Why do I get so irrationally angry at all these "poor men" threads?

Orm, the question I'd ask is who is getting to decide what counts as 'the common good' in any given society on a particular issue.

If you read Rudyard Kipling's 'The White Man's Burden' he makes colonialism sound like it's for the common good of the colonised.

So I'm passionately interested in social justice but always sceptically assessing claims about what counts as 'the common good'? Does that make sense.

Literature is worth teaching because it has the power to defamiliarise reader's habitual assumptions. Fiction can be an escape from reality but at its best it encourages a better engagement with it.

Rape, sexual abuse, incest: all these issues crop up when I teach, inside the covers of the books I teach and through the life experiences of the people I'm teaching. What turns up in the fiction often gives people permission to talk about what they have found unspeakable in their lives ... That to me is profoundly powerful.

"Well they're going to hear a fuck of a lot of sexism growing up from the world around them, so explaining the problem in an appropriate way for your child is probably fairly important."

And how do you suggest this is done? This is what I'm not getting here. Tell me how rather than they why? How do you give a boy the message that Men oppress Women without impinging on his self-identity in an unhelpful way? Do you have a concrete example? What language would you use to 'explain the problem in an appropriate way' with a five year old? a ten year old?

Surely you can discuss behaviour in the abstract without gendering it? Surely this is preferable and less limiting for both girls and boys? (Please don't come back at me with rape, as I won't be discussing this with either a five or a ten year old).

I have hardly any recollection of any of the contemporary literature because I found it really boring. I vaguely remember writing an essay about the male gaze in Surfacing by Margaret Atwood. I certainly wrote an essay about male gaze in Chaucer's A Knight's Tale and one about Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. God knows who the critics were, at this stage.

I suppose I have a problem with the absolutism of 'Men oppress women'. Yes, of course, 'Men' do.. but not all men do and while I appreciate the subtle distinction you make between a socially constructed masculinity and the mere fact of maleness, I wouldn't be comfortable making statements like 'men oppress women' around either a male or female child.

I wouldn't be comfortable with any statement, or position, that implies an 'all'. As a word, "men" is a collective noun, a noun which implies membership by any individual that fits the category. If I say 'men oppress women' in conversation to my son or any future daughter, I am implying heavily that it is a fact that all men oppress all women. It is very difficult to do that without disrespecting the men who do NOT oppress women (which is the type of man I would be trying to raise). Therefore I am presenting male oppression as a necessity, a fact.

This is all very different to teaching a son or a daughter that it is outrageously wrong that, say, abuse was covered up in the churches or that a rapist in Ireland was met with handshakes from community members on his sentencing, or that female genital mutilation is wrong, or that it is wrong that there is a gender based pay gap or or or

but

I do believe that to say 'men oppress women' is disrespectful to both genders. It casts all men as oppressors and all women as victims. I don't think that challenges the status quo, sorry. I think it suggests there is no choice.

Also, with my other hat on, children's understanding of language takes a long, long time to develop sophistication and nuance. I would not want any child of mine to so much as overhear me talk about 'men' and 'women' in these terms, as cognitively and linguistically it will assume a different and potentially damaging meaning.

"Patriarchy submerges itself but advances its cause under the namechanges of 'reason' and 'the common good' ... "

Is there no such thing as the common good then? Or is it simply irrelevant to feminists?

I guess it was contemporary 15 years ago!

I cross posted on the sons - but I think it's a bit simplistic to say that you can teach a son respect for women while simultaneously equating maleness/masculinity with subjugation, dominance, power hunger etc.

When I say I believe in postmodernism or in masculinities, I mean - very truthfully - that I don't believe there is one way of being masculine, or that men and women need to ascribe to the dominant cultural stereotype, that there is choice. So I am saying that I do believe that gender is socially constructed. But if, as a mother, I talk a lot about men as oppressors of women, I will pass the message to my son that women believe men oppress them. That is problematic. I can talk on about respect all I want, but actually, I need to respect my son's maleness if I want him to respect my (and other women's) femaleness. I don't think it's adequate to teach him how to respect women. In the same way, I don't think it would be right to teach a daughter to disrespect men. So ergo, I have to make a distinction between a patriarchal male stereotype and the fact of being male. If I've read RedLentil accurately, I need to adopt a strategic essentialism.

By the way, when I refer to social gaze, I am referring to the human ability to track where the eyes of another human being are looking and infer from that what they are referring to or thinking about, which is closely linked to emergent language (among a whole host of other things!). It is an aspect of the child development literature and has nothing to do with cultural or feminist theory! I was highlighting that I chose the scientific study of actual gaze over an academic cultural construct. It was meant to illustrate my lack of contact with cultural theory over the last ten years!

Patriarchy submerges itself but advances its cause under the namechanges of 'reason' and 'the common good' ...

I'm well aware of Butler's views on McKinnon and Dworkin.

I'd like to see them more widely read because I like to have lots of different views circulating and being given room to breathe when I'm helping people to learn. If a student puts me in a position where I have to revise my own assumptions, that's a good day's work done by all. But of course academic feminism is only 'academic'. I find Butler works well with students because it gives them a sense that they can intervene wherever and whenever to dislodge the certainties about men, women, boys and girls that their friends and families pass off as truth.

There are two women I know well on a regular thread here who frequently mention men 'allowing' them or not 'allowing' them to make basic decisions about their real lives. I suspect everyone on this thread would be prepared to speak up on that, and on some or all of the assumptions isnt rightly drew our attention to, Foucault or no Foucault.

Dittany, you are reading far too much into my questions. I've tried to be explicit about my part in this discussion as, more or less at this point in my life, a novice to feminist theory. I've also been clear that my questions were for my own learning: a bit Socratic, I guess?

Maybe I should make this clearer: I did a course on Cultural and Critical Theory about 15 years ago in my first year of university that included a few lectures on various critical theorists. Like many first year university students, I didn't attend all my lectures.. So I have a vague, hazy memory of various moments/ideas/arguments that made some sort of sense to me in guiding my responses to literature. Over the course of my undergraduate 'career', I veered further and further away from contemporary literature because endless analysis of the male gaze didn't interest me. I felt it was divorced from reality, lacking in anything authentic or real. Empty. I could argue the toss and I graduated first in my class because I could do so quite convincingly. But it all seemed hollow and I wanted to work with the living, not the dead. So I changed tack and trained as a speech and language therapist. For the last ten years or so, my academic interests have been influenced by analysis of gender only in so far as boys with communication disorders outnumber girls 4:1. My specific academic have been in very specific aspects of human communication e.g. the development of social gaze vs the male gaze. So I have, as I said above, no real agenda in relation to this. It is something quite new to me, there are bits of theory it is dredging up from the recesses of my memory, but these are not deeply held convictions. I am hypothesis-testing, there is no prejudice as that would involve pre-judging.

My real question is summed up by RedLentil above:
"But could you in turn answer the question about how you would help a son work towards a fulfilling identity, one coterminous with the feminist beliefs we broadly share?"

Dittany, my point about essentialist feminism was poorly expressed: I too came to feminist consciousness reading Dworkin and McKinnon and would be delighted if they were more widely read.

Your claim that there is only one masculinity draws on that branch of feminism, whereas mine would be on the Judith Butler side of things ...

My work tends to be focused on identifying moments when patriarchy fails to endorse its claims to be self-identical and immoveable (Here at the moment the patriarchal church and state are officially identical in purpose and mutually reinforcing. In reality their alliance is a backroom deal all about clinging on to power: the Taoiseach is currently performing a painful, contorted and evidently legalistic dance to avoid calling the Church on child abuse. The inadvertent effect is to cause public fury, and generate public pressure for priests and politicians to be legally separated.) So for me, it is important politically not to argue that all men are successfully engaged in supporting a fully-functioning patriarchy. If I was involved in a debate about rape or domestic violence with my students, I'd be much more likely to use those broad-stroke claims. My aim would always be to use relevant strategies to put patriarchy under pressure.

I agree to some extent that the earlier writers aren't taught because what they say is unpalatable to a male-dominated academy.

But could you in turn answer the question about how you would help a son work towards a fulfilling identity, one coterminous with the feminist beliefs we broadly share?

I wasn't actually saying that, I stated it but was asking a question - rhetorically so to speak.

You know, dittany, your tone towards me seems really quite aggressive and patronising. I find that quite interesting. I've been quite clear that I am only arguing from the point of view of challenging my own perceptions - devil's advocate style - and that I'm a bit out of touch with all of this. RedLentil and Morloth have broken it down on the basis of this: I am sensing you feel more affronted by questions.

The reason I challenged the point about Foucault was that, at the point I mentioned him, you made an assumption about my education. Not because I have any issue whatsoever with the need for female thinkers to be better represented.

I was actually asking genuinely e.g. is it viewed as 'non-feminist' to cite a male thinker etc.

Femininity is not a group at all - it is a set of character traits. Women are a minority group.

problem is if you want equal prominence to female thinkers, that the majority of the greatest thinkers have been men (not for any better reason than they are the ones who have had the opportunities - after all, if Xanthippe had anything to say about the nature of things, it sure as hell didn't make Platos final cut..)

Interestingly theories about what people are either being innate/learned pre-date the Greeks...i always go for a bit of both myself. no point denying women/men are diferent - however here is a great deal of mileage in getting fair tratment for individuals...

You'd hope to see the balance turning round...however i don't think it great if women only get mentioned WRT womens issues - femininity is not a minority group!

Men's claim to victimhood is a straight attempt to re-assert patriarchy. No question about that.

isnt: the argument about 'socially constructed' gender roles is roughly this ...
Gender roles at any given time in any given society are so tightly constructed and reinforced that they appear in fact to be real, natural and immoveable.

Feminists who think gender roles are not 'naturally' fixed begin to think about the ways in which this apparently immoveable and harmful set of roles can be dislodged, unpicked, destabilised etc.

The danger is that we descend as Dittany suggests into a moral relativism where patriarchy, having being identified, simply refuses to stay and fight fair. It disperses itself through 'masculinities' so many and varied that feminist energy is diffused and defused. Patriarchy remains.

That danger is quite real and there are plenty so-called feminists in the academy and outsdie it who are playing happily into this trap.

But essentialism is a trap too: the belief that men are naturally dominant means that women will always be disadvantaged and sets all feminist practice as doomed to fail anyway.

But the discovery that gender roles are socially constructed rather than fixed does not have to provide a dead-end to feminist practice.

We can still use the notion of men (collective group with shared interests, characteristics etc) and women (ditto) when it suits us politically: to pull women together, using a 'strategic essentialism' of the kind Spivak talks about.

What doesn't help women is real essentialism of the kind that leaves a son unguided and unsupported in his bid to establish a gender identity that is genuinely positive.

Joanna Bourke's work on masculinity and war is very interesting by the way ...