When men seek to pull together to challenge some aspect of their gender oppression independent of feminism, conventional feminists often respond by saying that the men are being oppressed by patriarchy and that ‘feminism already addresses those issues.’ Men should join the feminists in challenging that patriarchy instead of working independently as part of the (much-vilified) men’s rights movement.
Par For The Course
Perhaps there are scads of mainstream feminists quietly supporting men’s efforts to achieve gender equality with women. Unfortunately, they are being very quiet, judging how difficult it is to find those feminists on the Internet. Too often, mainstream feminism’s leading lights are openly dismissive of male oppression or the need for men to see other men challenging gender stereotypes, as when Jill Filipovic compared male circumcision to a “vaccination,” or more recently, when Melissa McEwan sneered at an article focusing on men taking a bigger role in preparing holiday meals:
Here’s some more of this delightful article about how women should immediately start baking ALL THE COOKIES for men in time for Thanksgiving
She is referring to this recent Today article which discusses how more men are cooking the turkey for (American) Thanksgiving, and often doing so with a prototypically masculine spin (i.e. deep frying it or grilling it). Sadly, this dismissive attitude towards the portrayal of men challenging gender stereotypes isn’t a new tack for one of the more popular feminists on the web … in fact, it’s par for the course for Melissa and Shakesville.
The Today article itself is largely innocuous. It’s the kind of corporate public relations pablum that has become increasingly common at resource-strapped ‘news’ entities.
Brining, deep-frying, slow cooking: This Thanksgiving, a growing number of men will be doing more than gobbling turkey — they’ll be cooking it, and they’re not afraid to experiment.
And if the results skew more mad-scientist than Martha Stewart, the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line will be there to help them. In a nod to the Thanksgiving kitchen’s shifting demographics, Butterball is adding male staffers for the first time in the 32 years it has run the annual helpline, which started taking calls Nov. 1. (It also launched a search for a male spokesperson.)
It wouldn’t be at all surprising if all or most of the Today article was, in fact, penned by the PR chief … er, “director of communications” of Butterball. But, as far as such things go, it’s actually a pretty nice piece which highlights the laudable trend of men becoming more involved in their family’s domestic affairs, something feminists have been pushing for decades.
A Different Narrative
How does all this factor into the notion of male oppression? Simple. Our culture is saturated with narratives of men competing — often violently — in the male dominance hierarchy. In fact, I don’t think it’s going overboard to say that this narrative is one of the dominant narratives in our culture. So if you’re opposed to this toxic narrative, it’s gratifying to find respectful stories of men taking on non-traditional and stereotypically feminine roles.
Too often, men who shy away from the ‘male dominance hierarchy competition’ are treated with contempt. Take, for example, this sad list from Cracked Yahoo. It’s a current article, published just a week or two ago. Notice anything about the genders of the “wimps” profiled?
When it comes to being mocked for failing to ‘perform violence,’ it’s a man’s world, indeed.
We have a long way to go before we can say that our culture fully respects men in all of their human vulnerabilities. Articles like the one focusing on men doing more of the holiday cooking are valuable because they show that men don’t have to be dominant to be considered worthy of inclusion in our public conversations.
True progressives know that’s nothing to sneer at.
This comment thread is the “No Hostility” thread. Please read this and this for the ground rules. The “Regular Parallel” thread can be found here.
This really has to do with her long-standing “no cookies” attitude towards change. That is, if change doesn’t come without any sort of praise or positive reinforcement, it’s worthless as people may be doing it for the praise/positive reinforcement, and not because they accept the underlying ideological concepts.
Of course, positive reinforcement is a necessary thing in order to create any sort of widespread positive change. Not only does it help attract people to join you, but at the end of the day if you’re unwilling to accept progress, you end up portraying yourself as someone who will only accept extreme results.
Karmakin,
There is a middle path.
I am not looking for praise, and I don’t accept the underlying ideological concepts (if I understand what you mean by that phrase).
I am not cooking the turkey this year because I have some grand notion about changing gender roles; I just like to cook. (Of course, that makes me privileged because, being the paragon of masculinity that I am, I don’t give a frack about conforming to gender roles (or breaking them down, for that matter)).
So, I am doing two different brines and the traditional oven roasting method, no deep frying or slow cooking.
But, what struck me as most obnoxious about her article was that the USA Today article did not seem to be praising men for cooking the turkey, as much as it was simply an observation about a new trend.
The gender-bending type comments were more of a distraction, as if they were included to pay homage to feminism.
-Jut
I shall simply observe that an article about women who cook (boring old traditional) turkeys for their families would not be likely to include the women’s professions as key identifiers. It would be more like, “Sally Smith, a working mother of 2,” or “Melissa McEwan, whose unused uterus makes us wonder why she would even bother cooking a turkey.”
I wonder if she would also observe that in an article about women DOING SOMETHING THAT THEY HAVE NOT DONE TRADITIONALLY IN THE PAST they likely WOULD include the fact that they are doing those things while being mothers or instead of being mothers and that sort.
What she is not realizing is that the reason those mens occupations are listed is because men were expected to do the work outside the home and thus not be around to cook.
To me this seems like more of the usual “if its not feminist approved its wrong” talk.
If someone is sufficiently determined to hate you, doing things that they supposedly want you to do, or just being nice to them in general, will make them more hostile, not less. They have to explain away your seemingly “good” actions by inventing a sinister ulterior motive, so now they’re attributing even more negative attributes to you then before. (e.g. the common feminist hatred of nice guys.)
ballgame,
“But, as far as such things go, it’s actually a pretty nice piece which highlights the laudable trend of men becoming more involved in their family’s domestic affairs, something feminists have been pushing for decades.”
Eh, they typically seem enthusiastic about the IDEA of being people who are pushing for men’s greater involvement in family life, and ambivalent at best about actual involvement by actual men. Snottiness of her delivery aside, I’m not sure McEwan is really all that out of step with mainline progressives here.
I think it greatly depends on the person involved, John. I think there are plenty of mainstream feminist progressive women who are genuinely happy that their male mates are actively involved in domestic matters, and who appreciate the importance of the involvement of those men in their children’s lives. So I don’t at all agree that progressives as a whole are “ambivalent at best about actual involvement by actual men.”
I also want to point out that it’s not even clear that Melissa herself is actively opposed to male domestic involvement. What is clear is that she is indifferent-to-hostile to media recognition of male difficulties with gender enforcement, presumably because that threatens the ‘men privileged, women oppressed’ narrative that forms the basis of her gender politics.
There’s always been a certain brand of leftist (I wouldn’t call them progressive) who do not like acknowledging progress as it makes things less severe and gets in the way of a complete ultimate victory.
The traditional term for it was “heighten the contradictions”. That’s where MM’s attitude really comes from.
I am a progressive person…the pro-progress people and the anti-progress people really don’t get along. At all.