I’m about to assert something that makes me nervous, because I worry that people are going to stick me in the “asshole MRA” box. Don’t get me wrong: I certainly don’t think that women have it better, overall, than men do. But I do wonder whether it might be good for feminists to acknowledge that — although we don’t experience nearly as much privilege as men — there are a lot of advantages women experience that men don’t.
Because women aren’t seen as threatening, we have an easier time doing confrontational things like approaching strangers on the street. Because women aren’t seen as fighters, we stand a lower chance of being mugged than men do. Because women are seen as emotional, we’re given a huge amount of social space to consider and discuss our feelings. I can work with and be affectionate with children far more easily than a man could. I can be explicit and overt about my sexuality without being viewed as a creep.
And there are at least a few recurring complaints about how trying to be masculine can suck. First and foremost: that men don’t feel they’ve been taught to process their emotions, or don’t feel allowed to display them. Another: that they’re perceived as less manly if they don’t achieve success through a career, especially if they aren’t the main breadwinner for their family. A third: that men are expected to be sexually insatiable, or always to be sexually available.
Of course, it’s worth noting that the advantages women experience are almost always the flip side of unfortunate stereotypes. For instance, one might say that women get more social space for emotion because we’re stereotyped as irrational and hysterical. But that doesn’t change the fact that most of us easily grasp that space, while most men don’t. And if we can reject the Oppression Olympics for just one minute and stop thinking about who’s got it worse, it becomes clear that the advantages and drawbacks associated with being both male and female are intertwined. The two systems reinforce, and cannot function without, each other. The gender binary may not hurt everyone equally, but it hurts everyone. As those beautiful “Every Girl / Every Boy” posters say, the most obvious example is: “For every girl who is tired of acting weak when she is strong, there is a boy tired of appearing strong when he feels vulnerable.”
I do suspect that it may not be psychologically realistic to ask people from our underdog-loving culture to embrace an image of themselves as privileged; my thoughts turn again to the trans man who hated the thought of being a white male. But if we feminists can’t work productively from a stance that acknowledges our social advantages, how can we expect straight/dominant/big-dicked men to do it?
Could feminist acknowledgment of the women’s gender-based advantages help pave the way for more men to acknowledge male privilege? Could feminist acknowledgment of the advantages on both sides of the gender binary help us better grasp what sucks about being a guy?
Am I citing Thomas Millar too much here? Well, at least once, he frustrated me. Amongst the comments on one blog post, I thought he was stating his views about stereotypical guys rather harshly. I suggested that it might be better to seek common ground, or at least to explain things gently; he said he wasn’t interested — “I think we all work with some people where they are and can’t soft-sell our views enough to deal with others.” He added, “If I’m going to alienate someone for saying what I think too bluntly, I’ll pick entitled cis het dudes.”
I won’t pretend I didn’t laugh when I read that — but I worried about it, too. I’ve had an enormous number of experiences trying to discuss feminism/sex/gender with men in which the men tensed, bristled, and closed me out. I don’t think it was always because those guys couldn’t stand the thought of losing their privilege, either. I think a lot of dudes have been led to feel that they have no place in gender discussions — that those discussions will always be about what men are doing wrong, and that no one’s prepared to work with them where they are.
All groups have outsiders. Movements inevitably form themselves around oppositional forces. As someone who’s spent her share of time feeling feminist rage, I’d say that being filled with feminist rage is totally understandable. And seriously, don’t get me wrong: I’m not giving unfeminist guys a free pass. I’m not happy about the fact that so many men are apparently alienated from feminism because us radicals are too confrontational — or too uncomfortably correct — for their fragile masculine egos to handle. (I’m being sarcastic! Mostly.) I’m really not happy about the fact that I’ve got to think about marketing anti-oppression — in a just universe, wouldn’t anti-oppression market itself?
But at the same time, I’m a realist. I know this isn’t a just universe, and I want to use tactics that’ll achieve my goals. Which are: I’d really like to find more men at my side in the sex and gender wars. I’d really like to talk to more guys who don’t see ideas stamped with feminism as an attack — rather, as an opportunity for alliance. Plus, if we’re going to think in terms of cold hard tactics, it’s worth noting that normative men hold most of the power in America. (That’s part of what we’re complaining about, right?) So swelling our ranks with The Oppressive Class means we can ruthlessly use their power for good.
Can we do better at making feminist discourses around gender and sexuality open to normative men, without driving ourselves crazy? How can we make our movement open to, and accepting of, normative men? Put another way, how do we convince normative men to support us?
Maybe we don’t need a lot of normative men in the camp of sex and gender radicals; maybe we’ll be happier without silly Gender Studies 101 questions clotting our discussions. Still, even if we don’t try to “recruit” them, I’d love to see more widespread analysis of masculinity and masculine sexuality amongst normative dudes … if only because getting a sense for their societal boxes might simply make them happier. If only because I think they’ve got their own liberation to strive for.
So at the very least, I’d like to contribute to an America where serious examination of masculinity and male sexuality can flourish.
I linked to these a couple years ago when they were published, but the magazine’s website seems to be down. So, here they are in a blog entry. Happy Halloween (in a couple days)!
i.
Gwennie the good-hearted ghoul
did her best to avoid being cruel.
She offered to mate
with the men that she ate
and then let them drown in their drool.
ii.
Nanette the near-sighted ghost
was frequently witnessed to boast
that her spectral sneer
froze mortals with fear.
In fact, she was haunting a post.
iii.
Maureen the malingering mummy
felt aches in her kidneys and tummy.
“I feel pale and drawn,
but my organs are gone!
So why do I still feel so crummy?”
Said her doctor: “In matters of health,
the issue’s not absence, but wealth.
You’ve got too much time
to moan, groan and whine.
You’re too wrapped up in yourself.”
From an article entitled “Precarious Manhood,” which was referred to on a guest post yesterday:1
If manhood is viewed as elusive and tenuous, two implications are that (a) challenges to men’s manhood will provoke anxiety and threat-related emotions among men and (b) men will often feel compelled to demonstrate their manhood through action, particularly when it has been challenged.
There are undoubtedly many actions that men can perform to bolster their status as “real” men and thus assuage their feelings of gender role stress even if these actions provide only temporary relief from masculinity concerns. For example, men may display manhood by drinking heavily, driving fast, excelling at sports, making lots of money, bragging about their sexual exploits, and fathering many children, to name a few.
Indeed, across several empirical demonstrations of responses to gender identity threats, men who underwent challenges to their masculinity showed decreased liking for other nonprototypical members of their gender in-group (Schmitt & Branscombe, 2001), projected assumptions of homosexuality onto a male target (Bramel, 1963), sexually harassed a woman (Maass, Cadinu, Guarnieri, & Grasselli, 2003), took stronger levels of electric shock (Holmes, 1971), and overestimated their height and sexual experience (Cheryan, Cameron, Katagiri, & Monin, 2008).
Vandello, J.A., Bosson, J.K., Cohen, D., Burnaford, R.M. & Weaver, J.R. (2008). Precarious Manhood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95 (6), 1325 – 1339. Pdf link. (back)
[Reprinted with the kind permission of Clarisse Thorn. All three installments of this series (once they've all been posted) may be read here.]
In the 2006 documentary “Boy I Am“, a trans man talks about how one of his mental barriers to transitioning was the fact that after transition, he would be a “white male”. And, he laughs, the “last thing in the world” he wanted to be was a white male!
A year or two ago, I attended a lecture by Jackson Katz, a rather overtly masculine, cis male anti-abuse educator who lectures in colleges around the country. Bullet-headed and aggressive in stance, he said a lot of valuable things — particularly about how men ought to take ownership of problems we traditionally consider “women’s issues”. It’s certainly true that if we want to end male abuse of women, men must participate in the movement. But although Katz discussed some issues of masculinity, I heard little about how we can make things better for men. His proposition of a men’s movement was centered around correcting the things some men are doing wrong. (I attended in the company of my friends Danny, who blogs at Sex, Art & Politics, and Sammael, who started his own BDSM blog this year. Hey guys, got any good memories of Katz?)
Although they’re often watered down, many feminist concepts have gone mainstream. For instance, Americans have some consciousness of traditional feminist critiques about how women’s bodies are represented in the media. Indeed, that consciousness has become so endemic that, in a grandly ironic twist, marketers now capitalize on it to sell beauty products: the nationwide Dove Campaign for Real Beauty attempts to use deconstruction of the media’s representation of women to sell Dove soap. Americans are also quite aware of men as the privileged class — sometimes regarded outright as the oppressors.
But this shift in awareness about gender issues faced by women has not been accompanied by a widespread understanding of gender issues faced by men. And that creates situations like an activist working towards a masculinity movement that talks mainly about how men are hurting women, or a trans man who has trouble with the idea of transitioning partly because he doesn’t want to be a white man — one of the oppressors.
How can awareness of oppressive dynamics make it difficult for men to own their masculinity? Does male privilege ever make life harder for men? When does male privilege blind us to oppression of masculinity? There’s some mainstream awareness of gender issues faced by women; is there any similar awareness of the problems of masculinity?
A good friend of mine first caught my attention by talking about gender. We encountered each other at a BDSM meetup, and when I mentioned that I’d been thinking about the boxes around masculine sexuality, he launched into a rant about oppressive sexual dynamics. He gave me references to complex sexuality blogs and intelligently used words like “heteronormative” and “patriarchy”. But a month or so after we started talking, I mentioned his interest in gender issues … and he gave me a puzzled look. “I’m not really into gender studies,” he said.
He talks about sex, gender and culture all the time — but he also specifically identifies as highly masculine, and felt that to be at odds with identifying as someone who questions masculinity. As Thomas Millar writes: “There’s a huge unstated assumption that to even address the question [of male sexuality], for men, is to mark one’s self as ‘other.’ … cis het men are brought up to fear that their masculinity could ever be called into question. By even opening up a dialog, I think some folks fear that they are conceding that their sexuality is not uncontroversial.”
Men currently experience this problem in a way that women do not. In other words, women don’t risk being seen as unfeminine as easily as men risk being seen as unmasculine; nor do we have quite the same fears about it. In 2008, a group of researchers published a paper called “Precarious Manhood”. Their concluding statement: “Our findings suggest that real men experience their gender as a tenuous status that they may at any time lose and about which they readily experience anxiety and threat.” Earlier in the paper, they wrote that — although “our focus on manhood does not deny the importance of women’s gender-related struggles” — “Women who do not live up to cultural standards of femininity may be punished, rejected, or viewed as ‘unladylike,’ but rarely will their very status as women be questioned in the same way as men’s status often is.”1
When is it to a man’s disadvantage to publicly examine and question masculinity? Surely the mere act of questioning and examining gender does not make a man less masculine; how can we work against the perception that it does?
At the same time, though, this isn’t a “with us or against us” situation: men who don’t choose to identify as non-normative also don’t tend to join the “opposition”. By “opposition” I mean folks like “Men’s Rights Activists” (on the Internet we call them MRAs). MRAs — at least according to my stereotype of them — are conscious of social and legal disadvantages suffered by men, such as the fact that men are at a severe disadvantage in child custody cases; at the same time, they’re blind to male privilege. It’s a deadly combination. My personal favorite MRA quotation ever is, “White men are the most discriminated-against group in the country.”2 Mercifully, MRAs are a fringe group, but they make a big impression.
My “not into gender studies” friend once told me that although he frequently deconstructs problems of masculinity in the privacy of his own mind, he doesn’t like to publicly have those conversations because he doesn’t want to sound like an MRA. He said, “A lot of the time, men who want to think seriously about masculinity won’t talk about it aloud because we really don’t want to be that,” emphasizing “that” with loathing. He later added, “It’s very tricky to discuss masculinity yet avoid simply devolving into male entitlement. That’s the crux of the problem with the ‘Men’s Movement’ assholes — none of them are addressing the underlying problems of masculinity. They’re just whining about not receiving the privileges their cultural conditioning tells them to expect.”
How do the current “men’s rights movements” discourage men who might, in a different climate, be very interested in discussing masculinity? Assuming men can reclaim the “pro-masculinity movement” from MRAs, do any men feel motivated to do so? Can men occupy the middle ground between MRAs and LGBTQ, feminist, or other leftist discussions of gender — that is, can men find space to discuss masculinity without being aligned with “one side or the other”?
All too frequently in radical sex/gender circles, the theme has been blame. Men in particular are excoriated for failing to adequately support feminism — or criticized for failing to join the fight against oppressive sex and gender norms — but few ideas are offered for how men can be supportive and non-oppressive while remaining overtly masculine, especially if their sexuality is normative (e.g., straight/dominant/big-dicked).
There are fragments: some insight might be drawn from the ways in which many BDSM communities create non-oppressive frameworks within which we have our deliciously oppressive sex. With practice, one can get shockingly good at preserving a heavy dominant/submissive dynamic that still allows both partners to talk about their other needs. Surely that understanding of sexual roles vs. other needs could be adapted to the service of gender identity. Yet so many BDSMers still fall prey to the same old gendered preconceptions.
Don’t get me wrong: of course anyone would deserve plenty of blame if they refused to let go of their entitlement, or chose not to examine the ways their behavior might support an oppressive system. But I think men exist who are willing to do those things, yet feel blocked from relevant discussions because participating creates anxiety about their sexual or gender identity. It strikes me as unreasonable to attack them for that. Choosing to present one’s sexuality and/or gender identity in a normative way is not in itself a sin. It’s not fair to expect people to fit themselves into a box that doesn’t suit them — not even for The All-Important Cause of better understanding sex and gender.
Where can we find ideas for how men can be both supportive and non-oppressive, and overtly masculine? How can we make it to normative men’s advantage to analyze masculine norms? What does it look like to be masculine, but liberated from the strictures of stereotypical masculinity? How can we contribute to a Men’s Movement that encompasses all three bases — being perceived as masculine, acknowledging male privilege, and deconstructing the problems of masculinity?
Vandello et al. “Precarious Manhood.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 95, No. 6, 1325 - 1339. 2008. (back)
Kuster, Elizabeth. Exorcising Your Ex. Fireside, 1996. (I know, it’s hardly the most official of references — but isn’t it a great quotation?) (back)
Posted by Richard Jeffrey Newman | October 27th, 2009
Three students from my technical writing class came to see me during my office hours a couple of weeks ago because they were unhappy with the grades they received on their first assignment of the semester and they wanted my help in rewriting it for a better grade. The assignment, which I give every time I teach technical writing, is pretty straightforward. Students are instructed to imagine that it is the end of the previous semester–which in this case would be Spring 2009–and they have gone to the English Department office, where they are told that registration for Technical Writing is by instructor’s permission only, and so they need to submit to me a letter of application. In writing this letter, they are allowed to use any source material they think is relevant: the syllabus I have handed them, the college catalog, my faculty and/or personal website, my ratings on ratemyprofessors.com–anything–as long as what they write contains the following:
An explanation of the course’s relevance to either their career goals or their academic careers;
A discussion of what they perceive to be their strengths and weaknesses as writers;
A discussion of what they believe they have to offer the class.
The assignment is difficult, especially given the fact that my students are, overwhelmingly, college freshmen or sophomores. Not only have most of them never had to write a real letter of application before–and good letters of application are damned hard to write–but even seasoned writers can find it difficult to articulate their writing strengths and weaknesses. More, it is rare that an 18-, 19- or 20-year-old has the maturity to write persuasively about either her or his character traits or plans for the future. Indeed, one of my goals is that, by confronting students with just how difficult it is to write about themselves in a way that is both persuasive and professional, the assignment will spur at least some of them to think a little more deeply about who they are, what they want to do with their lives, the place of writing in their lives, and how and why they choose to present themselves in writing the way they do.
The first student who came to see me, a woman from Senegal for whom English is a third language, received an F on her paper because it was filled with so many grammatical, editing and proofreading errors that, had it been an actual letter of application, I would have stopped reading after the first half of the first sentence. Truly, it read like she’d spent, at most, fifteen minutes typing, unfiltered, whatever was in her brain and then handed to me the piece of paper that emerged from her printer without giving it even the most cursory of second glances. Almost the first thing she said to me when she sat down in my office was, with her eyes starting to tear up, that maybe the best thing for her to do was drop my course. Clearly she was a horrible writer, she said, and she did not want to end up with an F on her transcript. I asked her if she was a good writer in French, the language of instruction in her country, and she said yes. I asked her what grades she’d gotten in high school on the essays she’d written in French, and she told me A’s and B’s. The problem, then, I explained–and I am paraphrasing a much longer conversation–was not that she was a horrible writer. Literacy skills transfer from a first to a second–and even a third and fourth–language. The problem was that she hadn’t taken the time to do her best work, and when I suggested that maybe this was because she’d figured writing a letter would be easy, she smiled and nodded. Now that she knew better, she said, she would at least give rewriting the assignment a chance before deciding to drop the course.
I’ve been teaching in the English Department of the community college that employs me for twenty years now, and I am still surprised–though perhaps I shouldn’t be–that it’s the students who are used to getting good grades with whom I have to have the above conversation. Not that these students are the only ones who fail to take assignments seriously, but they tend to be the ones who come to my office either, like my student from Senegal, more or less destroyed by the poor grade I have given them or convinced that what they need is to get from me my personal “Student Road Map to the A.” Student who are looking for the latter tend to argue that my standards are not just different from those of all the other teachers who have graded their work in the past; my standards are much, much tougher. This was what the second student who came to see me said. An African-American man who wants to be an inventor and a consultant, his first words after he sat down across from me were, “I don’t understand what you don’t understand about what I wrote.” It’s a fair question, and one I usually look forward to answering because it can lead to real dialogue and real learning on the part of the student, except that–at least at first–this student was more interested in persuading me that the strategy he used in his letter should have gotten him a better grade than the C I gave him than in hearing my explanation for why it didn’t. I explained, giving several examples to illustrate my point, that his letter was neither well-focused nor well-enough substantiated and organized to convince me, were he truly applying, to admit him to my class. Each time I paused to see if he understood what I was saying, though, he responded by explaining in turn that his goal in the letter was for me to get to know him as the impressive person he is–that is my paraphrase of what he said; he was not, in fact, arrogant enough to say it like that–because that knowledge, he felt, ought to have been sufficient for the letter to succeed. When I suggested that asking me to read five paragraphs of often irrelevant detail about himself before he even mentioned the fact that he was applying to my class might be asking a bit too much, he explained, again, how important it was for me to get to know him. “I still don’t understand why you don’t get this,” he said.
So I went over one paragraph with him in extreme detail. I showed him how adding specific examples to support the claims he was making about himself, while at the same time taking out the irrelevant information, would make his letter persuasive. He understood, or at least seemed to understand, but instead of taking this understanding and going back to rewrite his letter, he tried to push me into doing the same thing with every other paragraph. When I told him I would not do that, that he needed to take what he’d learned and try to apply it–to do, in other words, his own work–he said, “I’m beginning to understand what you want from me, and so what I need to know now is how to get you to give me an A, and the only way I am going to learn that is if you go over each paragraph with me.”
What I need to know is how to get you to give me an A. I recognize that students want good grades; I acknowledge the emotional validity of feeling like, if you are paying for an education, part of what you should be receiving is a roadmap to the grades you want to receive; and I certainly appreciate that there are students for whom the practical value of their grades outweighs, legitimately and reasonably, whatever value I might place on some ideal notion of what teaching and learning ought to be about. As I see it, though, my job is not to show students how to get A’s. My job is to teach, to help students learn, which means that, on one level, it doesn’t really matter to me if a student moves from a D to B, or from a C to a C+, or from a B to an A. What matters is that they have moved, that they are better writers when they leave my class than they were when they entered. It’s not that I am indifferent to students’ desire and/or need for good grades, but learning to write is not like filling in a blank or coloring in a circle on an exam where there is only one right answer to each question and so the formula for getting an A is clear. Rather, learning to write is a lot like growing up. No matter how much advice and guidance we get, the fact is that we all grow up in our own way, at our own pace, and some of us never manage it at all. Read the rest of this entry »
Political activism at it’s [sic] best is honest grassroots efforts by people finally fed up with lying politicians who decide to do something about an issue rather than just complain. We have a great example of that coming up here in Minnesota on the immigration issue.
On Saturday, July 11th at 2 PM, there will be a rally held at the Mower County Courthouse. It’s located at 201 First Street NE, Austin, MN. This will be the second rally in a month at that location.
Basically Austin is a town that the residents feel has been devastated by illegal immigration, and a lone resident, Sam Johnson, finally got fed up. He organized the first rally despite being up against professionally organized counter protests by the likes of La Raza, Centro Campesino and various Marxist organizations bussed in from the cities.
Sam Johnson, honest American, just doing the best he can to make our country free of “illegal immigration.” Or, you know, any immigration. Because this is Sam Johnson:
In case you’re wondering — and I doubt you are, but some people might not be able to view the picture — yes, that’s a guy wearing a neo-Nazi uniform. Because Sam Johnson isn’t just a hard-working white American who’s fed-up with illegal immigration. He’s a neo-Nazi, the head of the National Socialist Movement Southeast Minnesota. He is one of the most vile individuals in my state, and he’s a guy who the world will be better off without.
Sally Jo Sorensen of the outstanding Bluestem Prairie blog actually interviewed Johnson (one hopes she took a long, hot shower afterward); you should really read all of part one and bookmark the site for the next two installments, but here’s a brief excerpt:
“Minorities should not be citizens,” Johnson said, “only 100 percent true white Americans.” He outlined his vision of a nation in which all people of color would be stripped of their citizenship, no matter how long their families had lived in the United States, and moved to communities that would be strictly delineated according to race.
People of African descent would live with other people of African descent, Latinos with Latinos, Asians with Asians, American Indians with American Indians, and “real Americans” with other “real Americans. “Real American” and non-citizen status would be determined be having had family living in the country for five generations or 50-70 years.
Only if non-whites broke the law would they be sent back to the country of their ancestors’ origins, regardless of how long their families had lived in the United States. Of course, Johnson emphasized, this would dictate deporting all immigrants living here illegally.
“Minorities could have jobs, own homes, and enjoy their own culture,” he said. They simply wouldn’t be citizens of the United States, nor could they become citizens. They would have to keep separate.
Why separate?
“If you look back in history to every country that’s allowed different races to mingle,” he said, “you’ll see that nation has fallen.”
“Look at what happened to Rome,” he said, when I example him for an example of what he meant. “Jews and Africans came into Rome, there were uprisings, and Rome fell.”
This is the guy that True North — a blog that has included Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.; PowerLine’s Scott Johnson; and David Strom, the head of the Minnesota Taxpayers League as contributors — decided to back. A neo-Nazi. But that shouldn’t be surprising — the Republican party has deliberately chosen to throw its lot in with the most extreme elements of the hard-core, fascist-and-no-that’s-not-hyperbole, racist right. It is disgusting. It is despicable.
This is why those of us on the left don’t buy it when the right claims that they’re not racist — because they are so very willing to embrace racists when it helps them. If Republicans want to stop being seen as the party of hate, they need to stop the hatred. Otherwise, they need to own the fact that a sitting Republican congresswoman is a contributor to a website that promoted a neo-Nazi hate rally, promotion that included sharing Sam Johnson’s email address with those looking to get involved. Only a party that found racism acceptable could be comfortable with that.
UPDATE: Just because these things have a way of finding their way down the memory hole:
This is the first of three guest posts, reprinted with the kind permission of Clarisse Thorn. This post originally appeared here on Clarisse’s blog. Once they’ve been posted, all three posts will be accessible at this link.
Clarisse Thorn is a feminist, sex-positive educator who has delivered workshops on both sexual communication and BDSM to a variety of audiences, including New York’s Museum of Sex, San Francisco’s Center for Sex and Culture, and several Chicago universities. She curated the original Sex+++ sex-positive documentary film series at Chicago’s Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in 2009, and has also volunteered as an archivist and curator at the Leather Archives & Museum. Currently, she is working on HIV mitigation in southern Africa.
Due to irregular internet access while she’s in Africa, Clarisse may be slow responding to comments.
* * *
Over the summer, I wrote a 3500-word piece about masculinity. It touched on some themes I’ve messed around with before, most notably in my reviews of the Sex+++ documentaries “Private Dicks: Men Exposed” and “Boy I Am.” I fondly hoped that I might be able to do something “real” with it, but I’ve gotten rather immersed in my work here in Africa — and I’ve been having some trouble keeping up with America, due to irregular Internet access. Today, I managed to catch up with some of my blogroll and saw that Audacia Ray recently posted some thoughts about masculinity, including excellent links to various new frontiers in the masculinity conversation. Looks like the topic is really heating up — finally! I’ve been obsessing about it off and on for years, and it’s exciting to think that people might finally talk to me about it.
So, rather than letting my masculinity piece languish under a rug — since I’ll probably never be able to do anything official with it before the conversation moves on, anyway — I’m just going to serialize it here. (I’d post the whole thing at once, but I don’t want to inflict 3500 words on everyone’s blog reader!)
Questions I Want To Ask Entitled Cis Het Men, Part 1: Who Cares?
Why do I care about masculinity?
I’m rather perverted, but not enormously queer. I present as femme, and — although I’ve been known to tease my sensitive (frequently long-haired) lovers for being “unmasculine” — I fall in love with men. At heart, I love knowing that I’m fucking a man.
However, because I’m cis and straight, I feel profoundly at a loss when trying to articulate problems of (for lack of a better phrase) “Men’s Empowerment”. The issues don’t feel “native” to me; I’ve intersected with these questions mainly through the lens of lovers and friends. Watching their struggle is demoralizing, but trying to imagine how I can give them feedback is more demoralizing.
A male friend once wrote to me, “I think you personally find expressions of masculinity hot, but you also have no patience with sexism. You’ve caught on that it’s tricky for men to figure out how to deliver both of these things you need, that you don’t have a lot of good direction to give to fellas about it, and that neither does anyone else.”
So:
How men can be supportive and non-oppressive while remaining overtly masculine?
On top of my limited perspective, there’s been an echoing lack of discourse — that is, very little mainstream acknowledgement of the problems of masculinity. The primary factor in that silence is that normative cis men themselves tend to be flatly unwilling to discuss gender/sex issues. Often, their first objection is that the discussion is neither important nor relevant. This is true even within subcultures centered around sexual analysis, like the BDSM world — I once met a cis male BDSMer who said, “Why bother talking about male sexuality? It’s the norm. Fish don’t have a word for water.”
But if masculine sexuality is water and we’re fish, why doesn’t that motivate us to examine it more — not less?
Don’t get me wrong: I agree that America’s sexual conceptions are centered around stereotypical male sexuality, and I agree that this is damaging and problematic. Believe me, I’m furious that it took me many years to reconceive “actual” sex around acts other than good ole penis-in-vagina penetration! But if American stereotypes and ideas of sexuality are male-centered, then surely that makes it more useful for us to be thinking about male sexuality — not less.
And those male-centered ideas of sexuality aren’t centered around all men — just stereotypical men. LGBTQ men are obvious examples whose sexuality falls outside the norm; fortunately for them, they’ve created some spaces to discuss that. But there are lots of other non-normative guys who aren’t gay or queer, yet feel very similar sexual alienation — and because there’s so little discourse about masculinity outside LGBTQ circles, they usually just don’t talk about it.
What does it mean to be a cis het man whose sexuality isn’t normative? Which straight cis guys don’t fit — and hence, feel alienated from — our current overarching sexual stereotypes?
Guys who identify as straight BDSM submissives are one fabulous example of non-normative men who are frequently alienated from mainstream masculine sexuality, but who often don’t have a forum. Men with small penises are a second. There are lots of others. In the words of sex blogger and essayist Thomas Millar: “The common understanding of male sexuality is a stereotype, an ultra-narrow group of desires and activities oriented around PIV [penis-in-vagina], anal intercourse and blowjobs; oriented around cissexual women partners having certain very narrow groups of physical characteristics.”
Still, that doesn’t mean that straight, dominant, big-dicked dudes who love boning thin chicks feel totally okay about the current state of affairs. It just means they tend to have less immediate motivation to question it. They also have less of an eye for spotting gender oppression, because — though they’ve got their own boxes hemming them in — they’re still more privileged than the rest of us, and the nature of privilege is to blind the privileged class to its existence.
A male submissive once told me, “Lots of heteronormative men know something is wrong with the way we think about sex and gender. I can see them struggling with it when we talk. They can’t put their finger on it; they have a hard time engaging it. But I engage it all the time; I have to, because my sexuality opposes it.”
When is it to a man’s advantage to examine and question masculinity and stereotypes of male sexuality? Which men are motivated to do so?
It’s tempting to assert that men whose desires fit neatly (or at least mostly) within the stereotype have it made — after all, their sexuality works within the norm so many of us struggle to escape. But I’ve had this assumption corrected several times, usually by smart “stereotypical” men themselves. At one point, while developing a sexuality workshop, I sent the outline to a bunch of friends. The original draft contained this paragraph: “Our sexual scripts favor a certain stereotype of men and male sexual pleasure, which makes it hard for women to figure out what we really want and what we really enjoy, and also makes it harder for non-stereotypical men to figure that out.” One friend sent that paragraph back, having quietly appended: “… as well as for stereotypical men to discover or explore new desires beyond the stereotypical script.”
When we discuss the limitations around sexuality from a non-normative perspective, how do we exclude normative people who might develop themselves in new directions if they had the chance? What do normative men stand to gain by thinking outside the box about masculinity and sexuality?
Hotel owner tells Hispanic workers to change names. You know, you’d think that at some point in this series of increasingly bad decisions it would have occurred to him that he was creating a public relations nightmare, if nothing else. But I guess this is one of those times where bigotry trumped any semblance of critical thinking skills. And it’s easy to say that being a bigot is a state of mind devoid of logic in the first place, but it’s more complex than that. I’m certain that this man (and all the people like him) are convinced that their behavior isn’t based in racism or is even problematic. They really believe that they are in the right and it’s other people who lack logic. And it’s not until there are real consequences that they begin to consider the possibility that maybe, possibly, perhaps their thought process is flawed. But that’s an uncomfortable thought pattern and not necessarily one they follow for long so real change is rare. Why? Because sooner or later other people who know them (or who just agree with them) start saying things like “So and so is a good man. He’s not a racist.” or “They are just a product of their times. You have to understand.” or even (and this one is my favorite) “That’s not real racism. Real racism is…” because some folks think that it takes a burning cross, rope, and a tree before it’s real racism.
Racism doesn’t work that way of course, but it might as well when you consider that other than the initial public censure someone like this hotel owner faces, there’s not much in the way of consequences for most racist behavior. And no, I’m not advocating time in the stocks or whatever horrible physical punishment someone wants to liken to being held accountable. All I’m saying is stop giving out those excuses and justifications and free passes because it’s not racist enough for whatever standard would make it difficult to look a POC in the eye while retaining a relationship with the person whose bad behavior you’re excusing. I won’t even get into whether or not someone should boycott businesses/books/other goods and services based on individual bigoted actions. That’s a personal decision. I just want the minimum cost for engaging in racist actions to be acknowledgment that the action is racist. Yes, there is no way to peek inside someone’s heart and know for sure that their motivation was conscious racism, but it’s not about the intent, it’s about the impact. So, regardless of what you know about your friend, relative, significant other, favorite comedian, other unnamed person connected to your life in some way…stop making excuses for their bad behavior. Personal accountability isn’t toxic even when it’s being taken for toxic behavior.
Graduating during a recession has big, long-lasing negative consequences. “If you’re graduating from college this spring, you’ll be sitting around at the age of thirty-five still suffering from the fact that Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Ben Nelson, and Kent Conrad decided to make the stimulus bill stingier in order to better bolster their credentials as preening centrists.”
A collection of links to scholars arguing for and against smaller class sizes. The upshot seems to be that smaller class sizes make the biggest difference for young kids and in schools serving “underprivileged” populations.
Whoopsie, we destroyed all hope of a functioning government: “The supply-siders are to a large extent responsible for this mess, myself included. We opened Pandora’s Box when we got the Republican Party to abandon the balanced budget as its signature economic policy and adopt tax cuts as its raison d’être. In particular, the idea that tax cuts will “starve the beast” and automatically shrink the size of government is extremely pernicious.
Indeed, by destroying the balanced budget constraint, starve-the-beast theory actually opened the flood gates of spending. As I explained in a recent column, a key reason why deficits restrained spending in the past is because they led to politically unpopular tax increases. But if, as Republicans now maintain, taxes must never be increased at any time for any reason then there is never any political cost to raising spending and cutting taxes at the same time, as the Bush 43 administration and a Republican Congress did year after year.”
“I’m so tired of stories that take place in the same three neighborhoods in New York or LA. I’m tired of young white people and their love problems. I’m tired of FBI agents.”
Unless you live in Minnesota or are really, really plugged in to state-level politics, you probably don’t know who Margaret Anderson Kelliher is. So allow me to introduce her. She’s the current Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives, the second and longest-serving woman to hold the position. She’s also one of the DFL candidates seeking to replace incumbent Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty in 2010. She’s considered one of the front-runners for the DFL nomination, along with a handful of others, like former Sen. Mark Dayton, Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak (who has not officially announced, but who is widely expected to run), and former Minnesota House Minority Leader Matt Entenza. If nominated, she’d be the first woman to head a major-party gubernatorial ticket in the state’s history.
Oh, and she’s also a gossipy teenage girl.
That assessment of Speaker Anderson Kelliher comes from progressive Minnesota blogger Brian Fallidin. Fallidin has not endorsed a candidate for governor yet, but he’s been pretty supportive of Entenza thus far, which is a feeling that I, ahem, do not really share.
But that’s fine. Fallidin is allowed to like Entenza, just as I’m allowed to dislike him. I don’t know, ultimately, who he plans to vote for (I’m leaning toward Rybak myself, but am still persuadable). And he’s allowed to dislike Margaret Anderson Kelliher, a candidate who definitely has her flaws (as does, to be honest, every DFLer running).
But Fallidin crossed the line in his latest post criticizing Anderson Kelliher. Part of the post was about minor, inside-baseball type stuff (Anderson Kelliher claiming a supporter who apparently had previously indicated support for Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner, a second-tier candidate), the sort of vaguely embarrassing mistake that hits every campaign. That’s not the part I mind. No, the part I mind is this:
It seems that Margaret Anderson Kelliher is doing a MAK-Attack on pretty much everyone these days. Her gossip girl comment originally reported in the City Pages where she said “You’re going to have a lot of fun doing a fact-check on what he says….” about Matt Entenza reminds me of that one girl we all hated in high-school–you know the one that desperately wanted you to like them, and when you didn’t they’d say nasty things behind your back?
Okay, quickly disposing of the substance of Fallidin’s complaint: Matt Entenza has a history of lying. It’s the reason I’ve vowed not to support him. Anderson Kelliher is allowed to raise character issues, especially as they relate to a candidate’s public conduct (and spying on your party’s endorsed gubernatorial candidate — while you’re running for Attorney General — is public conduct). Just as Entenza is allowed to raise the fact that Pawlenty drank the DFL’s milkshake last legislative session. These are legitimate issues for voters to discuss, and frankly, issues that should be brought up.
So it’s an absurd complaint. But more absurd is the way Fallidin frames his complaint. Here, reread the paragraph again, this time, with some emphasis added to the relative parts:
It seems that Margaret Anderson Kelliher is doing a MAK-Attack on pretty much everyone these days. Her gossip girl comment originally reported in the City Pages where she said “You’re going to have a lot of fun doing a fact-check on what he says….” about Matt Entenza reminds me of that one girl we all hated in high-school–you know the one that desperately wanted you to like them, and when you didn’t they’d say nasty things behind your back?
Now, Brian has told me via email that he didn’t intend to write anything sexist. And maybe he didn’t.
But damn, that’s pretty sexist.
Look, there’s nothing wrong with decrying Anderson Kelliher for brining up character if, for some reason, you don’t think character should be brought up in a campaign. But when you choose to focus on “gossip,” twice in two sentences, and when you compare the highest DFL officeholder in state government to “that one girl we all hated in high-school–you know the one that desperately wanted you to like them,” you’re not making a comment on Anderson Kelliher’s behavior. You’re making a comment on her gender.
Because women gossip — amirite, fellas? They just love to pick-pick-pick at people in the out crowd, not like men who get all brawny and manly and stuff. So girly, that gossip. Except, of course, that men gossip more than women, and also, nobody more fits the idea of a gossip than the guy who hired a private investigator to dig up dirt on Mike Hatch. But that, of course, wasn’t “gossipy,” because Entenza’s a dude.
But we’re not dealing with reality when we compare the Speaker of the Minnesota House to a high school sophomore. We’re dealing with stereotypes. And stereotypes are all about putting people in their place. Anderson Kelliher couldn’t be attacking Entenza for lying because she views him as a liar.1 She must be doing it because that’s what girls do. And she’s a girl. A girly, girly girl.
I’m sorry, whether Fallidin intended the post as sexist or not, it was sexist. It belittled Anderson Kelliher and belittled women generally. I don’t care if you support Margaret Anderson Kelliher for Governor or not — as I said earlier, I’m not leaning toward her at the moment. But one should make that case based on her record as speaker and as a state representative, her positions on issues related to the state, and on her perceived ability to win the governor’s mansion for the DFL for the first time in nearly a quarter-century.
But Anderson Kelliher’s gender is not a reason to malign her, subtly or overtly. And while I dearly hope this is the last time I have to write a post like this, I know all to well that it will not be. If the 2008 primary fight between now-President Obama and now-Secretary of State Clinton taught us nothing else, it is that many progressives, sadly, are as willing to traffic in hackneyed, sorry stereotypes as the staunchest teabagger — if it helps their candidate win.
As further proof that women are not the only ones who gossip, let me just say that several little birdies have told me that there is no love lost between Margaret Anderson Kelliher and Matt Entenza, and that the two are bitter enemies going back to before the time when Entenza was Minority Leader and Anderson Kelliher was Assistant Minority Leader. But you didn’t hear that from me. (back)
Here’s a list of blogs that are keeping up with the latest incidents involving police being assholes with tasers. Click on, scroll down, and if you are aware of any that I missed, tell me in the comments. In the meantime, I go to some sleep.
My brief, light-hearted fantasy story “Great, Golden Wings” is available on Beneath Ceaseless Skies. Check it out, if you like. I’m told it will also be available in audio soon.
Lady Percivalia watched the young cinematographist’s hands as he set up his equipment. They were narrow and graceful, dusted with pale-colored hair. His limber fingers moved rapidly as he angled his screens and adjusted his projectors.
Beside Lady Percivalia, the Lady Harrah gave a dramatic sigh. She sank back in her chair, fluttering her lashes, her face arrayed to look attractively ill. Lady Harrah was well-known for feigning such attacks of faintness. They’d won her the attentions of several young men who, while not known for their intelligence, were smart enough to seize the opportunity for getting close to a distressed young woman with a heaving bosom. Unfortunately, Lady Harrah’s best efforts had failed to make any impression on the cinematographist.
Lady Harrah enjoyed a miraculous recovery from her faint. She leaned over to Lady Percivalia. “Watch this,” she whispered. “I’ll get his attention.”
She unpinned a dragonet brooch that adorned her ruffled bodice and tapped its head. The intricate gold carving blinked into a semblance of life. It stretched like a waking cat and flew brightly into the air, a whir of jeweled wings. It caught the cinematographist’s sleeve in its jaws and tugged politely.
An amendment that would prevent the government from working with contractors who denied victims of assault the right to bring their case to court is in danger of being watered down or stripped entirely from a larger defense appropriations bill.
Multiple sources have told the Huffington Post that Sen. Dan Inouye, a longtime Democrat from Hawaii, is considering removing or altering the provision, which was offered by Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) and passed by the Senate several weeks ago.[...]
“The defense contractors have been storming his office,” said a source with knowledge of the situation. “Inouye either will get the amendment taken out altogether, or water it down significantly. If they water it down, they will take out the Title VII claims. This means that in discrimination cases, they will still force you into a secret forced arbitration on KBR’s (or other contractors’) own terms — with your chances of prevailing practically zero. The House seems to be very supportive of the original Franken amendment and all in line, but their hands are tied since it originated in the Senate. And since Inouye runs the show on this bill, he can easily take it out to get Republicans and the defense contractors off his back, which looks increasingly likely.”
This is possible because the bill is now in conference committee, where the House and Senate versions of the bill are merged into a single bill.
Kos has lots of contact info for Inouye, and more information (including the claim that various congressional staffers have anonymously accused Inouye of sexual harassment and in one case rape).
I’ve been hearing a lot lately about the terrifying scale of the racist hatred being directed toward Obama. Yesterday I saw this article, which implied that the Secret Service is struggling to keep up with threats against the president.
Since Mr Obama took office, the rate of threats against the president has increased 400 per cent from the 3,000 a year or so under President George W. Bush, according to Ronald Kessler, author of In the President’s Secret Service.
Some threats to Mr Obama, whose Secret Service codename is Renegade, have been publicised, including an alleged plot by white supremacists in Tennessee late last year to rob a gun store, shoot 88 black people, decapitate another 14 and then assassinate the first black president in American history.
And today there’s this article, about a creepy militia-like organization (one of several hundred just like it, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center [cited in the article]) that’s convinced Obama is Hitler and is therefore preparing to fight back against his impending “dictatorship”:
Oath Keepers is not preaching violence or government overthrow, Rhodes said. On the contrary, it is asking police and the military to lay down their arms in response to unlawful orders.
The group’s Web site, www.oathkeepers.org, features videos and testimonials in which supporters compare President Barack Obama’s America to Adolf Hitler’s Germany. They also liken Obama to England’s King George III during the American Revolution.
One member, in a videotaped speech at an event in Washington, D.C., calls Obama “the domestic enemy the Constitution is talking about.”
OK, none of this is surprising to me, nor should it be to anyone who understands just how racist this country is. This is simply the new face of the KKK — the sheets are off, the N-word is gone, and they’re using code-words like “patriotism”, but these people are preparing for a race war. They’re terrified that Obama’s election means… something. That PoC will enslave white people, maybe. The end of white dominance in the country’s bastions of power and privilege. The fact that these bastions are in no danger whatsoever of a mass “browning” is beside the fact; Obama is a symbol, and they’re terrified of the potential change that he represents. And to assuage their terror, they’re gearing up to kill… well, not just him, but pretty much anybody who scares them. I figure most of us ABW bloggers and readers are probably somewhere on that list, if you go far enough down. I mean, really — we’ve got radical Christianists* praying for the man’s death. These are the terrorists we should really fear.
But I found myself wondering, today, what Barack and Michelle Obama have told their children about this.
Because parents of black children have to do that. If they have any sense of responsibility, they prepare their children for the racism they’ll inevitably face. I don’t have kids, but I certainly remember my parents and grandparents carefully pointing out incidents and disparities and stereotypes, and talking with me about them. I remember my mother instructing me about how to act with the police — as a woman I’m not in quite as much danger from them as a black man would be, but I’m not safe either. Yet even with this advance preparation, I remember being shocked as I grew older and realized that racism had not ended with the Civil Rights Act, as I had been taught in school. It was still happening, still killing — still a near-daily threat to my personal health and welfare. My parents had done what they could to cushion this shock, but it was still painful, even terrifying, when I finally understood it as more than an intellectual exercise.
So what, I wonder, does the first couple tell Sasha and Malia? Do they try and prepare their daughters for the possibility that their father will be assassinated because of his race? Have they warned the girls that they’ll probably never be able to leave Secret Service or bodyguard protection, at any point in their lives? Do they keep the girls off the internet, for fear they’ll find out that Dad is getting 30 death threats a day? Or when they talk with the girls about it — how the hell do you talk to a child about something like that, without traumatizing them for life? How do you keep children, when they’re immersed in so much hatred and fear, from growing up hateful and fearful themselves?
I’m not a parent yet, so fortunately I don’t have to deal with these questions. (I am an official “auntie” to my best friends’ kids, but like a good auntie I get to defer the tough questions to Mom and Dad. To a degree.) But I cannot help empathizing with Michelle, who was younger than me when she had Malia, and wondering how I would handle the matter if I were in her position.
PoC parents: how do you do this? How do you prepare your kids for this fucked-up world?
* Using this term consciously to mimic the way most of American society refers to “radical Islamists.”
Sorry for the delay in this week’s dollhouse episode. I’ve been a bit busy, and this was a solid episode. Not so world-changing that I had to spend the next three days searching for superlatives, or so incompetent that I was instantly driven to rant. Just solid. I think in some ways it proves that Dollhouse can have solid Engagement of the week episodes, so I was wrong last week.
So for those who haven’t been following dollhouse ratings from the edge of your seats – the news has been all over the place. The episodes were appalling, they were better but still awful, Fox was going to pull it, Fox was committed to making and airing all 13 episodes, Fox had confirmed airdates for the next 5 episodes
Well four days or so after that good news Fox has announced that they’re not airing Dollhouse during sweeps, but instead they’re airing double episodes through December. This means I’m going to be in withdrawl all through November, and also I’m grumpy. If anyone out there has a Nielson box, the offer is still on for a very small bribe.
There’s something that gets bandied about a lot in workshops when people are talking to newbies. “You don’t have to kill your characters to up the stakes,” they say. “There are worse things that can happen to people than death.”
This is… well, I don’t know if it’s true, as stated. But there are certainly many things that are more fictionally interesting than death (in most cases) that one can do to one’s characters.
The art of character torture is one that all writers need to master. For those writers who wuv their characters, it can be a hard thing to force them into dangerous situations, to push them to emotional brinks, and to take away the things they love. For others of us who are more cold-hearted, character torture can be a fun way to pass the time. When I was in college, I used to spend hours with a friend of mine plotting ways we could torture our characters.
To torture your character effectively you have to really understand them. You have to know what their fears are so that you can force them to face those fears. You have to know what they love so that you can take it away. If your character has a deftly, deeply created psychology, then you can accomplish subtle and fascinating things by forcing them to face the things that they, personally, don’t want to face, instead of just forcing them to come up against the problems that scare everyone.
To use TV as an example, if you really want to torture Monk (or Felix Unger from the Odd Couple), you make him use a port-a-potty. If you really want to bother House (or Sherlock Holmes), you make him face a problem he can’t solve.
Those are big, bold characters with big, bold problems, but it applies to subtler characterization, too. It’s a little harder to find cultural touchstones to tap into here, but literature is full of moments where a character is crushed because of a seemingly small event that symbolizes a great deal more to them because of their history.
Now, if you wanted to push these characters’ buttons, you could do it with less subtle devices. They all fear death. None of them want to see their family members killed. But good characterization gives you more than one tool with which to up the stakes for your characters — not just the hammer that you can use to devastate any character, but also all the little pincers and hot irons that are tailored to your character specifically.
However, when I see this advice handed out in workshops, I usually see it being invoked in an ableist way. “Your character doesn’t have to lose his life to show he’s sacrificed to show that he’s lost something. There are other things you can do that are even worse. You can…”
And here comes the ableist parade: You could mutilate him. He could lose his arm. He could lose his legs. He could become disabled.
Now, I’m not going to argue that becoming disabled isn’t a bad thing for most characters who start out abled. Losing an ability that you used to have is no fun. But you know what it isn’t? Worse than death. Being disabled is not worse than death.
Yet I know I’ve sat in workshops where these statements were made, and I nodded along, and I probably even repeated the sentiment (hopefully not to students, but I certainly don’t remember every thing I’ve ever said in class). It wasn’t until I was sitting here, thinking about ableism, that suddenly an old piece of criticism someone gave me on a story drifted into my mind — he has to lose something, maybe you could have someone cut off his arm — that I realized: Oh, hello ableism. How are you today?
I know that writers have different techniques for writing, and so I wouldn’t submit this as being proscriptive for everyone. But I’d like to ask people, including myself, to think about what it would be like if we removed disability from the list of things that we can use to torture any generic character with, the things like death, and losing family members.
It would still be a tool we could use when we wanted to torture a character whose psychology made them specifically susceptible to fears of being disabled — doctors who pride themselves on being able to cure everything and can’t deal with their disability because it’s a constant reminder of their failure to do so (to bring us back to House), but also piano players who fear losing their manual dexterity, athletes whose careers are built on being able to run, or even just people who are really ableist.
What would it be like if disability was portrayed as something that specific people feared for specific reasons, rather than being used as something unilaterally feared and reviled?
There was a blowup in the feminist blogosphere recently on the lack of intersectional recognition and dealing with disability. I’ve have not been following it as well as I should have, but one of the posts I read mentioned FWD/Forward In it’s About section, the contributors explain their mission:
FWD/Forward is a group blog written by feminists with disabilities. It is a place to discuss disability issues and the intersection between feminism and disability rights activism. The content here ranges from basic information which is designed to introduce people who are new to disability issues or feminism to some core concepts, to more advanced topics, with the goal of promoting discussion, conversation, fellowship, and education.
This site does not claim to speak for all feminists with disabilities. However, we are trying to cultivate a broad perspective which incorporates as many experiences and viewpoints as possible. We have attempted to assemble a diverse team of contributors with a broad spectrum of disabilities who come from different cultural, racial, religious, and class backgrounds, as well as age groups, and we welcome contributions such as guest posts, suggestions for article topics, and engagement in the comments from people interested in disability issues, disability feminism, and related topics, especially if those contributions will broaden our perspective.MORE
I learned a lot and I think that lots of people could too. Which is why I am highlighting this blog specifically. And I encourage you all to go there and read everything else, cause what I linked is but a fraction of the stuff there.
One of the more bizarre sub-plots from the bizarre story that is the faked balloon voyage of Falcon Heene is the YouTube video in which Falcon and his brothers claimed to be “not pussified.”
It’s a lovely video about how three young boys aren’t being “pussified,” and also, how they hate gay people. Hard to see how a family where dad has his children opine about how much they don’t want to be girls could go wrong, and so surprising that there have been, at the very least, allegations of domestic abuse against Richard Heene, the boys’ father.
Now obviously, this video is all about hating on the soi disant “feminizing” of American men, but it was the title of it — “Not Pussified” — that caught my eye. Because that links Heene back to one of the great moments in blog history.
I don’t know that Heene read du Toit’s screed, but it seems pretty likely. At the very least, he picked up the word pussified from one du Toit’s readers, and then cheerfully passed it along to his sons. And that says something — for du Toit’s ideals are, to be blunt, awful.
The essay really should be read by anyone seeking to understand the mind of someone like Richard Heene, although I caution that it should not be read without a vomit bag by one’s side. It can’t be summarized, but here are a few choice passages:
We have become a nation of women.
It wasn’t always this way, of course. There was a time when men put their signatures to a document, knowing full well that this single act would result in their execution if captured, and in the forfeiture of their property to the State. Their wives and children would be turned out by the soldiers, and their farms and businesses most probably given to someone who didn’t sign the document.
[Several other examples of manly manliness deleted]
There was even a time when a President of the United States threatened to punch a man in the face and kick him in the balls, because the man had the temerity to say bad things about the President’s daughter’s singing.
We’re not like that anymore.
Quick interjection — du Toit is from South Africa. Yes, he now lives in America; still, I can’t help reading this and thinking, “who are you calling ‘we?’”
Now, little boys in grade school are suspended for playing cowboys and Indians, cops and crooks, and all the other familiar variations of “good guy vs. bad guy” that helped them learn, at an early age, what it was like to have decent men hunt you down, because you were a lawbreaker.
Now, men are taught that violence is bad—that when a thief breaks into your house, or threatens you in the street, that the proper way to deal with this is to “give him what he wants”, instead of taking a horsewhip to the rascal or shooting him dead where he stands.
[Several paragraphs of "proof" that modern men are weaklings deleted]
And finally, our President, who happens to have been a qualified fighter pilot, lands on an aircraft carrier wearing a flight suit, and is immediately dismissed with words like “swaggering”, “macho” and the favorite epithet of Euro girly-men, “cowboy”. Of course he was bound to get that reaction—and most especially from the Press in Europe, because the process of male pussification Over There is almost complete.
How did we get to this?
Remember, this was back in 2003, when our President was at his apex of manliness. Still, it says something that du Toit was swooning at the Mission Accomplished landing, doesn’t it?
In the first instance, what we have to understand is that America is first and foremost, a culture dominated by one figure: Mother. It wasn’t always so: there was a time when it was Father who ruled the home, worked at his job, and voted.
But in the twentieth century, women became more and more involved in the body politic, and in industry, and in the media—and mostly, this has not been a good thing. When women got the vote, it was inevitable that government was going to become more powerful, more intrusive, and more “protective” (ie. more coddling), because women are hard-wired to treasure security more than uncertainty and danger. It was therefore inevitable that their feminine influence on politics was going to emphasize (lowercase “s”) social security.
Yes, ladies — it’s your fault! Your fault that men no longer fight duels! Your fault that we no longer engage in fisticuffs, or drink until our livers explode! Blast you, and your belief that maybe it’s okay if drunken bar fights are not a daily occurrence in one’s life!
Kim du Toit whines for several more paragraphs about how television commercials show men as big doofuses, and therefore women are castrating bitches who deserve to be lonely (no, seriously: “What this guy is going to do is smile ruefully, finish his cereal, and then go and fuck his secretary, who doesn’t try to cut his balls off on a daily basis. Then, when the affair is discovered, people are going to rally around the castrating bitch called his wife, and call him all sorts of names. He’ll lose custody of his kids, and they will be brought up by our ultimate modern-day figure of sympathy: The Single Mom. You know what? Some women deserve to be single moms.”) and ranting about Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (”A bunch of homosexuals trying to “improve” ordinary men into something “better” [ie. more acceptable to women]: changing the guy’s clothes, his home decor, his music—for fuck’s sake, what kind of girly-man would allow these simpering butt-bandits to change his life around?”) and embracing misandry (”Yes, the men are, by and large, slobs. Big fucking deal. Last time I looked, that’s normal. Men are slobs, and that only changes when women try to civilize them by marriage. That’s the natural order of things.”) Oh, and also supporting sports like dog- and cock-fighting. And claiming that George W. Bush is a real man who doesn’t have to prove it. And making racist statements. And then comes perhaps the most asinine four paragraphs ever written in the English language.
Speaking of rap music, do you want to know why more White boys buy that crap than Black boys do? You know why rape is such a problem on college campuses? Why binge drinking is a problem among college freshmen?
It’s a reaction: a reaction against being pussified. And I understand it, completely. Young males are aggressive, they do fight amongst themselves, they are destructive, and all this does happen for a purpose.
Because only the strong men propagate.
And women know it. You want to know why I know this to be true? Because powerful men still attract women. Women, even liberal women, swooned over George Bush in a naval aviator’s uniform. Donald Trump still gets access to some of the most beautiful pussy available, despite looking like a medieval gargoyle. Donald Rumsfeld, if he wanted to, could fuck 90% of all women over 50 if he wanted to, and a goodly portion of younger ones too.
This is what Kim du Toit called for: the manliness of Donald Rumsfeld, and the condoning of rape — for rape is understandable, given how mean women are. And only the strong propagate — those strong enough to take by force what is not given.
That is what manhood is to men like this. Compare with the “pussification” seen by sneering troglodytes like Heene and du Toit: men taking responsibility for themselves. Choosing to think before acting, talk before fighting. Picking up the floor, maybe washing the dishes. Cleaning ourselves. Not putting our children heedlessly into harm’s way. Behaving, in short, like civilized human beings are supposed to.
It does not surprise me that a man who would raise his sons to declare that they weren’t going to be pussified would be the same kind of man who would beat his wife. Would be the same kind of man who would use his children to get ahead. Would be the same kind of man who would commit several felonies, and lie to the police, in a vain effort to get on television. It doesn’t surprise me at all, because the kind of man du Toit praised, and the kind of man Heene claimed to be, is at heart a narcissist, far more interested in himself than anyone else in the world, far more willing to risk himself and his family than to change course and admit fault. If the pussification of the Western male means fewer men like Heene and du Toit, then all I can say is that we can’t get pussified fast enough.
