chauvinist campfirelostcosmonautAugust 26 2012, 19:50:34 UTC
well, all right, you and I haven't talked about feminism per se -- or even defined it for purposes of our discussion -- so it's understandable for you to think that I'm not a de facto anti-feminist and that what I'm actually objecting to is watchdog-ism and general knee-jerkery. Fair enough
However, that assumption is actually th most common reaction of (American) feminists when I say I'm not a feminist. It's as if it simply doesn't compute. "Mario, you're a good guy, you're not dumb, surely you don't mean to say you don't believe in the radical notion that women are people!"
Instead of enumerating my beliefs in convenient bites, let me tell you a story, because that is th best way of practicing what I preached. My best friend is a girl. I have five best friends, but th #1 one is a girl, S., and she is th funniest one of th five. Five years ago I went on a trans-American road trip w/ her and one other girl (K., who is also one of th world's funniest people) and one of my other best friends (R., who is male and also funny, though generally not as funny as th two girls). Either none of us had ever gone to Cracker Barrel before, or @ least one of us had never gone to Cracker Barrel; one day for lunch, one of us insisted that we stop there and find out what Cracker Barrel was all about. We were all extremely hungry, and when th steaming gravy-covered biscuits came out, it was such a cathartic moment that K. reached her hand out to invite a high five from me. I had neglected to brief anyone before th trip that I do not high-five females, and, caught unprepared, I blurted,
"I don't do that." "Don't do what?" "High-five yr kind."
K., slightly embarrassed, w/drew her hand as I offered up some gay-ass apologies that served only to deepen everyone's embarrassment. She excused herself to th restroom, and our meal was eaten in near silence. Later in th car, S. gave me th what-for about th stupidity of it all, accusing me of willful neuroticism. I had no rational rejoinder and had to fall back on th one irreducible emotional truth of th matter: high-fiving girls "just doesn't feel right"
This character trait (character flaw to you, perhaps) has become something of a running joke to my female friends, who have made a point of high-fiving one another conspicuously in my face, or posting pictures of girls high-fiving in my comments section, or trying to catch me unawares w/ a trick high-five, etc. There was once even a Flickr group that one of them started that was devoted to female and mixed-gender high-fiving
Th truth has become apparent: th reason it doesn't "feel right" -- besides th fact that girls always do it wrong -- is that to me th high-five symbolically affirms th bond between men -- macho men who dunk basketballs, shoot deer, rate her tits on a scale of 1 to 10, and do their own car repairs. Which also explains why exchanging a high five w/ my less 'masculine' male friends also 'feels wrong'
Of course ultimately this is a trivial matter, but it ought be be enough proof to you that I don't view women and men as equal. It is proof to me, @ least, that even if I don't view women exclusively as sexual beings, that may well be how I view them first and foremost
If our conversation can remain cordial after this revelation, it will be a credit to you. However, as ever, flames aren't disallowed
--mza.
P.S. ah don't bother clicking on Gawker, Jezebel, or Olbermann anymore, and don't know who Schultz is. My counter-outrage is mainly directed @ my own FB friends & acquaintances, and indirectly th various media outlets who fuel them (which seems to be practically all popular media)
P.P.S. glad you liked that blog link. I'm curious to read more from her but am already overloaded w/ favourites
Th truth has become apparent: th reason it doesn't "feel right" -- besides th fact that girls always do it wrong -- is that to me th high-five symbolically affirms th bond between men -- macho men who dunk basketballs, shoot deer, rate her tits on a scale of 1 to 10, and do their own car repairs. Which also explains why exchanging a high five w/ my less 'masculine' male friends also 'feels wrong'
oh i get it now. you're telling me you're gay.
(wakka wakka)
seriously though, i don't see how this makes you a "de-facto anti-feminist." it seems more like you're aware that you've got a natural tendency to instinctively view women through the goggles of lust. which doesn't strike me as particularly unusual. i'm probably guilty of that as well (at least when introduced to women i find attractive - if there's anything chauvinist about your confession, it's that it implicitly aligns "women" with "attractive women," which only tells part of the story). this is kinda why i'm reluctant to refer to myself as a "male feminist" or whatever. whenever i hear a dude say "i'm a feminist too!", it always sounds like they're waiting for someone to applaud them and throw a herring into their mouth. it's like calling yourself "post-racial" - the assumption that you've overcome a prejudice is the proof that you haven't.
but all our caveman instincts are only the starting point of interacting with people, right? if all we wanted was to fuck women and run off to our bros for a game of fantasy football, we'd be a lot less needy, possessive, neurotic and emo. gender shit is messy by definition. and obviously, you've managed to still maintain friendships with the downtrodden high-five-less ladies of your inner circle... and you haven't signed up for pick-up-courses with mystery yet, so i'm not sure that "macho men who dunk basketballs, shoot deer, rate her tits on a scale of 1 to 10, and do their own car repairs" are necessarily your only homiez left. i mean, you're discussing this with ME for christ's sake.
BTW, ed schultz is the newest liberal MSNBC windbag. don't google him, he's a douche.
meat and motionlostcosmonautAugust 27 2012, 14:59:01 UTC
dan Schank, I haven't got another story ready, you'll just have to trust for now that my RL sexism has little to do w/ conflating attractive and unattractive women. They're all non-high-fiveable to me, yes, but th rules of interaction otherwise are so different that they might as well be separate species. Oddly enough, though, success w/ attractive women (by chauvinist male standards) absolutely depends on being able to trick yr own brain into seeing attractive women as unattractive or @ least plain. It makes that instinctual nervousness go away, which lets you talk and act like a normal human being instead of being that shifty, stuttering, hard-trying Michael Cera type who scores w/ hot chicks in movies only through liberal application of male fantasy. And yes, I did learn that from Mystery -- never took a course, but that Neil Strauss book was full of insights of that nature
Yes caveman stuff is only th bones, and th meat we put on them is what makes culture powerful and interesting. Every day of th human world can be visualized as billions of skeletons negotiating w/ one another as to what meat goes where. But just as bones don't allow our knees to bend both forwards and backwards (w/o serious crippling injury), so caveman stuff is negotiable only so far before something breaks and there's a push-back. Look @ China, where they love male babbies so much that they let sex-selective abortion get out of control. Now they've got 20 million lonely, backed-up Chinamen w/ nowhere to put their meat. That's a lot of misery created through purely cultural means
Don't get me wrong. There's no "invisible hand" of th sexual market that will auto-correct for cultural excesses. Humans are v. talented @ adapting to shitty circumstances via technology & general resourcefulness. China might perfect th sexbot in th near future, out of necessity; or (more likely in my mind) Japan will perfect th sexbot and export it en masse to China. And den sexbots will be th new cultural excess that threatens th stability of th sexual market. Failing all else, we're also quite talented @ being & staying miserable, and not resisting all th shit culture crams down our throats. As Adam Curtis so eloquently argued in All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (echoing Herzog's offhand comments in Burden of Dreams), in ecological systems it could be that there's no fucking equilibrium, just CHAOS followed by more CHAOS
I've made peace w/ chaos easily -- it's a strength & weakness of my breed. But we flippies are also fatal optimists, and for me this means I will always favor th kind of chaos that makes me & th people around me happiest, even if that means erring on th side of a caveman worldview
--mza.
P.S. right now my demand for macho homiez far outstrips supply. However for a self-professed non-macho-man & feminist sympathizer, you are an outstanding Internet homie. It's too bad we don't live in th same town
P.P.S. think ah just got to th part you were talking about in Battlestar where it started to shit its pants: Starbuck/Apollo boxing match, right?!
Essentialism isn't necessarily antithetic to feminism. (If you can even refer to one monolithic entity that counts as the body of feminism, entire.)
I can continue to love and respect you, no matter what views you express on this topic, and am happy to pull out all my old, dusty women's studies larnin', if this conversation grows legs.
My comment may belong somewhere else in the world of threaded comments, but mostly I want to say that you are my internet touchstone - I feel like you have been the bridge from then to now (for which I feel I owe you a debt of gratitude) - and as someone else in the friend-loneliness of a "new" place, I hope that we can all find places for our roots to grow. Community gardens, this old eljay patch, real life, whatever.
pattern recognition is importantlostcosmonautAugust 27 2012, 15:41:00 UTC
anti-essentialism rose to prominence well after I'd graduated from college and lost all interest in academic jargon, but ah get th gist -- no treating wide swaths of humanity as monolithic, no ascribing essential traits to those monoliths, no absolute declarations of what is or is not female or "feminine", etc. Ah get th gist, but my view is a more pragmatic one. Whoever recognizes patterns of behaviour across a population and doesn't use that information to make informed guesses about future behaviour is a fool. We all do it, anyhow -- I'm just more willing than average to admit it publicly. And it took me a while to recognize patterns of female behaviour in a way that was useful to me -- I'm nearly 40, and it took a lot of shitty relationships -- a lot of "practice" -- for any of it to make sense to me. Well, that and reading that idiot Mystery's principles of seduction. Yes he's gross, yes he's a v. weird man, but damn it he was th only one to unlock th intricacies of social dynamics in such a way that even idiots could understand it. If Mystery's an idiot, he's certainly an idiot savant
Anyhow my views on sex & race might not be totally incompatible w/ anti-essentialism. My guesses about human behaviour are still guesses, subject to to surprise by individual variation & transcendence
Thank you for yr kind compliment -- still not sure what's gonna happen after lostcosmonaut's done, but I hope to take all of you w/ me to th next place
However, that assumption is actually th most common reaction of (American) feminists when I say I'm not a feminist. It's as if it simply doesn't compute. "Mario, you're a good guy, you're not dumb, surely you don't mean to say you don't believe in the radical notion that women are people!"
Instead of enumerating my beliefs in convenient bites, let me tell you a story, because that is th best way of practicing what I preached. My best friend is a girl. I have five best friends, but th #1 one is a girl, S., and she is th funniest one of th five. Five years ago I went on a trans-American road trip w/ her and one other girl (K., who is also one of th world's funniest people) and one of my other best friends (R., who is male and also funny, though generally not as funny as th two girls). Either none of us had ever gone to Cracker Barrel before, or @ least one of us had never gone to Cracker Barrel; one day for lunch, one of us insisted that we stop there and find out what Cracker Barrel was all about. We were all extremely hungry, and when th steaming gravy-covered biscuits came out, it was such a cathartic moment that K. reached her hand out to invite a high five from me. I had neglected to brief anyone before th trip that I do not high-five females, and, caught unprepared, I blurted,
"I don't do that."
"Don't do what?"
"High-five yr kind."
K., slightly embarrassed, w/drew her hand as I offered up some gay-ass apologies that served only to deepen everyone's embarrassment. She excused herself to th restroom, and our meal was eaten in near silence. Later in th car, S. gave me th what-for about th stupidity of it all, accusing me of willful neuroticism. I had no rational rejoinder and had to fall back on th one irreducible emotional truth of th matter: high-fiving girls "just doesn't feel right"
This character trait (character flaw to you, perhaps) has become something of a running joke to my female friends, who have made a point of high-fiving one another conspicuously in my face, or posting pictures of girls high-fiving in my comments section, or trying to catch me unawares w/ a trick high-five, etc. There was once even a Flickr group that one of them started that was devoted to female and mixed-gender high-fiving
Th truth has become apparent: th reason it doesn't "feel right" -- besides th fact that girls always do it wrong -- is that to me th high-five symbolically affirms th bond between men -- macho men who dunk basketballs, shoot deer, rate her tits on a scale of 1 to 10, and do their own car repairs. Which also explains why exchanging a high five w/ my less 'masculine' male friends also 'feels wrong'
Of course ultimately this is a trivial matter, but it ought be be enough proof to you that I don't view women and men as equal. It is proof to me, @ least, that even if I don't view women exclusively as sexual beings, that may well be how I view them first and foremost
If our conversation can remain cordial after this revelation, it will be a credit to you. However, as ever, flames aren't disallowed
--mza.
P.S. ah don't bother clicking on Gawker, Jezebel, or Olbermann anymore, and don't know who Schultz is. My counter-outrage is mainly directed @ my own FB friends & acquaintances, and indirectly th various media outlets who fuel them (which seems to be practically all popular media)
P.P.S. glad you liked that blog link. I'm curious to read more from her but am already overloaded w/ favourites
Reply
oh i get it now. you're telling me you're gay.
(wakka wakka)
seriously though, i don't see how this makes you a "de-facto anti-feminist." it seems more like you're aware that you've got a natural tendency to instinctively view women through the goggles of lust. which doesn't strike me as particularly unusual. i'm probably guilty of that as well (at least when introduced to women i find attractive - if there's anything chauvinist about your confession, it's that it implicitly aligns "women" with "attractive women," which only tells part of the story). this is kinda why i'm reluctant to refer to myself as a "male feminist" or whatever. whenever i hear a dude say "i'm a feminist too!", it always sounds like they're waiting for someone to applaud them and throw a herring into their mouth. it's like calling yourself "post-racial" - the assumption that you've overcome a prejudice is the proof that you haven't.
but all our caveman instincts are only the starting point of interacting with people, right? if all we wanted was to fuck women and run off to our bros for a game of fantasy football, we'd be a lot less needy, possessive, neurotic and emo. gender shit is messy by definition. and obviously, you've managed to still maintain friendships with the downtrodden high-five-less ladies of your inner circle... and you haven't signed up for pick-up-courses with mystery yet, so i'm not sure that "macho men who dunk basketballs, shoot deer, rate her tits on a scale of 1 to 10, and do their own car repairs" are necessarily your only homiez left. i mean, you're discussing this with ME for christ's sake.
BTW, ed schultz is the newest liberal MSNBC windbag. don't google him, he's a douche.
Reply
Yes caveman stuff is only th bones, and th meat we put on them is what makes culture powerful and interesting. Every day of th human world can be visualized as billions of skeletons negotiating w/ one another as to what meat goes where. But just as bones don't allow our knees to bend both forwards and backwards (w/o serious crippling injury), so caveman stuff is negotiable only so far before something breaks and there's a push-back. Look @ China, where they love male babbies so much that they let sex-selective abortion get out of control. Now they've got 20 million lonely, backed-up Chinamen w/ nowhere to put their meat. That's a lot of misery created through purely cultural means
Don't get me wrong. There's no "invisible hand" of th sexual market that will auto-correct for cultural excesses. Humans are v. talented @ adapting to shitty circumstances via technology & general resourcefulness. China might perfect th sexbot in th near future, out of necessity; or (more likely in my mind) Japan will perfect th sexbot and export it en masse to China. And den sexbots will be th new cultural excess that threatens th stability of th sexual market. Failing all else, we're also quite talented @ being & staying miserable, and not resisting all th shit culture crams down our throats. As Adam Curtis so eloquently argued in All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (echoing Herzog's offhand comments in Burden of Dreams), in ecological systems it could be that there's no fucking equilibrium, just CHAOS followed by more CHAOS
I've made peace w/ chaos easily -- it's a strength & weakness of my breed. But we flippies are also fatal optimists, and for me this means I will always favor th kind of chaos that makes me & th people around me happiest, even if that means erring on th side of a caveman worldview
--mza.
P.S. right now my demand for macho homiez far outstrips supply. However for a self-professed non-macho-man & feminist sympathizer, you are an outstanding Internet homie. It's too bad we don't live in th same town
P.P.S. think ah just got to th part you were talking about in Battlestar where it started to shit its pants: Starbuck/Apollo boxing match, right?!
Reply
I can continue to love and respect you, no matter what views you express on this topic, and am happy to pull out all my old, dusty women's studies larnin', if this conversation grows legs.
My comment may belong somewhere else in the world of threaded comments, but mostly I want to say that you are my internet touchstone - I feel like you have been the bridge from then to now (for which I feel I owe you a debt of gratitude) - and as someone else in the friend-loneliness of a "new" place, I hope that we can all find places for our roots to grow. Community gardens, this old eljay patch, real life, whatever.
Reply
Anyhow my views on sex & race might not be totally incompatible w/ anti-essentialism. My guesses about human behaviour are still guesses, subject to to surprise by individual variation & transcendence
Thank you for yr kind compliment -- still not sure what's gonna happen after lostcosmonaut's done, but I hope to take all of you w/ me to th next place
--mza.
Reply
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