Bitch

Update: They made it! Yay!
Bitch magazine is in some financial trouble. If you have ever thought of subscribing and/or donating, this may be your last chance.



This is a pretty sad thing to learn the day after I got excited because there was the magazine in my mailbox...

Men's Story Project

Anybody local to the SF Bay area might like to come out to see this show I'm involved in. Men exploring traditional and non-traditional masculinities. I'd love to see y'all there.



Also, listen Josie (the one responsible for all of this mayhem, our producer and the creator of the Men's Story Project) and Robert (a contributor) talk about the project on KPFA (the MSP section is about 72 minutes in, but the whole show is pretty interesting!) here.

If I Didn't Know Better...

...I'd think that maybe Jim Meddick, the guy who creates the strip Monty, has been reading this blog, and is now making fun of himself:

A Wee Bit about Kyle Payne

Renegade Evolution has a great roundup about Kyle Payne, if you have been under a rock and haven't heard about this jerk. I think everything that can be said has been said, but I will say this: It's good to remember that there are sometimes good reasons why feminist women and trans feminists are suspicious of feminist men. It sucks that there is a tendency for people to lump feminist men together, as we are of course as different from each other as feminist women are different from each other, but one can understand this tendency when somebody like Payne pops up.

Of course, lots and lots of feminists don't lump us together like that, and also recognize that, while the potential wolf-in-sheep's-clothing problem is always going to be there, men contribute a lot to feminism.

bell audio

I used to have a weekly series on bell hooks that has (as much else here) fallen by the wayside. But if anybody who loves hooks is still around these parts, you can listen to some of her speeches and Q&A's online. Thanks to Lisa at Black Women, Blow the Trumpet! for the link.

Go Read Fem.men.ist

If you're not already reading Richard's blog, you're missing out. Here's a sample of Richard's discussion of Terrance Dean's book, Hiding in HipHop:

There definitely seems to be more vilifying of the men in DL culture than criticism of a larger culture that gives few options for people to just live their lives. I am not endorsing anyone cheating on their wives/partners in order to have down low interactions, I just think that some of the pain that Terrance Dean seems to convey should be taken into account... As a hetero man, I myself wonder what it would be like if I lived in bizarro switcheroo-change-o land, and had to keep up appearances to be "a gay man" but really want to date women, and have to see them on the down low. If you are also a straight man, and reading that made you cringe... hold on to that feeling. Especially if you are not able to understand why men would go on the down low. Empathy to the human condition is essential for us all to make it y'all...

Richard's also involved in a project I'm involved in, The Men's Story Project, which all y'all should come see if you're local to the SF Bay Area.

The Body Positive

My friend Jen pointed me to a great organization, The Body Positive. They do work with people through the Health At Every Size model of health, and they place a good deal of their focus on restructuring how we imagine our own bodies. Jen, who has worked as a fitness trainer for many years, had this to say:

Two years ago I had the great fortune of meeting Connie Sobczak. Connie is the co-founder of The Body Positive, a non-profit organization created with the purpose of helping people overcome negative body image and distorted relationships to food. The Body Positive connects people to their internal wisdom, freeing them to live joyfully in their bodies. When Connie and her good friend, Elizabeth Scott, LCSW, founded The Body Positive in 1996, concerned stories about body image and eating disorders we're still topping the news. Lately, most of the stories covering body image focus on female celebrities' weight loss/weight gain extremes, trivializing the significance of the issues.

I can tell you that for the years I worked as a Fitness Trainer I don't think I worked with a single client who wasn't afflicted with some degree of body hatred. It broke my heart to see otherwise healthy, successful and dynamic people who existed in a constant state of dissatisfaction with their bodies or questioned their very worth as human beings because they were unhappy with the way their bodies looked.

Recently I was telling a good friend of mine about The Body Positive and how important and urgent their work is. Her look told me she wasn't convinced. My reply was this: "Consider over the course of your life all the time you've spent agonizing about your body, trying to lose weight or control you're appearance in some way. Now multiply that number by virtually every woman (and now more men) in the U.S. Now imagine all of those collective hours being redirected towards something positive for our world."

The Body Positive is trying to raise some money. If you have some, you might think about giving some of it to them.

Men's Project

For those of you in the SF Bay Area, spread the word. Deadline extended to May 30th.

Call for submissions:
Men's Story Project


Men of all ages and backgrounds are invited to participate in the Men's Story Project! This project will bring together a diverse group of men's real stories to create a local performance about men's life experiences. We're looking for stories from men of a variety of race/ethnicities, sexual orientations, social/cultural backgrounds, life histories, etc.

The pieces can be poems, monologues, prose, raps, just a few powerful sentences, a dance piece, music, etc. - on subjects such as lessons you were taught about what it means to be a man, social/cultural expectations, learning on your own what it is to be a man, experiences of violence, experiences of promoting peace/healing, relationship with your body, sexuality, gender, power, transformation, taboos, etc. Pieces should last a max of 5 minutes. It may also be possible to exhibit visual art in the space.

Contributions of all kinds are welcome -- funny, serious, vulnerable, risk-taking, triumphant, etc - the main theme is REAL. We will present them to an audience in a Bay Area venue TBD in June or July, with the lofty goal of helping move society forward in conceptions of what it can mean to be a man.

If you want to create a piece but would prefer to have someone else read it, that's fine - authorship can be anonymous. If you have a story in mind but want some coaching to get it on paper, we have folks who can help you.

This is a progressive event and will be a safe space.

*Submission deadline: May 22 May 30th*

Participants will be paid $50.

This is an independent project getting off the ground, and is not affiliated with any organization.

Please send submissions + a short bio and any q's to Josie Lehrer at jlehrer1@gmail.com

Sticks and Stones

From The Fusco Brothers, which provides a seemingly endless supply of blogfodder: Because domestic violence is hi-larious.

Don't Vote For McCain, Because He's Pussywhipped

Ted Rall has some interesting stuff, but this cartoon about McCain bothers me:
Rall's point that McCain is supported by special interests--in this case, special interests related to his wife's business--isn't unimportant. But the idea that we shouldn't vote for McCain because hes somehow emasculated by his wife's power and money is distracting, rather than interesting or funny.

There are so many other reasons to not vote for McCain, other than the idea that his wife made him sign a prenup, or that she makes him keep the toilet seat down (that BITCH!).

Note: This is all leaving aside the lack of compassion toward anybody who has ever been a prisoner of war that Rall exhibits with the "I miss the Hanoi Hilton" comment.

Mildred Loving

Mildred Loving has died. From her wikipedia page:

Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don't think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the "wrong kind of person" for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people's religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people's civil rights. I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard's and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That's what Loving, and loving, are all about.

To think that it was in the late 60's that her case came to the Supreme Court makes me shudder.

Note: When I first went to the wikipedia page, I found this:

Richard [her husband] died of AIDS from having sexual intercourse with a nigger in 1975.

I'd never edited a wikipedia page until today, when I deleted that sentence. It makes me wonder how many lessons have really been learned, of course.

Killing Hookers is Funny!

From A Softer World:


First of all, ASW loses points right away for trying way too hard to be 'edgy' or something, here. So the humor is supposed to be that the kid is a violent racist? Aside from that being not-so-funny, it's not worrisome that a kid might enjoy killing hookers in the video game, because they're not, y'know, human beings--instead, they're women, and sluts on top of it. On the other hand, "blacks" (ack) are human, so it's ...funny?

One More Thing Feminism Can Do: Critique Traditional (White) Masculinity

I've been thinking some more about why I think the tragedy that is Sean Bell's death is a feminist issue. Holly pointed out at Feministe that part of the reason why it's a feminist issue is because it's difficult to take in the situation without also taking in the women that Bell's death has left behind, and the anguish his fiance, Nicole Paultre-Bell, must live with. Holly also notes:

The problem here, as Delores Jones-Brown points out, is that there is a systemic pattern of police officers shooting unarmed suspects. The problem is that this disproportionately affects communities of color. The black men who are most often slaughtered by such violence, and all the women and children in their lives too, their loved ones, friends and relatives. A system that is all too eager to exonerate “the thin blue line” and continue business as usual. All of these are feminist issues. Racism must be a feminist issue, for any kind of feminism that counts. Police brutality must be; the biases of the criminal justice system must be.

There is another aspect of this, which was revealed to me in a comment by donna darko, who said:

Sean Bell and Jena 6 are not feminist issues although feminists are interested in them and post about them. For example, what is the feminist solution to the Sean Bell and Jena 6 case? There are feminist solutions to incidents of police brutality involving women. This is feminism’s worst nightmare: IT’S NOW ABOUT TEH MENZ!

I think I see Donna's point. To take it to an extreme, we ought to be concerned about the ways in which feminism and feminists may lose focus to the point of making everything a feminist issue. But I also think that it can be worth our time to look at most problems through a feminist lens. In the case of the Sean Bell tragedy, feminism can offer up an analysis of the force of traditional masculinity, for example.

First off, I think that what happened to Sean Bell is at least partly the result of the enforcement of traditional masculinity, a masculinity based on fear-of-other-men, on might-makes-right. Mixed up in all of this is also the way in which traditional conceptions of masculinity revolve around traditional conceptions of white masculinity, where men of color aren't 'real' men, but rather, animalistic, and dangerous. And traditional white masculinity is so entrenched in various institutions that it affects all of the people in those institutions--even to the point of men of color reinforcing such masculinity themselves, as (I think) is the case with the two men of color who shot Sean Bell.

And where do we find critiques of this type of masculinity? Well, one place we find it is within the frameworks of feminism. This isn't the only place we might find it, but it's where I see a consistent critique of it. Which is not to say that anti-racist analysis, for instance, isn't just as viable a lens through which to see this tragedy--but so is the feminist lens, inasmuch as traditional masculinity has had a hand in such tragedies, and inasmuch as feminism offers us ways of critiquing and changing masculinity.

So, in part to speak to Donna's point, I want to say that while there may not be a feminist solution to what happened to Sean Bell, there is a feminist analysis that can be done, that needs to be done, on how traditional conceptions of masculinity helped to cause Sean Bell's death (not to exonerate any of his killers from their individual responsibility, to be clear). Feminism isn't the only tool to use in order to do this, but it's a good one.

Also: Sudy makes a similar point regarding a feminist analysis of the Iraq war:

The question is not what makes the issue feminist, but has a feminist perspective been applied to the issue? Many perceive the Iraq war not to be a feminist issue. I don't give two shits if it's a "feminist issue," I care if feminists have applied their analytical skills, intelligence, resources, and insight to the Iraq war.

Also: If you don't think that some of the problems of police abuse of power don't revolve around conceptions of traditional masculinity, you might watch this, courtesy of Lauren:

Pick a Gender

Today, two comics which embrace gendered stereotypes without actually keying in on gender. That is, they both struck me as sexist-ish, but then I recognized that gender, while invoked implicitly, was explicitly left out of the equation. Still embracing gendered stereotypes? Hmmm...

First, Mr. Boffo has a backseat driver:

I had to take a closer look at the person in the backseat to realize that there seems to be some (purposeful?) gender ambiguity there. It's interesting to note that women in Mr. Boffo tend to be variations on a theme of tall, pretty, skinny white women with ponytails, so it may even be more likely that the person in the backseat is meant to be a guy (I doubt Mr. Boffo understands that there are myriad genders, so I'm going binary in my discussion of it). My first reaction is now nixed by a mixed reaction. More importantly, this ain't one of the funniest strips I've seen.

Next up, one of my new-ish favorite strips, Savage Chickens, takes on the whole men-want-sex-women-want-love trope:
Thing is, these both seem to be hens, not roosters. So am I projecting the stereotypes? Maybe. Or perhaps, to give Savage Chickens more credit, Doug Savage, who writes and draws the strip, is defying the stereotype, and just commenting on how sometimes people (chickens) want different things than they profess to want. Or maybe he just doesn't know how to draw a rooster? Or maybe they're both roosters, and he can't draw hens? Or maybe he's a gender outlaw, and purposefully doesn't draw gender in at all...?

50 Bullets

Regarding the multiple tragedies of violence and injustice against Sean Bell, let's just all agree that feminists need to understand how important this is.

First of all, what Holly said:

The problem is that this disproportionately affects communities of color. The black men who are most often slaughtered by such violence, and all the women and children in their lives too, their loved ones, friends and relatives. A system that is all too eager to exonerate “the thin blue line” and continue business as usual. All of these are feminist issues. Racism must be a feminist issue, for any kind of feminism that counts. Police brutality must be; the biases of the criminal justice system must be.

Secondly, Amy Goodman at Democracy Now has a good interview with Sanford Rubinstein, the attorney representing Sean Bell’s fiancee Nicole Paultre-Bell, and with Jessica Sanclemente, the co-coordinator of People’s Justice regarding the injustice we're seeing.

Being An Ally -- How Hard Is It, Really?

Sudy has a great post that includes some words about how it really isn't that difficult to be a good ally (and why people should stop asking her how to be a good ally):

Being an ally is not as dramatic as people paint it lately. I mean, how difficult is it to decenter yourself and your own life and absorb someone else's for a few minutes of your day? Do you realize it's not just about you? It's not just about YOUR definitions of what is an ally. DO you know acknowledge the larger systematic boot of violence against womyn of color and the knife of economic violence that shoves womyn of color into corners of poverty, rape, and silence? (I mean, really acknowledge it.) Being an ally is not ripping the mic from someone else and thrusting it in the face of WOC. Because, in the end, fast forward 60 years from now, the only person who can answer if you led a life of transformation and solidarity is you. Why ask me?

I think she's right, but I think there are some good reasons why potential allies look to those we are trying to be allied with for some answers. If I sit around and talk about how to be a good feminist ally (for instance) with a bunch of feminist men, we're going to be missing out on some of the answers, just by virtue of blind spots of privilege that we may not be able to even know are there. This isn't to say that we can't come up with good, interesting, varied answers to our questions, or that we shouldn't try to, that we shouldn't do the work required to figure this stuff out. I don't want to make it Sudy's job to teach me how to be a better ally. And yet, I want her views on it, so what to do?

Well, that's where the above quote comes in. Decenter from my own life and soak up her views for a while. Read her, and not just what she has to say about allies. Shut up and listen more often. That's some of the advice I'm going to keep giving myself, even though she, and others, have given me the inspiration to do so.

Embracing the Enormity

One reason that I've stopped posting regularly was that the enormity of the various tasks at hand are sometimes overwhelming. Fighting sexism? Ongoing, huge battle. Fighting classicism? Ditto. Fighting racism? Yet another seemingly impossible task. All the while, finding a space to do this as a white, middle-class man? Sigh.

Add to that a growing understanding that communities of protest, communities that seek justice, often aren't very good allies, well, that makes one take a few steps back, reassess and rest.

But of course, 'resting' can be privilege-driven, can't it? I can stop posting, sure, but here I am, living in the US as a white, middle-class man...putting down my pen (so to speak) just means I get a break, to a large degree (though I would claim that men don't get a break from the hardships that patriarchy places on them, either). When BFP stops posting, and takes down her site, because she's understandably fed up, she still has to face a racist, sexist world.

So I'm starting to feel like my hiatus here, while fueled by understandable concerns for my own mental and physical health, is also a way of letting my white/male/able-bodied privilege win out. And, while I think that shutting up can be a lot of what an ally ought to be, I also think that there are ways that I can raise my voice without shouting down those-who-I-would-be-an-ally-of.

So, to start off, howabout a little checklist for myself, to combat the desire to take another break?

1. But it's hard to hear that one isn't being a good ally.
Yep. Sure is. Getting called out feels like shit, especially since people are much more likely to blame than praise in the world o' blogs. You work really hard on trying to bring social justice, and you get called out for what, to you, might seem like small things. But you know what? You don't get to judge what counts as a 'small thing'. These are communities we're talking about, and we're all in it together, so if enough people call you out and say it's important, then it is.

2. There's just too much work to do.
Also true. But keep in mind that you're not doing it alone, and you're not even facing the most daunting challenges--others are. You post about comics and men & feminism, for goodness' sake, not systematic rape in the congo. Maybe you should be posting about other, more important things, but to claim that posting about comics and gender is too daunting, as one of your tasks, is to embrace your privilege. Fight that.

3. But I'm Not Welcome.
Not in every community, not all of the time. That's why this space exists, in part. And there are those who value your voice, and who value what you say. Seek them out. Nurture them. And continue to understand that it's ok that you're not welcome some places. Keep the righteous indignation at a minimum, because it is so often a reflection of your privilege.

There's more, of course, but this is a start.

What to Say

One feels the need to respond to the controversy, but really, there isn't so much left to say that hasn't already been said, and said better than I could say. I guess I'll just say this:

Feminism and anti-racism ought to be inextricably intertwined. Lots of times, they aren't seen that way. That's something we ought to work to change.

Other than that:

First, just go see what BFP has to say abut the whole thing.

Then, take these words from Lauren to heart:

What I don’t get is how so many of us that were irritated by what often seemed like an intentional oversight are suddenly scandalized to be called out on our own biases, blindnesses, and lenses of privilege. Put your big girl panties on and take notice.

Update: Ok, go read what Twisty has to say as well:

You feel that, white feminists? That’s your obstreperal lobe telling you that feminism and good intentions do not a get-out-of-racism-free card make.

Restrained Amusement

In yet another example of one of my favorite comics annoying the crap out of me: XKCD Thinks Restraining Orders Are Funny...



Thing is, I get that this is funny, conceptually. At the risk of going Monty-Python-esque, the humor is found within pushing the boundaries (no pun intended) of the concept of a restraining order--normally, it's just meant to keep people away, so a restraining order as described in the comic is antithetical to what restraining orders are for. The cognitive dissonance provided by holding the original concept and the revised concept in one's head helps create the humor. And yet, for me, it can't help but conjure up the women (and men, and people of all genders) who have to get restraining orders, for various reasons, which helps the funny slip away quickly and quietly.

Post Feminism?

The next time somebody tells ya that we don't need feminism, we only need humanism, you may trot out this little ditty, from a United Nations commissioned report:

Women are discriminated against in almost every country around the world, a UN-commissioned report says. It says that this is despite the fact that 185 UN member states pledged to outlaw laws favouring men by 2005. It adds that 70% of the world's poor are women and they own just 1% of the world's titled land. The report, which was prepared for UN Human Right Commissioner Louise Arbour, says rape within marriage has still not been made a crime in 53 nations.