously antagonistic towards men under the never-questioned expectation that men ought to “take it on the chin” with a smile, 2. it’s made explicit that, once inside the fold, male feminists will never be considered equal members; male feminist will be presumed guilty, will be subject to ideological strip-searches, and will be required to forever prove their own innocence. 3. the apparent majority of feminists signal, through their silence, that hating men is more or less peachy keen (i.e.: failure to rebuke Daly when given chances to do so).
I don’t know how say it any clearer, figleaf: The above does not resemble “equality”. It is a recipe for one sex to unrestrainedly pour hostility and antagonism onto the other sex. It is a boxing match where one participant is required to keep both hands tied behind his back while the other is allowed the free use of brass knuckles. Maybe you’re not bothered by that in the least. Maybe you think it’s just desserts for men and their million years of oppression. Well, unfortunately, the only people who don’t seem to see any unfairness in that arrangement are feminists and their friends. And, it seems to me that you and your friends are an increasingly rare breed.
Like it or not, a lot of rank-and-file women don’t see feminism in a positive light and that’s not going to go away any time soon.
So you can go blame that perception on Rush Limbaugh all you want, figleaf. Go right ahead. Blame Rush. Blame Fox News. Blame whatever rightist scapegoat that floats your boat. Blame anyone but the actual feminists who substantiate that image. Go right ahead. Whatever easy, convenient scapegoat is the most palatable to you.
You can tell me that feminists can’t possibly be expected to police their own tin-foil-hatters. You can give me whatever euphemisms you want. You can cite whatever self-serving theories you want. Frankly, I don’t care how you wish to dispute the particulars because it’s wholly irrelevant here: A lot of rank-and-file women find feminism instinctively repellent, no matter how you care to define feminism. Don’t quote the dictionary to tell me what feminism is all about, listen to the women who want nothing to do with feminism.
That’s right. I am not kidding you. I’ve seen a number of normally sympathetic, left-leaning women express that they want nothing to do with feminists because of the apparent tolerance for man-hating. I’ve struck-up conversations with rank-and-file women at random, and they seem to think feminists have deep, irrational antagonism towards men. These are women who have misgivings about feminism, not the pants-wetting men who you love to caricature as oafish, piggish reactionaries who can’t stand having their privilege taken-away. As it turns-out, a lot of women aren’t comfortable with man-hating. And, you know what? They aren’t ignoramuses who don’t understand feminism and need it explained to them better. They’re women who’ve seen feminism and don’t like what feminism has become.
But instead of asking “what are feminists doing wrong?” the overwhelming instinct is to find scapegoats elsewhere. Why is that? Is feminism already so perfect that it can’t be improved? Is feminism so self-evidently correct that nobody could ever have a legitimate beef with it? Is “feminism” so precious and holy that knowing it causes one to automatically love it?
Here’s a big chunk of the truth as I see it: many feminists make feminism look bad. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a problem.
So I don’t see how feminism has many opportunities for growth in that state, do you? Either some kind of major reformation of feminism needs to take place– less tolerance of man-hating, for starters– or feminists are going to continue making the same mistakes, over and over and over, wondering why the hell they can’t get their agenda implemented.
Last I checked, Martha Coakley, the feminist-endorsed candidate in Massachusetts, got trounced at the polls with significant numbers of women voting against her. How many wake-up calls does your camp need?
figleaf: I don’t have as much time as I’d like to have in order to post a more detailed response, but I did want to give you plaudits for your efforts to find and support a DV shelter which does not treat the problem as something only men do to women. It’s encouraging to hear that perhaps it’s becoming more common for shelters to be aware of how both men and women may be victimized by domestic violence (though my impression is that such awareness is still the exception and not the rule).
Figleaf: “Here’s another way to look at it (and I promise this isn’t rhetorical table-turning.) Should you be held accountable for women-bashing that goes on in a lot of comment threads online? No. Should you even be held accountable for not confronting woman-bashing when you’re not part of it? No. Do a bunch of guys unloading on women somewhere else, who you don’t even agree with, or necessarily even like, reflect on what you’re trying to do or say? Do you maybe even get frustrated or embarrassed about it?
Sure, maybe it would be great if we spent all our time policing our respective tinfoil brigades. But, them being tinfoilers, it really would take all our time. Instead we just tend to be embarrassed and say “he/she isn’t with me.””
Problem is, Figleaf, feminism expects, nay DEMANDS, that men on a whole police themselves and fight misoginy wherever it may be whether in the community, on-line, the media, the workplace, if there’s misogany, men don’t get a pass and are lambasted for not doing enough to stop hatred of women from permeating in their ranks. Even men who aren’t a part of this are lambasted for not standing up and saying “That’s sexist” tto men they know when, maybe just maybe, they have only not to the standards expected from feminists.
Meanwhile, men are not allowed to expect feminism do the same thing with activists in their movement who spout anti-male bigotry because “They’re not feminists and they don’t speak for feminism” and “Feminism is not a monolith”. You know Andrea Dworkin is still being taught in women’s studies? Her work should’ve been put out to pasture the minute she died, yet women’s studies still present her work as part of the cirriculum. I don’t care how her work was “relevant” then, she was a mentally ill person who found all heterosexual relationships bad due to some “Power dynamic”. Yes, she was abused herself but she took all that anger and aimed it squarely at men. That kind of misdirected rage is no longer relevant now as relationships are more complicated than some “Power Dynamic” making it unfair for women. Do I see any feminists protesting this? You’d think the movement would get with the times. Yet, not a peep.
Men aren’t a monolith, Figleaf. Yet the standards are exccedingly high when it comes to fighting sexism and it all falls on men’s shoulders alone since they “benefit from the priveledge of their class and the structures set up by the elite”. Anytime a man says otherwise, they’re told to “Check their privledge” and not turn it into a “What about the Menz” argument.
You may think it’s wiser to spend less time policing tin-foil brigades. But maybe feminism should practice what it preaches and stopping putting so much on the shoulders of men in the first place while turning around and saying feminism is beyond reproach when they’d rather not bother policing their own movement. Otherwise, it’s blatant hyprocrisy.
@Danny: “I find it odd that feminists say they are not a monolith yet some of them act as if men are a monolith.”
It’s a hard habit to break. The trick is that feminists are not a monolith so it’s consistent that some of them can act as if men are a monolith without all of them doing so.
@W: “So I don’t see how feminism has many opportunities for growth in that state, do you?”
Ok, I think I see where you’re coming from. It’s the variation on the “no true feminist” fallacy where you, and admittedly a lot of “I’m not a feminist but…” feminists feel the defining feature of “feminism” is man-hating. Or hairy legs. Or avoiding lipstick. Or being a lesbian. Or wearing purple and shaving your head. Or agreeing with Mary Daly. Or whatever. If you’re not that then you’re not a feminist you just… agree with 95% of everything feminists believe in, and don’t agree with… everything about 85% of feminists don’t agree with!
It’s kind of like the right-wingers and conservative feminists who say all pornography is violent, degrading, and coerced because… according to them anything that isn’t violent, degrading, and coerced isn’t porn, it’s “erotica.”
You’re saying the same thing: if you’re not a “feminiazi” you’re not a feminist at all. Ok. Fine! But, seriously, if, like most of the folks here, like most women and quite a few men, you agree with about 95% of everything feminists believe in, and disagree with everything about 85% of feminists also disagree with, and nearly 100% of those beliefs (you know, women’s right to own property, women’s right to equal pay for equal work, women’s right to sexual autonomy, women’s right to access contraception, women’s right not to get their asses grabbed when they walk down the street, women’s rights to be defined as a legal person even after they marry, women’s rights to go to college, women’s rights to be called “women” instead of “girls” after age 18, women’s right to have sexual assault be taken seriously even if they’re not virgins, and all the other things that, at least in America, were not at one time rights for women and in some states still, for somethings, amazingly, aren’t) originated with women who called themselves feminists, and moving into the 21st Century, are pushing hardest to expand the definition of rights away from strict chromosomal designations into uniform rights and responsibilities for people regardless of gender because the more you look at women’s rights the more you realize that what passes for men’s rights are limited almost literally to boobie prizes, then… what, exactly should you call that?
Seriously, W, it sounds like you’re core definition of feminist is pretty much 100% Mary Daly party line or not a feminist at all. That’s your definition. If I agreed with your definition and theirs then yeah, I’d be 100% committed anti-feminist too. I don’t so I’m not. And you’re getting pushback mostly because other people, including people like me, who call themselves feminists don’t agree with (and sometimes don’t recognize!) your definition.
This goes back, by the way, to my post that ballpark originally linked to: Mary Daly types and Rush Limbaugh types agree that 85-95% of all people who fit the standard profile for feminists don’t count. And it sounds like you also agree with them that 85-95% of all people who fit the standard profile for feminists aren’t feminists either.
So fine. What do you call that? A lot of people who match that profile but don’t match your, or Rush Limbaugh, or Mary Daly’s definition call themselves, um, feminists. And, as you say, a lot of people who match that profile (including, again, contributors to this website including you) don’t. Which is fine, I guess. But what should you call it?
(Note: Sadly “humanism,” which would be an excellent candidate, is out if we use your criteria because for just about every feminist who’s deprecated men there’s a humanist who’s deprecated women.)
I mean, seriously, this website is easily 80-85% feminist! Even if it’s 100% anti-Mary-Daly, Twisty Faster, Catharine MacKinnon, etc. So what do you call that?
figleaf
Figleaf: “Ok, I think I see where you’re coming from. It’s the variation on the “no true feminist” fallacy where you, and admittedly a lot of “I’m not a feminist but…” feminists feel the defining feature of “feminism” is man-hating.
You don’t find “You’re priveledged so your experiences don’t count compared to women”, “Check your privledge”, “What about the menz” a form of hatred? This is shaming. And any group who uses shame to silence dissenting opinions (like what you’re doing, labeling “W” an anti-feminist) shouldn’t be calling themselves for equal rights between men and women.
Figleaf: “I mean, seriously, this website is easily 80-85% feminist! Even if it’s 100% anti-Mary-Daly, Twisty Faster, Catharine MacKinnon, etc. So what do you call that?”
Wrong. It’s only for the feminism that used to stand for equal rights across the board. Not for the feminism that uses priveledge to shame men who want to participate in the gender debate.
hash!
Okay. But it’s that 20-15% that feminists don’t agree with us on that matters.
In particular, it matters to feminists.
For example, my own analysis of the wage gap issue isn’t that it’s systemic persecution by THEM(tm) but a result of women being expected to do the majority of childcare.
A position that society will continue to push(explicitly and implicitly) until it lets go of the idea that women are better caretakers then men.
The way we start deconstructing this notion is by promoting fatherhood as equally important as motherhood.
Otherwise women will always be ‘ghettoized’ as caretakers. Of there own or others kids. No way around it.
Eh… no one’s paying attention to me. I’m going to go cry in a corner. >.<
All: I’ve pulled a number of comments into moderation due to the ‘no gang-tackling’ rule that applies to NoH threads. This should not be taken as a judgment on the quality of the comments themselves (I thought there were many valid points raised, actually), and I’ll restore them after some time has passed allowing figleaf to respond to what’s been posted.
typhonblue: I don’t know what your “hash!” comment means. Or, for that matter, why you think no one’s paying attention to you. I’d give you an Internet hug, but I know you hate that kind of stuff!
“I don’t know what your “hash!” comment means.”
I do. In the Army it’s called Battle Damage Assessment.
And I am paying lots of attention to you, TB; I am admiring from a distance. I used to jump in when you were on a roll, but nowadays I just like to stand back and enjoy the show. When you go to eat teppanyaki, why get in the way of the knives?
Jim… I was just making fun of myself and the fact that figleaf hasn’t responded to me once. *tear*
BTW, the hash refers to the fact that my previous comment became, well, hash when I tried to edit it.
Battle Damage Assessment sounds cooler though.
I’m not terribly interested in further discussion based on a one-dimensional picture of feminists. But I did want to respond to the idea that all feminists are invested in a notion of universal patriarchy that’s the same in all times and places.
I’m a historian by training. Very few of my feminist colleagues would use “patriarchal” uncritically. In the U.S., we no longer live in a pure patriarchy, though vestiges of it are easy to find (such as the all-male Catholic priesthood). I understand that on the internet, you get a lot of talk about “the patriarchy.” I don’t find that particularly useful, for reasons that I explained here.
@typhonblue: The research of both Ann Crittenhood and Joan Williams suggests that 1) caregiving responsibilities are the biggest hindrance to workplace equality, and 2) highly involved fathers face discrimination in employment very similar to that faced by working mothers. So yes, I agree that there’s a serious need to promote the idea that women are not inherently better caregivers than men. We also need employers to accommodate the needs of families, instead of pretending that their employees are unencumbered by any other responsibilities. For more on Williams’ work, see the publications at the Center for Worklife Law. The report “One Sick Child away from Being Fired” does a good job of showing how discrimination affects men with family responsibilities, too. (I’m not linking to it directly because it’s a pdf, but you’ll find it on the center’s main publication page.)
The most important way of doing that is by legally protecting men’s relationship with their children as much as women’s relationship with their children is protected.
You have mentioned some feminists who’ve written on the importance of promoting men as caregivers, but this is what I see happening in the field of family law.
Father’s rights groups are campaigning for a ‘rebuttable presumption of joint custody’ and feminist groups are campaigning against it.
Again, the way you can equalize the caregiving field most rapidly is by removing legal impediments to male caregiving, yet I see one group fighting for and another group fighting against.
And the group fighting against turns around and complains about the wage gap. Well, there will always be a wage gap as long as child care is women’s work and supporting maternal legal preference enshrines ‘childcare is woman’s work’ in law.*
Is the contradiction mendacity or just short sightedness?
I wish ballgame would release my last comment as I think it sums up my main objection with feminism as it is practiced. Namely that it shuts down critical thinking.
*One might counter with the idea that childcare should be as highly valued financially as, say, rocket science, thus childcare workers should be as highly paid as rocket scientists. However there is a problem with that. Childcare, rightly or wrongly, is seen as an activity that half the human race can do well(the other half varying degrees of passable, badly and very, very badly.) Rocket science is something very few people do well and so is valued accordingly. There is also a built in quality control for rocket science; if the rocket blows up, you’re a bad rocket scientist, likely an ex-rocket scientist. No such quality control exists for child care.
If we did propose a massive shift of wealth from people who do something besides childcare for a living to people who do childcare for a living then I, for one, would like to see a quality control system implemented and an expectation that child care workers have to have as much training for childcare as any other civil servant(plus periodic performance reviews and an expectation that they should face fines and potential jail time should they be negligent or abusive). Considering that a child can be a deadly weapon when not handled properly, I think some sort of year long military-style boot camp might be in order. I imagine the single people, working parents and empty nesters who would be ultimately funding such a scheme likely would agree.
@typhonblue: having been a stay-at-home dad for 13 years, with two kids, they already have a “boot camp.” It’s called being home with kids for 13 years, plus nine months for each pregnancy. Even when it’s your partner’s pregnancy and not yours.
Seriously, if you’ve ever done it you know that you tend to spend a heck of a lot of time getting ready as soon as the home pregnancy test-strip turns blue. So there’s your 8 to 7-month headstart right there. Then when the baby(s) come, especially for the first year most tasks are high priority (crying baby, dirty diaper, naps, laundry) that have to be done on demand but low urgency (very few deadlines you don’t impose on yourself.) That means you’ve got to be on duty constantly. (seriously, 15 minutes after the first time my first child ever crawled he managed to pull a metal wastebasket over on himself and then while I was cleaning that up he made it halfway up the steep attic stairs!) But while you have to be on duty constantly you’ve always got lots of time to think, plan, listen to books on tape, read an email, send an email, visit a blog, etc. It’s constant interruptions, sure, so you never have time to build up a head of steam for anything. But you’ve still got time to bone up on all kinds of childcare stuff.
But “boot camp” on top of that? I don’t see it.
It’s possible to have one parent commit to one side of the work/care fence, and and with single parents it’s harrowing but possible to commit to both. But the real thing that needs to happen more often, at least in two-parent households, is for both parents to really share the load. Trust me, it’s healthier for everybody. Including both parents. And the children, who get combinations of two points of view and two sets of ideas instead of one.
@typhonblue: “Until the feminist theory of ‘patriarchy’ can explain why the situation for women is vastly different in North America vs. the Middle East then it’s a phrase devoid of any scientific worth.”
This is hard? Most historians, anthropologists, archeologists, and linguists agree that contemporary approximately-western culture arose in the same place and then fanned out from the fertile crescent into North Africa, the Indian Subcontinent, and Western and Eastern Europe, encountering and responding to local conditions and populations. Much, much later different populations in mostly-western Europe travelled west and eventually became the dominant culture in the Americas. With each move they brought elements of the original culture, language, administrative, and legal practices that made them so robust to begin with. Large chunks of administrative and legal practices derive from the Code of Hammurabi, which especially in the section between laws 100 and 200 spell out what amounts to men’s legal ownership of women and women’s legal status as property, with some laws covering penalties or rights for prostitutes and (at least nominally) free women who operate inns/boarding-houses.
If you read through those laws you can see the concepts of patriarchy (rule of extended families by the oldest male relative), privilege for men (there are penalties, obligations, and payments required of women that are not required of men), and oppression (men are allowed to exact penalties, obligations, and payments from women and servants that women and servants can’t exact from them.)
And if you read through contemporary laws from different cultures that ultimately derive from the original mesopotamian culture and laws you see that just as the languages, religions, and other elements of the cultures have changed quite a lot they still reflect a lot of the original ideas. Including the presumption that women are property and men are property owners, that men have rights that women don’t, and that men are free to do certain things that women are not.
Also I think it’s silly to think (generally) American and (generally) Middle-Eastern laws are all that different. In 1873 (just a few years before my grandmother was born) the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that married women couldn’t become lawyers. Which might sound like they were just fusty and prejudiced but actually goes way, way deeper. Women couldn’t become lawyers, they ruled, because the legal profession restricted the practice of law to licensed “persons” and under well-established law married women weren’t legally “persons” at all. Lest that seem like a fluke of American law, in 1905 the Canadian Supreme Court made the same ruling: under the law upon marriage women ceased to exist as legal entities, period, at all.
Look at it that way and the most you can say is that, say, Yemini patriarchy is only a century behind U.S. and Canadian law.
In a number of states in the U.S. it’s still true as Hell that when a woman is raped the traditional and legal victim is… her husband, father, or closest male relative. Those laws are derived from English Common Law, which most U.S. states expressly adopted as a convenience when they were founded. Under English Common Law, by the way, rape is a property crime. Guess who the property is?
And this is exactly how different from the law in the (generic) Middle East?
If you’re interested in the rights of men, by the way, the English Common Law definition of rape is one of the reasons why there’s historically been so little interest in prosecuting on behalf of male rape victims: under the law men aren’t property so strictly speaking it’s legally impossible for men to be raped. Not by women. Not by men.
And this is different how from the law in the (generic) Middle East?
Well, one way it’s different is that just like over time languages, technology, law, and agriculture diverged from it’s origins, so over time so has treatment of women, with the result that in, say, Scandinavian countries women wound up with very different, and sometimes considerably more legal, political, economic, and social rights than places nearer the source.
But to the extent roughly-western cultures were more or less influenced by the same original legal template you also tend the legal status of women more or less influenced in similar ways.
The upshot? In a U.S. wedding the bride wears a white dress as a nod to virginity and her father “gives her away.” In other places if she’s not a virgin he may not be able to “give her away” at all. Very different variations based on very similar laws.
Anyway, I don’t know what else it means to other people, but that’s where “patriarchy” comes from and that’s how it can look so different in two different cultures without being “devoid of scientific worth.” Some places just need a lot less cleaning up than others in order to erase presumptions of differential gender obligations (male and female.)
figleaf
No, actually, you haven’t explained anything. You’ve spent about a dozen paragraphs explaining how the two cultures are similar and then hand waved the differences.
And:
Exactly my point.
The law is very similar and yet… one hundred and fifty years ago a husband’s ‘property’ could get a restraining order against him. And today Saudi women(for example) are still subject to honor killings with little legal recourse.
Incidentally, the laws may be only a century behind, but the social _attitudes_ are millenia ‘behind’. Therein lies the rub.
Why?
This is it. You’ve spent about ten times more space explaining how the cultures are similar and almost no space on how they differ aside from noting that they do, indeed, differ. Yet how they differ is what’s vital to understanding the nature of patriarchy, how it forms, perpetuates itself and takes over other cultures.
The more you explain how the laws are similar, the more important it is to figure out this other factor that leads to a very different social milieu for women.
(Incidentally, until someone can come up with evidence that western husbands bought and sold their wives one hundred and fifty years ago, I believe their position is more accurately represented by the term ‘ward’ then ‘property’. In this context seeing rape as a property crime still is consistent with not seeing women _as_ property. Her ‘property’-chastity-has been violated but it is held in trust by her father or husband.)
figleaf says:
January 29, 2010 at 2:03 pm
I’d like to know how this situation came to be. Why did women acquiesce to a body of law that regards them as property? What circumstances produced this result?
@figleaf and typhonblue: Neither “property” nor “ward” is quite the correct term for the legal status of wives in the U.S. and England prior to marriage law reform. The doctrine of coverture held that “man and wife” were one person, legally speaking: the husband. That’s consistent, too, with the ruling that women couldn’t become lawyers because they didn’t possess legal personhood.
I do agree, though, that the tradition of “giving away” the bride derives from a notion of woman-as-property. Or at least, women’s sexuality as property.
And yes, we’re only about a century beyond those laws, and there are still states that view marital rape as a lesser crime than other forms of rape, but that century is precisely the difference between full-fledged patriarchy and the rump form of it that still exists. That century between Yemeni law and U.S. law is absolutely critical – it’s the century in which patriarchy entered its death throes here, and that makes all the difference. Coincidentlaly, I have a Yemeni student this quarter. Based on what she’s told me, I think her country will need more than 100 years to dismantle patriarchy. It would be disingenuous to ignore these differences.
Figleaf, I’d be very interested in knowing specifically which states still have laws on the books framing rape as a property crime against a woman’s father or husband. I know there are adultery laws in some states that define it as sex between a married woman and a man not her husband – Minnesota, for example, has such a law. I’m not aware of equally retrograde rape laws.
@ Pat Kibbon: The societies of ancient Mesopotamia were highly militarized, and patriarchy – like slavery – was enforced primarily through blunt force. While men could have multiple wives and access to concubines and prostitutes, adultery by a woman was punishable by death, although her husband could choose to let her live under the Code Hammurabi. A later law said that if a wife contradicted her husband, she could be smashed in the mouth with burnt bricks. Such treatment was legitimated by the rise of religions that worshiped male gods and saw male earthly leaders and male-headed families as part of a divine order. Patriarchal law also subjected children to discipline through violence and loss of property rights. It further enlisted men in enforcement by subjecting them to penalties if they failed to cooperate with laws subjugating women. (The death penalty applied to a woman’s adulterous partner, too). Finally, some elite women served as deputies to their husbands – and thus collaborators. They sometimes exercised limited control over property and could rule over slaves. (I think of them as the Phyllis Schlafleys of the ancient world.)
In short, patriarchy definitely isn’t something that women chose for their own benefit and protection. It was imposed on them through the threat of harsh physical violence.
@typhonblue: What exact difference is there between a woman being transferable property with no independent legal existence and being a transferable ward with no independent legal existence?
More to the point, what, exactly, would you call a system that considers women but not men transferable wards with no independent legal existence? Especially if the system is isomorphic with other systems that derive from the same legal foundation and differ mainly in extent, severity, and enforceability?
Also
“Yet how they differ is what’s vital to understanding the nature of patriarchy, how it forms, perpetuates itself and takes over other cultures.”
I’m not sure what the question is here. I’m pretty sure I answered that question in my preceding, if too-wordy comment, above. I also thought I made clear that what’s interesting isn’t how it spreads — it’s already done that. What’s interesting is how it’s already deteriorated in some places more than others, and what or who stands in the way of snuffing it out completely.
The short answer is that “patriarchy” is common, inherited legal principle that designated sex is a legitimate reason to differentially grant or limit the rights of individuals. As in designating persons of one gender as wards such that under the law a violation of her bodily integrity and personal autonomy is an offense not against her personally as a human being but against a custodial adult charged with administering her chastity-property in trust.
Since I have a problem with the broadly-distributed legal principle that rights and penalties should be different based on designated sex (whatever you want to call that) then it’s pretty irrelevant to me whether it’s really bad (as in the 21st-Century middle-east) or kind of bad (as in 19th-Century America) or relatively mild (as in most of 21st-Century America.)
One last thing: you asked specifically how… whatever you want to call the principle that discrimination on the basis of sex comes to be applied differently in different countries I’d say the easy answer is that it’s had an awful lot to do with how much and how long and how well people of discriminated-against sexes have been able to press first for legal recognition period, then for the right to vote, then for the right to economic self-determination (in the United States that would have only been in 1972), and then for the right to bodily autonomy and sexual self-determination (for married women that would have been in the 1980s.)
@Sungold: From a Maryland Court of Special Appeals ruling ( PDF ) from 2006.
“The concept, undergirding the Battle holding, rooted in ancient laws and adopted by the English common-law, views the initial “de-flowering” of a woman as the real harm or insult which must be redressed by compensating, in legal contemplation, the injured party – the father or husband. This initial violation of the victim also provided the basis for the criminal proceeding against the offender.”
This by way of explaining why a very reluctant court (Maryland’s equivalent of a Supreme Court) overturned a rape conviction based on the English Common Law principle, which at least at that point hadn’t been superseded, that since the real crime of rape was ‘defloration’ and the victim had originally relented to attempted penetration (by a second assailant!) she couldn’t be “re-flowered” and therefore it wasn’t a crime that her (second!) assailant didn’t stop when she asked him not to continue. For what its worth, elsewhere in the ruling the court pretty clearly… invited the legislature to correct the loophole. But there you go.
figleaf
I was corrected by Sungold. The correct term is ‘coverture.’
As far as I know the only transfer is between a father and the husband his daughter has a legal veto in choosing.
Incidentally, what would you call the majority of men, who are legal property of the state (conscription)? Many of whom never had the vote?
So we have two state defined relationships. Coveture and citizenship. In the case of coverture the guardian(for want of a better word) has several legal obligations towards his coveturee as well as legal limits on his behavior. He cannot beat her, mistreat or neglect her material needs. He is financially responsible for her upkeep and legally responsible for her criminal behavior. He can be thrown in jail for her debts.
The relationship between state and citizen is vastly different. The state has no obligation to provide financial support and a citizen has little recourse in the case of state-perpetuated mistreatment(as there is rarely a larger, neutral body to appeal to as in the case of abuses in marriage.) Further a citizen is, in all intents and purposes, legal property of the state. He can be subject to conscription or forced labor in which the state often gives little concern to his safety or well-being. Citizens could also be thrown into jail for debt. And, to add insult to injury, many of these citizens have no say in the state they are beholden to.
Interestingly, we women have never became truly become citizens. We have became some strange combination of coveturee and citizen; not subject to the draft, not completely held responsible for our own behavior, not completely held responsible for our own upkeep.
So it’s still ‘patriarchy’ if men are the ones legally limited rather then women?
So in the 1980s rights of married women started to supersede those of their spouses(to my knowledge it’s still legal for a wife to rape her husband.)
Regardless. What is this ineffable quality X that distinguishes a pre-legally egalitarian society like Victorian England and, to use Sungold’s example, current day Yemmen? Obviously these two cultures are not ‘isomorphic’ or, at least, the differences between the two are essential to examine and not dismiss if we are to understand ‘patriarchy.’
Yep. Society is pretty nasty to rape victims, male and female. Did you know that there are many jurisdictions in which women can’t be charged for rape of men because there are no laws protecting male sexuality against female aggressors?
Indeed.
Although I think to examine those differences would require examining how the Christian conception of manhood, even if it is patriarchal, is constrained by the whole ‘sacrifice for your wife as Christ sacrificed for the Church’ thing.
How such a simple moral teaching can start to erode the foundations of patriarchy.
The end of Patriarchy in the west didn’t start with the last century. Over the last two millennia we’ve seen the gradual dismantling of patriarchal law that has culminated in the exponential change we’ve seen in the last century.
To be honest I think if we don’t nail down what makes Victoian England different then modern day Yemmen, then the pendulum is just going to swing back the way it came. Maybe not in my lifetime but within a few centuries.
Sungold says:
January 29, 2010 at 5:23 pm
Who was in a position to impose those conditions? How did they attain that position? Why did women not successfully resist the imposition of those conditions?
@typhonblue: “So it’s still ‘patriarchy’ if men are the ones legally limited rather then women?”
Of course! That’s the whole point! Women just figured it out first because whereas the system “rewards” men who are “worthy” with access to women, women were less crazy about the reality of being judged primarily on their ability to perform the duty of being the rewards!
Either way it’s a sucker call, though. Women just have a 40-year head start on figuring it out. With a number of false starts on the way (coughMaryDalycough.) But once I started hearing, especially, younger ones but also ones like bell hooks who are closer to my age saying the problem isn’t men it’s instead a system that legally, socially, culturally, and economically holds women and men back from reaching our full potential I said I was on board.
And seriously, doesn’t it make sense that if I’m not into feminism out of some kind of nice-guy “chivalry” it must be because I’m seeing something in it for men too? Because, seriously, I’m not a masochist. (I’m not even here to be a masochist.)
figleaf
Wow. Too tired and have to get up early tomorrow to respond. So it’ll have to wait.
I will say that patriarchy has to benefit the “average” man, and not just in ways that it doesn’t benefit women, if they get their own benefits that men do not receive. For instance, telling a black man who could not vote in a state in which white women could vote that he lived in a patriarchy -which happened in some states in the 19th century- wouldn’t be very much believed by him now would it?
In other words this discussion of “patriarchy” *cough* is way too simplistic. Hopefully by the time I’ve returned someone else will have taken up the challenge of figleafs’s feminism 101 level explanation of patriarchy. In short, if you don’t know it figleaf, and Sungold you are setting yourselves up for some massive fail, so if I was you I’d get ready and try to tighten that “patriarchy” definition up just a little bit. And I’d also deal with female agency – if you can!
figleaf:
It’s a hard habit to break. The trick is that feminists are not a monolith so it’s consistent that some of them can act as if men are a monolith without all of them doing so.
Even more of trick than that is that those that have that habit can somehow simultaneously remind people that feminists are not a monolith while at the same time acting as if men are. Yeah you can call it consistency. You can also call it hypocrisy.
I mean, seriously, this website is easily 80-85% feminist! Even if it’s 100% anti-Mary-Daly, Twisty Faster, Catharine MacKinnon, etc. So what do you call that?
An attempt to claim that the other 15-20% should just be ignored and that feminists have a corner on the common 80-85% therefore if you agree you must become a part of feminism?
[Comment originally posted Jan 28, 2010 @ 16:50—ballgame]
I should add that this analysis exempts me from being considered feminist. Even if it presents a potential solution to a feminist problem, it doesn’t support feminist theory. Again, that 15% gets me shown to the door.
I also believe that, at this point, misandry does more direct harm to women then misogyny–another 15% belief that’s likely to have me shoved out of the feminist camp.
I guess my main problem is that that 15% represents my critical thinking skills. If feminists aren’t going to allow me to think critically about their theories and ask questions then…
Actually, that’s it. My main beef. The numbers of feminists who think feminist theory should be accepted uncritically or who accept feminist theory uncritically.
[Comment originally posted at Jan 28, 2010 @ 17:30 —ballgame]
figleaf says:
January 28, 2010 at 1:05 pm
Let’s say that 2% of feminists are avowed “man-haters”. Now let’s say that these 2% have 98% of the influence over social, legal, and economic policy that affects men. Now imagine that the 98% of feminists who don’t hate men provide a platform for the 2% who do, and that without that platform the 2% would have no influence whatsoever.
You can see that there would be reason for those of us who are adversely affected by the policies advocated by the 2%, would want to tear down the platform from which the 2% operate.
[Comment originally posted Jan 28, 2010 @ 17:43 —ballgame]
figleaf: “I mean, seriously, this website is easily 80-85% feminist! Even if it’s 100% anti-Mary-Daly, Twisty Faster, Catharine MacKinnon, etc. So what do you call that?”
[Please try to remember to use quotation marks. —ballgame]
I’m glad you agree that this website is largely feminist. And, I suppose a lot of the people here find common ground with what a lot of feminists say that they believe. So what’s the problem? What’s the disconnect?
I think ballgame and Daran can say it much better, but here’s my take on part of the disconnect: Sometimes what feminists say they are doing is not, in fact, what they are actually doing. A crazy idea, I know, but I’ve actually seen it happen. No, really! Shocking, isn’t it?
So, for example, when a prominent feminist web site says that “of course men are welcome in feminism!” and, once men express interest in signing-up, they are promptly proclaimed guilty of indelible sins, told to quietly sit in the back of the bus and speak only when spoken to… then some crazy people out there might consider that a kind of bait-and-switch. Just to give one example that has been described on this web site.
So why should I be considered an anti-feminist just because I refuse to shut-down my critical thinking faculties? Should I just shut-up and play Big Sister Knows Best, even if it looks self-evidently ridiculous to do so?
Should I passively accept ideas that I find to be empirically false, logically absurd or hateful just because they happen to be endorsed by feminists? If a feminist says something that goes-against the facts, I should assume that the facts are wrong and not the feminist?
And if typhon and I are not welcome within feminism because we refuse to stop asking questions, what does that say?
[Comment originally posted Jan 28, 2010 @ 17:57 —ballgame]
All: I just approved a number of comments that I had earlier pulled into moderation because they were responding too quickly to a comment by figleaf (I think), and thus violated the ‘no gang-tackling’ rule for NoH threads. The thread has proceeded fast and furious since then, so releasing them now might not be ‘ideal,’ but I didn’t want to keep them bottled up. They’re thoughtful comments and deserve consideration.
Figleaf, do you have a problem with us being 85% feminist? It seems there’s this expectation that everyone who has an interest in feminism has to take everything as gossipal.
That’s another problem I have with feminism now: Their idea of the amount of investment one gives to it’s theories. If you’re wanting to become a part of the movement, there cannot be any compromises. Either you accept every theory without question or you have no right to call yourself a feminist.
So, if I believe in the wage gap yet see there are other factors at work ASIDE from sexism and the “Glass Ceiling”, then I’m not a feminist.
If I believe in violence against women but consider that women can also initiate this, I’m not a feminist.
If I belive in stopping rape but ask women to take extra precautions and defense measures, I’m accused of blaming the victim, assuming every woman must wear body armor whenever they go out for a night on the town, in addition to not being a feminist.
If I’m concerned about the welfare of women but also show even a tidbit of concern for the welfare of men that has nothing to do with “Patriarchy”, I’m given the “What about the menz?” snark and accused of hijacking the movement, in addition to not being a feminist.
And don’t get me started on pointing out that women can also be violent and possess the ability to sexually assault and rape as well. It’s like I threw a skunk into their happy haven.
I may be a believer, but not so blind as to shut down my thinking and analyzation skills. Feminism now seems to want to appeal to emotion so badly, damn facts or evidence, that they’ll turn up the volume and even mentally damage the non-believer in the name of “Equality”. (Don’t laugh. Some of the insults they throw back at non-believers would make misoganic men blush!)
@figleaf: Thanks for the reference to Maryland rape law. The decision you cite was overturned in 2008. The decision overturning it can be found here (pdf). Here’s the key passage:
“While it certainly may be the case that the common law’s focus on penetration was somehow originally related to the “de-flowering” of virgins, a search of early English case law and scholarship reveals that by the time Maryland expressly adopted “the rules of the common law of England” in 1639, the English law of rape had evolved beyond the understanding of rape as merely a trespass upon a man’s property. Before Maryland adopted the English common law, penetration could no longer be said to represent the completion of the harm caused by rape, although it was still focused on as sufficient evidence for the required element of vaginal intercourse.” (p. 34)
But it’s still chilling to see how recently a court was willing to draw on centuries-old common law to define rape as a property crime against a man. On top of that, the 2006 decision (the one you cited, figleaf) names North Carolina as another state where the courts have ruled against the concept of “post-penetration rape” – that is, a woman has no right to withdraw consent after intercourse has begun. I can’t find the relevant North Carolina case (State v. Way) online, but it’s reasonable to assume that it, too, was undergirded by early common-law understandings of rape.
Can we be more precise when we talk about patriarchy? It’s not a gender-free construct. History doesn’t support describing it as the “common, inherited legal principle that designated sex is a legitimate reason to differentially grant or limit the rights of individuals.” Patriarchy cannot be defined in this de-gendered way. Patriarchy refers very specifically to male dominance over women. That doesn’t mean it’s good for all men. In fact, only a minority of elite men clearly benefit, while the rest are subjected to various forms of oppression, whether along other axes such as class and race, or whether directly from patriarchal law and institutions.
A system in which women, as a class, dominate men would be “matriarchy.” Despite the theories of early archeologists, anthropologists, Friedrich Engels, and some feminists, there is no evidence that matriarchy has ever existed. There have been matrilocal and matrilineal tribes, where households or inheritance were organized along female kinship lines. That’s not the same as matriarchy. Prior to the creation of patriarchy, hunter-gatherer tribes usually had a division of labor according to sex, but every person’s labor was essential and such tribes were likely fairly egalitarian and often matrilineal. They were not, however, matriarchal.
In The Creation of Patriarchy, Gerda Lerner notes that there are two ways of defining “patriarchy”:
“In its narrow meaning, patriarchy refers to the system, historically derived from Greek and Roman law, in which the male head of the household had absolute legal and economic power over his dependent female and male family members. People using the term that way often imply a limited historicity for it: patriarchy began in classical antiquity and ended in the nineteenth century with the granting of civil rights to women and married women in particular.
“This usage is troublesome because it distorts historical reality. The patriarchal dominance of male family heads over their kin is much older than classical antiquity; it begins in the third millennium B.C. and is well established at the time of the writing of the Hebrew Bible. Further, it can be argued that in the nineteenth century male dominance in the family simply takes new forms and is not ended. Thus, the narrow definition of the term ‘patriarchy’ tends to foreclose accurate definition and analysis of its continued presence in today’s world.
“Patriarchy in its wider definition means the manifestation and institutionalization of male dominance over women and children in the family and the extension of male dominance over women in society in general. It implies that men hold power in all of the important institutions of society and that women are deprived of access to such power. It does not imply that women are either totally powerless or totally deprived of rights, influence, and resources. One of the most challenging tasks of Women’s History is to trace with precision the various forms and modes in which patriarchy appears historically, the shifts and changes in its structure and function, and the adaptations it makes to female pressure and demands.” (pp. 238-39)
Even under Lerner’s second definition, we are living in an era when patriarchy is moribund. Women do have some access to “power in all of the important institutions of society.” We don’t have equal access. A quick glance at the composition of Congress confirms both of these propositions: Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House, the number of women in both chambers is at a historical high, and yet women are still a small minority (17%) in each: 17/100 in the Senate, and 74/435 in the House.
@Pat Kibbon: The ruling elites of Mesopotamian patriarchy originally achieved power through overt violence. Elites were composed of successful warriors. In an age of low-tech weapons, brute physical strength mattered crucially, especially when it was expressed collectively as military success. Lerner writes that the most likely explanation for the origins of male dominance is that “the development of intertribal warfare during periods of economic scarcity fostered the rise to power of men of military achievement.” (46)
Again, patriarchy doesn’t mean that all men benefit, or that all women are powerless. It’s a description of power relations in the aggregate, in which the dominance of elite men is undergirded by laws and institutions. Children, slaves, and women are subordinated, [edit: as are non-elite men]. But a small number women exercise power as deputies of powerful men, and a small number children will grow up to become patriarchs themselves.
@typhonblue: While early Christianity was indeed liberating to women in some respects, the liberation of women has not proceeded along a linear course. Notions of husbands “sacrificing” were long paired with legal permission to beat one’s wife. At the same time, Islam requires men to support women, so you can’t credit Christianity with imposing a unique duty on men that eventually led to women’s emancipation.
As for men being conscripted and forced to pay taxes: When this occurs without any say, men are not citizens, they are subjects. Citizens enjoy both rights and duties. This is a really important distinction which, if ignored, portrays men as universally victimized. Such broad generalizations aren’t sustainable for either men or women.
Sungold: “Again, patriarchy doesn’t mean that all men benefit, or that all women are powerless. It’s a description of power relations in the aggregate, in which the dominance of elite men is undergirded by laws and institutions. Children, slaves, and women are subordinated.”
Okay, then why say not all men benefit yet only claim children, slaves and women are subordinated?
Men who don’t benefit aren’t exactly getting a free-ride, especially those in the low class. They have problems as well. REAL problems and struggles. Not just with men at the top of the heap, but women and feminists who latch on to those “Patriarchal” stereotypes.
For example, on the one hand men are implored to break free of their bread-winner role. Yet, women still look to a man’s bank account as one deciding factor on whether to initiate a domestic relationship with him and marry. Kind of a mixed message isn’t it?
Then there are male victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse from women. Everytime, they’re told “Don’t bury your feelings. Talk about the hurt, you’re a human being.” but “Don’t whine so much, you wimp.” When men talk about getting support services for their abuse, they’re criticised for attempting to take funds away from services for abused women.
Father’s are also criticized for not doing their fair share around the house in raising the family, trying to escape through their job. Fair enough. So we have men out there helping. But then they’re told “No, no, no! That’s not how you’re supposed to do it!” and “God, never mind. I’ll do it. It seems the only way to get everything done right around here.” Particularly aggravating if you’re helping with the baby and kids. Might as well only help with household repairs and technical fix-ups since that’s the only area you’re ever really valued rather than bust your rear end in living up to the “Standards” of your partner. This happens with women as well when doing men’s work, but it seems women are so…vile when it comes to living up to their standards in maintaining a household and family.
Men are also told to get more involved with their kids even after divorce. Yeah, then realize the court system values the mother’s word over the father and you’re stuck with either visitation or footing the bill on child support without a single chance of being involved.
Why only think of children, slaves, and women as the only forms subjected to subornation if you refer only to “elite” men as power holders of this patrarichy? Unless you still think men at the lower heap still benefit from patriarchy due to their sharing the same gender as their “elite” powerbearers.
Sungold: “Even under Lerner’s second definition, we are living in an era when patriarchy is moribund. Women do have some access to “power in all of the important institutions of society.” We don’t have equal access. A quick glance at the composition of Congress confirms both of these propositions: Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House, the number of women in both chambers is at a historical high, and yet women are still a small minority (17%) in each: 17/100 in the Senate, and 74/435 in the House.”
And you think it’s because women don’t have equal access to this “Power” you speak of? You think if they gain it, problems like this will be eradicated?
What would you do if you got that power? Because I highly doubt that you would use it wisely since women are “Human beings” and human beings can succomb to power and turn into the very monster they fought.
@Eagle31: I edited the first sentence you objected to, because you’re right. Non-elite men are also dominated under patriarchy – although they may also derive some systematic benefits by virtue of being men (e.g., norms that wives will do the lion’s share of housework or that men should control family finances). I’m choosing to take your objection as a good-faith criticism, despite its accusatory tone.
Earlier in my comment I wrote: “Patriarchy refers very specifically to male dominance over women. That doesn’t mean it’s good for all men. In fact, only a minority of elite men clearly benefit, while the rest are subjected to various forms of oppression, whether along other axes such as class and race, or whether directly from patriarchal law and institutions.” Either you didn’t read my comment very carefully, or you chose to ignore this section of it, which is an essential part of explaining both how patriarchy works and why most men should reject it!
I agree that men get mixed messages. In many cases, it’s more than a mixed message, it’s a true double bind – as in the breadwinner conflict you describe. I spend quite a bit of time discussing those mixed messages and double binds with my students, in hopes that future generations won’t be quite so constrained.
I agree that women aren’t angels, anymore than men are. You write as though I’m demanding that women seize the power men currently have. Where did I say that?
I’m not advocating matriarchy. Very few feminists do. I’m advocating a more flexible, egalitarian society. Please don’t put words into my mouth.
Also, why put “Power” in quotes? Last I checked, our congresscritters wielded some real power, even if it’s mostly the power to screw things up.
I’m going to go deal with real life for a while. In the meantime, it would be great if folks responded to what others actually wrote, rather than arguing against a caricature or putting words into people’s mouth. I believe Ballgame tries to set a constructive tone, which I appreciate. For the sake of more fruitful discussion, I’d hope to see more of that, and fewer broad, unsupported generalizations.
Sungold: “I agree that men get mixed messages. In many cases, it’s more than a mixed message, it’s a true double bind – as in the breadwinner conflict you describe. I spend quite a bit of time discussing those mixed messages and double binds with my students, in hopes that future generations won’t be quite so constrained.”
I have trouble with this when, in the next breath, you say:
Sungold: “Non-elite men are also dominated under patriarchy – although they may also derive some systematic benefits by virtue of being men (e.g., norms that wives will do the lion’s share of housework or that men should control family finances).”
They get mixed messages and are essentially trapped. I hardly call that benefiting from anything.
By the way, my tone may sound accusatory to you but I’m being honest and 100% blunt. I’m simply sick and tired of feminism preaching equality when they aren’t quick to fight with men against stereotypes that still exist for them in places like the court system, domestic violence, sexual abuse, household support, and fatherhood. I’ve heard many excuses ranging from:
“It’s Patriarchy”, “They’re priveledged. Their opinons don’t count.”, “Women don’t wield the power so they can’t be sexist.” etc, etc, on and on, day in and day out whenever someone takes the time to THINK and find holes in their theories. Can you blame me for sounding accusatory when I keep getting the same hallow reasoning or am accused of making it “All about the menz”.
Not that you have. But other feminists have whether you choose to acknoledge it or not. Oh, and here’s another one I’m tired of. “They don’t represent feminism.”
Well, SOMEBODY is allowing them their voice box.
About congress and politics having less women. I’m definitely of the opinion that there are constraints and sexism, especially in high-profile campaigns like that of Hilary Clinton in 2008. On the other hand, I wouldn’t think that a 50% parity means equality. This is equality of outcome, not of opportunity.
Should we require 50% parity of men/women in nursing, teaching, mechanics, engineering, garbage hauling, trucking, welding, construction work, nursing homes, daycares, secreterial work?
All professions that are very skewed gender-wise. I’m all for the ‘skew’ to be less pronounced, and have say 70% women/30% men in nursing (instead of 95/5 currently), and advocate for men to go in that career more until that time when such a balance is met, yet I wouldn’t find it right if people pushed for there to absolutely be a 50% ratio.
I’d advocate the same for every profession where there is perceived bias or discrimination either based on hiring practices, social notions (like daycares), sexist bias (nursing and construction) where one is viewed as less feminine/masculine for doing it.
Trucking shouldn’t be viewed as a guy’s job with the rare woman, and nursing shouldn’t be viewed as a girl’s job with the rare man. This limits the opportunity of those who might have wished to do it.
But that doesn’t mean people will choose 50/50, even with much less social constraints.
Well, here’s my patriarchy post.
First I’m going to define patriarchy, then I’ll prove it doesn’t exist -at least certain types never have – and show that the concept is problematic in many ways.
Patriarchy: A system whereby “gender” or sexual identity is used to determine privileges, rights, and access to power set up for the benefit of the majority of men at the expense of women.
When one looks at it this way, a pure patriarchy has never existed, indeed it’s arguable whether a lesser type has ever existed in that its very hard to find a society where the average man benefitted unequivocably in access to power, sexual power, political freedom and access to power in reproduction and over one’s own bodily integrity at the expense of the average woman and this as a matter of public policy. The closest would probably be some of the Greek city states, certainly not all of them.
Patriarchy has never been defined as only beneffiting a few men at the expense of women and all others. I’m not even sure why such a defnition should even exist, given that this type of “patriarchy” for the average man seems more like a “tyranny”.
There are other problems with the term patriarchy.
1. Feminists have never been able to pin down where the alleged patriarchal social conditioning is coming from. Or if they have, they’ve carefully avoid stating it, though I suspect some of the more radical ones attack the nuclear family due to it. “Patriarchy” as the feminist define it, can only be passed down from mother to child. It can only be so, because women do the vast majority of child-rearing the early years in pretty much every society I’ve ever come across, even if they are not single mothers.
2. Since Sungold, for instance , wants to move the definition of patriarchy a bit to include only a very few select men at the top, thus in effect the “patriarchs” are the winners of the male social dominance heirarchy. I might then ask Sungold why women seem compelled to push men into these status battles (not that they don’t do more than enough status battles of their own. Girls in middle and highschool are notorious for this) and to reward the winners with sex /children and punish the losers with ridicule/loneliness/sic their boyfriends on them, etc.?
3. The term is insulting. It implies a conscious conspiracy to keep women in their “place”.
4. One would think that in a Patriarchy, one of the most, if not the most important parts of social policy would be to uphold the patriarchy. That is, limit female access to justice, certainly never take them into consideration when making or changing laws, etc. A patriarchy would never let women vote, for example.
And yet its very rare to find declarations of Kings/Emperors etc that deal with sex as a policy matter. Most ancient societies seem to have taken their “gender roles” ( to use an overused but still sometimes accurate feminist term) for granted. No country has ever went to war to uphold a patriarchy, and there’s very little evidence of widespread gender pograms , feminist misconstructions of the phenomena of the “witch trials” in the middle ages notwithstanding. The fact that the majority of congress people are men is also taken to mean they are, for instance, upholding the patriarchy as if most men in congress care only for the thing between their legs, and not what the majority of their voters *women* want.
5. Men’s protective nature vis-a-vis women is taken as an example of patriarchy. That is, a facet of the legal system that let a white woman have a black male lynched for the crime of looking at her wrong, and took women’s words as inherently more truthful than males in at least a few cases is seen as opppressing women.
I could go on. But really, when there are more useful words such as kyriarchy that could be used why feminists seem to insist on using such a alienating and guilt-inducing term is beyond me. I think its probably because the modern movement is mainly founded on assumptions of male guilt and privilege.
I could quibble with a few things Sungold and Figleaf have said, but this post is long enough as it is.
I think what I’ve shown above is already more than enough to deconstruct the idea of patriarchy.
I could do more. That’s just a beginning of the problems with such an idea.
Sungold:
The definition of patriarchy you describe is essentially meaningless. Even hunter-gatherer cultures have a chief or ‘big man’ who is very often a, well, man. So they likely aren’t egalitarian according to your definition.
Now, if every culture on Earth and throughout time is patriarchal, then what does the word ‘patriarchal’ really _say_? It says nothing meaningful because it explains nothing about the differences between cultures.
Then most men in society have been subjects, even into the early part of the last century.
Then what is that mysterious quality X? As you yourself said, Victorian England is a far cry from modern day Yemmen. Why?
Women’s History could start by developing a vocabulary for classifying cultures that’s a bit more useful then patriarchy and… um… no culture that’s ever existed.
figleaf:
And why is it that a relationship with a woman is a ‘reward’ that a man earns? Doesn’t that suggest a man’s sexuality is worthless compared to a woman’s? And, adding a bit more context to it, a woman’s sexuality isn’t a reward that’s just handed out like a trophy by the patriarchy, universally the woman in question decides who to hand the ‘reward’ to.
Would it be better to see a man as being a ‘reward’ that a woman earns?
As for your idea that ‘better motivation’ has enabled women to effect more and faster change…
In the past one hundred years women have managed to effect the kind of social change that usually takes millennia. If we look at women’s influence in terms of real life effects women stand like behemoths beside other social forces.
You think this is evidence that women were more oppressed therefore simply better motivated. Where I’m standing–and looking at the sheer magnitude of force that must have come to bear to create these changes–that sounds rather unconvincing. The more you talk about how horribly patriarchal society was before these changes occurred the more the improbable and mind-boggling the change becomes. It’s like something huge stepped in and clocked patriarchy; a K.O. in three rounds. Either patriarchy is a frail, fragile little thing, broken by what amounts to a mouse fart* in the history of human endeavor or when women march the world falls over itself to make way.
To be honest I highly doubt men will be able to effect these kinds of changes without some kind of miracle. Men’s rights will chip away at things for centuries, probably millennia. (For example? Maybe in one hundred years there will actually be a universal definition of rape that includes men as victims.)
Why the difference?
* 3 generations. No blood loss. Compare to any other social revolution; bloodless ones take forever, bloody ones are, well, bloody.
“Maybe in one hundred years there will actually be a universal definition of rape that includes men as victims.”
See, this is why I’m starting to think nobody’s really serious here. Pay close attention to the dates in the following two quotes (semi-randomly selected based on 30 in Google)
And welcome to the future, from that hotbed of women’s-rights activism, the Medical University of South Carolina
Notice something funny about those dates? I mean besides that they’re all dates in the past? Before 1960 (quite a long time before actually, maybe thousands of years) rape was assumed as something men could only do to women. After 1962 it was specifically defined in the U.S. as… something only a man could be guilty of and only if his victim was a woman!
Contemporary feminism didn’t really start to take of until the 1970s. When… son of a gun… the laws started changing to… embrace the reality you think won’t even start to happen for another 100 years!
You ought to feel pretty good about this, TyphonBlue, the future’s already here, 110 years early!
Know why I happen to know this? Because until the spring of 1980 I believed it was impossible for a man to be raped or for a woman to commit rape. And you know who told me that no, men can definitely be raped and that women can definitely be rapists? The decidedly feminist female director of a local rape-relief and domestic-violence crisis/shelter program. Who, at the time, was part of a lobbying effort to get our state laws on rape and sexual assault redefined.
Oh wait, who told me that? The feminist director of a predominantly feminist-organized and financed crisis center with predominantly women clients. What were they lobbying for again? A “universal definition of rape that includes men as victims.” When was that again? 1980. So why don’t you have to wait 100 years to change that definition?
Once again, I’m not into feminism because I’m a masochist. (Though, seriously, I keep feeling like a masochist for trying to say anything nice about it here.)
figleaf
Figleaf:
I wonder if things are as simple as you seem to think they are:
http://www.ncvc.org/ncvc/main......ntID=32361
All states, eh? Depends on the state statute it seems to me.
We’ve had extensive discussions on this site before about male rape, whether males can be raped , etc. I remember the british mens rights activist Angry Harry let us know that males cannot be raped under British law b/c the act is defined as penile to vaginal penetration only. These threads were within the past few years.
Let me hypthesize that your link is wrong and that not all states allow for male rape. Conflicting information here. Who is right?
So it broadened the definition to include male victims of _other men_. When I said ‘men as victims’ I was thinking ‘men as victims of women’ but I did not write it.
I think you’re misunderstanding where I’m coming from in general, figleaf.
I don’t have much of a problem with feminism insofar feminism doesn’t overlap with gender conservatism. Where I have a problem is when feminism denies or dismisses female agency or male vulnerability. (Which is the exact same problem I have with other forms of conservatism.)
IMHO, the evidence is overwhelming that DV is 50-50, that men are equally sexually vulnerable to women(in situations of statutory and date rape) and that women are just as violent and abusive and like to get things their own way-ish as men.
Incidentally, realizing I wasn’t uniquely vulnerable(far from it, in fact) due to my gender has to be about the most liberating thing I’ve ever experienced.
I recommend the experience to other women!
I realize this is a slightly ambiguous offhand comment, figleaf, but I think it’s a reaction that’s not uncommon among some feminist visitors here. It’s an unfair generalization. First, just as all feminists are not the same, the participants here at FC also vary widely in their attitudes. Secondly, the commenters do not represent the blog’s ethos. Somewhat atypically for a blog, I think, our active regular commenters as a whole diverge significantly in their attitudes from we who run the blog. As a group, they tend to tilt rather more strongly towards the “MRAish” side of the spectrum than the bloggers. [Edit: Only a handful appear to actually identify as MRAs, FWIW, and I don't intend "MRA" here as a smear the way many feminists use the term. —ballgame]To be absolutely clear, we highly value all of our commenters and acknowledge that they generally raise extremely valid criticisms of aspects of feminism. However, it would be erroneous to assume that if a commenter makes a particular point, it must represent a consensus view here just because it isn’t contradicted.
The nature of this blog is such that it really requires more blogger involvement than is possible for us bloggers at the moment, particularly when we have intelligent mainstream feminists like you, Denise, and Sungold participating. I think the resulting conversations have been great, but I do find it a bit frustrating personally that I can respond to only a tiny fraction of the things I’d like to respond to. My priority will be to respond to the feminist commenters, which may contribute to the impression that I’m endorsing everything that everyone else is saying, which is not the case.
I will respond to your other points shortly. [Edit: Well, I hope to respond as quickly and thoughtfully as my schedule will allow, but moderating the other thread kind of took a bite out of my blog time for the moment.
—ballgame]In the mean time, I’ll be temporarily pulling others’ comments on this thread into moderation as per the ‘no gang-tackling’ NoH rule.
This may be a bit poorly typed fince I’m on a handheld with a bad connection but if there really are any states that haven’t gender neutralized their definition of rape and a reqirement that it involve penetration of the victim by the perpetrator I’m going to be a lot angrier than anybody else you’re likely to know personally.
Having been subject to aggravated criminal sexual assault (without “penetration” either time, not that that should make a difference under any law), once by a female and once by a male (both times when I was still a minor) I think I’m pretty well qualified to say anyone who thinks there’s the difference is significant is an asshole and if you give me an address I’ll be happy to let him, or her, know about it.
This isn’t the 20th Century anymore and I’ve got just about zero tolerance for that kind of mentality. If you think I’m contemptuous of people who get in the way of gender neutrality in society (and I think I’ve made my feelings about that pretty clear here) it nothing like what I feel about people who try to hold it back with a bunch of “essentialist” bushwah. Which would explain my disrespect for (not to beat a dead horse) Mary Daly and her ilk.
figleaf
Male victims of female rape are rarely understood to be victims, even if they can manage to bring their aggressor in court. They’re not taken seriously by basically everyone who has to do with their case, are ridiculed and told they got lucky, homophobia might enter there since a man who refuses sex has to be gay…
South Park presented the issue, with their usual overgeneralization and weird humor when a 4 year old child was raped by his kindergarden teacher. The whole police station then proceeded to laugh it off as soon as they heard the victim was male (and the aggressor female), notwithstanding being 4 year old, even if until then they took it seriously.
Sure, it’s South Park, and no one expects it to present things accurately, but it gets the concept of what it presents still. That male victims of female rape are not seen as victims at all.
[Originally posted Jan. 31, 4:20 p.m. —ballgame]
Well, the fact that some doodz feel that whether or not they wash their own socks should have have anything to do with me, is exactly why “personal is political.”
(Couldn’t resist, feel free to strike.)
@Schala: “Male victims of female rape are rarely understood to be victims.”
Wow, thanks for the South Park reference. That was my experience too. More of a “he shouldn’t have been playing there” from the moms and an unfamiliar dad saying something about me “getting an early start.”
For the record that would have been sometime between 1959 and 1960. It bothered me a lot more than I thought it was supposed to have. It’s one of the reasons I was so startled when the rape-relief director corrected me so quickly when I’d quipped “of course women can’t rape men” back in 1980. It was sort of like I’d been missing a piece of the puzzle. Just a year or two later I started getting into both non-separatist women’s and non-MRA men’s movement philosophy.
figleaf
figleaf
Zo:
Well as long as you aren’t trying to take credit for them doing I don’t think there’s any problem if you do or not.
Sungold says:
January 30, 2010 at 12:46 pm
So, labor can be divided by sex in an egalitarian way?
In the division of labor, which sex was given the labor of leadership?
On what basis did hunter-gatherer tribes decide to divide labor by sex?
I’m not quite clear on how economic scarcity puts men in a position to impose their collective will on women (who I assume begin on an equal footing with men).
Are you saying that a system of male dominance is a successful adaptation to economic scarcity?
A small number of elite men and a small number of elite women are ruling a large number of non-elite women and a large number of non-elite men; how does that constitute “male dominance”?
Sungold: “but every person’s labor was essential and such tribes were likely fairly egalitarian…”
I bet they were fairly egalitarian because there wasn’t as much stuff to go-around. One family in the tribe has a big clay pot and the other family in the tribe has two little clay pots. Barely any social stratification at all. Some Utopia that must’ve been.
I am glad to hear it is possible to divide labor according to sex in a fair and egalitarian way. Pre-patriarchy, at least. Not like today. Post-patriarchy, similar divisions of labor became horribly oppressive. The change must’ve taken place at about the same time that the family with one big clay pot started to grab ALL the pots, smashing the pots they couldn’t grab, and everything went straight downhill from there.
Sounds to me like someone is romanticizing a past Golden Age. A Golden Age to which we can return. I thought only conservatives did that?