". For someone who has supposedly studied feminist work you don't seem to know much about it or feminists, given all these weird ideas you have about it."
As I've been quite open about, dittany, it was a long time ago and it is a long time since I have discussed any of this.
I want to thank tortoiseonahalfshell for recognising that I am not in any way trying to decry feminism: I don't understand it, really, and I am trying to learn.
I am ill-equipped to discuss it, true, but I am certainly not trying to silence anyone with my arguments. I am trying to open it up, explore the parameters of it, which I fully appreciate is tiring if you've heard it all before. But of course I haven't so can't see it from this angle.. I don't know what you've heard before, or how you've challenged it etc.
The reason that I said I found your tone to me aggressive has nothing to do with feminism. It has to do with the fact that I am telling you, explicitly, that I *don't' 'get it' and you feel that I am trying to subvert your argument and be anti-feminist to win some argument. I don't feel I have an agenda or a side that could 'win' any argument and I don't want it to be a battle. And if gender is socially constructed, well so too is mine: no one is immune to these forces? So if my arguing is clumsy, or even unwittingly anti-feminist, it's certainly not done in the name of any straw-feminism. There are simply aspects of feminism I find hard to reconcile with my tiny male son - and that's just the truth.
I had a look at the bingo and I do feel patriarchy hurts some men, I guess. Not Men with a capital (who for some bizarre reason are always City Traders and barristers in my head), but men like my father, who was sexually abused by a paedophile priest and grew up in a home where severe violence and intimidation were the daily norm.
My father, to his credit given his horrendous background, was very feminist. So is my mother. I never, ever felt that my choices would or should be limited in any way by being a woman. My two grandmothers (still with us!) are powerful, strong women. It took a long time for my father's mother to have the courage to walk away from her abuse: she had an entirely different, second life after she walked away. My mother's mother (in her 80's) is a similar force to be reckoned with.
I can't think of one belief I held about being female that I could say was constraining or enslaving. So it is hard to think about male-female relations in terms of oppression, despite the fact that obviously my grandfather was an abuser, an oppressor..
I suppose, to go with the title of the thread, I do sometimes feel poor men, and a lot of that has to do with the relationships I have with the men in my own life: my father, my husband, my son.
Particularly my dad. Destroyed by sexual abuse in that most patriarchal of institutions, the Church. So 'patriarchy' didn't really do my poor dad any good.. and it's difficult for me to see beyond that.. to lump my father in with the abusers or the warmakers. That creates a tension for me in any discussion of Men Oppressing Women.
I suppose I am trying to say that I do believe that you can have an Oppressing Male and a non-oppressing male; that it is not always as straightforward as that bingo card would have it? I say non-oppressing vs victim because certainly my father was not 'taught' it was right to respect women, he was taught to abuse and beat them.. yet he chose to learn from that lesson that it was wrong to do so. Maybe because of his own abuse, who knows? I just can't see men (without the capital) as the enemy and I hope this explains why..
And perhaps I did learn to argue in a male, anti-feminist way.. but I have never really considered that, one way or the other, before now, so I apologise if it has raised anyone's hackles..