A Response to AMM’s Comment on My Publishing a Poem at The Good Men Project (Along with the Full Text of the Poem)

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

In a comment on my post announcing the publication of “For My Son, A Kind of Prayer” at The Good Men Project (TGMP), AMM wrote:

I visited the place a year or two ago and read a number of the articles, and they tout a version of masculinity which, underneath all the verbiage, is basically just a “kinder, gentler” version of the same old male privilege. I remember that he-who-must-not-be-named (but whose initials are HS) was an honored contributor, which IMHO does not speak well for it, but was entirely consistent with the rest of what was there.

This made me think that, first, especially when posting the announcement on this site, I should have given an explanation for why I agreed to let TGMP publish my work, since I share AMM’s reservations, or at least I have similar ones, about what the site is all about. Second, it made me think that I should post the entire poem here so that people who will not go to TGMP will have a chance to read it if they want to. (The entire poem is below the fold.)

The short explanation as to why I agreed to have my work published in TGMP is that Noah Brand, the site’s still relatively new editor-in-chief, solicited me directly. (A longer explanation is perhaps a post unto itself about what it would mean, from a feminist/pro-feminist/feminist-friendly perspective, to put men’s experience at the center of discussion.) Noah is the founder–one of the founders?– of No, Seriously, What About The Menz? (NSWTM), which appears on Alas’ blog roll. I read the blog occasionally, and while I find the comments troubling, troublesome and sometimes offensive, I think that the posts embody a discussion of men and masculinity that is both necessary and fruitful. NSWTM is, obviously, not a space where women’s issues are front and center; nor could you accurately call it a male feminist/pro-feminist space, given that the people who comment there are often openly hostile to feminism. Nonetheless, it is in its mission a feminist-friendly space, and I think it is important and worth respecting that they are trying to have a discussion among and about men that is inclusive of all men, from a variety of perspectives, who want to engage in a respectful and thoughtful way.

Which does not mean that I think NSWTM succeeds in this regard–my own experience is that it often does not–but that I respect what Noah Brand was and is trying to do there and that I respect the fact that he is trying to do the same kind of thing over at TGMP. Something he said recently in an interview on The Jane Dough is worth thinking about:

Women face forms of oppression and a constant barrage of microaggressions that men do not, no question. But there are also several decades and at least three waves of feminist thought and activism to help them engage with those problems. Men face different problems, different microaggressions and stereotypes, and we’re still working on finding the language to talk about those. Feminism has the right tools for the job, but has been historically reluctant to engage with men’s issues, and the thing calling itself the Men’s Rights Movement is about as useful as a land war in Asia. (Emphasis mine.)

While I find Noah’s formulation at the end of this quote kind of awkward, I do think he’s right about this: to the extent that feminism has, rightfully, reasonably, placed women’s experience at the center of its analysis, the feminist “toolbox” will not automatically fit men’s experience, and so men need to find a language that will name our experience accurately and that will open up the kinds of analysis and transformation that accurate naming makes possible. There’s no way to know ahead of time whether TGMP will be the place where that language truly begins to take shape, but I think it’s important to be part of an attempt that is as big and as public as TGMP is. That’s why, when Noah solicited me, I agreed to send him some of my work.

And now, here’s the poem. Please remember that it does contain graphic descriptions of sexual violence against both men and women: Continue reading →

Posted in Feminism, sexism, etc, Men and masculinity, Writing | 3 Comments  

‘Scuse Me, Great Nations Coming Through

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Jeff Fecke

Remember John Derbyshire? Of course you do! He’s the incredibly creepy guy who got fired from National Review Online for writing an incredibly racist screed for an online site frequented by Pat Buchanan and Steve Sailer.

Anyhow, Derbyshire may have left NRO, but he’s still kicking it old school at the online webmagazine VDARE (slogan: “It’s Stormfront For People Who Like to Pretend They Aren’t Nazis”). And by old school, I mean the 1650s.

VDARE.com occupies a corner of the non-Conservatism Inc. spectrum, though, and publishes commentary from other corners thereof, and it would be nice to have a definitive name for the whole shebang—something a little less defined-by-exclusion than “non-Conservatism Inc.”

“Alternative Right” has been snaffled by Richard Spencer, all good luck to him. “Paleoconservative” has come to have a whiff of incense and cassocks about it, at least to me. I have tried to float “Oppositional Right,” but it’s a bit of a mouthful.

The enemies of conservatism are eager to supply their own nomenclature. “White Supremacist” seems to be their current favorite. It is meant maliciously, of course, to bring up images of fire-hoses, attack dogs, pick handles, and segregated lunch counters—to imply that conservatives, especially non-mainstream conservatives, are cruel people with dark thoughts.

Leaving aside the intended malice, I actually think “White Supremacist” is not bad semantically. White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with. There have of course been some blots on the record, but I don’t see how it can be denied that net-net, white Europeans have made a better job of running fair and stable societies than has any other group. [Emphasis Mine - jkf]

Yes, White Supremacy is a nice term! After all we white people have done a great job running the world, and we’ve only sometimes wiped out indigenous populations a few times. Sure, there was that one time we took all the valuable stuff out of Africa in exchange for subjugating the peoples of Africa and selling them into slavery, and okay, there was that time we started randomly partitioning the Middle East based more on what European countries’ interests were than on where actual peoples lived, and of course, there were those little bitty genocides here and there, but hey, you can’t steal the wealth of the world without breaking a few humans. And there’s no question but that the domination of other states by white people has worked out great for white people!

In all seriousness, a man who would embrace the idea of white supremacy as a good thing has no business in polite society, and neither does any site that publishes him. And frankly, it’s an indictment of any organization that ever published him, because you cannot tell me that Derbyshire suddenly became a white supremacist in the last few weeks, and you cannot tell me that a writer would never have shared those thoughts with his colleagues, even if he had enough sense to keep them out of print. If there was any doubt that NRO still clings to ideals of racial separatism and racist degradation, Derbyshire’s years of service there should eliminate them, even if they fired him when he had the poor judgment to actually express those ideas openly, rather than in code.

Finally, two quick things. First, the link above goes to Little Green Footballs (I know, they’re anti-racist now, which is weird, right?) rather than VDARE, because to hell with VDARE. I don’t link to Nazis.

Second, sing us off, Randy Newman.

Posted in Colonialism, Race, racism and related issues | 3 Comments  

The Good Men Project Publishes “For My Son, A Kind of Prayer”

Posted on May 12, 2012 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

I am really happy that The Good Men Project has chosen to publish a new of poem of mine called “For My Son, A Kind of Prayer.” Too often, I think sites like that ignore the potential for poetry to speak truth to the cultural conversations we have about all kinds of issues, in this case gender, sexual violence, heterosexual male privilege and other related issues. At least I hope that’s what this poem does. Here’s the beginning–and please be aware that the poem does contain graphic descriptions of sexual violence against both men and women:

Just before his mother
pushed him through herself
hard enough to split who she was
wide enough for him to enter the world,
I touched the top of my son’s head;
and after he was born,
the midwife—her name,
I think, was Vivian—
held my wife’s umbilical cord
in a loop for me to cut, which I did,
freeing our new boy’s body
to enter the name
we had waiting for him;
and then Vivian laid him
against the curve of his mother’s body,
giving him to the breast
he would for years
define his world by;
and once that first taste of love
was firmly lodged within him,
she bundled him tight,
placed him in my arms
and, while I sang his welcome
in a far corner of the room,
turned to assist the doctor
sewing up my wife’s
birth-torn flesh.

Posted in Men and masculinity, Rape, intimate violence, & related issues | 2 Comments  

Prostitutes in the US are 42 times as likely to be murdered as the average American

Posted on May 12, 2012 by Ampersand

From an article about serial killers who work as truck drivers:

In early 2009, the FBI announced the Highway Serial Killings Initiative, focused on killers who choose their victims and dump their bodies along highways. Some of the victims are hitchhikers and stranded motorists, but most are truck stop prostitutes. In the 1980s, the FBI was accused of inflating the numbers of serial homicides, fomenting a serial killer “panic,” so they are careful not to overstate their case today. But recent studies suggest that the numbers of serial murder victims have continually been underestimated—even during the serial murder “panic.” The undercounting is because the vast majority of victims have always been prostitutes—as many as 75% according to one scholar. Research into prostitute mortality suggests that the homicide rate for prostitutes is 229 out of every 100,000. The U.S. national average is five.

Posted in Prostitution, Porn and Sex Work | 12 Comments  

Bits & Pieces: Lines That Didn’t Make the Cut – Remembering Claudia

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

The first in an occasional series of posts about what I end up editing out of the poems I am working on.

The revision process leaves every writer with bits and pieces of work that no longer belong to the poem or story or whatever where they first appeared. Sometimes these scraps and fragments grow to become full fledged works on their own; sometimes they get grafted onto other works-in-progress; but, as often as not, they end up in a file where the writer rarely, if ever, looks at them again. I went digging into my file recently, looking for something that I knew would fit in a poem the beginning and end of which I was having a very hard time connecting. As I read through bits and pieces I’d put in there, I began to realize that, for me, the lines that don’t make the cut as I revise a poem tend to be those in which I am either explaining to myself what I am trying to say or trying to force the language to go in a direction it just doesn’t want to go. The lines in this post fall into the latter category:

and if you imagine
that night as a film of my life,
then a thunderclap or dissonant chord
would call the moment to your attention:
layers of meaning packed hard
in the still image you’d carry home
of what it means to me to remember
that where the large oak
we put chairs beneath
for our summer concerts
now spreads its shade,
I played when I was nine
tackle football with Claudia.

In the poem this was originally part of I was writing about an evening when I went down to the garden which sits in the center of the eight-building co-op where I live to walk off some anger. Thunderclouds gathered overhead just a few minutes afterwards and the rain that fell as I made my way around the concrete path that marks the garden’s perimiter felt like small hailstones on my skin. This garden holds a lot of memories for me. My grandparents lived in the building next door to mine for nearly fifty years, and we visited them almost every Sunday from as early as I can remember until I went away to college. When I was a little boy, not much more than five or six, I made friends with a red-haired girl named Claudia who lived in the building across the way. She was–and I find myself wondering if people still use this term–a tomboy, and one of our favorite things to do was play football on what was then a dirt field between the back of her building and the back of my grandparents’. I don’t remember being invited to her house or that she ever came to my grandparents’ place when I was there. Our friendship was the kind that little kids often have; we saw each other when we saw each other; and since she knew I would be there almost every Sunday, she would just head down to the garden to see if I was there; or sometimes I would get there first and wait for her.

Anyway, in the middle of what I thought was going to be my last lap around the garden, a bolt of lightning lit that field up, lush with grass after all these years and with a gorgeous, almost mountainous tree dominating the center. (A couple of summers ago, a hawk made itself at home there.) In that flash, I suddenly remembered the last conversation I had with Claudia. We’d been friends for about five or six years by that time, so we were eleven or twelve. It was Shabbat–I’m not sure why we were visiting my grandparents on a Saturday–and so Claudia and I were both in shul, hanging around outside the sanctuary where the adults were busy praying. She was wearing a pink frilly dress, which surprised me because I’d never before seen her dressed “like a girl,” and she was huddled with a group of girls I didn’t know. I tried a couple of times to talk to her, to get her to come with me to the places in the synagogue where, when we’d met there in years past, on Rosh HaShana for example, we’d spend time together until services were over, but she kept brushing me aside. Finally, I asked her point blank if she wanted to come out to play after lunch. (Neither my family nor hers was strictly observant.) “No,” she told me, “sports and climbing trees are for boys. I’m growing up now, and I am not a boy.” As far as I recall, she and I never spoke to each other again.

The poem ended up being about something else, but this memory still makes me very sad.

Cross-posted on Because It’s All Connected.

Posted in Feminism, sexism, etc | Leave a comment  

Mitt Romney Inadvertantly Teaches Us A Lesson About The Long Term Effects Of Bullying

Posted on May 11, 2012 by the angry black woman
mitt-romney-inadvertantly-teaches-us-a-lesson-about-the-long-term-effects-of-bullying

Yesterday we learned that Mitt Romney, in addition to being a vulture capitalist and a rank political opportunist, was also a schoolyard bully. This is my unsurprised face.

John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend…

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

… “It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,” said Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was “terrified,” he said.

… “He was just easy pickin’s,” said Friedemann, then the student prefect, or student authority leader of Stevens Hall, expressing remorse about his failure to stop it.

… Friedemann, guilt ridden, made a point of not talking about it with his friend and waited to see what form of discipline would befall Romney at the famously strict institution. Nothing happened.

Read the entire article for more exciting tales of Mitt’s teenage years.

Romney claims that he doesn’t remember the incident, but we all know that he does. We know this not just because the man is a proven liar, but because when a person carries out an act of violence like that, they remember it. Probably with a lot of pride.

The only way I would accept that Mitt doesn’t remember that particular incident is if there were so many times that he bullied and assaulted classmates he didn’t like and thought were gay that he just can’t separate one from another. Either way, the picture is pretty grim.

And not all that surprising.

Consider the kind of man Romney is. He has not a bit of compassion, empathy, or regard for people other than himself and the people he holds dear1. He casually destroys people’s lives, makes their jobs disappear, then laughs and makes jokes about it. His ever-changing political stances prove that he doesn’t hold values, he pretends them, and says whatever is politically expedient no matter who it hurts.

And he knows he can get away with it, because he’s been getting away with imposing his will on others in a violent manner since school. No teacher, no principal, no student challenged or punished him for what he did to that kid. He probably went home to his family and received praise for it.

Mitt Romney is a perfect example of why the problem of bullying needs to be addressed at all times, wherever it happens. Schools need to take responsibility, parents need to take responsibility. And this is for the good of the victim of the bullying as much as the bully themselves. Because, if gone unchecked, that bully may grow up to think victimization is acceptable. Which means that more people have to suffer because of the bully’s lack of empathy or restraint.

Any time anyone wants to give me an excuse for why they won’t take steps to stop bullying, whether it be because of some myth about the victims needing to “man up” or some bullshit about not having enough resources to deal with it, I am going to point at the nearest picture of Mitt Romney and say “people like you are the reason why Mitt Romney is the man he is. If you admire him, then you’re just as bad. If you recoil from that thought, stop making excuses and address this problem.”

Mitt Romney Inadvertantly Teaches Us A Lesson About The Long Term Effects Of Bullying -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Footnotes

  1. And it is apparently limited to people. Just look at what he did to his poor dog.
Posted in Syndicated feeds | 8 Comments  

Something Awful

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Jeff Fecke

Looks like I picked the wrong day to quit drinking:

An unidentified entrepreneur admits he is trying to profit off Trayvon Martin’s death by selling gun range targets featuring the teen who’s death has sparked a nationwide controversy.

Although Martin’s face does not appear on the paper targets, they feature a hoodie with crosshairs aimed at the chest. A bag of Skittles is tucked in the pocket and a hand is holding a can resembling iced tea.

[...]

According to an advertisement for the targets that had been posted on a popular firearms auction website, the sellers stated they “support Zimmerman and believe he is innocent and that he shot a thug.”

That online ad has since been removed.

[...]

In an email exchange with reporter Mike DeForest, the seller wrote, “My main motivation was to make money off the controversy.”

The seller would not disclose how many paper targets had been made, but said in an email, “The response is overwhelming. I sold out in 2 days.”

Some of those targets were sold to two Florida gun dealers, according to the seller.

Before DeForest identified himself as a reporter, the seller claimed that targets were still available for purchase. After being informed Local 6 was investigating his online business, the seller claimed the targets would no longer be sold.

Oh, well that’s great. I mean, sure, the guy was evil enough to make a target depicting a murder victim, but heck, I’m sure he’ll totally back down now that he’s on the news.

Seriously, sometimes I think the comet can’t get here fast enough. Most people are decent, kind, caring individuals. But the worst of us are truly awful.

Posted in Race, racism and related issues | 5 Comments  

I Got Your Book: The Gilda Stories

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Maria

Like always, we gotta start with some celebrations!

Princeless has been nominated for an Eisner!

Mary Anne Mohanraj’s collection of SF erotica looks fantastic!

Charles Saunders‘ Damballa, was just awarded Best Pulp Novel of 2011! Here’s an excerpt of a review:

All of the wondrous trappings of pulp are here in this incredible work: action, adventure, evil scheming Nazis and a hero determined to foil their plot to embarrass the United States, politically, in the boxing ring – the key component here is that Damballa is a black man.
 
Given the classic pulp elements present in the novel, it would have been easy for Saunders to just trot out a pulp archetype and just changed the color of hero’s skin but an author of his skill and ability would not be limited to taking the easy way out. Instead Damballa has deep, African roots and an intriguing origin and supporting cast, the surface of which has only been scratched by this first adventure.
 
Hooray! NK Jemisin is working on a new trilogy!
 
Julia Rios is joining the editorial board of Strange Horizons. 
 
Here’s a discussion of the ongoing race problem in YA. 
 
Here’s a link to “The Battle of Little Big Science“, a short story by Pamela Rentz, who writes SF featuring Native characters.  
 
This coloring book features a natural diva. 
 
There are some very familiar names on this list of books to watch out for… like Walter Mosley and NK Jemisin! 
 
On to the review.  The Gilda Stories/Bone and Ash follow two centuries in the life of Gilda, a black lesbian vampire. She escapes from the plantation whose brutal masters claimed the life of her mother, only to be nearly raped by a slave catcher. She kills him, and is eventually found by the first Gilda, the madam of a brothel in New Orleans. This brothel, Woodard’s, will define “home” for our heroine for the next two centuries. It’s here that she learns about the power of the written word, the significance of women’s friendship, and the basics of what it means to be a life-affirming vampire. When Gilda the elder turns our heroine into a vampire, and then chooses for herself the true death, Gilda the younger must navigate a human world where her opportunities are defined by her race and gender, and an immortal world where she’s inherited a loving (though sometimes distant) family.
 
The novel’s in an episodic format, so basically we jump through moments in Gilda’s life — like her friendship with Aurelia, a black club woman passionately working against poverty in her community — and moments in American and global history — like the gradual collapse of the nation-state in light of environmental degradation. This collection of short stories is also a meditation on time, and the inevitability of outliving people and things you love. In many ways, this last contributes a kind of elegic quality to the narrative. Gilda can’t help but hold herself apart from the current of the everyday, because the waters of time will always leave her untouched. Each story explores a moment in time where Gilda is forced to confront the fallacies in her own emotional distance, where she has to navigate ephemeral relationships with no easy lines of descent or convenient resolutions. In this way, The Gilda Stories fit into a longstanding tradition in LGBT literature of exploring “a queer time and place“, as well as family and friendships that defy conventional understandings of gender and lineage. 
 
I selected this collection because it recently celebrated its 20th anniversary. Here’s a quote from the author:

Gilda being black is core and informs how she makes meaning of her world, and how she is responded to. Gilda understands the various ethnicities of the girls in the bordello. She knows that Bird is a Native American. When Gilda visits Sorrel’s salon in Yerba Buena, she understands that people look at her askance because she is black. As a female, Gilda knows she is vulnerable on the road alone so she dresses as a boy. It is from Gilda’s perspective that we learn these things. For me, people of color and women are the center of the universe; it’s natural. Assuming this centrality allowed me to address people’s racism without having the racism take over the story.

As a black woman, Gilda recognizes situations that put her in jeopardy. As a vampire she has power to overcome these situations, but she knows that other people don’t have that same privilege. She experiences life as a black woman, but she has privilege as a vampire.

Gilda’s a really quiet narrator. I think fans of Parable of the Sower will find her especially charming; she’s a really sharp narrator, not at all a kid, and navigates the ethical quandaries facing her with a surefootedness now rare in paranormal fiction. She regrets having to kill, and does so rarely, but it’s not something she hesitates over, and she never, ever spends pages and pages thinking about how she’s some sort of secret monster. Gomez also avoids defining Gilda by her vampirism; she does hunt, yeah, but she’s also a traveler, a theater person, a writer, a singer, etc.  The one thing that she carries with her throughout all these careers and adventures is her understanding of herself as part of a community of vampires, and a member of a family. She’s loved, and that love (and needing to make family outside of conventional lines of descent) are what really set this vampire apart from others.
 
If you pick up this collection in the near future, you’ll be really super lucky; Gomez is presently working on a new set of Gilda Stories. Here’s a 2011 excerpt. 

I Got Your Book: The Gilda Stories -- Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

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Portland Opera’s Production of “Candide”

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Ampersand

So I had the great pleasure of being invited to see a dress rehearsal of the Portland Opera’s production of Candide. So much fun! The show is hilarious, just a little bit dirty, and incredibly cynical, and the performances were all terrific. I think Candide is one of those operas that even folks who don’t usually like Opera would like, so if you’re in Portland I recommend checking it out.

I didn’t have time to do illustrations as elaborate as I’ve done for past Portland Opera productions, so I did caricatures of four of the characters in the show. I’m pretty pleased with how Pangloss came out.

Also, be sure to check out the #pdxcandide tag on twitter to get links to the drawings by all the other Portland cartoonists who were invited!

Posted in Cartooning & comics | Leave a comment  

President Obama Endorses Marriage Equality

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Ampersand

From an ABC News interview:

I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.

And:

It’s interesting, some of this is also generational. You know when I go to college campuses, sometimes I talk to college Republicans who think that I have terrible policies on the economy, on foreign policy, but are very clear that when it comes to same sex equality or, you know, believe in equality. They are much more comfortable with it. You know, Malia and Sasha, they have friends whose parents are same-sex couples. There have been times where Michelle and I have been sitting around the dinner table and we’re talking about their friends and their parents and Malia and Sasha, it wouldn’t dawn on them that somehow their friends’ parents would be treated differently. It doesn’t make sense to them and frankly, that’s the kind of thing that prompts a change in perspective.

I admit, I’m a bit surprised to see him do this before the election (although perhaps he was cornered by Biden’s recent statement of support for SSM). Also, he’s still saying that this should be an issue decided by each individual state, not by the Federal government (a view I agree with, but only because I think it’s strategically the best approach for now).

Although the fight will continue mostly unchanged, this is still a landmark in the history of lgbt rights. Someone on my twitter feed (can’t find it now, so paraphrasing) wrote, “for the first time in my life, I have a President who thinks I should be fully equal.” That’s valuable.

Posted in In the news, Same-Sex Marriage | 22 Comments