Chivalry
People often indicate that they think I'm doing all this in support of other people's social struggles. I'm not.
People often reject or dismiss what I'm saying because they don't regard me as having any authentic social concerns of my own. But I do.
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I'm not doing this for chivalrous reasons, I'm doing it for my own selfish reasons. I vehemently DO NOT WANT the masculinity thing and all that comes with it. When something is being socially forced upon one, and one doesn't bloody want it, and is harassed and tormented and physically beaten for not accepting it and wearing it and conforming to it, you can call it oppression or you can invent a new word for it-I don't care-but YES goddammit I get to complain about it. It's intolerably wrong. It's a social evil.
It is time to tie some sets of concepts together with metaphorical twist-ties.
First, the zero-sum notion of oppression: that wherever oppression exists, there are the oppressed, who suffer, and the oppressors, who benefit. The sense that we care about social justice for the oppressed but we don't have to concern ourselves about the experiences of the oppressors, who are the evil ones.
Second, that masculinity is the basket of characteristics of males, of men, who are the ascendant sex, the oppressors of women. Because this is a patriarchy. What you get when you twist-tie those two notions together is the sense that males cannot be oppressed as males, and masculinity is specifically imposed upon a person on the basis of being male, hence the experience of being expected to be masculine and being harassed and tormented for not being so is "not oppression" and not something a person can authentically complain about. Oh, if we can toss another variable into the analysis, like being gay, well, being gay puts a person into a category that has been oppressed so now we can care about being bashed and hassled for not being a masculine man...as long as we comprehend it as a mistreatment that exists because the victim is gay.
In early January my blog post was about Oppressor Guilt and specifically addressed the notion that oppression benefits oppressors. I asked people to imagine that they were given the option of being one of the oppressors or not having oppression at all:
Join me in this thought experiment. Pretend I have magical wish-granting powers and I offer you this choice: you can either be the alpha oppressor yourself and have hegemony and power over all the other peoples, with all the benefits and luxuries that that entails, or you can live in a world that is totally without oppression, a world of equality and voluntary cooperation. (And no oppressor guilt anywhere to be found).
I could point out that if you choose to be the oppressor, you lose the moral high ground, even if you're only making that choice in a hypothetical scenario. Because then you're essentially saying that your real objection to oppression is that someone who isn't you gets to be the oppressor, and you want to hold that position. But for the second time, that's almost so obvious that it's not interesting. You didn't choose that anyway, did you?
I was co-posting my blog to the Straight Dope back then, and one person on the Dope replied
I would [opt to be an alpha oppressor], in a heartbeat. I know many others who would as well, I'd say probably the majority of the people I know.
Perhaps I should have restricted the question to people who care about social justice. Either way, though, it is necessary to acknowledge that at least some people would prefer an oppression-free world: they would not consider themselves better off as oppressors than they would be if they lived in a world that didn't have oppresion. That's sufficient: oppressors could have real justification for wanting out of the overall situation, for their own selfish non-chivalrous reasons. There is no excuse for trivializing or dismissing their intense desire for a non-oppressive and fair world, if that's their political sentiment, or for deciding that only those who are identified as the oppressed are entitled to complain and to seek change.
My first serious attempt to be a social activist about this sissy-hating coercively masculinizing society took the form of trying to connect with the radical feminists and to join them in seeking a nonsexist world. It made so much sense, so much self-explanatory obvious sense, that I didn't really look into other options. I set off to become a women's studies major in college, and prepared to present my case and explain my personal take on it.
But I was mostly assumed to be there for chivalrous reasons. I found other males who were supportive of women's issues. I went looking for more intense and fervent males who were more wrapped up in it, and found increasingly apologetic males fervently pleading guilty to our part and our participation in perpetuating patriarchy. I interacted with the women, my colleages and my professors, and found a lot of women happy to see men caring about women's issues and a few women who didn't want men to be movers and shakers even in a minor way within their movement. I found some gay rights activists who had connected their oppression with the larger picture called patriarchy. But I did not successfully explain why and how I was here for my own reasons, to contend with the specific things the patriarchy had done unto me.
Chivalry is not popular among feminists. A voiced concern for the fragility of women was used to restrict women from experiences and opportunities, and the various attempts to revere women as having a special and superlative nature led to pedestals and gilded cages. Chivalry is not about equality. It is, if anything, a somewhat fetish-toned fascination and valuing of a noble difference. It can be creepy and objectifying and no matter how effusive the praise for the people in the noble category, it may not benefit them.
The political chivalry of people becoming all wrapped up in seeking social justice for some other downtrodden group is also a little offputting and worrisome, and for that reason many white people in the late 1960s were told that they could not play a large role in black people's struggles, that if their concern were real they should go back to white communities and fix racism there. And with that history already established in American social-justice corridors, the more radical feminists were the least interested in men trying to do leadership things. And even the act of speaking, of putting experiences and concerns into words and defining them as one's issues, is a bit of a leadership thing.
Let's pick another notion to twist-tie into this bundle: the image I've used several times in this blog and elsewhere, of liberal progressive people behaving as if they had been issued a set of index cards with all the categories of marginalized people they need to concern themselves with listed on them. And how abrasively hostile they can be (and historically have been) to folks whose identities aren't (yet) on those cards. What's that all about? Well, there's a difference between that notion that a people should be free from oppression and the notion that a person should be free from any inconveniences or irritations. And face it, not everyone is adept at making a social analysis on their own. But this attitude is also influenced by the notion that there are oppressors afoot, people utterly undeserving of our sympathy because they're getting away with stuff already, as beneficiaries of the oppression of marginalized categories of people they don't belong to. So it's related in a big way to the "Who is Most Oppressed Sweepstakes" phenomenon.
Patriarchy is a social system that intrinsically depends on a masculinizing process. In other words, a social system that is rotten to the core and hurts everyone everywhere is rooted in part in that exact process, of forcing males into this mold. Don't tell me I benefit from what is being forced on me. I'm not politely declining it out of concern for the unfairness of it for other people, I'm selfishing shoving it away from me because I. Don't. Want. It. I'd rather be dead. I would risk hostility and retributional violence for the opportunity to speak against it. I have risked throwing away my entire life by dedicating it to this one single endeavor, making it the purpose of my life. Not because I owe it to the world (I don't) or because I, as a male, wish to make restitution for what my sex has done (even though I do) but because this is personal, this is my vendetta against what was done to me.
Final concept to tie in my twist-tie: repositioning. Saying what I came to say within the context of feminism didn't work because I was perceived (inaccurately) as participating chivalrously. But if one way of explaining my situation to people doesn't work, I find another.
I am genderqueer. The things I describe and make complaints about are things that happen to genderqueer people. It's my own cause, something I care about for my own reasons. Meanwhile, genderqueer people are oppressed as a part of the larger phenomenon called patriarchy. If you oppose patriarchy, consider me an ally. But also consider yourself informed: I have nary a chivalrous bone in my body. I am in this struggle because it is my struggle.
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I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
People often reject or dismiss what I'm saying because they don't regard me as having any authentic social concerns of my own. But I do.
------
I'm not doing this for chivalrous reasons, I'm doing it for my own selfish reasons. I vehemently DO NOT WANT the masculinity thing and all that comes with it. When something is being socially forced upon one, and one doesn't bloody want it, and is harassed and tormented and physically beaten for not accepting it and wearing it and conforming to it, you can call it oppression or you can invent a new word for it-I don't care-but YES goddammit I get to complain about it. It's intolerably wrong. It's a social evil.
It is time to tie some sets of concepts together with metaphorical twist-ties.
First, the zero-sum notion of oppression: that wherever oppression exists, there are the oppressed, who suffer, and the oppressors, who benefit. The sense that we care about social justice for the oppressed but we don't have to concern ourselves about the experiences of the oppressors, who are the evil ones.
Second, that masculinity is the basket of characteristics of males, of men, who are the ascendant sex, the oppressors of women. Because this is a patriarchy. What you get when you twist-tie those two notions together is the sense that males cannot be oppressed as males, and masculinity is specifically imposed upon a person on the basis of being male, hence the experience of being expected to be masculine and being harassed and tormented for not being so is "not oppression" and not something a person can authentically complain about. Oh, if we can toss another variable into the analysis, like being gay, well, being gay puts a person into a category that has been oppressed so now we can care about being bashed and hassled for not being a masculine man...as long as we comprehend it as a mistreatment that exists because the victim is gay.
In early January my blog post was about Oppressor Guilt and specifically addressed the notion that oppression benefits oppressors. I asked people to imagine that they were given the option of being one of the oppressors or not having oppression at all:
Join me in this thought experiment. Pretend I have magical wish-granting powers and I offer you this choice: you can either be the alpha oppressor yourself and have hegemony and power over all the other peoples, with all the benefits and luxuries that that entails, or you can live in a world that is totally without oppression, a world of equality and voluntary cooperation. (And no oppressor guilt anywhere to be found).
I could point out that if you choose to be the oppressor, you lose the moral high ground, even if you're only making that choice in a hypothetical scenario. Because then you're essentially saying that your real objection to oppression is that someone who isn't you gets to be the oppressor, and you want to hold that position. But for the second time, that's almost so obvious that it's not interesting. You didn't choose that anyway, did you?
I was co-posting my blog to the Straight Dope back then, and one person on the Dope replied
I would [opt to be an alpha oppressor], in a heartbeat. I know many others who would as well, I'd say probably the majority of the people I know.
Perhaps I should have restricted the question to people who care about social justice. Either way, though, it is necessary to acknowledge that at least some people would prefer an oppression-free world: they would not consider themselves better off as oppressors than they would be if they lived in a world that didn't have oppresion. That's sufficient: oppressors could have real justification for wanting out of the overall situation, for their own selfish non-chivalrous reasons. There is no excuse for trivializing or dismissing their intense desire for a non-oppressive and fair world, if that's their political sentiment, or for deciding that only those who are identified as the oppressed are entitled to complain and to seek change.
My first serious attempt to be a social activist about this sissy-hating coercively masculinizing society took the form of trying to connect with the radical feminists and to join them in seeking a nonsexist world. It made so much sense, so much self-explanatory obvious sense, that I didn't really look into other options. I set off to become a women's studies major in college, and prepared to present my case and explain my personal take on it.
But I was mostly assumed to be there for chivalrous reasons. I found other males who were supportive of women's issues. I went looking for more intense and fervent males who were more wrapped up in it, and found increasingly apologetic males fervently pleading guilty to our part and our participation in perpetuating patriarchy. I interacted with the women, my colleages and my professors, and found a lot of women happy to see men caring about women's issues and a few women who didn't want men to be movers and shakers even in a minor way within their movement. I found some gay rights activists who had connected their oppression with the larger picture called patriarchy. But I did not successfully explain why and how I was here for my own reasons, to contend with the specific things the patriarchy had done unto me.
Chivalry is not popular among feminists. A voiced concern for the fragility of women was used to restrict women from experiences and opportunities, and the various attempts to revere women as having a special and superlative nature led to pedestals and gilded cages. Chivalry is not about equality. It is, if anything, a somewhat fetish-toned fascination and valuing of a noble difference. It can be creepy and objectifying and no matter how effusive the praise for the people in the noble category, it may not benefit them.
The political chivalry of people becoming all wrapped up in seeking social justice for some other downtrodden group is also a little offputting and worrisome, and for that reason many white people in the late 1960s were told that they could not play a large role in black people's struggles, that if their concern were real they should go back to white communities and fix racism there. And with that history already established in American social-justice corridors, the more radical feminists were the least interested in men trying to do leadership things. And even the act of speaking, of putting experiences and concerns into words and defining them as one's issues, is a bit of a leadership thing.
Let's pick another notion to twist-tie into this bundle: the image I've used several times in this blog and elsewhere, of liberal progressive people behaving as if they had been issued a set of index cards with all the categories of marginalized people they need to concern themselves with listed on them. And how abrasively hostile they can be (and historically have been) to folks whose identities aren't (yet) on those cards. What's that all about? Well, there's a difference between that notion that a people should be free from oppression and the notion that a person should be free from any inconveniences or irritations. And face it, not everyone is adept at making a social analysis on their own. But this attitude is also influenced by the notion that there are oppressors afoot, people utterly undeserving of our sympathy because they're getting away with stuff already, as beneficiaries of the oppression of marginalized categories of people they don't belong to. So it's related in a big way to the "Who is Most Oppressed Sweepstakes" phenomenon.
Patriarchy is a social system that intrinsically depends on a masculinizing process. In other words, a social system that is rotten to the core and hurts everyone everywhere is rooted in part in that exact process, of forcing males into this mold. Don't tell me I benefit from what is being forced on me. I'm not politely declining it out of concern for the unfairness of it for other people, I'm selfishing shoving it away from me because I. Don't. Want. It. I'd rather be dead. I would risk hostility and retributional violence for the opportunity to speak against it. I have risked throwing away my entire life by dedicating it to this one single endeavor, making it the purpose of my life. Not because I owe it to the world (I don't) or because I, as a male, wish to make restitution for what my sex has done (even though I do) but because this is personal, this is my vendetta against what was done to me.
Final concept to tie in my twist-tie: repositioning. Saying what I came to say within the context of feminism didn't work because I was perceived (inaccurately) as participating chivalrously. But if one way of explaining my situation to people doesn't work, I find another.
I am genderqueer. The things I describe and make complaints about are things that happen to genderqueer people. It's my own cause, something I care about for my own reasons. Meanwhile, genderqueer people are oppressed as a part of the larger phenomenon called patriarchy. If you oppose patriarchy, consider me an ally. But also consider yourself informed: I have nary a chivalrous bone in my body. I am in this struggle because it is my struggle.
--------
I am now echoed on DreamWidth, like many other LJ folks. My DW acct is here. Please friend/link me on DW if you are a DreamWidth user.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts