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.

'I guess I'd have to disagree that the people who tried to change and obfuscate the meaning of the feminist usage of gender are actually feminists.'

So people who disagree over the meaning of a single and ambiguous concept are showing themselves as not being feminists? Even if they agree about everything else?

frankfrankly, thank you for your eloquent and considered posts. In particular I think your point about patriarchy is well made.

I think where I was stumbling last night was on the definition of gender as both a power relation and as a source of identity. I'm struggling to understand dittany's viewpoint that gender is only a power relation and wonder if the identity part of it is ascribed to sex instead, in which case she might find the idea of multiple sexes acceptable but multiple genders not. So the 'problem' is shifted onto sex instead. If that makes sense. Damn I wish I could express myself as clearly as you other posters.

Waves at Ormrenewed - hang in there. All will become clear!

That's my understanding too FF - I think for the feminists of the earlier waves these ideas are problematic because they feel that patriarchy becomes dispersed into lots of mini-categories. This can seem to let men off the hook for the fact that as Dittany says there are global patterns of real violence against women.

I guess some of the rest of us would feel there is more risk in thinking of patriarchy in fixed and essentialist ways because you are helping to establish and confirm its status as an absolute monolith.

Lots of my friends here haven't had any exposure to third-level education and would refuse the name of feminist. They repeatedly tell me that their boys are 'real boys' and their girls are 'so girly'. A local issue at the moment has meant that lots of people are trying to persuade me that a small boy very damaged by patriarchy will 'inevitably' turn out bad because he is predetermined to fuck up by his background.

The most productive feminist approach for me here, right now, outside the classroom is to encourage people to think about gender roles as non-binary and at least potentially disruptable.

I had a very interesting chat with DS yesterday afternoon after he went to a friend's party. A younger boy really admires DS (6) and was very upset last week when DS copied behaviour acted out on him and laughed at another boy who was crying. At the party, DS revised that behaviour: he stayed with a crying child and comforted him and the younger boy praised him for it.

Anyway, I pointed out to DS that he has the opportunity to break a cycle in however small a way. He can either show this younger boy that being calm, kind and empathetic is not a sustainable stance for boys, or he can show him that there are non-aggressive ways of being a boy out there.

The idea of masculinities helps me to parent my children in a way I'm happy with.

"So to answer molesworth...

Gender is not a hierarchy we want to get rid of, patriarchy is.

Gender is the construct or expectation of masculinity and femininity which men and women are brought up in, influenced by, controlled by, enjoy, partake in etc. If we were going to be really correct we would say masculinities and femininities in the plural. Analyzing gender is not easy as it is something within each of us, expressed through each of us in different ways. It is not something 'out there' that we can point out and look at.

Sex is a biological category - there are 5 indicators:
-chromosomes
-hormones
-gonads (testes/ovaries)
-genitals
-reproductive organs (prostate/womb)
In 1/100 people one of the 5 is out of alignment. "

You see, I guess this is what I learned way back when.

Though I do see the point that women remain at the bottom of the heap in many respects. It's much more 'okay' now for a man to openly admit to enjoying aspects of childcare and to take an active role in that. I regularly see little boys with pushchairs and feeding dollies with bottles in nursery settings.. but I guess this has just expanded the options of what it is deemed okay for men to do/be without altering the options for women? Women are still 'mannish' (in a derided fashion) if they want to operate outside of their gender stereotypes whereas men are applauded for it?

When a man asks for something more radically challenging of the stereotype, like flexible working where he will provide the bulk of the childcare, then he is seen as less worthy in the workplace and lumped in with all the troublesome women who can be passed over for promotion as the Special Projects are 'not suitable' for part-time working?

And yet, all academic discussion aside, it is difficult to operationalise confrontations of gender-stereotypes in real life as social constructions of gender are so all-encompassing and pervasive. My dh and I were discussing this last night. He is possibly going to lose his job. He said that if he ends up providing 100% of our childcare because he had lost his job, he will feel devalued as a man. He said that if it were an active choice he would feel less devalued. I think that's interesting.. because I guess many women I know feel their identity is somehow devalued by society for either choice: going to work/staying home.. and the choice is never really a choice, it is mostly dictated by circumstance. So I see how men, even in this, have the 'upper hand' so to speak.

What I find interesting about my dh's position is that before we had a baby, we often talked about him giving up work and me returning full-time, as - in simple terms - he hates work and I love it. Yet since the baby has come, I can see now that he ties 'work' and 'fatherhood' together in his concept of being a man: he feels, and is aware he feels, a sudden urge to provide (even though we both earn the same). His father and mother both farmed the land and shared some aspects of both parent/working roles e.g. they both milked and they both spent time in the day caring for their kids, but his father did the physical work of maintaining the farm and his mother did the cooking/cleaning. We both feel pulled towards sharing work/childcare in our own domestic arrangement but it is less easy to do in our society than in the more traditional roles his parents undertook.. which I find fascinating.

From a domestic viewpoint, we can arrange it as we like and it is working well: dh has always done all the laundry in our house, but is doing the cooking too while I breastfeed.. we can negotiate our own equality.

Yet work is so different because it is more socially mediated, and so dh does find himself under attack from 'provider anxiety'. And I can see why it is like this for us. The farm was such a focus in his family.. but its success or failure benefited all of the family. My work and my dh's have no intersecting point of benefit to our whole family.. so it is hard to choose, given that we ARE constrained by a social system that will disadvantage a part-time worker regardless of their gender, who should 'give up' the most. Despite all our talk, we are finding it easier to consider 'woman at home, man at work' arrangements than we would have thought we would. In reaity, we will probably split it down the middle.. and both be disadvantaged..

So, I am an uneducated woman (hated school, left at 15) bringing up young adult women and a man. I am hoping to learn lots from these threads and to challenge my ways of thinking

So thank you people for debating and discussing these issues and helping me...

BUT I have almost hidden all these threads and I think I may still go ahead and hide them all, dittany - you come across as so very aggressive and it's off putting and scary. I am seeing reasonable questions, ideas and theories which many people are putting across so very well but you are just arguing and putting people down - everything you destest from men

I may stay with learning more about feminism but right now, I think why bother, if I question and get it wrong - I might be the person she picks on next

scaredoflove - please hang in there with it. I think it is vital that contemporary feminist debate becomes a place which women just like yourself feel they can contribute. Which is why I've been so so pleased to see mn set up this topic.

Part of the problem has been that women feel distanced from the term/debate of feminism and the voices that need to make up the heart of it have been lost. I do think there is a place for academic discourse on it, for clarifying theories and developing the nuances in feminist thinking, but that is not the be all and end all of the discussion.

Two things - scaredoflove, I know exactly where you're coming from - I'm being much more cautious about posting on many of these threads than I normally would be, and definitely considering my words more carefully in case I get jumped on . . . . and I am generally quite hardcore about this kind of stuff & very accustomed to standing up & saying unpopular things in front of large groups of people.

I don't know what the answer is, because I think that the discussion is really important and inspiring, but perhaps we all just need to be careful not to put people down, but to answer their questions & make our points in a considered way. (Nor indeed to make jokes that have the same effect, which I know is my besetting sin.)

Mrsbean, I found your post really interesting, and it is something I think about a lot as someone who lives in a very rural farming area, which on the surface might have quite a lot of traditional gender divisions, but in practice is not necessarily so clear cut.

Hey, frankfrankly, good to have you on board, pleeeeeease stay.

Dittany, I have a huge amount of respect for you, and not least for your willingness to continue engaging in these conversations - more than once I've read an AIBU and thought eh, I cannot summon the energy to engage yet again, hopefully Dittany will be by.

But as for why I was paraphrasing MacKinnon etc? Because I didn't understand what you were getting at, and I googled feminist analyses of gender, and I know you're a Mackinnon fan, and so I thought aha, maybe this is what dittany is trying to say.

So I know you write clearly, but I didn't understand you. And it does feel like saying 'don't known why you had to bring that into it, I was being clear' is pretty patronising. I am really, really fucking smart. And I am very well read and very highly educated, and I have been actively engaged in feminist thought and argument for a long time now. And I say that not because I just like to blow my own horn, but because if I'm still not understanding you it's because these are hard, highly nuanced concepts, most of us haven't been introduced to them in depth (or at all) and hey, sometimes we just don't agree.

I loathe tone arguments. I'm never going to say, try and be nicer about this subject that is so raw and so real and in relation to which, the whole exhortion to be nicer is proving the need for the movement.

But I do think you need to maybe stop assuming that people are deliberately misunderstanding or obfuscating the issues here.

Tortoise, I think there is an enormous difference between (a) "being nice", and (b) having a genuine respect for other people and treating them as equals who happen at the moment to disagree with you. It is, absolutely, possible to have a genuine, raw and heartfelt debate without putting people down.

Thank you for replying

I am enjoying reading and learning and questioning my own beliefs/thoughts and I am suprising myself for being able to keep up and comprehend and follow what is being said. I am using my ability to google, to look help in my understanding and I really hope that through all this, I can personally grow. But I know I won't really participate whilst I am scared that I will be the one to be almost attacked due to not being able to articulate my thoughts very well (dyslexic/dyspraxic)

I think I will stay with reading for now and save my disussions with myself

Scaredoflove, I think it's really important that feminism isn't seen as some sort of exclusive club that you can only gain entry to if you know the right people (have read the right authors) and 'speak proper', using the same words and phrases as the others in the club.

Takver, I didn't grow up on a farm myself and I would have thought it was, as you say, a very traditional lifestyle with limited options for women, a place where the men wer definitely 'on top'- but you're right, it isn't clear cut. Family and working life is something communal, where you all 'muck in' so to speak.

It is important to remeber that all our cultural "norms" were once radical ideas which people who espoused them got into real trouble and hardship to debate and bring to attention of the incumbent power base. Abolition of Slavery and Votes for Woemn were both radical thoughts for their day and the advocates of them had really tough times to bring them into mainstream, and at the time, both were scary and threatening ideas. Now we consider both these things as a universal "given" in our society.

Sometimes people espousing a cause have to be tough and uncompromising and single-minded as they have to punch through years of predjudice, opposition and being denounced and derided.

The thing is, social change often is only achieved through conflict. And any social change that challenges the incumbent power base or overwhelming morality of the day has a particularly hard time.

Examples of attitudes that were ingrained in their time:
Black men are inferior to white men
Slavery is acceptable
Women are inferior to men as they die in childbirth which means God doesn't care about them as much as men
Kings are the ultimate power and imbued by God with power over their fellow men
If women read too much it will give them brain fever
Children should be beaten regularly

"So I know you write clearly, but I didn't understand you."

Again, just to go back to the chain of communication here, if you are engaging in a conversation with a person where they tell you they don't understand you, they are asking you to repair a communication breakdown. If you choose not to repair, or do so in a way that is unlikely to prevent a further communication breakdown, you are effectively telling them that you are not interested in an equal communication.

Communication is two-way: if one partner doesn't understand, then the communication of the other partner is not clear. Nor is it equal.

Well, I didn't say that, though, I tried to cover it up with the Magic Google. That was my fault.

You did make it clear, Mrsbean, I know, they're different circumstances. I just don't want this to become a derail entitled How We Think Dittany Should Communicate. I would hate for the method of argument to overcome the substance. I'm enjoying the substance.

Miggsie, I agree, that's why I loathe tone arguments.

Not specifically chasing dittany on this toths.. I suppose I think it's concerning to read that the general language/tone of a feminist discussion is excluding. Everyone should strive for clarity, and recognise differences in communication style/background/level of familiarity with the subject that will lead to genuine misunderstanding. I read scaredoflove's post and thought to myself it would have been much better if I'd just come out with that point in as many words instead of blathering on for an age..

I have to say this topic does seem to generate long posts .

No more Orm. Short and sweet so I can say what I mean and mean what I say...

I'm enjoying your contributions orm

God please don't be put off, scaredoflove or anyone else. I love all this feminism debate and read a lot about it online, but I have read exactly none of the texts being mentioned here, and am struggling to keep up with the terminology.

I think one problem is that academic dicussion generally can be very alienating if you assume that it's "higher level" stuff than personal matters are. Some academics perpetuate this, because they like to be "experts", in the same way that e.g. surgeons can be arrogant about their own knowledge. I'm pretty sure Dittany doesn't usually post from that perspective, but she certainly has the knowledge at her fingertips to retort to those kind of debates when the need arises. Maybe her "academic argument trigger" was stepped on accidentally by mrsbean.

If you're not up on the philosophical/academic side of feminism/gender studies (as I am definitely not), you could try doing what i do and assume that academics are having their fun, but someone whose experience comes from chatting down the pub, or personal musings, is just as entitled and welcome to intervene as someone who knows Dworkin or Foucault inside out. I call it "wandering blithely in" . I'd hate anyone to think that opinions/experiences/thoughts without a founding in learned writings are invalid, feminism is for everyone.

When he tries to act on these chats though, he has to face up to his own concrete notions of what being a boy means here and now. He's swayed by the media versions of boyness that popular culture bombards him with. His much remarked on sense of justice means feck all when he is being beaten round the head by boys who rule by fear in the schoolyard. When he argued with his cousins who were belittling his sisters, his refusal to see the gender distinctions that they see as 'real' meant they just thought he was a bit mad.

My sister happily tells me stories about these cousins, all under eight, talking about 'hips bums and boobs' and while she acts vaguely schocked by this language, she doesn't root out the values behind it. And she is a schoolteacher, the kind of schoolteacher who DS goes in and treats as an authority, whose views on gender will weigh with him at least as much as the ones his parents espouse.

He isn't a pure individual who gets to choose a gender role, masculine, feminine or neutral. Instead he lives in a patriarchal society where the power roles seem to him to be proved by the existence of a binary system of bodies and he is being asked to swim against the tide.

Butler means a lot to me because she talks about the limits of our ability to exercise power in this complex social field, where people repeatedly constitute us as traditional men and women despite our attempts to reconstitute the whole discussion.

I haven't explained myself very clearly anywhere on this thread I'm afraid. (I was Sibh on the 'feminist reading thread I mentioned earlier btw)

Scaredoflove, don't be put off at all. A life lived as a woman is a body of research in itself.