To Oppose Patriarchy: It's Different For Men
My radical feminist colleagues sometimes wonder why, since I'm claiming to be one of them, I use so much of the rhetoric of the gender activists, especially laying claim to a gender other than "man" for myself.
It's not how they are doing feminism. They reject a bucketload of gendered assumptions, roles, stereotypes, etc that are projected onto women in this society, but they still identify as women. Why, they ask, am I not approaching the matter the way they do?
Oh, and before anyone on my gender boards asks why I concern myself with the views of transgender-exclusive people at all, let me clarify that this question comes up among radical feminist women who are not opposed to the recognition of transgender people -- they just don't see the act, or the fact, of being transgender as being a feminist behavior in and of itself. Any more than it's an anti-racist or a disabilities-rights act.
Overall, I think women are much better at realizing how the world appears from a male perspective, and knowing a lot of the particulars of male experience, than men tend to be about incorporating women's views. This is true because the male experience is amplified and projected, and because women's safety and survival has often depended on understanding men. But be all that as it may, this is one area where those parameters don't apply. I haven't found feminist women to have much understanding of how the feminism terrain looks when you're approaching it as a male person.
• For individual males, there is no significant movement of like-minded males for us to join. I can readily imagine Mary Daly observing that this is a bit like saying the courts should have been lenient and sympathetic with OJ Simpson at his murder trial because, after all, he just lost his wife. Nevertheless, I'm going to cycle back to this point in a minute.
• Power: it's patriarchy after all, and people tend to comprehend women rising up against it, even if they think they shouldn't, even if they think the different roles and spheres of the sexes (etc) is naturally or divinely ordained or whatever. It's less obvious to many people why any male person has a vested interest in dismantling patriarchy or opposing it. So our motives are unclear -- to people in general and specifically to the feminists with whom we might seek to ally ourselves. Will our endeavors still leave us in power? If so, then this male version of "feminism" looks like it's just a parlor game, some superficial gloss. Kind of like lip gloss, you could say.
• Ladies and Women and Men: I think it was either Robin Morgan or Gloria Steinem, relating the story of having a sit-down with a newspaper or magazine's editorial policy board, and explaining why they didn't like them referring to adult female people as "girls" when the equivalent males were always designated as "men".
"So what would you prefer? 'Ladies'?", the editor asked them.
"We practically held our noses and winced. No, definitely not that. That term was polluted with notions of screening out those who aren't ladylike, and notions of narrowly defined behaviors, all that 'act like a lady' crap, you know? 'WOMEN', we told him."
Women was a preferable term because it was inclusive and pretty much stripped down to the biological: one was a woman whether one was a homemaker, a politician, a police officer; a lesbian, an asexual person, a hetersexually active person; maiden, crone, or mom. The matter of including transgender women wasn't on the map at the time of this conversation, but at the moment it seemed like a pretty universal term that would unify all the people that feminists wanted to unify.
The word "Man" does not function as the male equivalent of "Woman", however much the dictionary may say otherwise. It correlates far more closely to the way that "Lady" is used. There is the notion that not all people with the male biological merchandise qualify as men. Instead there are those males who are men and then there are the ones that fall short of that. It's a status to which all members of the relevant sex are assumed to aspire, and success is not so rare that only an elite handful make the grade (although there's some social ambivalence about how many "real men" exist), so everyone is supposed to be caught up in trying to be recognized as one, or to pass as one.
• The Generic: Feminists have long pointed out that "man" is the generic sex in our society, that the male experience is falsely universalized as if it applied to everyone, and that whenever the generic human is posited, that human is automatically sexed as a man. One consequence of this is that feminists could push away the special marked status of being treated as a woman and demand to be regarded as a generic human, with human rights and human privileges (and get accused of trying to be men when they did). But a male person cannot reciprocally push away the gendered assumptions about male people by embracing the generic human, because as males we're already assumed to be the generic human AND because since the special attributes associated with female people are attached only to the special marked value of Woman, they don't get applied along with male-associated characteristics when a male person lays claim to a generic ungendered identity.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, will be released later this year by Sunstone Press, and it describes my experience of setting out to be a women's studies major as a means of joining the feminists.
In the years that followed the period covered in that story, I shifted to the LGBTQIA platform, having already tried to speak as a participant in the feminist platform -- but found that it was not my platform to use. There was space for me to be a supporter, an ally, but not an activist in my own right, speaking for my own reasons and from my own interests and voicing my own political concerns.
Lacking a movement to join as a male person who'd been identified and treated as a non-masculine (i.e., sissy, femme, non-man) male, identity politics by its very nature lets me speak as me without having to speak "for all the guys". Other male people are welcome to join and say "me too" or they can remain Men if they feel correctly and accurately described by the generalizations and social notions thereof. I'm not telling them or the world at large that all of us male folks are unfairly and unpleasantly constrained by the pressures to be masculine and that we all want to be free of it. Instead, I'm establishing a proud and self-affirming identity as one male person who has chosen to embrace what I've been called, because that was my reaction from the start: "Yes, I am like one of the girls, and so? The girls are doing it right, they make sense to me and I don't want to be like you and the other boys!"
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
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Do you counsel young people trying to sort out their gender identity? You should read my book! It's going to add a new entry to your map of possibilities when you interact with your clients!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer Stay tuned for further details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
comments at Dreamwidth -- https://ahunter3.dreamwidth.org/77514.html#comments
It's not how they are doing feminism. They reject a bucketload of gendered assumptions, roles, stereotypes, etc that are projected onto women in this society, but they still identify as women. Why, they ask, am I not approaching the matter the way they do?
Oh, and before anyone on my gender boards asks why I concern myself with the views of transgender-exclusive people at all, let me clarify that this question comes up among radical feminist women who are not opposed to the recognition of transgender people -- they just don't see the act, or the fact, of being transgender as being a feminist behavior in and of itself. Any more than it's an anti-racist or a disabilities-rights act.
Overall, I think women are much better at realizing how the world appears from a male perspective, and knowing a lot of the particulars of male experience, than men tend to be about incorporating women's views. This is true because the male experience is amplified and projected, and because women's safety and survival has often depended on understanding men. But be all that as it may, this is one area where those parameters don't apply. I haven't found feminist women to have much understanding of how the feminism terrain looks when you're approaching it as a male person.
• For individual males, there is no significant movement of like-minded males for us to join. I can readily imagine Mary Daly observing that this is a bit like saying the courts should have been lenient and sympathetic with OJ Simpson at his murder trial because, after all, he just lost his wife. Nevertheless, I'm going to cycle back to this point in a minute.
• Power: it's patriarchy after all, and people tend to comprehend women rising up against it, even if they think they shouldn't, even if they think the different roles and spheres of the sexes (etc) is naturally or divinely ordained or whatever. It's less obvious to many people why any male person has a vested interest in dismantling patriarchy or opposing it. So our motives are unclear -- to people in general and specifically to the feminists with whom we might seek to ally ourselves. Will our endeavors still leave us in power? If so, then this male version of "feminism" looks like it's just a parlor game, some superficial gloss. Kind of like lip gloss, you could say.
• Ladies and Women and Men: I think it was either Robin Morgan or Gloria Steinem, relating the story of having a sit-down with a newspaper or magazine's editorial policy board, and explaining why they didn't like them referring to adult female people as "girls" when the equivalent males were always designated as "men".
"So what would you prefer? 'Ladies'?", the editor asked them.
"We practically held our noses and winced. No, definitely not that. That term was polluted with notions of screening out those who aren't ladylike, and notions of narrowly defined behaviors, all that 'act like a lady' crap, you know? 'WOMEN', we told him."
Women was a preferable term because it was inclusive and pretty much stripped down to the biological: one was a woman whether one was a homemaker, a politician, a police officer; a lesbian, an asexual person, a hetersexually active person; maiden, crone, or mom. The matter of including transgender women wasn't on the map at the time of this conversation, but at the moment it seemed like a pretty universal term that would unify all the people that feminists wanted to unify.
The word "Man" does not function as the male equivalent of "Woman", however much the dictionary may say otherwise. It correlates far more closely to the way that "Lady" is used. There is the notion that not all people with the male biological merchandise qualify as men. Instead there are those males who are men and then there are the ones that fall short of that. It's a status to which all members of the relevant sex are assumed to aspire, and success is not so rare that only an elite handful make the grade (although there's some social ambivalence about how many "real men" exist), so everyone is supposed to be caught up in trying to be recognized as one, or to pass as one.
• The Generic: Feminists have long pointed out that "man" is the generic sex in our society, that the male experience is falsely universalized as if it applied to everyone, and that whenever the generic human is posited, that human is automatically sexed as a man. One consequence of this is that feminists could push away the special marked status of being treated as a woman and demand to be regarded as a generic human, with human rights and human privileges (and get accused of trying to be men when they did). But a male person cannot reciprocally push away the gendered assumptions about male people by embracing the generic human, because as males we're already assumed to be the generic human AND because since the special attributes associated with female people are attached only to the special marked value of Woman, they don't get applied along with male-associated characteristics when a male person lays claim to a generic ungendered identity.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, will be released later this year by Sunstone Press, and it describes my experience of setting out to be a women's studies major as a means of joining the feminists.
In the years that followed the period covered in that story, I shifted to the LGBTQIA platform, having already tried to speak as a participant in the feminist platform -- but found that it was not my platform to use. There was space for me to be a supporter, an ally, but not an activist in my own right, speaking for my own reasons and from my own interests and voicing my own political concerns.
Lacking a movement to join as a male person who'd been identified and treated as a non-masculine (i.e., sissy, femme, non-man) male, identity politics by its very nature lets me speak as me without having to speak "for all the guys". Other male people are welcome to join and say "me too" or they can remain Men if they feel correctly and accurately described by the generalizations and social notions thereof. I'm not telling them or the world at large that all of us male folks are unfairly and unpleasantly constrained by the pressures to be masculine and that we all want to be free of it. Instead, I'm establishing a proud and self-affirming identity as one male person who has chosen to embrace what I've been called, because that was my reaction from the start: "Yes, I am like one of the girls, and so? The girls are doing it right, they make sense to me and I don't want to be like you and the other boys!"
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
-------
Do you counsel young people trying to sort out their gender identity? You should read my book! It's going to add a new entry to your map of possibilities when you interact with your clients!
My book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, has been published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, is also being published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer Stay tuned for further details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts
comments at Dreamwidth -- https://ahunter3.dreamwidth.org/77514.html#comments