Feminist Rant
A male friend posted an item about radical feminism and women who hate men. I wasn't going to respond, but then I decided I would, but I got too wordy for an LJ comment, so I'm posting here after . . . how many months of no updates? ANYway. . .
When I hear something like "What causes women[. . .]to hate and despise men so vehemently?" my first reaction is to say "3000+ years of oppression" and walk away. However, I'll try to be a little less abrupt here.
I mean, to me, it's bloody obvious. It doesn't mean that I, personally, hate and despise all men (actually, I know hardly anyone who does) but it strikes me as oddly naive to wonder how it could happen.
browngirl 's comments about societal patterns strike me as absolutely spot on. I don't consider myself to be a racist. Frankly, white supremacist attitudes disgust me. But I understand why some people of colour are angry/resentful/pissed-off-at white people in general. We live in a country (talking USA here) where, historically, whites have treated other races horrendously. No, it's not as bad as it once was. No, I may not have personally done much to earn the anger. But inequities still exist. Neo-nazi and skinhead violence as well as garden-variety racism is still out there. And I do still get the benefits of white privilege, even without asking for them. If I don't actively try to work against racism, it's perfectly reasonable for people of colour to regard me as more a part of the problem than a part of the solution, however little I like to think of myself that way.* And even if I do actively try to work against racism, it's still at least understandable that some may see me first as a privileged white person rather than an ally.
Feminist anger is a remarkably parallel case. The big difference is that most women and men live together interdependently in ways that many people of different races do not. Most women grow up with a father or father-figure around; many have brothers. Most straight or bisexual women (and some lesbians) are involved romantically/sexually with a man at some point in their lives. So things get complicated.
Which brings us to that stereotype of the man-hating lesbian feminist. You mentioned that it's a false stereotype and I have to agree. I was a radical feminist in the '70s, and though I'm hardly a radical anything anymore, I have every intention of being a serious feminist for the rest of my life. I've worked and studied and organized with a number of feminists. My experience is that most lesbians I've known are feminists (really, why on earth would they not be?) but not man-haters. For the most part, they don't invest enough emotional energy in men to hate them. Their primary focus is on women-though, of course, as with other women, most of them grew up with fathers and/or brothers and some of them have sons, so it can still get complicated. But I think that, in some cases, lesbians can actually have more comfortable friendships with men than many straight women can.
My experience is that most women (feminist or not) who hate men are straight. They've got that 3000+ years of history thing going and the problem of being attracted to/intimately involved with members of the oppressor class.** It's a volatile combination that can stir up quite a bit of rage. Also, factor in that, historically, it has been husbands and fathers who enforced society's rules on their wives and daughters (although often mothers and sisters or other women have been co-opted to enforce those rules in order to gain male approval). Our most intimate relationships come with a built-in historical power-dynamic that is anything but consensual. And that makes things rough for everyone: male, female, or other.
Saying that "all sex is rape, even the sex within marriage" is carrying things a bit far, it's over-dramatizing (and has the rather unfortunate side effect of tending to trivialize rape by applying the term where it doesn't always fit). But that power-dynamic is still often present, even if not to the extent it once was. It used to be that rape in a marriage was considered legally impossible because to get married was to give permanent consent. A man had a right to have sex with his wife--whether she wanted it or not. When that's the law, it makes rather a mockery of the idea of consent. Were there some men who'd have been horrified at the thought of forcing their wives to have sex when they didn't want to? Sure. Were there women who enjoyed sex with their husbands and had a great time? Sure. But they were lucky. Marriage, as an institution, wasn't about consensual sex. As an institution, it still isn't, really.
We, as a society, have come a long way in the past fifty years, thanks largely to activists of various stripes and their allies, but we're not at the promised land yet. There are still struggles to be waged on a number of fronts. The inequities may, in many cases, not be as obvious to the teens and twenty-somethings of today as they were to the teens and twenty-somethings of thirty, forty, or fifty years ago. But if we fail to notice their existence, we not only will make no further progress, I'm afraid we may lose ground. Therefore, despite the progress made, I respectfully beg to differ with robin_june 's comment about the meme that made itself go extinct. In the words of the bumper-sticker: I'll be post-feminist in the post-patriarchy.
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*And, no, the occasional job I-or any white person-might miss out on because of affirmative action does not balance the systemic privilege we get for being white in this society.
**If your reaction to that is "but I'm not oppressing anyone" I refer you once again to
browngirl 's comment about Person A and Person B. It's a matter of societal patterns, not a personal indictment.