Theory Thursday: Lenses and Malleability

After posting about Armchair Feminism, it's probably not a fantastic idea to do a post that is theory-heavy, but here it is.

In the comments from a recent post, Eric notes some problems with the idea of understanding the world through a feminist lens:

See, I sometimes think the "lens" is the problem itself. I am cautious about adopting lenses that produce rigorous conceptual models; I would prefer to gain some insights into the world from various philosophies and political movements and literatures and ideas and worldviews and religions by keeping an open mind. Thus the eclectic part, I grab bits and piece from all over the place and rethink things. Now, of course, that's what works for me at this point in my life.

I admit a lot of this is also very intellectual/academic for me. I'd rather understand and be able to teach/explain/discuss/lecture rather than necessarily agree with/internalize a particular viewpoint. My problem with framing it as a "lens" is that it implies your applying them a priori to reading something or looking at something or watching something. I find this problematic because it then prevents you from developing other possible lens, of opening other possible world-views, or ways of looking at the world or experiencing the world gained from those works.

I agree that the conceptual tool of 'lenses' is problematic in some of the ways Eric points out--though I find it useful to quite a large degree, when people think I mean something apart from, and prior to, experience, problems can arise. The main weakness of the 'lenses' metaphor is that it can imply that a person can pick and choose lenses prior to experience, when in fact even the very choice of which lenses we choose from is given by our current world-view. But one strength of the 'lenses' metaphor is that it allows for, I think, one of the things that Eric also values: Malleability of a world-view. I can choose to look at something through the lens of feminism. And then I can look at it through lenses of race theory, and atheism, and class theory--and even where these conceptual frameworks don't intersect, I can gain more insight into the world as a whole.

On a related note, I'm all for malleability. In fact, that's central to my truck with traditional gender roles (which is one basis of my interest in feminism): I don't have a problem that there are roles. My problems begin to arise when the roles are seen as forever-and-ever-amen, writ in stone, and very not-malleable. (Not that I believe they are infinitely malleable, either, of course, which becomes important rather quickly.) And many varieties of feminism focus on anti-essientialist conceptions of gender roles (among other things), which is one of the things I like about feminism.

I think I get Eric's take on an eclectic world-view, using concepts he's chosen from various other world-views--and I tend to do that more than most as well.

I do think there is a danger of letting the malleability of one's thoughts provide an excuse to stay on the sidelines regarding the world. I start wondering if this happens to Eric as often as it happens to me, when he says this:

I'd rather understand and be able to teach/explain/discuss/lecture rather than necessarily agree with/internalize a particular viewpoint.

For me, one place that I come to feel ok with identifying as a feminist is as regards real violence done by what I see as a patriarchal dominance hierarchy; when I look at my mother's life, and the hurdles she had to overcome, the violence she faced by virtue of being a woman, it makes me want to get off the sidelines and take to the streets (so to speak) more, even if I may be subscribing, for however long, to a set of concepts that I may not agree with at some point in the future. When I see men suffering violence at the hands of other men over what amount to traditional conceptions of masculinity, when I see women going through something like what my mother has gone through, I want to do more than teach/explain/discuss/understand/lecture, and I think that's a good thing--and I think internalizing a viewpoint, if one recognizes that such a viewpoint is often just a starting-point, and that the viewpoint itself is malleable, isn't such a bad thing. In fact, It's doubtful to me that we can avoid internalizing viewpoints to some degree in order to better understand them. And I think using the conceptual tool of 'lenses'--as long as we do recognize the limits of conceptual tools in general--can be powerful.

What Men Can Do Wednesday: Armchair Feminist, Part Two

Months ago now, I wrote about the idea that men who identify as feminists or feminist allies have to watch out that they don't get caught up in too much 'armchair feminism'--that is, we have to keep in mind that we may too often slip into a detached sort of conceptualizing of feminism, in part because we don't as often or as easily find ourselves face-to-face with the harms that patriarchy and misogyny can cause.

But the more I read and think about the conceptual frameworks that help create our relationship to gender and to power, the more I think that men can gain some motivation for better understanding feminism by paying attention to the ways in which patriarchy harms boys and men. This is not to take away from how these things harm people of other genders, of course--and for many people, avoiding harm to others is a pretty powerful motivation. But for many of us, avoiding harms to ourselves is also a powerful motivator, and I think feminist men should better understand this.

Thing is, the harms that men experience as a result of rigid gender roles, rigid hierarchical societal structures, and the like, are sometimes more subtle than the harms that women often face, or harder for men to see. Some of this just has to do with the way that men are harmed by rigid gender roles, and some of it flows pretty directly from men being at the top of the dominance hierarchy--it's tough to see the water that we're swimming in.

In addition, because of the very way that masculinity is envisioned and enforced, often these harms go unclaimed by men themselves, for fear of being seen as unmanly. Rather than, for instance, feeling the immediate, visceral effects of being verbally accosted while doing something like trying to buy some gas, men have to face the stress of being thought of as, and being taught to think of themselves as, protectors and providers, even in contexts where such things are impossible (as one example). Which is not to say that women don't face subtle forms of harm, or that men don't face visceral, physical and obvious harm in part by virtue of conceptions of masculinity--but it may be that men need to more often look harder to find a harm that exists.

Part of the risk of armchair feminism for feminist men comes from not recognizing these harms--once recognized, we might better feel the passion of our ideals.

(Part one.)

Gender in Comics: Girlfight

This week, we follow one comic for a week, and the comics almost speak for themselves. That won't stop me from writing something anyway, of course. Also, because of our new format, we can finally show the comics at a readable size!

I really like Non-Sequitur a good deal of the time. For one thing, it's got a single dad raising two girls, which isn't a family situation we see all that often in pop culture. Also, the comic isn't afraid of getting political from time to time, which I like on the comics page. But Non-Sequitur is often fodder for these Gender in Comics pieces, mostly because of the way Danae, who is more often than not the center of the strip, is painted. There's lots to like about Danae--she is a bit of a rascal, with bits of Calvin (sans Hobbes) and Dennis (she's more menacing, really) and a touch of Doonesbury thrown in (Danae aspires to get away with stuff the way politicians often do). But she's also often the vehicle for putting forward gender stereotypes, and this past week took the cake.

Girlfight
First off, we rarely see Danae interacting with other girls. This isn't so different from a lot of comics--Danae has her friend the horse, who plays a similar role the Hobbes does in C&H. But of course, when we do see her interact with a girl, it's all about conflict over a boy:

Girls Are So Mysterious
Jeffrey (!) just can't figger them girls out! They're so wacky! And completely in control of him and his brain, in their quest to outdo each other:

Get the "Leash"
Plus, befuddled boys are just lead around by girls, on a (metaphorical, of course) leash, subject to the whims of girls. If these were adults, you get the idea that the leash would be replaced by...something more intimate:

Also: Men LOVE to Be Objectified!
Because that's so cool, if you're a guy. Men like to be treated like meat because...it makes them more manly...or something:

No Competition, No Interaction
Because girls have nothing better to do than to fight with each other over boys, and because boys have no say in the matter. Oh, except that girls are mean:

It's so cute! The girls are fighting over the boy, but just because they like to fight with each other! And poor boys! Women are way too mysterious for them to ever understand...they'll only get hurt.

bell hooks Monday: Little Conversations Go a Long Way

As I've mentioned before, I came to feminist theory through philosophy, and one of the first explicitly feminist texts I read was bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. We read the book for a class called Democracy and Eduction, and while a lot of the books had a lasting effect on me, Teaching to Transgress is the one I still go back to from time to time. And, like all of hooks' books (at least the one's I've read), it's not just about it's central subject matter--she infuses her ideas about race, class and gender (among other things) throughout the work, even though it is technically a work on pedagogy.

One simple thing that I've taken away from the book is that teaching and learning happen every day, and that, given an approach that opens the minds of others, people tend to be very interested in talking about feminist issues. hooks describes this phenomena early on in Teaching to Transgress:

"I am grateful that I can stand here and testify that if we hold fast to our beliefs that feminist thinking must be shared with everyone, whether through talking or writing, and create theory with this agenda in mind we can advance feminist movement that folks will long--yes, yearn--to be a part of. I share feminist thinking and practice wherever I am. When asked to talk in university settings, I search out other setting or respond to those who search me out so that I can give the riches of feminist thinking to anyone. Sometimes setting emerge spontaneously. At a black-owned restaurant in the South, for instance, I sat for hours with a diverse group of black women and men from various class backgrounds discussing issues of race, gender and class. Some of us were college-educated, others were not. We had a heated discussion of abortion, discussing whether black women should have the right to choose."--pp 72-73, Teaching to Transgress.

The more one gets exposed to the ideas within feminism, the more one sees that lessons to be learned (and taught) are everywhere, and that one has a sort of embarrassment of riches as far as being able to show, for example, that pop culture tends to encourage misogyny. And one has a chance to talk with people about this stuff almost every day.

The other day I was on a conference call with a few of the people I work with often, two men around my age, when one started teasing the other about having worn a pink shirt. I eventually asked the person doing the teasing what colors he though men should wear, and what colors they shouldn't. In high school during the late 80's, we all wore pink shirts for at least a short while, after all, I pointed out. We ended up having a nice little discussion about it, and about how it's ok for men to wear 'salmon' but not 'pink', even if they are the same color. I'm not so naive so as to think that these men are now feminists, having had such a discussion--but we managed to have a discussion about traditional gender roles and their place in society, which I consider a feminist issue. A few days later, I had a conversation with a 5-year old daughter of a friend, who wanted to show me her 'princess' shoes. I told her they were nice, but that I didn't really like princesses. "Why not?" she asked. "They're kind of boring." She looked at me like I was crazy, and I simply said: It's ok for you to like princesses, but not everybody likes princesses. Again, I don't kid myself about countering the massive tide-of-princess-iness that this girl has been inundated with since the time she could consume media--but sometimes one little voice sticks in one's head. So you never know.

Maybe when she's older I can loan her my bell hooks books.

Carnival!

The 47th Carnival of Feminists is up over at Ornamenting Away and dizzy does a great job walking us through a lot of great posts, including one from Hugo about some reasons (good and bad) that men sometimes identify with feminism.

Go check it out.

Men Doing Feminist Work: Kenneth Clatterbaugh

As a person who has a BA in Philosophy and never finished his master's thesis, I still have a soft spot in my heart for professional philosophers, and when they do work on examining masculinity, all the better. And anyone who can write both Contemporary Perspectives on Masculinity: Men, Women, and Politics in Modern Society and The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy deserves success and happiness in everything he does. Also, the guy deserves a lot of thanks for hanging out with The Promise Keepers so that none of us had to.

Because much of my feminism is wrapped up in blogging, I oftentimes wonder about the notion of doing good work here, that working with ideas here is worthwhile, and I also think about how much of that eventually translates into a better world (and how much of it doesn't). In the end I think professional theorists like Clatterbaugh can and do make a difference (as, I would argue, do some bloggers), though it can be more subtle and cause changes over longer periods of time than traditional activism. Anybody who is unsure about the effects of theory on the world can look to Descartes--without him it's questionable whether we'd have traditional conceptions of the division between mind and body, for instance (and Xtians would have a different conception of the soul).

As I begin to unpack the last few decades of theory around men and masculinity, I'm starting to recognize how much work has already been done, even if so much more is still to come, regarding reshaping traditional masculinity into something better. Theorists like Clatterbaugh do a lot of that work.

He certainly is ready to ask some of the right questions. From his Contemporary Perspectives on Masculinity: Men, Women, and Politics in Modern Society:

1. What is the social reality for men in modern society?
2. What maintains or explains this social reality?
3. What would be a better social reality?
4. How can we achieve this better reality?

And, in beginning to answer these questions, I think he takes a straightforward, yet intricate, approach:

Certain masculinities are favored socially or come closer to the gender ideal. Boys are taught to adopt these social roles and ideals. Certain collections of behaviors, attitudes, and conditions (certain masculinities) are favored and rewarded, others are ignored, and stil others are punished. Masculinities may vary from subculture to subculture, but they are dominant in the sense that htey are favored and actively promoted thorughout society, and those who appear to exemplify them are most likely to be placed in positions of power and trust. Thus, there is a strong set of similarities among the powerful men who sit in boardrooms, in legislatures, and in other responsible positions. And there are strong similarities among men who are excluded from positions of power and prestige. Of course, there are exceptions and there are changes, but there are also rules of thumb that favor certain sets of behaviors, attitudes, and conditions: For example, to be articulate, loyal, heterosexual, white, and wealthy are favored characteristics of hegemonic masculinities.

Clatterbaugh ties together conceptions of masculinity, paying attention to the intersectionality of gender, class, race and sexuality. Plus, y'know, he has that book on philosophical conceptions of causality, if you feel like a bit more light reading.

For more information, check out his wikipedia entry and his site.

Picking A Fight

Some recent comments have led me to do more thinking about what I want to get out of this blogging-feminism-as-a-guy thing, and what I want other people to get out of my writing. Some of my goals: Find some ways for men who don't identify with feminism per se to see how feminism may help them. Find some ways for men who do identify with feminism to better understand the difficulties involved in being a man while being a feminist, and to find and develop a community of feminists, as well as a community of feminist men. And, while I fail or succeed in these goals to various degrees, I seem to be giving non-feminist men the impression that I really, really want them to be converted in some way, that I want them to come over to our side of things or some such. Jim W says in the comments:

I can assure you, though, that if male feminists insist in adapting wholesale all the rhetoric and assumptions of radical feminism, we will convince very, very few of our fellow men.

Leaving aside the idea that I somehow espouse 'radical' feminist ideals (erm...have you checked out Women's Space/The Margins lately?--if you think I'm radical, then perhaps you haven't), I suppose on some level I am trying to 'convince' my 'fellow men'. I put forth ideas and arguments and paint a picture of my own world-view--implicitly I'm asking people who don't share my world-view to consider it. But changing the minds of men isn't my primary goal, though it is part of the larger picture; mostly, I want to have discussions with men. I want to discuss things with other feminist men (which is one of the sadder parts of this 'groupblog' being not so group-y at the moment). And I want to discuss things with other men who don't identify as feminist. And I want to discuss things with other men who share some of my own feminist ideals (Jim W. is a stay-at-home dad: Some antifeminists would consider this a feminist act) even if they don't share all of them. I'm up for discussion--and with that some minds may change (even mine!), but I don't think changing minds is my central goal here. In a good discussion of ideas, mind-changing may happen, but it may not: everybody may simply achieve a better level of understanding about their own beliefs and the beliefs of others.

'Good discussion' doesn't mean the same thing to everybody of course, and by 'good discussion' I don't mean 'any discussion'. I've enjoyed conversations with people here who disagree vehemently with some feminist ideals, and, yes, some of my ideas have changed as a result (I'm thinking here in particular of discussions around the invisibility of man-on-man violence in discussions of male violence through a feminist lens, for instance). I draw lines though, I pick my fights, and I sometimes chose to not put time into some potential discussions. If there is some common ground, if people are civil, I tend to be more interested in discussion.

Ultimately, I do hope that minds get changed, mostly because I see the ways in which feminism helps men and people of all genders. But this isn't a conversion blog. It's not my aim to create born-again-feminists. I just want to put my ideas out there, and let them be part of the larger realm of ideas. As such, appeals to change the way I'm saying things to make my ideas more palatable to the greater number of men will largely not do much good. There are men out there who will really listen and discuss (and when and if I think this is not so, I'll likely not continue this blog)--and on the whole, I'd rather spend my time discussing things with them--whether we agree on something or not.

What Men Can Do: Build Better Boxes

I've (still) been (slowly) reading Susan Faludi's 1999 book, Stiffed, after having seen some interviews with her regarding her newest book, The Terror Dream. Again I am amazed that there really are many more resources for feminist men than I had previously thought possible, and I've been ignorant of a good deal of it. Perhaps it's just my own level of general ignorance(!), or perhaps I've bought too much into the antifeminist notion that feminism is 'all about women' for way too long.

Stiffed seems to be one long, reasoned examination (with examples!) of how traditional conceptions of masculinity and femininity may harm men, together with the threads of several interrelated questions that run through the book: Why have men not revolted, in the way that some women have, against the bogus demands of traditional gender roles? And some corollary questions: Why do so many men appear to blame feminism for the ills that feminism has gone a long way toward explaining?--Why do so many men want to kill the messenger?

So far I think Faludi gives us lots of good questions, and I'll be curious to see what her answers are. But the questions themselves, and the background of the questions she illuminates for us, are intriguing. She gives us a quick summation of one way of looking at the growth of the feminist movement:

More than a quarter century ago, women began to suspect in their own lives "a problem with no name." Even the most fortunate woman in postwar, suburban American, maneuvering her gleaming Hoovermatic across an expansive rec room, sensed that she'd been had. Eventually, this suspicious would be expressed in books--most notably Betty Friedan's The feminine Mystique--that traced this uneasiness back to its source: the cultural forces of the mass media, advertising, pop psychology, and all the other "helpful" advice industries. Women began to free themselves from the box in which they were trapped by feeling their way along its contours, figuring out how it had been constructed around them, how it was shaped and how it shaped them, how their reflections on its mirrored walls distorted who they were or might be. Women were able to take action, paradoxically, by understanding how they were acted upon. "women have been largely man-made," Eva Figes wrote in 1970 in Patriarchal Attitudes What had been made by others women themselves could unmake. Once their problems could be traced to external forces generated by a male society and culture, they could see them more clearly and so challenge them.(pp13)

As women began to recognize the social forces that shaped them, and to recognize that these social forces were more often than not both institutional and also shaped by men more than they were shaped by women, they began to form a movement. But, Faludi tells us, the ways in which men were harmed by these social forces weren't examined enough--partly because of the perception that it was men who had contributed more to the creation of said social forces:

Men feel the contours of a box, too, but they are told that box is of their own manufacture, designed to their specifications. Who are they to complain? The box is there to showcase the man, not to confine him. After all, didn't he build it--and can't he destroy it if he pleases, if he is a man? For men to say they feel boxed in is regarded not as laudable political protest but as childish and indecent whining. How dare the kings complain about their castles?(pp13)

I'm not sure that Faludi is encapsulating actual feminist thought about things here, or just giving us a psychological picture of how things were and are for some. Still, as a feminist man, I sometimes struggle with this very notion--there's no doubt (in my mind) that in some senses, I have 'more power' than many women have, by virtue of being a man--but of course this generalization doesn't immediately get me outside of the box that traditional conceptions of masculinity place me in. I didn't build the box, even if men-in-general are the main contributers to the box. No matter who built it, I still have to live within it, and I still have to find ways of breaking it up--and having some privilege as a man doesn't make that easy.

I think most feminists recognize men get ambushed by bogus conceptions of traditional gender roles, though I also think helping men understand all of this isn't on the top of most feminist to-do lists; many feminists simply have plenty of other work to do. And I don't have a problem with that: I think that men who identify as pro-feminist or feminist need to do the work involved--we need to talk with other men, we need to resist some traditional conceptions of male masculinity (and femininity), we need to listen to women and work with them. We don't need to place the problems that traditional conceptions of masculinity cause us at their feet (or worse, blame them for the problems).

And, of course, many men are doing this. This is exactly the sort of things that are being done by the men we profile on Fridays: Groups like Men Can Stop Rape and Men's Resources International are working to redefine masculinity, in part, so that this box we're in starts to go away, or at least is built differently. But it's important for us to recognize that it's too easy to 'explain away' the work that men have to do--to simply point to patriarchy and imply that men can just leave the shackles of traditional masculinity behind because in whatever sense they are the patriarchy, is to ignore the realities of the situation, the complexities of the interactions between institutional conceptions of masculinity and individual men. Faludi's book goes a long way toward reminding us of the difficulties that we, as men who are pro-feminist and feminist, have to overcome.

Tuesday: Gender in the Comics, the What Men Are Like Edition

As always, click on the comic for a slightly larger version.

Violence is Funny When It's Man-On-Man
They're violent, and they show each other love by beating the crap out of each other. Oh, and it's funny:
Beatle Bailey is actually pretty disturbing in its use of violence, I think. Not only is this a 'running joke' in the comic, but really this is state-sanctioned violence to boot, with the drill sargent beating the private to a pulp.

Men Are So Lazy...
...even their cats call them out on it:
And yet, this still sort of makes me giggle. Must be the talking cat.

Men Love Power Hierarchies
There's nothing other men respond better to then pure, unbridled status:

In my experience, the people who try to manage this way end up really, really successful for a time--sometimes for a very long time--and really, really unhappy along the way. But that's just my experience.

bell hooks Monday: Strong, Feminist Women

More from hooks' Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life:

"I remember when mama wanted to know way back when we first started to live together why aren't you marrying him. I was just nineteen but I had enough sense to say Mama, I don't know who I am really, I can't be marrying nobody. I am over thirty now. I know who I am. And I understand what's happening here. The therapist explained it too. That Mack is engaged in change--back to the way you were behavior. He wants me to be the innocent needy child-woman he fell in love with, not the powerful adult feminist woman. He reminds me more and more of mama and daddy. It just seems that all the time he's trying to break my spirit, not so I will leave him, but so I will become the child-woman he fell in love with."--pp191-192

I love this passage for a couple of reasons. First of all, I love that bell-at-19 knows herself well enough to know that she doesn't want to get married at 19, before (for her) she figures out who she is. I love that she uses that reason with her mother. And then later, when she's 30, she knows, as does her therapist, that who she is at 30 isn't who she was at 19--and who she is at 30 isn't who Mack wants her to be, on some level.

We only know about Mack what hooks tells us about him, but what she tells us about him through the book shows that he's a fairly complex person as well. And, while it would be a gross over generalization to say that men (even feminist men) 'have a problem' with strong, feminist women, it would be equally as absurd to ignore the fact that there are some things going on there, in the friendships and romantic relationships between strong feminist women and the men in their lives...even the men who identify on whatever level as feminists.

I find myself having to be quite conscious of my own reactions during conversations with feminist friends and lovers. Of course, each relationship has its own dynamics, so I'm painting with too broad a brush here (no pun intended), but I notice various ways of interacting that I have to pay attention to--some of my feminist friends like a good argument where voices are raised (the kind of argument I like less and less, actually); some like quiet, reasoned discussion over a period of weeks. Some feel inclined to disagree with me on almost everything--in part because they think I'm wrong, but in part because of some newfound strength and happiness they get having realized that they can disagree. And in all cases, my mode of arguing/discussing needs to shift and flow differently, depending on my own needs and the needs of my friend, and I have to deal with my own internalized difficulties when interacting with strong women--after all, much of what I've been taught as I was growing up suggests that such women aren't worth interacting with (even though strong men are worthwhile), and I still struggle pretty much every day with what I learned growing up.

Reading bell hooks, in a way especially when reading her autobiographical work, helps me to feel less alone in this struggle.

Men Doing Feminist Work: John Stoltenberg

Y'all have probably already heard of John Stoltenberg, one of the founders of Men Can Stop Rape and life partner to Andrea Dworkin. But this guy has been doing feminist work for decades, and it's worth taking a look at his work.

While I have some problems with MCSR's "My Strength" campaign (I think that it, unfortunately, plays on traditional male masculinity--i.e. 'men must be strong', and the images used in the various media of the campaign reinforce traditional male masculinity as well), I think that Stoltenberg's basic take on the ways that feminism can help men is right on. Feminism can help men realize that traditional conceptions of masculinity can be harmful to men. In "Why I Stopped Trying to Be a Real Man" he says:

As I watched guys trying to prove their fantasy of manhood--by doing dirt to women, making fun of queers, putting down people of other religions and races--I realized they were doing something really negative to me too, because their fear and hatred of everything "nonmanly" was killing off something in me that I valued.

That's why I feel a connection to feminism. I want a humanity that is not measured against the cult of masculinity. I want a selfhood that does not reject fine parts of myself just because they are not "manly." I want courage to confront the things men have done in the world that are damaging to women and that are also leaving no safe space for the self I hope to be.

Go check out Men Can Stop Rape. Some of Stoltenberg's writings can be found here.

Pop Culture Influence of Comic Strips

Last week there was some talk about the following comic on various blogs:


It's sort of strange, I suppose, that I haven't posted about it yet, given that I do regular posts on gender and comic strips every Tuesday. Thing is, sometimes something happens that is just so beyond the pale that one is sort of speechless. And that's how I felt about this comic.

Having had a few more days to reflect on it, I'm struck by two things that I haven't yet seen floating around the feminist blogs around this comic. First of all, this comic is a great example of authors who are blind to their own male privilege (although men might do well to carry mace to protect themselves from violence, they don't tend to, and they don't do so with rape in mind)--and it's not just a great example because of this comic, but because one of the authors who does Crankshaft (Tom Batiuk) also does Funky Winkerbean, which is often a heartfelt, semi-complex little comic. And for me, this just goes to show how much privilege can blind us...I think that Batiuk can be pretty progressive and smart, and yet he still somehow thinks jokes revolving around being attractive enough for rape (as if rape was all about attractiveness) is fair game.

Secondly, I think it's interesting that such an obviously horrible comic brings out ire in us, but some of us make light of some of the less egregious examples of gender stereotyping and reinforcement of traditional gender roles that go on in comics every day. Of course, there's plenty of all of that going around in pop culture in general--but I think that's why things like comic strips are a good example of how ingrained in our culture this stuff can be. So ingrained that it doesn't seem harmful until somebody steps over some line. For me, the comic above is no more or less a good example of policing traditional gender stereotypes than any others that I tend to post here on Tuesdays. It's more explicit, it's worse in its level of ignorance, perhaps, but it's the same sort of animal.

Document the Silence

Red.

What Men Can Do: Work with Women

I ran across an interesting article the other day, written by Zainab Salbi, who is one of the founders of Women for Women International, an amazing organization, from first glance, that helps to connect women in their struggles in order to lift everybody up. In this article, Salbi notes that she experienced a change in her own conceptions of men while working Kabul:

I will never forget the day that two turbaned, bearded strangers approached me as I stood in the midst of a camp for internally displaced people on the outskirts of Kabul, Afghanistan. My mind instantly flooded with stereotypes of the Taliban -- whose misogynist interpretations of Islam resulted in the brutal oppression of Afghan women -- and I braced myself for the ways they could express their disapproval for the women that were gathering to enroll in Women for Women International's program. But, to my absolute surprise, the men had come to thank me for the opportunities that our organization had brought to the women, their families, and their community.

First of all, I think it's wonderful that these men expressed their feelings on the issue--I'm not saying they should get a cookie, but I do think that it's a good thing when men recognize the ways in which feminist organizations help us all.

Next, Salbi takes a step back and asks us to acknowledge some of the struggles that men face:

But, what happens to men is complex as well. While it is true that men lead violent actions in war, including the majority of the killing, raping and pillaging that occurs, not all men are part of that reality. In truth, many men are drawn into the stereotypes of the male aggressor regardless of their own beliefs, values and actions. For example, when rape and other forms of gender-based violence are used as weapons during war, afterwards many men are left struggling with the very essence of their manhood and masculinity after they witness the rape of their wife and daughters.

I applaud Salbi's recognition of the importance of changing conceptions of masculinity and where that leads men--not only do men have to deal with the guilt of being the guiding force of violence (against women, yes, but also against other men), but they also have to deal with a lack of options. Bucking traditional masculinity is dangerous to men.

Salbi continues, telling a heartbreaking story of one man's (late) realization that how he had treated women his whole life was wrong. Unfortunately, this fact that was only revealed to him upon being humiliated at the hands of the Taliban:

As we work on building peace and stability in different war torn regions, it is important that we understand the complexities of gender and recognize the struggles not only faced by women but by men as well. This complexity and struggle can be seen all over the world. An Afghan woman once told me how her father-in-law, an older man with weak hearing who worked as a hospital guard during the Taliban control of Afghanistan was slapped by a member of the Taliban when he didn't open the door immediately to the knocks he couldn't hear. When her father-in-law returned home, he complained of being sick and remained in bed for three days. On the fourth day, he left his bed, knelt in front of the women in his family, and apologized for the times he had slapped them in the past, saying that, until his encounter with the Taliban, he had never thought of the humiliation it caused. From then on in that household, women were safe from physical abuse.

What can men do? Men can learn these lessons, sure (earlier would be better, of course, and the best situation would be if such lessons were taught to men as boys), but men can also work with organizations like Women for Women International, and donate to them financially, or as a volunteer. as more and more feminists see the importance of bringing men into the picture, this should help encourage more and more men to support these feminist causes.

Be sure to read Salbi's entire article. It's full of even more insight and inspiration, especially for feminist and pro-feminist men.

Tuesday Gender in the Comics

As usual, click on the comics to enlarge.

Complain, Complain, Complain
Read the press release from a book, oversimplify, write a comic, reinforce some behavior:
I must admit that this comic makes me laugh. This happens from time to time (mostly with South Park): I find myself at one time amused and offended. It's actually not a bad feeling. One good thing here is that the pointy-haired boss is the villain of the strip anyway (or one villain), so it makes sense that he would be this kinda jerk (although, really, this is too witty for him).

Original Spin
Here's a bible story I can almost believe:

I like how many apples he's eaten already (perhaps that made him wise enough to hire a publicist?), as well as the look on her face which tells us she's already realizing that she's going to be screwed over.

Manly Men: Tough and Gassy
To be a man, make sure you're tough, strong and vulnerable:
Oh, and don't listen to advice from your jerky friends on how to find love.

bell hooks Monday: Sex and Patriarchy

For those who have read bell hooks' feminist and race theory, but haven't read her autobiographical Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life, I'd point out that it's a lovely book, if difficult to read at times because of some of what she's had to go through in her life. It's also infused with feminist and critical race theory, so much so that it reminds me of reading Beauvoir's memoirs, which are filled with her philosophy in every page.

hooks simply has a way with words (in my opinion), and she's so self aware and not afraid to bring the fullness into her life, including her sexuality, into her theory, even if she does so subtly. Take this passage, for instance:

"I could not imagine having sex with any man in my parents' house. In their house in some way I am always a child. He wanted to do it there, to defy them. I did not understand this desire. One night we stayed awake while everyone else was sleeping, kissing and touching each other with out clothes on. It reminded me of hgh school, of crazed longings when boys would come over and one of my sisters would be sent to stand guard--to watch, so that nothing sexual would happen. This memory excited me. I unzipped his pants there on my knees in the darkness of my parents' house and sucked his dick until he came in my mouth. Pleasure and danger were there in that passion--the memory of boys afraid to come to our house cause Mr. Veodis might kill them. They all knew Mr. Veodis didn't let nobody mess with his girls. Down on my knees in the dark house of my childhood I was no longer Mr. Veodis's girl, I was my own woman, taking desire into my own hands. There were no spies in the house of love that night. It was our ritual marriage. I had broken the allegiance of family to be loyal to him. Love and betrayal were linked then. "

Ok, maybe "taking my desire into my own hands" isn't so subtle. But still.

There's so much here to unpack, but what strikes me the most is her description of consciously moving away from the rule of her father, from the literal patriarchy she had grown up in.

For me, hooks' description here brings back some unpleasant memories of my adolescence, of being afraid of the fathers of girls I was dating. Fearing fathers was the general rule; though there were exceptional fathers I met who didn't treat their girls (or boys) as property, mostly they did, or seemed to. Such is some of the horrible power of traditional masculinity--no father ever threatened me, because no father ever had to. It was simply understood, by everybody involved, that physical harm could come to me if I was 'caught doing things' with some man's daughter--whether the implicit threat of violence would be carried out or not, it was assumed, and that threat helped to shape my relationships, both to the girls I was dating, and to myself, in ways I still have yet to fully recover from.

Friday Men Doing Feminist Work: Jeff Hearn

Jeff Hearn is a British sociologist who does work on men and masculinity from a profeminist standpoint. He is one of the founders of the sadly defunct profeminist magazine for men, Achilles Heel.

One of the things I find most fascinating about him is that it's always nice to run into scientists who are doing, y'know, actual studies on gender inequality. He is also a founder/member of CROME: Critical Research on Men in Europe, which bands together scientists of all genders to do actual research on men from a profeminist perspective. From Hearn's wikipedia entry:

During and after the time of his studies Jeff Hearn has been an active member of the profeminist men’s movement. With David Morgan, Colin Creighton, Chris Middleton, Ray Thomas and Clive Pearson, he initiated some ground rules for the study of men and masculinity, published as ‘Changing men's sexist practice in sociology’, Network, No 25, January 1983. Following work in the Men and Masculinity Research/Study Group at Bradford, the principles were developed and published in Achilles' Heel in 1987, and 3 years later Hearn and Morgan appended a sixth in the book "Men, Masculinities and Social Theory".

The principles in short: Critical studies on men should be profeminist and respect the autonomy of feminism/women's studies; critical especially to men's practices, interdisciplinary and use various methods; reflexive also to its own research.

The more often I find men who have been doing profeminist work around men's issues since I was in high school, the more I wonder how it is that I managed to not run into these men before now.

Check out some of the many books Hearn has written or contributed to here.

Carnival

There's a great Carnival of Feminists up over at Cubically Challenged, including a post about what it means to be a feminist man by Roy of No Cookies for Me. Go check out the carnival.

Why MRAs Want to Kill the Messenger

I've just started reading Susan Faludi's 1999 book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, and so far I'm impressed with both the depth of her analysis and her writing style. Apparently she was lambasted from all sides when this book came out--some feminists thought she was being easy on men, and anti-feminists were pissed she was writing a book about men at all. But (so far, at least) she seems to simply be taking the concerns of how men get screwed by patriarchy seriously, not offering up excuses for men. And she's got the most succinct response to prototypical MRA concerns that I've run across, while at the same time offering up a sketch of an alternative way of understanding some men's reactions to feminism:

"Women's basic grievances are seen as essentially reasonable; even the most blustery antifeminist these days is quick to say that, of course, he favors equal pay and equal opportunity. What women are challenging is something that everyone can see. Men's grievances, by contrast, seem hyperbolic, almost hysterical; so many men seem to be doing battle with phantoms and witches that exists only in their own overheated imaginations. Women see men as guarding the fort, so they don't see how the culture of the fort shapes men. Men don't see how they are influenced by the culture either; in fact, they prefer not to. If they did, they would have to let go of the illusion of control.

Today it is men who cling more tightly to their illusions. They would rather see themselves as battered by feminism than shaped by the larger culture. Feminism can be demonized as just an "unnatural" force trying to wrest men's natural power and control from their grasp. Culture, by contrast, is the whole environment we live in; to acknowledge its sway is to admit that men never had the power they imagined. To say that men are embedded in the culture is to say, by the current standards of masculinity, that they are not men. By casting feminism as the villain that must be defeated to validate the central conceit of modern manhood, men avoid confronting powerful cultural and social expectations that have a lot more to do with their unhappiness than the latest sexual harassment ruling."(pp13-14)

What Men Can Do: Speak Up

More good stuff from Jackson Katz's The Macho Paradox

"I believe that men who are silent in the face of other men's violence--whether the silence is intentional or not--are complicit in the perpetration of that violence. We're not guilty because we're men. We're responsible--because we're men--either for speaking out or for not speaking out about other men's violence. This is hardly a new concept. Some of the proudest moments in the history of this country are grounded in the principle that members of dominant groups have a critical role to play in the struggle for equality. For example, whether motivated by secular or religious beliefs, many white abolitionists in the nineteenth century understood that they were complicit in the 'peculiar institution' of slavery unless they worked actively to end it. A similar sensibility informed the many courageous white radical college students and mainstream white liberals who played an important role in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Not coincidentally, a lot of those white people were accused by racist whites of succumbing to 'white guilt.' "(pp25)

We've all got our proud moments and our not-so-proud moments. The other day, in a group of acquaintances, one guy made a couple of 'jokes' that revolved around rape in men's prisons. I wanted to say something, but I didn't. This is a not-so-proud moment. I think that conceptions of traditional masculinity have an ace in the hole when it comes to keeping men silent: It's been set up to be 'unmanly' to talk about things like prison rape, to talk about men's violence against other men, in any other words but those of male dominance (i.e. 'those guys in prison deserve what they get'); traditional masculinity reinforces itself by silencing those of us who have (perhaps) the most power to do something about it.