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

[ImSoNotTelling]

In the last couple of days there have been a few threads about how difficult life is for boys, how our whole society is weighted against them, how they are set up to fail academically by a system weighted against them, how they are victims of violence, how no-one takes them seriously.

I understand that a lot of the protagonists on these threads have sons and are naturally worried about how things will play out for them in their lives, That is a given when you have children I think. You also want the best for them, for them to have all the advantages in life.

However this business about men being done down all the time, I just don;t see it.

For every one ad on teh telly with a man being incompetent at cleaning, I see 10 with a man in a sharp suit being successful, with loads of adoring women gazing at him.

I see images of men doing exciting physical activities, being powerful, swishing out of expensive cars, glanching at their expensive watches, exuding authority as they sweep down the road.

Most of our politicians are men, in the papers the vast majority of "experts" consulted are men.

Men will on average earn a lot more money than women over the course of their lifetime, even if the fact that many women go part time is factored out (sorry I've got no links). In fact women on average are earning less than men, in the same jobs, before they have even started their families. In my old industry the women earned 40% less than men.

So are boys and men in our society really having a terrible time, and we need to redress the balance? If we redress the balance, what does that actually mean? What do people who call for this want? For men to earn even more money than women in the same job? For more men to be decision makers?

I just get when I think about just how shit it is for women and girls, still, here and around the world, and yet we are all supposed to ignore that and accept that yes, men have it worse, let's forget abotu the girls (again) and concentrate on making everything even better for men.

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?

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?"

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.

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

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' ... "

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

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.

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.

"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).

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.

How old are your children Mrs Bean? DS is 11 and I think now might be around the time when this kind of thing should be discussed.

When I was 11 there was a girl on the bus who was subject to what my mother at the time referred to as 'horseplay' but was actually, thinking back, serious sexual harrassment. The school took it quite seriously at the time, and I think it could have been prevented if the boys had been talked to in advance about what is really unacceptable behaviour.

Interesting about the 'pot of rights' and how limited resources mean that women should be against anything being done to help boys/men because of it.

That attitude of course justifies every sexist act against women from the dawn of time. Because men could use that same argument equally well. 'There wasn't enough for all so we took it from you'

Arguing for true equality works better than arguing to continue the obscene inequality, but with women on top.

YANBU.

Haven't had time to read the whole thread (Looking forward to it after I've had some sleep) but the phrase "What About The Men?" is so common that it's abbreviated to "WATM?!!" or "Patriarchy Hurts Men Too!" in anti-feminist bingo cards!

The thing is, our cultural dialogue is SO dominated by men's voices telling men's stories about men's experiences that when the focus is on women at all, it just feels wrong and somehow the focus has to shift back on the men or the world is out of kilter. (As a sidenote, this study is interesting. Other studies have been done in university classrooms, where the professors took care to call on exactly equal numbers of male and female students. The students were then surveyed on which gender they thought spoke more. Interestingly, even when girls were called on exactly as much as boys, ALL students thought that the girls were called on "far more" than boys, because the 'default' position is men speaking, women listening.}

I love men very much - there's one rather important one in my house - but it's not my job to solve all men's problems, and feminists aren't required to do that as WELL as work to help women in this deeply unbalanced society. My stock response to "but what about the men?" is "I agree, there's a real problem with masculinity. We need a good strong understanding of what it means to be a man, and how that doesn't mean treating women badly. A lot of feminist men I know are working hard in challenging some of the terrible patriarchal constrictions on masculinity - what are you doing about it?" - that always gets some interesting responses. Often a complete silence. Because I am the one talking about inequality between the sexes, so it's assumed that before I get around to dealing with women's trivial issues, I'll make sure all the men are nice and comfy. Nuh-uh! If genuine equality frightens someone, they need to examine their privileged position in life, and why the system benefits them, and what they ought to do about it.

Finally, and I know this is a bit muddled and I really must sleep, I sincerely believe that gender equality is NOT a zero-sum game. By which I mean, if someone else does better, it doesn't automatically mean I have to do worse. I sincerely believe that when women do better in society (get access to the vote, contraception, workplace equality, public safety...) - society does better. Men doesn't do worse when women know their own minds, have their own money, and determine what happens to their bodies. Most men I know prefer women who are fully realised people. When women and girls do better, everyone does better. Certainly one of the finer things feminism has given the men I know and love is the freedom to have admit to having feelings.

[shrug] I think I might not be making any sense. Time to sleep!

Ahaha! I have just read up a few posts and realised I've barged into a v. different thread than the first 2 pages. Apologies! It seems to have become 'how to talk to your sons about inequality" - which is a very interesting topic and one that might deserve it's own thread.

I remember being talked to about racism, and why racism happens, and why it's very bad - when I was about nine. So it's got to be possible to talk about sexism and why it happens and why it's very bad, to a kid of about that age. After all, most nine year olds have a pretty well developed sense of what's "fair" and what isn't, don't they?

Ugh. Messing up my "Its" and "it's" there. - def. bedtime!

Thanks redlentil - yes I see that. If you fight a war for 'freedom' whose freedom do your mean I guess.

blackcurrant - your second paragraph sums up how I feel about men and feminism. They will benefit by default, because IMO an unbalanced society is an unhealthy society. But you won't get many men to realise that, nor quite a few women because they don't see the inequality. Its so much part of the fabric.

Some of you are going to get tired of explaining things to others of us But it's good to get things clarified. Many thanks.

Blackcurrant, that was a fantastic post.

Mrsbean, I am not speaking for dittany in any way, but: every single feminist conversation I've had online gets hijacked by a known set of objections- often by male commentators, not always. And they include things like twisting arguments to create strawfeminists ('so are you saying that it's just impossible to trust male thinkers') and 'well I think it's unfair to tar all men with the same brush' etc etc. One of the classics is the 'tone argument' - well, you're being very aggressive, if you were just nicer you'd have more allies, no wonder people don't like feminists. Classic silencing tactic.

So in some spaces, and I think especially when you've had these conversations for many years, it does get frustrating. And it's easy to assume that the other person is deliberately twisting arguments to marginalise feminists.

I don't think you are. And I'm hoping dittany doesn't mind me posting this, because I'm coming dangerously close to apologia, but I think maybe that's why the interaction between you has gone this way. I do think you're arguing in good faith, but unfortunately, and almost certainly because you have absorbed a lot of antifeminist canards without realising it, it sounds a lot like the things we're used to hearing in bad faith.

You should all, if you haven't seen it before, follow blackcurrant's Bingo link. Classic, wonderful, Feminism 101 stuff.