Men Matter: Boys Are People

I'm easing back into reading some feminist blogs, and one of my favorite feminist bloggers, Jill of Feministe, has a great post up today where she reflects on a new study that shows that (gasp!) adolescent boys think of adolescent girls as more than just sex objects. My favorite part of Jill's analysis:

And this is another “thank feminism” moment. The idea that boys just want sex (and girls don’t) is at its heart conservative and essentialist — and it’s a stereotype that lays the groundwork for requirements of “femininity” that inevitably involve refusing sex until a big fat diamond enters the picture, and bartering virginity for financial and social security. It’s not feminists who argue that boys are mindless animals only interested in sex; no, that argument comes from your anti-feminist social conservatives, who manage to inject it into abstinence-only sex education...

Men Who Do Feminist Work -- The Men of the Movie "Protagonist":Mark Pierpont, Joe Loya, Mark Salzman and Hans-Joachim Klein

I recently had the great pleasure of watching Jessica Yu's film, Protagonist. I am sometimes a bit of a documentary film junkie, and I was looking around for something to watch on ye old online-dvd-in-the-mail service's webpage, and ran into this film. Yu has several other prior films to her credit, and I haven't seen any of them, though I hope to see them all, now that I've seen this one.

The premise of the documentary is simple: Yu interlaces the stories of four men who, on the face of it, only seem to have a few things in common. As the film goes on, the relationships between the men's stories begin to come into focus, and it turns out that all four men have been struggling with various strains of traditional masculinity, and, though self-analyzing struggle, have found different sorts of masculinities to embrace.

I'm being extremely heavy-handed in my analysis, but the film itself has a pretty light touch. It wasn't until the last third of the movie that I realized that masculinity was really at the center of things for these men--and recognizing the ways in which they could reject rigid gender roles helped them to overcome some of the central difficulties of their lives. Feminism isn't mentioned by name here, and it's pretty clear that the men involved might not characterize themselves as doing feminist work, but, since feminist theory has done so much of the heavy lifting as regards railing against traditionally rigid gender roles, I say they are doing feminist work nonetheless.

I encourage everybody who is interested in documentary storytelling, men who are struggling with traditional conceptions of masculinity, and pro-feminist men in general to check out the film. And I don't think I can encourage you to do so more than by giving a bit of background on these four men. From the movie's site:

The Stories At the heart of each man's story is the quest to transcend his imperfections. While each man's motivations are highly personal, the stories demonstrate how the individual struggle between fate and character can have far-reaching consequences.

HANS-JOACHIM KLEIN suffers through a cruel childhood in a working class neighborhood near Frankfurt, Germany. When Klein joins the leftist movement in the 1970s, he is driven as much by idealism as by the desire to rebel against his authoritarian father, a cop. As Klein's activism evolves from radicalism to terrorism, he becomes a trusted comrade in the Revolutionary Cells (RZ), an offshoot of the notorious Baader-Meinhof gang. With the RZ he joins Carlos the Jackal in the violent kidnapping of eleven OPEC ministers, which leaves three people dead and Klein with a near-fatal gunshot wound.

MARK PIERPONT has a strict religious upbringing in New Jersey. The "black sheep" of the family, he realizes his attraction to other men, but desperately wants to avoid this sentence to "eternal hell." Pierpont's drive to suppress his homosexuality leads him to become a missionary, preaching abroad to crowds of thousands. Back in the states he infiltrates gay bars to spread the word of Jesus, convincing himself that his "homosexual problem" has been cured.

JOE LOYA also comes from a home steeped in both love and fear of God, as enforced by his zealous father. At age seven, Loya's mother dies, and his father's grief explodes into violence against Joe and his brother. When Loya finally fights back against years of abuse, the act of dethroning his father ignites a sense of intense power, of triumph over hypocrisy and brutality. Loya's determination to recapture that thrill leads him to his own life of brutality, in which he eventually robs over thirty banks.

MARK SALZMAN comes from suburban Connecticut. The smallest boy in his class, he is the subject of relentless torment from his peers and his mild-mannered parents offer little guidance. Upon seeing the show "Kung Fu" on television, Salzman is convinced that he can achieve personal transformation through the study of martial arts. Though he becomes best friends with the chief bully in his school, Salzman's quest to become a man of physical and spiritual strength is warped by his allegiance to a sadistic master.

PROTAGONIST seeks not to judge its subjects or make political pronouncements, but rather to use these stories as a window into human nature. Though our subjects' backgrounds are diverse, their shared experience points to a universal conflict: the conflict between the desire to control our world, and to accept our fundamental limitations.

What these descriptions don't tell you is that all four men were able to creating something of a reversal of their own fortunes, even though there was still a cost associated with how they were before the reversal.

Thanks for Jessica Yu, and to these four men, for creating such an interesting window into the inner lives of men and their relationship to traditionally rigid conceptions of masculinity.

Men Matter: Men Enforcing Male Privilege Hurts Men

(Men Matter is our continuing series on the ways in which feminists do a good job of keeping men in mind, as a loose sort of counter to the anti-feminist meme that feminists ignore harms done to men. See the first installment for more information.)

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville takes note of the scapegoating of men that implies that men = harassers:

I just want to note that none of the day laborers have been accused of, arrested for, or convicted of assaulting a women while she was trying to get into the Jack in the Box—which means that "the men in blue" posing as contractors and running the sting are presuming these male day laborers to be sexual predators just because they're men. (Also because they're swarthy men, but the emphasis here is on the "men" part.) Just another example of how its the people enforcing male privilege who inevitably have the dimmest view of men [emphasis added].

Men Matter: Lashes for Everyone

Introduction
From time to time, when some feminists point out something that shows that misogyny has deep cultural roots, some anti-feminist, MRA, or genuinely concerned person will put forth their opinion that feminists tend to give short shrift to the ways in which men are harmed by other men. These men (and women, sometimes) think that, because many feminists focus a good deal of their attention on the hardships of women, that said feminists are somehow slighting men, saying that the hardships men face aren't worth talking about at all. Many of the people commenting in this way think that men deserve 'equal time'.

I don't think it's the case that men deserve equal time from feminist women in general. This is a controversial point, probably, but I tend to think that it's feminist men who need to better articulate the harms that traditional gender roles sometimes have on men. And yet, I also disagree with the aforementioned commentors on a factual matter: They tend to claim that feminist women don't value the well-being of men--that men are completely left out of feminist analysis, except when noting the patriarchy. I disagree. Most of the feminisms that I find myself engaging in acknowledge the harm men face as regards rigid gender roles, and most of the feminists I interact with do more than acknowledge these harms. So, while I don't think that women feminists in any way need to prove themselves to these commentors, I find myself wanting to simply note a few counterexamples that I find through my daily perusal of feminist blogs and literature, as well as through my conversations with other feminists. I hope this will become a resource, over time, for people to recognize and remember that the lives of men are, indeed, important to feminists.

First up, Jill from Feministe notes that most media outlets are picking up a story about a woman in Saudi Arabia being punished with 200 lashes for being raped, but these same media outlets are generally playing down (or ignoring all together) the fact that a man who was with her was also raped, and is also being punished (though it's unclear for what at the moment) by lashing. And why might the media be doing this? Because it helps to reify the idea that women are treated so badly within "other" cultures, without addressing the fact that men and women are often treated horribly. Jill says:

This is a women’s rights issue, and it’s a human rights issue. But the erasure of the male rape survivor serves a variety of purposes, of which highlighting women’s rights abuses is only one. It lets us separate us from them; when we highlight the atrocity of a rape victim being put on trial, we allow ourselves to ignore all the other ways that our own systemic human rights abuses reflect those of Saudi Arabia: the death penalty, secret prisons, harsh punishments for juvenile offenders, lack of due process rights, disproportionate prosecution of minorities, and on and on. We position ourselves as the enlightened saviors, the ones who speak truth in the face of a nation of backwards Muslims. Of course, the people who were initially outraged over this case and who publicized the woman’s cause are Saudi — the lawyer, human rights activists, the media. And while that gets a mention, it’s only to further highlight the backwardness of Saudis.

And I think it's important to note explicitly that it isn't feminists who are ignoring the plight of this man; rather, those who have it as part of their interests a hyper-masculine sort of patriotism (i.e. Americuh needs to go save those women!) are the ones creating the silence around this poor man. In fact, if it weren't for Jill and Feministe, I wouldn't have known about the man in the story at all, even though I've ready many accounts from mainstream media about it.