The Shootist
Original post at Huffingtonpost
Right-wing diehards are trying very hard to “move on” about Dick Cheney shooting his rich hunting buddy. But there are moralists from left of the midline who are making the demand to back off on Cheney’s mishap, albeit in a more oblique way.
“He has committed many worse crimes,” the grievance goes. “Why should we focus on this?”
I’ll tell you why.
This is the age of postmodern politics — the age of impression management. This is the time when the narrative is used to trump reality. No doubt perfidy has always characterized politics, but the good old days of no-bullshit thuggery and patrician patronage has given way to the construction of puerile caricatures. And many thought that Bush was the mediocre narcissist who liked to dress up in flight suits and caper across the decks of aircraft carriers.
This incident exposes Cheney himself as just another costumed buffoon, and not the Darth Vader figure he and his desperately insecure admirers seemed to relish.
Gender is the elephant in the political living room, of course.
This is an administration who ran election campaigns that would make a Louisiana police chief blush; and they did it by constructing George W. Bush — a besotted pampered frat boy from a wealthy political dynasty — as a cowboy.
Dick Cheney has constructed himself as a hunter… consistent with his supposedly intimidating predator image.
These are hegemonic masculinities, but only in the most theatrical sense. The cowboy and the hunter are idealized archetypes from a mythical past.
One need merely note the symbolic exhibitionism of consumer masculinity all around us to see why this has been so politically effective. Gym-rat WWF musculatures that don’t exist in nature, SUVs the size of small tanks jacked up on giant wheels, t-shirts that declare “Insurance by Smith and Wesson,” and as we scale the class ladder the more subtly stated accoutrements of masculine dominance, from the “corrective” tailoring of the man’s suit to the Valexta briefcase. Masculinity itself is more often than not a game of dress-up, a pose, the ultimate life sentence of tough-guy theatricality for men.
In an era when even the American male working class is as commonly found in an office cubicle as a factory, when we spend an average of 7.5 hours a day in our homes with televisions on, drinking in this cognitive data stream of fantasy gender-norms, when we live in places called Fox Run with no foxes, Deer Park with no deer, Sleepy Hollow
that is in fact a bulldozed lot built over with masonite boxes, its little wonder that even the old oppressive masculinities — at least actually connected with where one lived and what one did for a living — have given way to costume-consumer masculinity. It is also little wonder that people can successfully run for king of the country in this reverse-drag as one of the mytho-erotic archetypes.
Cowboy. Hunter.
The Bush campaign mounted a billboard in Texas during the Bush-Kerry contest. One one side of the billboard was a pair of cowboy boots. On the other, a pair of shower shoes — also known as… flip-flops. The designer of this billboard had tapped directly into the American white male psyche, and these two sets of footgear were positively wading in gendered (and racialized) subtexts. The archetypical impressions defeated the comparative military records hands down.
Cowboys and hunters, lest we forget, in the American mythology are white archetypes, too.
The Republican Party snatched the mantle of “party of white supremacy” from the southern Democrats with Nixon’s Southern Strategy. But it was also the mantle of white male supremacy. This has been its core organizing principle ever since — even though it has to code this principle to avoid throwing its constituents into open polarization with the rest of society.
White men with big hats and guns have seldom been a welcome sight to Black men or women.
Dick Cheney loves photo ops with guns, whether accepting a Dan’l Boone muzzle-loader at an NRA Convention or having the cameras chase him around while he shoots farm-raised animals on hunting preserves. Cheney shot 70 confined, semi-domesticated pheasants in one day at the Rolling Rock Club and Game Preserve in Pennsylvania, a place for men who wear those power suits to demonstrate their ability to kill and dress up like “woodsmen.”
The fact that this is a country where a large number of men — many who vote Republican — actually do have more than passing familiarity with firearms, and actually know the basic safety measures that are required to properly handle them, is now a problem for Dick Cheney. Many of us learned firearms in the military, and since the mid-eighties there have been very sharp penalties in the military for “accidental discharges.” The military learned, slower than most, that there are two simple rules that will prevent the accidental discharge of a weapon and the collateral damage that can result.
(1) Never place your finger on the trigger until you have aligned the sights on a target.
(2) Never point the weapon at anything until you have identified it as something you intend to shoot.
However pathological the macho death-cult of guns is in this country, the people who have taken the trouble to learn anything about firearms at all now know that Cheney is what my dad used to call a pig-hunter and a fool that traipsed around after his “one beer” lunch on the quail preserve with his finger on the trigger. He’s no more a hunter than Bush is a cowboy.
He’s just another stupid, pampered, autocratic narcissist like Bush — bullshitting his way through high office — and leaving bodies in his wake with as little concern for them as he does for 70 pheasants. In the age of postmodern politics, when the impression is sovereign, the gendered spell is broken for a moment when the costume slips.
That’s why I relish every jibe and joke, and I hope people milk this incident for all its worth. I oppose male power, and white power, and the reign of narcissists. With every grant of legitimacy, we grant power. Ridicule is a potent political weapon. It is a form of resistance.
Consumer:
Werd. And all that I’m-taking-responsibility bullshit like, at the end of the day I was the guy that pulled the trigger, fncking two-bit @sshole. Hey Dick, do us all a favor and bite down on both barrels, fncking thug.
18 February 2006, 4:04 pmVictoria:
Oh, the hunters…
We’ve got guys like those in Spain.
http://www.cope.es/especiales/galicia_2005/diario.asp
Fascist machista and homophobic Manuel Fraga, he killed Bambi
18 February 2006, 5:20 pmEric:
Stan:
Keep on saying it.
Laughing at these clowns is possibly the best offense.
And it feels good!
18 February 2006, 8:56 pmHoward Campbell:
Stan,
I agree with your analysis. This is a well written article and your discussion of the role of the narrative is important for more people to grasp.
Since you get this big picture…my request is that you find ways to say this using simpler terms. This is not a criticism. What you see is spot on from my perspective.
Our job is to share this perspective with as broad of a readership as we can. Since you have this perspective nailed…how might you make it more accessible to more readers?
I hope you don’t mind my request.
Warmly,
Howard Campbell
19 February 2006, 1:54 amDoug Nielson:
The AP has a stock photo of Cheney pointing his gun in the air. According to the Wall Street Journal that is where you are supposed to point your gun when hunting quail for safety reasons. You are also supposed to know where the other members of your party are before you shoot. So either Cheney was drunk on his ass or he’s just a complete fucking idiot. Probably both.
19 February 2006, 1:59 amHe should be barred from ever holding a gun again except for the outside chance that he might take Bush hunting with him.
Stan:
The most paradoxical thing about this post, and others I have done on gendered reactions by the administration — like the “Bring ‘em on” remark — has been the fact that many of the supportive reactions to my own rants have themselves dripped with machismo.
It seems that my own machista past — which I would gladly be shed of for a more quiet conscience — is what gives me some kind of authority to make these remarks… and serves as an excuse for anti-Bush men (not talking about commenters here, in particular, but my experience since I started writing against this clique) to impugn the “manhood” (whatever that means) of Cheney and Bush as a way of demonstrating one’s own manhood by inference.
While it seems almost a selective immediate memory of what I write that is clinging with its fingernails to the vestiges of some destabilized masculinity, I recognize — again — that my own cred is that of an insider on the masculinity-thing. This has always felt very contradictory, even when it does seem to connect with mass sensibilities (which I acknowledge is a political “essential” — but then so was racism once).
I hope I have been clear here that it is the fracture on the inside of the house I am applauding… and that it is masculinity itself I find problematic — not merely its more hypocritical forms.
Male sexuality constructed as aggression — practical or symbolic, whether the masculinity of the left or right — is at the center of the global oppression of women by men, and of men by men.
This is my objection to the whole “chickenhawk” argument against the administration. It implies two things:
(1) The war would be okay if “real” (read: combat) veterans had waged it.
(2) Military masculinity valorized as a hegemonic sexuality is both “normal” and desirable.
Most of my posts on gender elsewhere on this blog will explain everything that is deeply wrong about both those implications.
My hope, perhaps a vain one, was that this short rant would expose the naturalization of gender that runs through all political discourse, and thereby expose gender — again — for what it is: an oppressive system of social power.
19 February 2006, 12:33 pmelaina:
I grew up with guns around me, all the time.
My father and grandfather would hunt regularly when I was a kid. I know a little bit about “hunting etiquette,” not from hunting myself, ’cause they’d never let me go with them (yes, because I was a girl.) But I would hang with them the night before they’d go out, and my grandaddy would get drunk and they’d just talk and talk about everything you’re supposed to do when you hunt.
Grandaddy kept a pistol on the side table next to his recliner. It was always there, out in the open, kids running all around, luckily we all took him at his word when he threatened us with certain doom if we were to mess with his guns. He was a white, Southern Baptist, blue-collar redneck drunk. If you knocked on the door after dark you’d be greeted by him, with his pistol in sight, until he’d figured out who you were.
Yup. You could safely call the men in my family right-wing gun-nuts.
Be that as it may, none of them ever hunted anything that wasn’t in season, and none of ‘em ever shot anybody by accident.
Laughing at Cheney’s moronic mishap gives me great pleasure. Laughing at it with my gun-nut, Southern, Republican brother is kinda surreal. It’s a baby-step.
The Big Step, or maybe it’s more precisely the Big Staircase, is pointing the laughter and the ridicule at the whole system of white patriarchal capitalist notions of “manhood.”
We need to work on our working definitions of “courage” and “honor” and attempt to take the masculine poison out of them. We have to rework our definitions of words like “coward” too.
And we need to realize that this fucking jerkwad Cheney, and all the folks that bow down to him and his ilk, YES, they are all indeed cowards. But it ain’t because they don’t know how to use their guns like “real men” should.
Indeed, this kinda bravado with firearms is very much in line with the masculinized “costume” to which Stan refers in his post.
Real men use guns like “real men should” all the time, they do it to keep the system as-is.
I hope that the bastard never lives this down, and while it’s a bit agressive I’d like to ditto the sentiment in Consumer’s post above.
And yeah, right now I’m laughing like crazy.
19 February 2006, 2:21 pmClarence Swartz:
I enjoyed the articals only I wish ever person could read them.Your caricterization off Bush and Chane made me think of the reasion the country is in Iraq, the Possabillity of control of bilions of barels of oil with no thought of the cost in lives both American and Iraq.This artical made me think of Chane shotting his frand,To get what you want don’t think twice just do it.
19 February 2006, 5:49 pmklkjlkjsd:
Your analysis is excellent. Keep thematizing.
Thank you,
P.S. Perhaps Cheney wanted to get caught. Doesn’t all this leftist chatter piss off the middle-class, strengthen the republican resolve for a ‘brave’ ‘masculine’ america. Where kicking ass kicks ass. Just think about it.
19 February 2006, 6:42 pmJS Narins:
I’ve come to favor First Initial, Second Initial, last name, especially because it doesn’t speak to the gender of the writer.
I also, perhaps futilely, approve of naming female children with the last name of the mother, and vice versa.
I really thought this was nothing, and a lame event, but you have made a decent point.
Too bad it wasn’t Bush.
Shooting Cheney! lol
19 February 2006, 8:24 pmM.E Millspaugh:
I have to say I was surprised as hell to hear about the vice pres shooting someone. Maybe it’s a new trend in preemption.
19 February 2006, 10:13 pmI grew up hunting, fishing, and target shooting. Safety was made second nature. My father drilled us on safety. So I found the shooting appalling on that basic level. Here in NY state you have to take a hunter’s safety course before being able to hunt- within the law. This course is rudimentary but the fellow teaching the class was shot in a hunting accident with a .50 muzzleloader. You remember those stories-especially from the horses mouth.
Anyway- after years in art school and years with a vegan significant other I no longer hunt-not that I have ruled it out completely. I still do target shoot from time to time and have overheard- that this shooting has not gone over well with the gunclub crowd. Not sure if that amounts to a hill of beans. I somehow find it encouraging.
Stan- thanks for all your work. I just ordered your new book btw. I was lucky enough to hear you speak at Time and Space Limited up here in NY. Last year I think.
trying to be the best human I can be.
M.E.M
Jon Flanders:
I like your take on this Stan.
While Dick Cheney blasts wealthy lawyer friends and small birds who can’t shoot back with a $23,000 shotgun, he sends children barely older than my 17 year old upstairs to kill other children with real weapons.
A risk and a chore he skipped out on himself. How much longer will this state of affairs be tolerated?
Surely someday in the future, it will not be believed that we did.
Jon Flanders
20 February 2006, 12:08 amstacia:
As for me, I appreciate the gender analysis, but I don’t think ridicule will get us anywhere. If it would, we’d have gotten there by now. It’s preaching to the choir. They’re ridiculing us, too, remember, and I have to say, we don’t do it any better than they do.
20 February 2006, 10:11 amWe call them thugs and assholes; they call us wimps and assholes.
Ho hum.
Not much of a debate.
I thought the left was the side that stood up for humanity. Doesn’t that mean everybody’s humanity?
If you’re going to capitalize on opportunities to insult the other side, take a page from Mencken’s book, who compared President Harding’s speeches to “laundry flapping on the line; dogs barking inanely in the night,” and make it funny.
Or at least make it original.
Consumer:
Stacia, if your thoughtful post was directed towards my rant, please know I wasn’t trying to engage in a debate. I just simply hate the fncker and the things he has done/is doing.
With regard to humanity, provide a definition of humanity (as in having a sense of) and then see if Cheney et al. fit the bill. These merciless gangsters think nothing, absolutely NOTHING, of killing people.
Fnck funny, this guy is a monster.
20 February 2006, 1:05 pmhoward:
…but if I am reading Stan right, I think “ridicule” is not the right word to use. Ridicule as such easily leads to what stacia correctly points out is just a bunch of name calling.
The gender analysis is central, and the ability to quickly deconstruct “male sexuality constructed as agression” is an important tool, both to understand and contest the things the tool is used for, and perhaps at the right moment to help unmask manipulation for those who up to that moment had not been in a place to see it.
20 February 2006, 2:08 pmR.S. Morris:
I didn’t see a lot of ridicule in Stan’s post, but political satire has an effective history of thousands of years. All you have to do is note that one of the first things outlawed by oppressive regimes (my understanding, anyway) is cartoons critical of their policies and you can start to appreciate the power inherent in lampoon or caricature. I think it’s not so much preaching to the choir as finding different ways to reach non-choir-members. For a grand example of political satire, check out “This Modern World” by Tom Tomorrow. http://www.thismodernworld.com/
Stan:
Pride in military service has been a contradiction in my life for the last fifteen years. I feel the weight of the macho Patriacrchy telling me I’m an idiot for even daring to attempt to put myself anywhere near you or any other combat vet, that I have no right to compare my experiences and I should leave well enough alone. But I know that’s bullshit.
I left the Army after I started to understand what it was and felt what it was doing to my soul. I never had to kill anyone. As glad as I am about that, there is a twisted relic somewhere deep inside that keeps telling me I’d be a better person if I had killed faceless “foreign enemy combatants” in one of the faraway lands I visited. For a person as anti-war as me, that’s a really weird thing to live with. But I’ll happily live with that rather than the alternative.
I’m proud that I completed my term of service, though I applaud anyone who would walk away from theirs now. Just because I wasn’t enlightened then doesn’t mean someone shouldn’t be now. So I’m proud of my service even while I’m trying to talk some teenager out of enlisting in the Marines or the Army or whatever. They pretty much blow me off, but at least I’m trying.
Lastly, I have found myself unable to escape my particular military past because every time I look at the news, read a blog, talk to my politically-aware friends and family, I am reminded that those skills we learned–the ones that good people on the Left are often hesitant to embrace–are going to be needed, and soon. So while I am railing daily against war, Patriarchy, aggression and hate, I am taking my son and daughter to the range, teaching them how to safely run a “target” rifle or pistol.
Hey, at least my eleven- and five-year-old kids haven’t shot any lawyers lately! (Hmmm…I wonder if I’m doing something wrong in their training…)
20 February 2006, 2:16 pmcarlosR:
Just read your brilliant expose of what this really is about. If only this could get broadcast where more people could read it. You are entirely right, these folks only care about perception. Bush as “cowboy”!? Ha I live in Montana man and I have known cowboys. But the cowboys will believe the image because the image of the guy in flip-flops is just as real.
20 February 2006, 5:30 pmSo you are right this is important. It got past my thinking “there are more important things going on”.
What has happened to the reality that all these great leaders got out of military service but don’t ask the wrong questions or you are unpatriotic.
People I think want to believe this b.s. because we don’t want to think, it’s too much work. Spoonfeed me my information/reality. Maybe it’a always been that way and we are just another empire doomed to repeat what empires have always done. Too bad, it was an incredible concept what they wrote in 1776. It really was.
Devans00:
Waiting to Exhale.
I felt like Monday, February 13th was the day America exhaled. Finally one of the Bush buddies had done something bad that most of us could understand and digest. Everyone and their dog could come up with at least 2 jokes (whether good or not).
Then the news on Tuesday that Mr. Whittington had a heart attack, put a damper on the glee about Cheney’s bonehead move that was running rampant. The more meek among us felt dutifully bad and joined the “let’s move on” chorus.
I try not to think about the $20 million + that was spent on the Clinton witch hunt where all they could come up with was that he got a extramarital blow job. Cheney came this close to killing a man and all his comrades can say is “let’s move on” and “this was a private matter.”
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
I do have one thing to say in Cheney’s favor. I appreciate his self reflection of how it felt to think he almost killed a man. Maybe he’ll have that in mind next time he’s in the room when they are discussing send more Americans to foreign lands to kill other people’s kids.
20 February 2006, 6:29 pmstacia:
I define humanity as including Bush and Cheney, and I have no problem doing that. I don’t agree with anything they do or say, but I’m not confused about their essential goodness. They’re products of their place in the system; they’re what the system demands at this moment in capitalism. If they thought any clearer, they wouldn’t be at the top. The problem is not that bad people have somehow seized control of an otherwise benign system; it’s that it’s a bad system FOR ALL OF US, including those at the top.
20 February 2006, 6:55 pmTherefore, we should see them not as monsters, but as potential allies in the struggle for a more human economy.
It’s a much more relaxing point of view.
I’m not sure that ridicule and satire are really such a threat at this moment in history, anyway. Maybe in previous points in time, but in our advanced consumer age, pot shots at the powerful are just more product, and provide a useful illusion of freedom of speech. Unless, of course, it’s funny, then I say have at it. Norman Mailer said that George Bush missed his calling, that he would have made a really good male model for L.L.Bean. I thought that was worth saying. In a better world, none of our recent presidents would have made it anywhere near the White House. Bill Clinton would have sold used cars, the First Bush would have been a Presbyterian parson, and Ronald Reagan, bless him, would have been a shoe salesman back home in Alton, Illinois.
Stan:
Actually, I find myself agreeing with you, Stacia, even as I disagree. That’s when these discussion become interesting.
In the structuralist sense, you are exactly right that Bush and Cheney and the rest of the mob are simply filling job descriptions within a capitalist world system which contains them as much as any of us. It is definitely a bad system in every sense of the word.
But if the system’s architecture can be compared to a building, full of rooms and offices, eventhough the offices at the top, like the Oval Office, has been somewhat constant — in the structural sense — over a relatively short historical period, there have been signficant changes wrought by a number of variables: the evolution of economic crisis; the techological and demographic changes; the changes in geo-biological substrates; and the actions of individuals (and mass movements) at key junctures when systems are thrown into disequilibrium. People like Bush and Cheney do not fundamentally change the direction of capitalism, but they can accelerate, decelerate, and even change the concrete character of crisis. Capitalism has been in a deep crisis since around 1973. That seems a long time, but in historical terms it is a mere wink.
Mass movements that struggle against existing power relations cannot remain mass movements unless they connect with the sensibilities of the masses themselves. Good leadership in mass movements connects initially with people’s affective, not merely cogntive realities, then develop that connection into a deeper understanding — developed in the process of struggles that teach people who their real enemies are (like the ruling CLASS, and not merely one inidivudual expression of it). Backward tendencies (like racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, heterosexism, et al) are isolated and corrected by good leadership, and those with advanced understanding of their struggles self-select as political cadres. But the mass movement must still connect with the masses, and one place that connection must happen to make opposition effective is through delegitimation of actually-existing power-holders. We have to say, that emperor has no clothes.
Gender is a particular interest of mine, because I think we have ignored it at our peril and loss.
Moments like this are opportunities to use ridicule as a method of unmasking gender — which is a legitimator for ruling circles.
20 February 2006, 7:31 pmstacia:
I think it’s possible to ridicule gender without ridiculing those that are trapped in it. Gender IS extremely silly, and laughing at it is probably one of the more direct routes out of its lethal effects, but we’re all trapped somewhere on the continuum and we should be gentle with each other. We should be disciplined enough to distinguish between capitalism’s ugly trappings (gender, class…) and the human being underneath. The costume and the actor are not the same, even if the actor plays the role so well they even have themselves convinced. Part of capitalism is to divide humanity into atoms, so we never see our common interest, and organize. The more we can refuse those divisions, the better we can see the system for what it is, and start to dismantle it. We’re all in this together, and everybody has a piece of the truth.
21 February 2006, 12:45 amRichard Leader:
Excellent article. However, I take issue with your usage of “hegemonic masculinity.” It’s a bullshit word conconcted by pseudo-profeminists, who endlessly plagiarize the term from one another in their ridiculous money-grubbing talk-show panel circuits, who are willing to keep the idea of masculinity alive for their own benefit. The idea of multiple masculinities is a useless academic one that has no value but to allow many males to revel in their own oppression (having/proclaiming/imagining themselves to possess a less dominant or hegemonic masculinine construction), rather than doing something about the root cause of sexism.
I won’t be satisfied until “hegemonic masculinity” is given the same cold shoulder as other Men’s Rights collaborations such as “the lace curtain” are laid to rest with.
You should reconsider your usage of the term.
21 February 2006, 5:27 amStan:
Stacia: The Bush administration sends people to their deaths. They order the destruction of entire countries. They are the personified expression of male white supremacy in this country. They attack people with their power. It is imperative that people fight back… at a minimum out of sheer self defense. Systems do not change without struggles, and they are struggles — concretely — not against the theroization of the system, but against the people at the top of that system.
Richard: You need to read “Masculnities,” by Robert Connell. It is nothing like the caricature you describe. You remarks totally fail to account for the intersections of race/nationality and gender, and class and gender… even generation (technological development) and gender.
I assure you that the masculine expectations of my former career were not the same as those for someone working at IBM, or that of an adolescent boy living in the barrio at Logan Park.
Position matters.
21 February 2006, 8:37 amRichard Leader:
“Richard: You need to read “Masculnities,†by Robert Connell. It is nothing like the caricature you describe. You remarks totally fail to account for the intersections of race/nationality and gender, and class and gender… even generation (technological development) and gender.”
Bullshit.
Go ahead and spend all your time on those intersectionalities. Meanwhile, profeminists these days out there lack the conviction anymore to even say the word “women.” Now, it’s always the “non-gender privileged.” Which includes, I guess, perverts and startrek geeks and anything you can think of.
So again, by jumping on the “masculinities” bandwagon (a bandwagon that is almost univerally POST-feminist in nature and given over to the Queer-Theory ivorytowerism that continues to spread lies and myths about Second Wave feminist ivory towerism), it is basically an alignment with the WORST apsects of pro-profeminism (profesional cash-grab profeminism), the kind that the NOMAS crowd capitalizes on in order to sell out lecture circuits in a way that the radical feminists who are critical of them never can.
This isn’t about what I need to read but about who is claiming personal power using this rhetoric of “masculinities.” Newsflash, it ain’t barrio boys. So maybe it’s about time “we” stopped doing those boys small favors and patting “ourselves” on the back. Because meanwhile, girls and women suffer a whole hell of a lot from non-hegemonic [sic] / non-dominant [sic] masculinities [sic, sic, fucking sick] too.
21 February 2006, 9:07 amEd:
I have more than a passing familiarity with guns in the field. The shooting incident was damn funny (except the victim’s suffering). You’re quite right to be taking the piss out of Cheney, so enjoy it.
Beyond that, I fear Stacia’s point will fly right past most of you. That’s too bad, because she’s probably the most grounded person in this forum.
Ridicule only works when it is funny. And humor is only funny when you can laugh at yourself first. But the kind of spittle-on-the-screen diatribe that passes for discussion in these forums some of the time isn’t really funny to anyone, except that 1% of the world that agrees exactly with your worldview. So you really are preaching to the choir, or joking to the choir as it were: “Knock Knock.” “Who’s there?” “Cheney.” “Cheney who?” “Cheney is a vile, murdering monster! HAR HAR HAR!” Who are you trying to persuade?
I commend all of you ardent Marxists to watch the “Marxist Peasant” scene from “Monty Python And The Holy Grail.” If you can’t find humor in that gentle mockery, you might want to take a break for a while. If you can’t find a tape, I’ll try to post a streaming video of the scene when I return from my latest imperial conquest. (more satire … hopefully you got that on your own.)
Ok, now on to some more serious questions for Stan.
1. You speak of the “white man wih a gun” archetype as rarely a welcome sight to black folk. What is your take on another more recent archetype, the “Gansta”, which is responsible for a whole lot more violent death of black folk in the US these days than residual Klan riders? Not a loaded question, just interested.
2. Interesting assertion: “Capitalism has been in a deep crisis since around 1973.” How people lived under communist and socialist governments in 1973, compared to now? Kinda undercuts your thesis.
3. This quote really goes to the heart of why Marxism always has and always will fail:
Marxism is nothing more than the exchange of one “ruling class” for another. And since the new ruling class is blessed with “advanced understanding”, they are immune to question or reproach from the masses they exercise paternal custody over. Hence you get dictators for life like Castro (and soon Chavez), or omnipotent party committees. Both of these forms of “leadership” hide behind their “advanced understanding” and couldn’t possibly subordinate themselves to a democratic system of choosing leaders.
Regards, and thanks as always for the intellectual stimulation.
Ed
21 February 2006, 9:17 amRichard Leader:
I realize I’m coming at this fairly aggressively, so I can’t fault you for being defensive in some respects, but really, there are “feminist” men out there selling plans to
“build sustainable masculinities”
or talking about how
“This form of masculinity [hegemonic] is incompatible with true democracy and human rights.”
The fact that statement holds true for EVERY form of masculinity seems to escape the new pro-feminist self help industry that has emerged out of the former mythopoetics after they somehow melded with groups like the White Ribbon Campaign (who has now hitched itself to men can stop rape [and not a more forthright Men can stop raping, which naturally doesn't exist!], a group founded on the premise that minority men abuse minority women due to the fact that minority men have been alienated from masculinity due to racism: that might be true, but the solution isn’t restoring everyone’s masculinity! Escalation is never the answer.)
21 February 2006, 9:28 amStan:
Richard, you need to go back and read what else has been written on this site (by me quite often) before you launch off on tirades against a straw man.
I have said again and again that masculinity is the problem. That is appears in different guises does not stand in opposition to that position, and removing the class, race, and national content from actually existing male power is intellectually dishonest and reductive.
I have consistently held the mythopoetic and other so-called “men’s movements” in utter contempt… not least because of their desperate petit bourgeois foolishness.
The commonalities of actually existing masculinities (which I have also enumerated here time and again) do NOT eliminate their concrete and contingent differences.
Your statements misrepresent what I have said… frequently… here.
You are shooting the wrong messenger.
Please refer to earlier posts at:
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=228
21 February 2006, 10:12 amhttp://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=218
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=215
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=185
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=166
http://feralscholar.org/blog/?p=252
Richard Leader:
I’m aware of your general positions. I currently don’t care about them at this instant, for the sake of this argument: your use of “hegemonic masculinities” — which for all intents and puposes is a trademarked catchphrase of a very specific cultural movement of white males (whether they identify as women or men or even “female”) who want to use Judith Butler’s name as a dildo to gangrape anyone in their path — is wrong. And I’m saying so. That’s not about intellectual dishonesty, everyone knows, even patriarchs, that there are subordinate men within patriarchy: gussying up the fact with a specific term invented to disguise other facts is what is REALLY intellectually dishonest.
I’m asking you to rethink your use of it, that is all.
I might not have a book like Robert Connell, but maybe I’m worth listening to, nonetheless.
21 February 2006, 10:40 amStan:
Richard, I am not your enemy. And you are being listened to… your posts are here. But you are constructing a straw man when you associate me with Judith Butler or any of that post-feminist academic mob (I am NOT an academic… never have been).
My use of the term is heavily contextualized, and I don’t believe Judith Butler or anyone else has a copyright on language.
I have thought of my use of it.
Masculinity refers to behavioral expectations associated with biological males in a gendered system of oppressive social power.
Hegemony (used in the Gramscian sense) is the internalization of these expectations and the reproducing ideology; and the hierarchies of cultural power that result.
I write about militarism. This is a period of heightened militarism, and with it a specific military masculinity is hyper-valorized and assumes a hegemonic status.
I am referring to systemic power, which Butler and others have rejected with their embrace of categorical nihilism. There is no reason I should cede perfectly useful language to them — particularly when 99.9% of the people do not even know who she is — any more than we should cede language to the right wing.
This hairsplitting is probably tedious for others, so I am done.
You can have the last word.
21 February 2006, 12:11 pmRichard Leader:
I’m not asking for the last word: just consider this, that pro-feminists normally abhor jargon. Some, unfortunately, go as far to abhor words like “patriarchy” as needlessly devisive or useless in “reaching men where they are” or whatever the latest speech fad is.
All I’m asking for is for consideration of why it *might be* that “hegemonic masculinity” has made such a huge — enormous — splash with an anti-jargon crowd? My belief is that it insulates male power, using a strawman: hegemonic masculinity (which few “masculinities” can ever live up to, *not even* Cheney’s, not every day, not all the time, anyway) becomes the boogeyman that protects masculinity as a whole; and the people that benefit from it.
And no, I honestly don’t believe that you really think that all words/phrases are up for grabs at all times (Admitting that isn’t ceding power over language, it’s just taking a stand, IMO); like “politically correct,” I think “hegemonic/dominant masculinity” is part of something specific–something we should take every opportunity to speak out against it: which is what I’m doing here. I’m not trying to jump on your back, I’m trying to convince you that it isn’t worth fighting for the use of the term and that when other people use it we should take that as an opportunity for discourse on the matter. We are responsible for combatting how “masculinities” studies have turned into an industry and that’s something we’re responsible for every day, even if we’re not scholars in the traditional sense.
21 February 2006, 12:53 pmelaina:
Well, I’ll say this, I DO see sense in what ‘ol Stan says about “hegemonic masculinities.” Shit. I know lesbians who tell me they’re the “man of the house,” play the role of patriarch, they think that’s what they need to do.
Have you ever heard, from a woman, “my child needs a male role-model. Someone to teach him how to be a man.”
I know women who hate having intimate relations with the men in their lives, but they do it because they have children and feel like the kids need a “father figure.”
How is it that perfectly sensible and intelligent women think that their kids need men around to teach them how to be “men” according to the ways that our society defines “being a man,” how does that happen without some sort of “hegemonic masculinity”?
Everyone internalizes the characteristics, behaviors, etc. that really add up to the reification of the male “self”, or more plainly, it’s just the preconcieved notions that we all have and our own definitions of “manhood.” To me that’s “masculine hegemony” or whatever.
Look at TV (whether you like to watch it or not, take a good long gander, because kids are HOOKED) and tell me that there’s no machine out there pushing a way for men to “be.” The same machine is doing the same thing for women and people of color as well, but look at WHAT it’s telling men to BE in opposition to the others. A hegemony isn’t necessarily a good thing. I don’t think that Stan’s arguing here that it is, and it seems to me that he’s saying (though I know I can’t speak for anybody) that this sort of hegemony is something that we have to FIGHT.
Gahh. Have so much to say here, but I have to go to work.
21 February 2006, 1:18 pmc sommer:
A few comments to be made, scattershot observations, if you will.
Cheney shooting his friend can be hopefully construed as a ” Mandate of Heaven’ moment. As you no doubt know, the Mandate of Heaven is the Confucian construct that allows for the divine right of dynasties to rule, yet accounts for an occasional changing of the guard.
A dynasty takes power and rules by Divine Right, it degenerates and decays over time, it falls when it loses the Mandate of Heaven which confers Divine Right, and the people, of course, are left under a new and improved dynasty. Still a damn dynasty, of course. And then the cycle repeats.
In other words, this is the moment where Darth Vader turns into Elmer Fudd, with a corresponding mythic delegitimisation in the minds of many, we hope. A view behind the curtain.
So get ready to welcome a Dem in 08. Hot Dog and Hosannah! Beer and pizza for everyone!
Another, altho somewhat bent, way to look at it might be as a deliberate shooting – Harry Whittington was known as quite a decent, actually kind of liberal Texas Republican(at least according to Molly Ivins). Perhaps his shooting was a deliberate, hands-on warning, the opening shot of an inter-party purge of softies.
As a more serious point, it is interesting to note that game management is an area in which a whole lot of more or less ‘conservative’ Americans accept and promote the notion of a commons. Wildlife is publicly owned and regulated for the use of all, and excepting game farm type operations, landowners do not own the game on their land, nor can they ignore regulations, although they do control access.
I am not certain if the discussion of Cheney as a sort of hunter-manque, taking on a deliberate ‘masculine’ role for mytho-political purpose, is sound. Being from Wyoming, I would suspect that he was hunting from about age 9, at least if the example of my own friends and relatives who live in that part of the country and prairie Canada is at all typical.
As for Dick’s game-farm pheasant shoot, thats SOP for toffs in UK, where the hunting tradition is strictly upper crust. The record lifetime kill is on the order of 250,000 birds for one of these armed fops, I can’t find his name at the moment, forgive me. He died in the field, shotgun in hand, though. Heart attack. It’s funny, in America hunting is regarded by many, especially on the left-liberal end of the spectrum, as redneck, in the UK it’s upper-class only.
regards
chip
21 February 2006, 2:32 pmRichard Leader:
Elaina, that’s not what “hegemonic masculinity” means, that’s plain old masculinity. The Hegemonic [TM] thing is always associated with a purported spectrum or continuum of masculinities — that is, it’s always plural — and it implies that there’s good, less bad, fun, cool, sexy and nifty masculinities and that it’s only a small segment of “gender” that is harmful to people: a few bad apples spoiling the fun game for everyone.
Part of the reason for the development of this theory is that males don’t want to take personal responsibility for sexism and the other component is, as Stan mentioned, more complex and not understood by most people: but in short, there’s supposedly feminist reasons for protecting masculinities, primarily the masculinity of female-to-male transsexuals, leatherdykes who are into abusive sex, and less often, women who just wear baseball caps backwards because a hat can’t just be a hat (although those women are less trendy and less interesting to talk about in such discussions, so they’re only brought up as a counterpoint to downplay the often misogyny of the first two categories).
In my own view, I disagree with the premise of competing masculinities because they are also complementary: if there were no rapists there would be no need for men to play heroic white knights; if there were no terrorists there would be no “need” for Bush; if there were no threat to a woman’s right to choose there would be no need for women to side with a pro-pornstitution radical left. So in my opinion, there can be no hegemonic masculinity, and even if there were, as long as there is ANY kind of masculinity it means that men will be men and thus have privilege over women.
21 February 2006, 5:05 pmDevans00:
Sorry, screwed up the link. Here’s the article I was trying to link:
21 February 2006, 6:18 pmThe West as scapegoat
by Max Boot
Los Angeles Times
February 15, 2006
http://tinyurl.com/glamr
Stan:
Boot’s commentary is xenophobic horseshit.
21 February 2006, 6:41 pmLinda Jansen:
Sounds right to me: Jennifer Van Bergen on Counterpunch
“War is manliness gone awry. It’s all about penetration, ejaculation, and domination. “Get in there (without warning or permission), discharge your weapons on anybody opposing you (and maybe even on those who don’t), and take control. ”
“War is rape and murder. Rape is always about gender, in some secret or not-so-secret way. While men can rape men, men rape women in far greater numbers. (Women don’t rape men.) Rape is a crime of opportunity. It is an act of hatred and aggression. Towards women.”
“So, war, which is about rape and murder, is an act of hatred and aggression towards women. It’s Mother Murder.”
Whole article link: http://www.counterpunch.org/vanbergen02202006.html
21 February 2006, 7:27 pmelaina:
RL: Elaina, that’s not what “hegemonic masculinity†means, that’s plain old masculinity.
Elaina: ‘K. I looked up “hegemony” on wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemony
Maybe I’m getting things screwed up. But am I wrong in thinking that “plain old masculinity” is one form of hegemony that we live under in Sunny Gringolandia???
And I was also thinking that the “destabilization of masculinity” that Stan talks about here on his blog is the continued questioning of said “masculinity” as a hegemonic norm, so to speak, and this continued questioning grabbing an intellectual and material foothold in the lives of people.
Or are you saying that the idea that “hegemony” in any form exists is a purely masculine construction? I’m trying hard to understand.
I think that “hegemonic masculinity” exists in material reality; but that doesn’t mean that I think that it’s a “natural” or biological thing. And it definitely ain’t a good thing, IMO.
Unfortunately, dealing with the material reality of living in capitalist, racist, patriarchy doesn’t give enough people the time and energy to develop such an advanced gender analysis, much less formulate lifeways engineered to dissolve the “hegemony.” When given the choice between starving or living the pre-designated “gender role,” most people will just put on the man or woman hat and go on and struggle through another day. Which is, to me, why hegemony does indeed exist in this form.
I long for a time when people of all biological sexes can turn their lives into activism against what we all know and think of as “masculinity” and “gendering.” Until then all we can do is swim in the ocean of shit that is Capitalist Imperialism. We have to get to that time, one way or another. Ideas by themselves ain’t gonna cut it.
Neither is arguing back and forth over the correct definition of the word “hegemony.” So I think I might just go on to bed and try to sleep some for once.
22 February 2006, 3:19 amEd:
I have to laugh at all of you trying to rationalize away biology. Manhood, manliness, masculinity, whatever word you pick … it is neither inherently bad nor inherently good. It is simply a fact of life. It’s what we do with our biologial raw material that matters.
Both men and women are a product of our evolutionary breeding. Men, like most male species of animals, are optimized for fighting and mating, because that is what ensured the survival of the species back when there was no such thing as civilization. Our instinctive behavior is really no different from lions, gorillas, or deer. Everyone sees the obvious physical differences between males and females of those species, yet we overlook the accompanying differences in brain and instinct. But the mental differences are there, in lions as well as men.
Fortunately, our society and culture have moved beyond the animal or tribal stages (mostly), and our brain has become our most powerful survival tool. Unfortunately, we are still saddled with the instinctive hormonal and psychological traits of our past. The 3 F’s are still chemically imprinted in the brains of all men.
Character is nothing more than the triumph of reason over impulse. It is simply that peculiar ability of humans to realize, “I have an urge to do this, but I will resist because I don’t think it is right.” That sense of right may be a base calculation of self interest, or it may be a higher minded application of moral principle. But at the end it’s still our brain telling our glands, “No, I will not listen to you, you will listen to me!”
Obvously there’s a bad side to the evolutionary imprinting we men carry with us. Deep within us, our instincts whisper dark thoughts: “That guy threatens my territory. Kill him.” “That woman is sexually attractive. Screw her.” Most of us recognize those impulses for the inappropriate relics of our caveman past, and keep them bottled up. But some men let them loose, and some are consumed by them, like the apes we all descended from.
But also imprinted within men are positive traits, things which have lead to plenty of good in this world. There are the obvious things like physical bravery, which manifests itself not only in badness like war and violence, but also in goodness like the protective impulse which regularly drives men to put themselves in great danger to help others. The fireman’s urge to run into a burning house to rescue a stranger, while not exclusive to males, is a deeply male trait.
There are also more subtle and ultimately more important traits. Discipline, determination, and stoicism are primarily male traits which can be harnessed for much good in the world. Again, such attributes are not exclusive to men, anymore than compassion is exclusive to women. But such traits are biologially burned into men, and they drive us to be what we are, for good or bad.
Women want a man in their son’s life because they realize a simle truth: that boy will carry his biological demons with him for his whole life. With a father, he has an example of how character can overcome the bad urges and harness the good impulses to be a force for goodness, safety, and security for his loved ones and others. He has someone to teach him to tame his instinct and use it for good.
You are all so consumed by analysis of “hegemonic archetypal mytho-patriarchal socio-politico-economic valorized gender power systems” that you outsmart yourselves on the basics of life. Some of your brains are addled by ‘isms.
Stan, I suspect you would get back in touch with your masculinity real quick if someone broke into your home and threatened your family. I also suspect that your son will become a good man, patient, kind and strong, because of the example you set for him. You may try to renounce your manhood but it will not renounce you.
22 February 2006, 4:32 amStan:
You’re funny, Ed.
We are not most animals. We are Homo sapiens sapiens (a name selected out of deep hubris). In fact, your account of the fighting-fucking caveman is a total myth and refuted by archeologcial and anthropological evidence. Fighting only became ubiquitous with the introduction of territorial disputes and class society, and then more often as a totally unbalanced form of plunder and bullying. This happened well AFTER we inherited our current genetic map.
This is a classic case of “naturalization,” the claim that a socially-constructed reality is “natural” (and therefore beyond our capacity to intervene, alas).
If someone broke into my home, and Sherry ran them back out the door with a chef’s knife, would she be displaying her “masculinity”? Please!
Evolutionary “breeding”?!?!
Thanks for the chuckle. Gotta go out to beat up the neighbors and kill a mastadon before I “mate” with the little lady.
Aaaaaarrrrgh!
22 February 2006, 7:25 amrich:
“would she be displaying her “masculinityâ€? Please!”
Yeah, it’s funny how these people forget these words are just words. As dumb as Ed is about this, the funny thing is that there’s big bucks to be made on the so-called Left writing books about “Female Masculinity” and whatnot too (these people remember that words are just words: but they want to protect the political meaning of that meaninglessness). That’s why I think it’s important to split hairs and why I was vehement over the “hegemonic” thing, even though — and especially because of — our general agreement on most points.
22 February 2006, 2:02 pmConsumer:
Feeling weird… I mean, I agree with Ed. Shit, someone check me brains! I’ve obviously gone stark raving mad!
But seriously, trying to deconstruct the male role at this point is like trying to make us all water-breathers again. Despite all of us originating from tadpole-like organisms, it just isn’t going to happen. So let’s all just breathe deep with our lungs. While realizing that someday these lungs may change. And probably should…(?) Not 100% sure about that last one…
These may be socially constructed norms but they are norms the world over. Just like Mr. Goff’s wife chasing the intruder out the door is a norm. A person, who happens to be a mother and a wife, does her best to protect her home.
I appreciate the commentary made with regard to pornography and its socially destructive effects. And I also appreciate that women can become Nave SEALs, the righteousness of becoming a violence-mongering serf aside… And that really bad Demi Moore movie aside too…
I dunno, I was In Tae Kwon Do when I was 10. And it was evident to me and to most others that the girl with the red belt was faster and stronger than all of us.
Going to bed.
22 February 2006, 2:19 pmelaina:
Stan: We are not most animals.
Elaina: Bingo!
And I’d like to make a little suggestion to Ed, and that would be to delve more deeply into evolutionary theory and look at the behavior patterns of female species of different animals before he dives into the whole “man’s a product of his caveman biology” mess.
The more I read and learn about biological evolution, the more non-linear I realize it is.
From what I’ve seen of violent behavior in the “animal kingdom” there’s not a clear breakdown re: biological sexes and their potential for violent action.
While I might indeed agree that our big, fleshy, extra-wrinkly brains are most likely our primary evolutionary heads-up, and our language as well, we forget that the most influential product of these two adaptations, culture, is uniquely human as well.
Ever hear of “exaptation?”
Well, here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exaptation
Just to show there’s wiggle-room from pure Darwinian hooey-phooey.
Our closest relatives in the primate family, pan paniscus (bonobos, or pigmy chimps) have a structural-social hierarchy that is NOT male-centric. AND they don’t have all-out warfare, like the pan troglodytes (common chimps.)
And is it just me, or does anyone else think that this male blind-spot on the potential that females have for violence aide in keeping us “under the thumb,” so to speak?
I mean, seriously, what of the lioness who goes out and kills to feed her cubs, or kills to protect them from predators (or male lions)? I’m just sayin’, since we’re talking lions and all.
And since we’re just throwing armchair-evolutionary-biology around, I’ll just put it out there that I don’t think that women are any less biologically suited for violence than are men. It’s cultural evolution that’s attempted to dampen this part of our biology, IMO, and it’s worked thus far. Another IMO that I’ll add is that sexual dimorphism in homo sapiens sapiens has not been studied in such a way that sheds any light on the cultural reasons for said dimorphism. All we have is a bunch of primarily male scientists saying over and over, that men are bigger and have more upper body strength.
*yawn*
Culture has told us (women) that we are weak (even though we’re expected to work harder and longer hours, and raise children, and deal with the violence, that is the supposed inheritance of men). When we deny this mandate we get killed and raped, we get beaten or molested by the folks who are supposed to love us. We end up having to work to death and pay taxes in a country where rich white numbskull politicians get drunk and run around with guns and shoot innocent bystanders, and then get cleared of charges. Yay.
Yay for the male spin on human evolution. It’s brought us real fuckin’ far.
22 February 2006, 2:28 pmEd:
Yes of course, Stan. We were all kind, gentle vegetarians living in our little grass huts, sharing everything and loving our neighbors in a lovely world of primitive communism. Then the mean ol’ Republicans and Businessmen came along and taught us to kill animals and hurt each other.
Thanks for the counter-chuckle! Nothing like Marxist prattle for a good laugh.
22 February 2006, 4:20 pmJose:
Cheney: Oh no! I’m sorry! I thought you were a terrorist!
Harry: You idiot, Dick! I’m wearing a hunting cap, not a turban!
22 February 2006, 11:39 pmRob Naardin:
Your funny too Stan
Ed doesn’t realize that the easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born a homo sapien. LOL
Did you ever read up on transpersonal psychology, Stan?
Some interesting reading in Chapter 2: Imprint types, The Semantic mind and Sexuality.
http://www.trans4mind.com/transformation/transform.htm
23 February 2006, 2:52 amEd:
Obviously men are more disposed to violence and aggression. 90% of all violent crimes are committed by men.
The question is simple: is the cause biological or social? It’s the old nature vs. nurture argument, right up there with coke vs. pepsi and the chicken or the egg in the pantheon of eternal debate.
But you’ve set up a classic false choice. The answer, of course, is both. Cultural norms and upbringing play a big role in our behavior. But biology also plays an undeniable role in the male tendency towards violence.
The scientific evidence is overwhelming that men are biologically predisposed to violence. The correlation between testosterone and aggression is so well documented that it would be laughable to deny it. Testosterone also correlates highly with dominant behavior, with lack of tolerance of frustration, and with sexual aggression. Read this nice student summary of the evidence.
Now you will set up a strawman by accusing me of saying it must be accepted since it’s biological in cause. But I never said any such thing. Male violence, by whatever cause, is wrong and should be fought and stopped. Acknowledging biological causation in no way makes violence more acceptable.
If you really care about stopping male violence, you will not ignore the biological factors increasing that tendency. To assert that male violence and sexual aggression are solely products of our social systems and culture is to completely ignore the scientific evidence to the contrary. If you insist on doing that, I can only conclude you care more about your ideological theories than about real results in the real world. How will you ever stop a problem when you only address half the causes?
23 February 2006, 6:12 pmElaina:
Ed: But you’ve set up a classic false choice. The answer, of course, is both. Cultural norms and upbringing play a big role in our behavior. But biology also plays an undeniable role in the male tendency towards violence.
Elaina: I don’t think that what’s been talked about here is setting up a false choice. When you say, “the answer, of course, is both,” then my answer to THAT is “No shit, Sherlock.”
What I’m saying is that I think that culture effects our biology. It’s certainly effected the bioSPHERE, in case anybody hasn’t noticed.
Ok. I’ll admit that yes, according to science now, the general discrepancy in the secretion of Testosterone between women and men is a big one- I’ve read different numbers, but it seems to fluctuate between ten and twenty times higher for males. Alright. But what I’M saying is that it’s damn-near impossible to know whether or not this difference was the same when the first homo sapiens were hangin’ out around the campfire eating mastodon cutlets.
And this is just off the top of my head but if I’m not mistaken low seratonin levels also have something to do with the presence of aggression. It ain’t ALL about testosterone. In fact, here’s a link to a paper on a study on the effects of both testosterone AND estrogen on aggression in adolescent males and females.
http://jcem.endojournals.org/cgi/content/full/82/8/2433
It seems as though high estrogen levels can also facilitate aggressive behavior.
And there’s oodles of literature out there that suggests that while our endocrine system might facilitate certain behaviors, it can’t PRODUCE them. Mitigating factors (like masculinist cultures that promote rape and violence against women in all of their media outlets/art/history books at the same time that they promote women’s subservience and submission) are necessary. (It seems like my Google-gland has pooped out for the evening. But just go and google ESTROGEN TESTOSTERONE AGGRESSION and I’d bet five bucks that there’s documentation for what I just said. I’m too tired to look it up right now for reference. I’m working off of old memories from developmental psych class at this point.)
I have about as much faith in biological science produced predominantly by males as I do in political theory produced in the same way.
I ain’t sayin’ that I flush it down the theoretical commode. I’m sayin’ it’s up for scrutiny and feminist critique. It’s awful hard to do that, given that most “empirical” science is by men, for men (as is MOST political theory.)
So no, I don’t think that testosterone is the “magic bullet” when we talk about the construction of masculinity, and to echo what Ed said, it sure as hell ain’t an excuse for what happens in real life. And I don’t see anybody ignoring male biology. Leaning too hard in that direction, though, does make it awful damn easy to throw out accountability; looking at cultural traits fosters accountability and I’d surmise that’s why men get so damned uncomfortable when we start talking about culture and it’s effects on our biology.
24 February 2006, 2:30 amEd:
Elaina:
I agree that culture affects our biology. But the reverse is also true: biology affects our culture. Both insights are equally relevant in solving the problems of gender.
You say you don’t see anyone ignoring male biology. But most of the theoretical discussion on this forum is based on the stated premise that gender behavioral differences are entirely due to social influence. That viewpoint explicitly discounts any biological influence, and is an inherently flawed approach.
Men ARE different from women. Our bodies are obviously different, and our brains are equally different. The same cocktail of hormones that gives me a beard and a deep voice also makes me think, feel, and act differently. Ignoring those mental differences is foolish and counterproductive.
I understand the appeal of the “social influence” model for you. Social systems can theoretically be reconstructed to suit your goals, whereas we appear to be stuck with our biology. But that is exactly why biology matters. Any social reorganization that ignores basic human biology or psychology is doomed to fail. That’s pretty much what happened with Marxism.
I’m not an excuser of male violence against women. In fact, it may bother me more than it bothers you. I’m not your enemy on this.
24 February 2006, 3:43 pmStan:
Had to cross-post this from De Clarke from another blog… on “humor.” De never ceases to blow my mind with her insights:
(Oh, Ed, if you read what has been written by me on gender you’ll find that I NEVER draw a distinction between socially and biologically constructed… and that, on the contrary, I have said this dualism is false BECAUSE the two are not really two — that is, in actually-existing human society nature and nurture NEVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES EVER EVER exist independently. They only exist as separate processes in gender as analytical categories, ie, in our heads.)
-Stan
*******
from De:
It’s a vexed topic Marek, and yes I would agree that the “Easter” cartoon is antisemitic, not anti-Zionist. It’s antisemitic for the obvious reason: it reinforces or endorses an existing and established prejudice or urban legend that has been used, and can be used, to foment hatred and violence — which is I think one way to define “hate speech”.
I don’t condone racist “humour” when it’s directed at people I don’t care for (like Likudniks); because it is not their Jewishness that is or should be the issue; it is their policy and political outlook that offend, not their mere, factual existence as Other. Which is clearly demonstrated by the several flavours of anti-Zionist Jewish thought — ranging from the ultra-Orthodox who find Zionism heretical to the secular left/liberal who find it barbaric. Conflation (Commie Pinko Queer, for example) is one of the dead giveaways of bigotry.
I personally think there’s a lot of freedom left for artistic expression even if there were laws prohibiting or fining occurrences of “the endorsing of existing prejudice and urban legend blah blah” as above. I would not really mind suppressing the publication of the “Easter” cartoon. it represents no original thought, just the mindless repetition of a cheap old cliche (aond one with vicious consequences). but then I don’t defend strenuously the “right” of pornographers to splatter propaganda all over the internet and video and print media explaining how much women secretly enjoy being humiliated, raped and tortured, either. another example of a deeply ingrained urban legend or existing prejudice, a legacy of injustice and violence, and an endorsement or brainless repetition of same.
in a way the “Easter” cartoon and materials like it are more dangerous than an Irving. an Irving is a contentious figure. he brings into focus the fact that there is a controversy, that he is bucking a “sane” consensus, he is a maverick. the “Easter” cartoon because its reference is implicit, taken for granted, is far more insidious. to “get the joke” the reader must be culturally aware of and somehow complicit in the “Jews Killed Christ” meme. when a humour-product relies on a bigot-meme of this kind, as a pre-requisite for “the joke,” it emphasise the rightful place of that meme in the fabric of the culture. it makes that meme “part of our cultural literacy,” a background meme to be accepted passively rather than a foreground meme to be challenged or considered.
similarly we could say that ‘Cage a Folles’ or ‘Victor/Victoria’ are homophobic in the sense that they reinforce or caricature stereotypes about gay men. they recycle weary old memes. but they do so in the foreground. there was a US political cartoonist who used to satirise Bush I, Dubya’s Daddy, by drawing him carrying a purse and walking mincingly; the implication was background. I loathe this politician therefore I compare him to a faggot and the joke works because we all know that faggots are loathesome/ridiculous. it’s the “we all know” that’s more lethal than an Irving crackpot imho: “we all know” that Jews killed Christ, “we all know” that women are lousy drivers, etc. nudge nudge, wink wink. the imperial Brits used to tell Irish jokes.
there are at least two kinds of humour (probably thousands, but allow me a little taxonomic simplification). one relies on the dissonance of treating a targeted group as less than human when we know they are human, i.e. the dissonance is found in insult or inappropriateness that is in some way inflicted. as in US soldiery finding it hilarious to put ladies’ underwear on male prisoners’ heads (and take snaps of the event to have a good ol’ har-de-har about later), or to force grown men to pile up naked like little children in gymnastics class, etc. or caricatures of racial subgroups that distort the human facial pattern so that Jews have clownish Pinocchio noses or Blacks look like monkeys. or mockery of ethnic costume as inherently, visually hilarious –those Arabs, mein Gott, men walking around in dresses!
humour of this type has a regulatory or reassuring relationship to norms of power. it reinforces the centrality of the jester’s culture, worldview, and status (implicitly shared with the audience, as “n*gg*r jokes” are intended for audiences of whiteboys only, and the nastiest kind of misogynist jokes are told at “stag” parties). and often it reinforces a political message of power (is there really a strong distinction between personal and political in these cases?), a reassurance of racial or nationalist supremacy, a reinforcement of prescriptive and proscriptive norms (men must not carry handbags, it is kapu). it is what I call “controlling humour” or “Constantinian humour,” humour in the service of some existing order. and this is the category into which I put most “Polack jokes” of whatever flavour.
sometimes these jokes outlive the social and power relations which prevailed when they first achieved meme status. does anyone feel a genuine, hot, impotent rage at Friesian jokes [a German-language specialty]? even Polack jokes in the US have lost some of their toxin now that Poles are fully assimilated (have become White). the sting of the joke is proportionate to the genuine injustice it encodes.
the second flavour of joke is what’s sometimes called “transgressive” humour, i.e. humour which runs counter to the proscriptive and prescriptive rules of the culture. jokes which make fun of the nomenklatura and apparatchiks under Stalin — and which could get the teller in serious trouble — are a good example; mockery of the Catholic church in places and times where its secular power was near-absolute; jokes about the royal family or the court; and so on. these jokes often serve to illuminate, rather than to subsume into the background, the memes by which the culture operates; by cocking a snook at the rulebook they call the rulebook into focus. the dissonance they tend to focus on is (a) inconsistency, i.e. “the rules say X but what really happens is Y,” (b) arbitrariness (“the rules make no sense” or “the emperor has no clothes”), (c) the actual humanity and individuality of persons who are considered unpersons or ciphers by the officialdom of the polity. jokes about nonpersons “getting a bit of their own back” or outwitting the system.
this leads me off into two directions that I don’t really have time for right now so will have to fly a quick recon over the ideas rather than really explore them… one is that in a liberalised society where there are few visible constraints on individualism, limited opportunities remain for “transgression” — and an easy out for the impulse is to transgress against the remaining, fairly reasonable rules like courtesy, kindness, etc. this can produce a genre of humour whose only “joke” is to be bloody offensive — with the Church and royal family tamed and corporate power hiding under a convincing mask of consumer choice and freemarketism, where are The Rules to transgress against? transgressive humour, in the hands of those unable or unwilling to keep digging for more subtle societal prescriptions and proscriptions –or having hit bedrock, i.e. untouchable Laingian rules about gender, race, and nation — descends to mere loutishness.
this loutishness can then, in an ouroborean hat trick, be turned against — guess what — ethnic minorities, etc. … back into Constantinian humour, reinforcing white supremacy, Christian hegemony, misogyny, homophobia, antisemitism or what have you, but now patting itself smugly on the back for being “transgressive” by violating the “rules” of civil discourse, courtesy, tolerance etc. so un-PC, so “radical,” so “daring”. or just bloody rude?
there are further hurdles and fun-house mirrors in the way of an easy assessment of whether a joke is hate speech or “just a joke,” and that is the persistence of memes. if Palestinians make ugly antiJewish references in their political cartoons or speeches, their position is (deliberately) ambiguous: relative to the Israeli occupiers their situation is that of the powerless confronting the powerful, and so the genuine corrosive antisemitism can be cloaked or justified as transgressive in the sense of mocking the powerful, the corrupt, the ruling class etc. similarly the meme “Jew=victim” has historical durability and colours the legimacy of laws forbidding hate speech against European Jewry — the persistence of real antisemitism (though on a smaller more marginal scale) helps to keep the meme alive and perpetuate an exceptionalist treatment of Jews as opposed to other ethnic minorities. humour that mocks or belittles Jews qua Jews — whether based in race or relgion — is clearly visible to us as “kicking the underdog,” as unfair, cruel, nasty, and in damned bad taste (crassness in the face of tragedy). humour which mocks Arabs or Islam is not (yet).
anyway, these are some reasons why I find neither absolutist freespeechism nor absolutist “civility censorship” comfortable positions. to know whether a “humorous” utterance is defensible I would have to figure out which kind it is, and sometimes this is easy and sometimes not. in answer to your query above, I don’t find the regurgitation of stale old antisemitic memes defensible — not as as (a) wit, (b) art, or (c) a practical strategy for challenging the Occupation of West Bank. it is not necessary to recycle the blood libel or loonytunes fantasies about the Elders of Zion to challenge Likudism. OTOH cartoons comparing Israeli war crimes in the OT with Nazi thuggery can sometimes be in bad taste, or the parallels poorly drawn, but I tend to think they fall into category B — humour which points out inconsistencies or hypocrises, “naked Emperor jokes.” the behaviour of the IDF in the OT and the inhumane policies backing them up, certainly offer a great big target; much as current US policies and practises invite sarcastic comparisons to forces by which the US self-defines as opposites (i.e. Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, George III’s Britain).
lastly — and this may surprise some people — I am actually very nervous about giving the State apparatus the power to permit or suppress speech and publication. it is all very well as long as the State is semi-democratic, semi-accountable, semi-transparent and semi-responsible. but if it turns fascistic, the legal power to suppress “sedition” can be a trump card in the hands of juntas, warlords, etc. it is almost enough to make one a freespeech fundie! OTOH the Bush regine has made great strides towards shredding the US constitution, establishing a supra-legal Executive, and rescinding basic civil liberties — all in a semi-democratic nation with ostensibly extremely free speech; and its shock troops like Limbaugh make conscious, cynical use of free speech rights to assault the rights and liberties of hated minorities and political opponents; so maybe theoretical free speech is not quite the bulwark against authoritarianism that we would like to believe?
don’t ask me for a definitive answer here. one of my answers would be to penalise unoriginality
which would require sone sophisticated judgment calls but would at least spare us the endless cookie-cutter replication of schoolyard and bar-room provocations.
The difference between theory and practise is practise …
24 February 2006, 6:19 pmelaina:
‘K. SO lately my favorite insult lobbed under-the-breath when in close situations with my masculine oppressors in daily life and sometimes at the top of my lungs in iffy traffic situations and/or at the television when folks like cheney, the prez, etc. make appearances is “fuckin’ douchebag.”
It was the first thing outta my mouth when I saw the “Cheney Shot Somebody and Got Away With It” story on the TV news.
Am I cool with “douchebag,” used in this context? I don’t know if I can let it go. I mean, sometimes I just gotta say something. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not vulgar all the time. It just feels appropriate at moments.
25 February 2006, 1:01 amEd:
Don’t be so emotional.
::ducks::
25 February 2006, 6:10 pmelaina:
Ed, hun, don’t worry- you ain’t made a blip on my “douchebag-o-meter”……yet. *squints at you*
26 February 2006, 12:14 amEd:
Dang, I had such a clever riposte ready … but I’m glad I’m not in bagdom yet.
This isn’t a totally academic discussion for me either. My sons are 3 and 5. I want them to grow up to be good persons and good men, and I spend a lot of time thinking about how to do that.
You’d probably recoil in horror at my definition of a “good man”, laden as it is with old fashioned conservative ideas. But a key component of “good” is respect for women, and a resolve to treat them well and stand up to others who treat them poorly.
I don’t give a hoot in hell for power systems or gender hegemony or any other analytical concept. But I do know my boys will be teenagers and young men, and they will have girlfriends and wives. I know they will probably have emotional arguments and possibly ugly breakups, and I suspect at some point they will be faced with drunken opportunity. I want to equip them properly with character, so they will resist their inner demons at those times and do the right thing.
I keep coming back to shame, because it’s what worked for me. Quite simply, my old fashioned southern mother beat one thing into my head as I was growing up: “Son, don’t ever, EVER hit a girl.” My dad didn’t repeat it so much, but he made it clear that he didn’t hold much regard for the manhood of anyone who would use physical force on a weaker person. He hated bullies, and anyone who picked on a weaker person was a bully, someone to be despised. And those viewpoints have stayed with me ever since, as if my parents were sitting on my shoulder.
So I guess the point of my rambling is that the idea of “masculinity” that you all revile so much can be a tool to affect male behavior in a positive way too. You just have to define it properly. Self respect can be a powerful motivator in the mind of a young man. You just have to make sure he respects the right things.
27 February 2006, 4:49 pmDeAnander:
Am I cool with “douchebag,†used in this context?
Hi Elaina. I’ll take you up on this just for grins. So, why is “douchebag” an insult? I’ll take a wild guess that it’s because women’s bodily secretions are (culturally speaking) kapu, dirty, filthy. [This may not be Anglocentric either -- consider the "dry sex" phenom in Africa, and/or the segregation of menstruating women in many cultures.] OK, so a douchebag is the receptacle for either a fluid used for douching or to contain the backflow after/during.
Why is this artifact a suitable and recognised insult, when calling someone a “used condom” would only provoke a blank stare or raised eyebrows? because semen, though kapu in some contexts, is overall considered a positive exudate, possessing positive mana?
Or because in antique times when most of these insults were coined, douching was a naive attempt to prevent pregnancy and hence associated with “slutty” or “loose” women? Or because douching is sometimes associated with an attempt to clear up an infection or venereal disease?
At any rate, the absence of a corresponding word with male rather than female physical associations suggests it’s not a gender-neutral insult, any more than “fussing like she caught her tits in a wringer” is a gender-neutral “joke”. Why not “like he caught his balls in a bolt-cutter”? because imagery of damage to intimate male body parts is too culturally painful for utterance, whereas imagery of damage to intimate female body parts is commonplace and even, to some percentage of speakers, amusing and/or erotic?
too much minute attention to details of vulgar utterance can send one quietly potty, as some 2nd Wave feminists (in my increasingly cynical hindsight) demonstrated. but listening for the patterns of utterance in phatic and scurrilous speech can tell us a lot about the culture.
as to Ed… well, fella, you seem to have made the classic patriarchal error of confusing “manly” with “human.” anyone, male or female ought to be taught that hurting those weaker than yourself is just plain wrong. to claim that a virtuous distaste for bullying is a uniquely masculine attribute, is to claim that women are intrinsically less virtuous (weaker of character) than men, which is right out of C19. ih this case what your Mama and Daddy did — and good for them, too — was to raise you with a decent human virtue, of not picking on people weaker than yourself. I trust that in addition to not hitting girls, you were raised not to beat up Grandpa, steal smaller kids’ candy bars, intimidate and mock disabled people, or kick the dog. so was I
and like you I can still hear my Mum sitting on my shoulder and telling me to resist my inner devils. nothing uniquely male about any of that.
28 February 2006, 9:48 pmConsumer:
Thanks for the thoughtful post, Ed. I really agree with you here. Despite knowing that, as stated above, a woman can be just as effective a Navy SEAL as a man, and I don’t consciously resent that. Although I resent Demi Moore for making that movie. More enema than cinema…
1 March 2006, 4:23 amelaina:
Ed,
You know, sometimes I feel like when I post here I’m doing it in another language, and the opportunity to engage with somebody in plain english is refreshing. All these high-faluting analyses, while necessary, IMO, are constructed in a very masculine, academic, abstract way, as far as language is concerned, that I think could be reworked so that the “analytical concepts” you mention are shown not merely as concepts but as parts of our real-life world.
Mudslides, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, and earthquakes are all very visible manifestations of unseen processes, whose force, while coming from processes that are natural, are susceptible to the influence of humanity’s impact on our ecology. While not inherently bad or evil, their effects can be negative, depending in great part on how we attempt to understand said processes and act accordingly.
Aggression is just as real as these things. The difference with human behavior is that we’re cognizant of it and have a direct line (through our brains) to changing it. And masculine-supremacist science has eeked out enough of a foothold for itself to understand the advantages, evolutionarily speaking, of consciously defining something known as “female”, that is, “woman”, and giving it a place in a masculine world which is subservient and not at all equal with what science defines as “masculine.”
Hegemonic masculinity is real. It might have started out abstractly, but at this point it’s not just a concept, and your post above only backs this up to me. All it means is that, culturally, there is a “normal” way to be male, and part of this “normal way” is thinking, or being taught from the time that you are a child, that women are weaker than men, and therefore must be protected. Men learn this and act it out, but for it to be successful women have to learn it and act it out, too.
I mean, think about it; what if men were taught, from the day that they were born (you mention your old-fashion southern Mother; well, I have one of those, too, so I know about having certain ideas “beat into” me), that if you hit a woman she will definitely hit you back and MEAN it, as opposed to “if you hit a girl it will hurt her and she’ll have no recourse, ’cause you’re bigger and stronger, because you’re a boy”.
And while we’re thinking in “what ifs”, well, imagine a world where every woman you know were taught, from girlhood, that she wasn’t any weaker at all than the boys and men around them. That when she spoke, everyone should have the respect to listen to her, and when she hit and fought, it would pack a sting.
Then Bobby wouldn’t be refraining from hitting Sally merely because it’s “wrong.” He’d not hit Sally because Sally would black his eye, and she might also tattle on his ass and the adults wouldn’t simply roll their eyes at her and say “boys will be boys”.
Neither men nor women currently grow in such a world. But it’s important to remember here that men who abuse their (unjustly and fallaciously acquired) power in ways that hurt women, from raping, torturing and killing them all the way to denying them education and a voice of their own in the world, don’t merely do this because they are “stronger,” in physical terms. They do these things because they KNOW that they CAN. This “knowing”, to me, seems to create a percieved need for the “man as protector” ideal, which to so many women is a myth and a criminal lie. Women also “know” in this sense, and it effects our daily lives, too– we learn to be afraid of men, we learn that if we don’t acknowledge their percieved power we’ll have a hard time slogging through from one day to the next.
In addition to an old-fashioned southern Mother, I was raised by a good-’ol-boy, white, conservative, working-class father. He too preached a hard line against men who “beat up on” women. He taught me some important stuff, though, that I think has helped me get through some very tough experiences. I’ll just quote him a little, so you can see what I mean.
“Don’t you EVER let anybody run you over.”
“If you get in a fight with a boy, hit him with a closed fist. Don’t let him walk away without a limp or some teeth missin’.”
“Don’t start anything you don’t think you can finish.”
“You have to be strong.”
“I’m glad you’re stubborn. You have to be when you’re poor.”
“You’re damn smart. Don’t ever forget that.”
I’ll admit right here to having been a mighty pugnacious little shit as a kid. I insisted on playing with my male cousins, doing the GI Joe thing, running around and wrestling with them. I think dad was trying to look out for me in his own way; and he didn’t try and keep me from exploring that side of myself.
But Daddy, rest his soul, also taught me some backwards stuff, that I’ve had to struggle against.
“You’re gonna have to get married one day.”
“Girls ain’t cut out for that kinda shit.” (re: sundry vocations I showed interest in as a kid, from the military to playing rock music)
“Your hands are too small to play bass. You won’t be any good.”
“Stick to singing. You got a good voice. You don’t need to play anything.”
“Your brother has his own room ’cause he’s the BOY.”
“Don’t talk back to your granddaddy, even if he’s wrong.”
“Men make the decisions in the world. That’s just the way it is.”
Now I’m the one who’s rambling.
But I’m trying to make the point that these ways of knowing, which are indeed systemic, have GOT to be reconstructed. As long as men are taught to think that they are inherently stronger than women, men will continue to opportunistically abuse “their power.” As long as women are taught to agree to this fiction, and further that our lives will run more smoothly if we acquiesce to it, their lives will be in the hands of men.
Women are not merely adult children. We have to stop thinking this about ourselves as much as men have to stop thinking this about us. It’s a hierarchy, whether or not anyone wants to use that word for it, and men posess the advantage within it.
Women have to learn that it is more important to protect and defend ourselves, as women, than is to try and find men who are gonna do it for us, as opposed to using the “power that they have” to hurt us. Men can work to protect themselves against this way of knowing, which is indeed harmful to them as well.
We should all be looking out for one another, because we’re all a part of this great big “system,” which is life on earth and living as human beings.
To me it’s useless to keep thinking that men should act as “protectors” if the goal is not to create a world where women no longer have to be protected from men.
I grew up in the South, Ed, so trust me, nothing you say about “manhood” is gonna make me “recoil in horror.” It takes a lot more than blog-talk to bring out that reaction in me. I can pretty much guarantee that I’ve probably heard worse.
At least you give a shit about what’s going on around you. That’s a start.
It can either be a point of productive conversation or a weak spot in the armor that I can attack relentlessly with male-centric verbosity I learned in college. Guess we’ll see what happens… and don’t get too pissed if I end up calling you a douchebag at some point. You can’t say I didn’t warn you ahead of time.
1 March 2006, 3:50 pmEd:
DeAnander:
The saying “tits in a wringer” is one I haven’t heard. But the saying “got his nuts crushed” is quite common in my male-dominated sub-culture.
Likewise, “Douchebag” is a less common insult than “Dickhead” or “Shithead”, and arguably less derogatory than “Cumstain”.
Amateur psychology doesn’t strengthen an argument, it weakens it.
1 March 2006, 4:06 pmStan:
Oh come on! I lived in that male subculture for quite a while, and misogyny is built into its very micro-circuits.
“Hurry up’ ladies.” (to men)
“Don’t be such a pussy.”
“Why do women have pussies? …So men will talk to them.”
“She’s a nice looking bag of guts.”
“I’m gonna run ten inches up into her guts.”
“Back up, bitch.” (to a man)
“My commander fucked me and didn’t even kiss me.” (from a man)
“Alpha Company is a bunch of cunts.”
“What’s the matter, Ranger? You got sand in your clit?”
“You can’t trust anything that bleeds for five days a month and doesn’t die.”
… just a few choice morsels of what I heard again and again.
De’s idiom is from UK, so she may be more familiar with UK’s most masculine speech artifacts, but the fact of the matter is… dickhead, which used to be primarily an epithet for a “cherry” (think about THAT), doesn’t have the same fighting-words edge as bitch or cunt. It’s like calling someone an asshole or an idiot.
People even say it about themselves. I was just bein’ a dick. There’s almost a whiff of pride in it. No soldier, however, says, I was just bein’ a cunt.
I knew a female naval officer once who said she aspired to become an asshole… instead of a bitch… when she pissed off her subordinates. It would have been an indicator of some kind of equality.
And your final mini-lecture about strengthening and weakening arguments… … tsk tsk.
This is De. Be careful of De. (-:
1 March 2006, 5:40 pmEd:
Elaina and Consumer, thanks for the kind words. I usually play the villain in these discussions, so it’s refreshing to be taken at face value.
Elaina, I get what you say about the “weaker sex” perception becoming reality. My mother was taught to be very southern and proper, which evidently didn’t include sports. As a result, she has no appreciation for what her body can do. She doesn’t know good pain from bad pain. I don’t think society and her family served her well in this regard.
But in the real world, “weaker” is not just a matter of perception. When it comes to violence and rape, strength and weakness are not just analytical constructs. They are are undeniable physical realities. Men on average are far larger, stronger, and more capable of inflicting grevious bodily harm than women are. That’s why women get beaten and raped. Because we can.
You ask what would happen if Sally was taught to hit Bobby back. That would work fine when Sally and Bobby were 8. But when Sally and Bobby are 28, if Sally gave Bobby a black eye, Bobby might respond by breaking Sally’s jaw. Or worse.
If I had a daughter, I’d teach her that she could accomplish anything in the world. But I’d also teach her to avoid dark parking lots and strange men.
1 March 2006, 6:18 pmEd:
Stan, my criticism stands. De was clearly guilty of over-analysis and mind-reading, something you are way too prone to in your writings as well.
As long as you continue to reject all criticism from those who disagree with you, you will NEVER persuade anyone who doesn’t already agree with you.
1 March 2006, 6:27 pmStan:
So, this means…. what?
You have avoided the point I made. Misogyny is always and everywhere a dominant cultural characteristic of the military.
You don’t hear these kinds of remarks all the time there? Feminization is not a put-down in the army? Women are not referred to, in all-male company, as split-tails, beavers, bitches, pussy, hammers, babes, poontang, etc etc?
I can hardly be rejecting criticism here. You didn’t criticize what I said. You didn’t even engage it.
Is devaluation of and hatred of women part of the dominant military culture or not?
1 March 2006, 7:00 pmDeAnander:
I’m puzzled. whose mind was I supposed to be reading? I was responding to Elaina’s query about whether ‘douchebag’ was transgressive or prescriptive humour, or at least that’s what I thought I was doing
I think I concluded that it was probably prescriptive.
however, Ed himself is apparently able to read women’s minds and instruct them as to what they were really thinking or saying (and find them “guilty” and pass judgment, too) so I’m sure he must be right
btw, I would call it amateur anthropology, not amateur psychology. I’m more interested in patterns — the pathologies of cultures, rather than the pathologies of individuals. and especially in intriguing gender asymmetries in language use.
while we think on it, why “dickhead” but not “cunthead”? because a dick (being male)does is something that a guy could think with, even if that makes him kind of a jerk or stupid — whereas the concepts “cunt” and “brain” or “think” can’t even get within hollering distance of each other? “cuntface” I think I’ve heard, meaning “ugly” (gee whiz), but never “cunthead”. any more than the phrase “he’s such a f***ing john” exists in symmetry with “she’s such a f***ing whore”. little verbal canaries in the coal mine…
an aside: I’ve certainly heard phrases like “nut crusher” or “ball buster” (as any assertive female inevitably has) but not in the context of “raised a fuss like…” indicating a kind of contemptuous disdain for a display of pain or outrage. generally the “nut crusher” meme as I’ve heard it is meant to validate the pain of the (male) subject, to convey sympathy or to elicit sympathy.
1 March 2006, 11:18 pmrsklnkv:
The evidence is mounting, I think:)
2 March 2006, 12:17 amOn another level, namely prison culture, women are continuously and almost ritualistically destroyed verbally. I always found it strange (understated) that rapists and men who beat women were considered pathetic, cowardly or ‘freakish’, yet nearly every conversation relating to women ends up degenerating to a sort of manly affirmation by belittling females. Calling them the most originally insulting names (beats out all that ‘guts’ stuff posted above, I guarentee it) one can imagine. To me, this is very telling on many levels. First, that it is a masculine stance to claim that beating or raping women is wrong, yet in the same breath talk about sticking a shiv in some punk for not putting out. Second, and ultimately, that it is manly to degrade women through insult because in prison culture, men are obviously the better, more powerful, and more hip-to-the-world than women. This is what they tell themselves, anyway. Or were told, or whatever.
Let me relate a story of (hopefully) interest :
A conversation took place between some of the more outgoing and powerful convicts on the unit one evening regarding whether or not it was okay, or cool, to hit a women if she hit first. There were mostly affirmations of what, in my experience, is typical among groups of tough-guys; It would be like hitting a child or a crippled person or a retarded person. Being sooo strong, as a man, why would one ever even need to hit a woman!?! For a moment, it seemed that everyone agreed that it was not a good thing to hit a woman. Then, one fella jumps in and says “I’d smack that b1^$#, you better believe it!” He expands on his epiphany and points out that if a woman is stupid enough to hit him, she is too stupid to NOT have a broken nose. It goes without saying that the conversation just went down-hill from there. Granted, jailhouse talk nearly always moves in the direction of making one seem much more in control of the world than they actually are.
“Devaluation of and hatred of women” are certainly part of the dominant prison culture, for what it’s worth. Pretty obvious but also seemingly encouraged at every level of society. I knew men who would call their own wife a whore and sell their sisters phone number but kill someone for making fun of their mother. It’s not biological, in my opinion, as I have personally always been quite disgusted by this kind of pathetic, slap-on-the-back man-crap. Some part of me has always rejected that ‘behavior’ as ignorant and uneducated, even though at this time in my life I was also somewhat ignorant and uneducated. So why, as a man myself, did I reject it? I found that the less time I spent around macho men, the easier it was to move away from the manly ideals taught to me by the male figures in my life, the TV, and the culture I was raised. Now, I think it’s fear that drives men to the so-called caveman crap. Would it be bad of me to atribute a lot of it to religious beliefs? FEAR.
Sorry to ramble:)
Ed:
Stan,
You resort to strawmen entirely too much. My comments to De were not an assertion of presence or lack of misogyny in the military. They were a specific refutation of a specific hypothesis that she made, to which I provided counter-examples.
To address your specific point: No. Devaluation and hatred of women is not “always and everywhere” a part of the dominant military culture. Such attitudes are present in varying degrees in the military, as they are in all male-dominated sub-cultures, but they are by no means the dominant viewpoint, nor are they pervasive. The term “always and everywhere” is an indication of how unreflective you are on this point, especially as it pertains to a culture you have not been a member of for more than a decade.
I’ll repeat my criticism of your analysis, which I’ve said many other times: your analysis shows a strong desire not only to control what people do and say, but also what and how they think. In order to justify your aguments, you frequently presume the ability to know what people think and why they think it. In doing so, you frequently make blanket generalizations about the thought processes of large groups of people, men in this instance. Your assumptions are frequently unjustified and inherently weaken your analysis of gender.
So since we’re playing the “you didn’t answer my point” game, what is YOUR answer to my critique?
2 March 2006, 8:24 amElaina:
De:
Just read your breakdown of my use of my favorite “insult.” Dangit. *sighs*
I got to admit I wasn’t thinking through all facets of it. I been using it in a totally individualized manner. When I think of douching, in my own head it turns into a representation of our supposed “uncleanliness,” like you were saying; an actual bag of douche as you would buy in your average gringo pharmacy is, in itself, a repulsive instrument, not because of the vaginal liquid it’s supposed to get rid of but just because of the preposterousness of being expected to do that to myself to rid myself of “odor” or “secretions.”
So the past couple of days I been talking to some female buddies re: whether or not they douche, what they think of it, etc. The general answer I got is that they don’t LIKE to do it but they feel like they NEED to, especially if they want to have sex when they’re on their periods.
I guess to wrap up what I’m saying is that, to me, (and only to me so maybe I’ll have to conceed and say that I should maybe limit my use of the word to extreme situations) is that the thing that is a “douchebag” has come to me to be kinda the gynecological equivalent of a priest’s cat-o-nine-tails, something women use to “cleanse” themselves which actually does them more harm than good. Does that make any sense? I don’t know who “invented the douchebag” or too much about the etymology of the word. So I’m strictly working off the top of my head.
And I’ll try and curb my use of the word. I swear. Sometimes these words just come flying out. I have a problem with that in other areas, too, but I thought I was safe with this one. Dang. Just when I’d nearly convinced some of the folks I work with to get our big boss a gag-trophy, one with a bronzed douchebag and a plaque that woulda read “Douchebag of the Year.” Oh well. Guess the road to hell really IS paved with good intentions.
To Ed-
I’m just wondering here, when I read your last comment addressed to me, what, if anything, besides avoiding “parking lots and strange men” would be good steps toward fostering a society in which women don’t have to be brought up to fear men?
I’m speaking of surviving in the USA, right now, but I have to remind you that in order to get by women generally have to have mobility. We shouldn’t feel like we need to be sequestered to be safe. You might answer that this is idealist thinking; but I’d argue back that it’s also practical thinking. (And I’m not trying to read your mind.) We have to work, we have to do stuff like shuttle kids around and go places that might have strange men and parking lots that are pretty much unavoidable. And there’s the fact that it’s just not feasible for men to constantly be hanging around “protecting” women as they go about their daily lives. My dad used to tell me not to walk alone at night. He worked, he played music, he took care of his parents when they were sick; my mother worked all the time and generally at night. I was alone A LOT as a teenager, and I had no car and lived within a half-mile of the mall. Guess what I did? I walked around our little city at night, alone, an awful lot. I try to keep my niece from walking around alone at night. I talked with her for a long time about this. I’ve talked to her big brother, tried to get him and his friends to keep an eye out for her and her little friends when they’re out and about, doing the teenager thing. I think it’s more effective to tell young women to walk around in groups instead of telling them not to walk around AT ALL.
But what about here, where most physical violence and rape comes not from a random stranger in a dark parking lot, but a person that the woman already knows? Fear and intimidation are key factors, I think, not so much size and brute strength, not that these don’t ever play a role. But I think that sexual dimorphism, the difference in size between men and women, isn’t always or even most often a case of itty-bitty-tiny to great-big-super-strong. You might be amazed at the power, for example, of an incredibly loud, angry female voice in an overly-insistent man’s face. It’s worked for me, more than once, in different situations.
It’s depressing that we live in a society where women are punished harshly for doing extreme things in extreme situations. My friend’s sister went to prison for 3 years for defending herself against a man. He was raping her, on top of her and raping her, and she managed to have the presence of mind to pull out her knife and stab him until he stopped raping her. He died a few days later.
All I’m saying is this predominant “men have to be noble and protect women” attitude doesn’t serve to change or rework things. It keeps an order, an order that doesn’t need to be kept.
Gar, I want to write more but I have to go get ready for a funeral.
2 March 2006, 4:07 pmR.S. Morris:
rsklnkv:
Fascinating story…thanks! Just curious: do you have any sense of comparison between the “military” and the “prison” culture? I only have experience with the former, but from the stories I have heard here and elsewhere, I’m beginning to think there might be some similarities, at least regarding misogyny and patriarchy. Not asking for any sort of professional dissertation, just your spin.
Take care.
Ed:
My experience in the military left me feeling that misogyny is “always and everywhere‖at least in the combat arms–for all intents and purposes. We can split hairs over semantics or pragmatics, but I never in five years met a grunt who didn’t degrade women regularly. I did it. Everyone I knew did it to some degree. Hell, most of the guys I know from that period of my life STILL do it!
Hopefully it’s different in the military these days–I’ll have to take your word, since you’re serving now and I’m not.
2 March 2006, 5:03 pmDeAnander:
I’m beginning to think there might be some similarities
to me it seems that there are marked similarities. once you’re in you can’t get out, for one thing; privacy and individuality are suppressed, uniforms are worn; men are subjected to bullying and hazing, without the option to retaliate; obedience is required with the threat of various punishments. didn’t someone once say about the old Navy, that going to sea was pretty much like going to prison but with the added risk of drowning?
back to the noblesse oblige school of masculine behaviour — it’s definitely preferable to thuggishness, at least when it’s sincere. gentlemanly men are a pleasure to deal with compared to thugs.
but they are not always “safer”. some men who are brought up to be “gentlemen” consider that there’s a contractual obligation for women to be “ladies” in order to “deserve” gentlemanly, magnanimous treatment. thus the most courtly, gracious males in mannerly Victorian society could without blinking rape and batter prostitutes for entertainment, since prostitutes were “unworthy” or “bad” women (not ladies); or the same “gentlemen” could be bloody rude and domineering and sexually predatory to female domestic labour. courtly Southern landowning gentlemen could rape “their” female Black slaves without a qualm, while meticulously observing every social propriety towards whitegals.
the quality of gentlemanliness extending to all other humans regardless of social standing is so rare that it’s remarked on in biography and fiction. along with the idea that good behaviour is the magnanimous condescension of the strong to the weak, goes the notion that the strong have the authority to judge and define among the weak or “lesser” human beings, who is worthy of magnanimity and who is subhuman and outside the rulebook. there are plenty of “gentlemen” who wouldn’t hit a girl, but would beat the s**t out of a faggot (even if the faggot in question were a slightly built and unathletic man weaker than themselves).
I don’t claim that “Ed” for example is one of these. I hope his Mama raised him far better than that — would he even be here if she hadn’t? but it illustrates at least one of the pitfalls of the noblesse oblige approach to interpersonal ethics.
2 March 2006, 5:52 pmEd:
Elaina:
I don’t know.
I’m sorry, that’s a crappy answer and it may look like a dodge to you. It’s not meant to be. You’re asking a genuinely important question and I don’t want to give you a flippant answer. Please let me consider it a bit.
RS:
I’m not saying it isn’t there. It is. I did it too, without even realizing what I was doing. Still do. But “always and everywhere” is a grossly unfounded statement. And even more unfounded is the idea that you can make assumptions about why someone says or thinks something. I don’t know why I call my intel guy my “powerpoint slide bitch”, but it’s not because I hate women.
2 March 2006, 6:01 pmStan:
You call him your powerpoint slide bitch for the same reason he does NOT call you — the commander — his operations order bitch. Because women are ranked below men. So much so that the animalization of women becomes the feminization of men who are lower on the pecking order… and I’d bet your S-2 laughs when he hears this reference to himself.. maybe even uses it FOR himself.
Women internalize this hierarchy, too. And when they do so with grace and humor, it would be graceless of us NOT to like them, eh? What ingrates we might seem to hate those who flatter our power, smile at us until their faces crack with the tension, wash our dirty drawers, and defer to us at every turn.
Slave masters did not always HATE their slaves — even when they routinely raped them, as did many of our exalted “founding fathers” — and when a slave was particularly obsequious, many white folk from the old south felt real affection for the Good Nigras.
It’s not simply about hatred. It’s about structured social power.
Misogyny can take the form of outright hostility to women — usually from the very MOST insecure men, the same ones who work 24-7 at being outwardly hyper-masculine — or the patronizing devaluation of women in which we might even refer to “our” women as princesses or queens or goddesses (as long as they’re not whores, the other half of THAT dyad).
Patriarchy is not some individual pathology. It is a social system, with interfused historical, economic, cultural, and socio-psychic dimensions… self-referential, self-reproducing, and appearing to us therefore as “common sense,” as natural. Its various reflections in the consciousness of individuals are just that… reflections. But of what? Of an entire, complex, and interlocking system of power. That’s the same reason capitalism cannot be reduced to greed, nor national oppression to racism.
2 March 2006, 7:58 pmDeAnander:
Suppose Guy A (ranking higher) called Guy B (ranking lower) his Powerpoint N*gga or his Powerpoint Coolie, and then said, “But of course I’m not a racist,” would it ring any bells? would it only be racist if Guy B actually was Asian or Black? would it be not-racist if Guy A was Asian or Black? would it have nothing, whatsoever, in any way, to do with structural patterns in white culture that mean the people who clean bathrooms and hotel rooms and wait tables and perform other demeaning services (like prostitution) are in fact disproportionately Black, Pilipino, Asian…?
What did it mean when an Iraqi victim of American torture at AbuGhraib protested bitterly, “They treated my brothers like women!”
We’ve been over this ground before (that racism is officially visible, or at least partially-visible, and misogyny is officially invisible and infinitely deniable). The two cannot be neatly separated, which makes comparisons like the one I just made rather tricky and dangerous (as if racism and sexism were oil and water, when instead they’re something more like oil and ammonium nitrate…)
Here is at least one example of racism, sexism, homophobia working synergistically and seamlessly…
2 March 2006, 8:39 pmEd:
Stan:
I don’t neccessarily disagree with your analysis. There is some merit to considering it that way as an analytical framework.
What I object to is your unwillingness to acknowledge the limits of your own analysis. For instance, you jumped right in and told me why I call my S2 a bitch. That’s pretty impressive mind reading, considering we haven’t seen each other in 20 years. People think and react in a wide range of ways for a wide variety of reasons. Professing special insight on our collective consciousness is a pretty big leap of logic.
Philosophically, what I most disagree with is the certitude you express on your political analysis. I understand your desire for a grand unified theory of social, political, economic, racial, and gender systems. But it don’t happen that way. Many physical scientists have foundered on the rocks of ambition while trying to formulate a grand unified theory of physics that wraps it all together. Social scientists like yourself are subject to the same foible. Please don’t take this as an insult or a taunt, but to presume you can redesign an entire social system is one of the most deeply arrogant human affectations.
I’m sorry you don’t think I have anything to offer except as an example of retrograde thinking. Perhaps I am too critical of your writing in public. But everyone needs someone to question their deepest assumptions. That’s why I read your work: to question my own assumptions. Tell me, who do you read to question your assumptions?
De, I see your point. Let me respond with a personal story.
Once upon a time when I was young, I had a close friend named Eric. While we were talking one day, I used the adjective “Jewish” to describe someone who was tight with their money. He looked at me kind of funny and asked me to explain, which I did.
Later, after we lost touch, I put 2 and 2 together and realized he was Jewish. It had just never come up in our friendship. I felt awful. I still do. One day I’m going to track him down and apologize for that unintentional slur 20 years ago.
The point is this: that slur clearly had origins in anti-semitism. But not mine. There is not an anti-semitic bone in my body. If anything, I’m a Semitophile. I have nothing but admiration for the Jewish people, and am deeply moved by their 2000 year struggle to retain their identity as a race.
So why did I say it? Because I was a young dipshit, and young dipshits parrot phrases they pick up from others, without thinking about offensive roots and connotations.
So yeah, I see the misogynistic roots of a term like “slide bitch.” But I also recognize that those roots don’t establish the speaker is a misogynist, nor that other persons are misogynists for tolerating it, nor that the culture is irretrievably misogynist. Some of it is just crassness, which seems to be a more prevalent characteristic of males than females. (I’ve never been in a female locker room, so I don’t know for sure.
) I don’t think the term bitch means I devalue females, any more than calling someone a cock means I devalue my own organs, or calling someone a jackass means I devalue farm animals.
Geez I was long-winded. I apologize.
3 March 2006, 4:37 amEd:
Elaina:
You asked me a tough question that I’ve been thinking about:
That’s a tough question, almost on a par with “how do we make the world a better place”, and not something any one person could know the answer to. But at the risk of sounding inadequate, I’ll express my views:
I think it all comes down to raising better men. Men with character and morals and values.
Glib, huh? Well, there’s an old saying: the important things are very simple, and the simple things are very hard. Raising “better men” with “character” is simple to say, but very hard to do.
On an individual level, I have my own views on what constitutes character and morals and values, and how to instill them. My views, gleaned from my own personal experience, revolve around the importance of family, education, religion, and the example of a father. You may have different ones, as do many others. But the important thing is that we have them, and we raise our sons to be better men than we were.
I think it’s very important that we not discard the institutions which assist us in this process. Family values, education, church, and fatherhood can help us raise men able to control their own behavior and be a force for good in society. Our sons will be masculine whether we want them to or not; we must teach them how to be masculine in a positive way.
It’s also important to realize that no matter how highly society evolves, there will always be bad men who resort to violence and prey on women. It’s in our blood, not just our minds. That’s why we need police, jails, and ruthless punishment for those who prey on others. Personally, I’d have given your friend’s sister a medal and allowed her to inherit the dead man’s estate. We also need masculine men with the physical courage to step in and stop abuse when they see it, by escalating force if needed. If I ever see a man beating a woman or abusing a child, he will be glad when the police arive and pull me off him.
At a political level, I believe in democracy. That is the one system proven to enable society to reinvent and improve itself. Society can’t be redesigned or managed, and all attempts to do so have failed. It must change from within, by and from itself. It’s happening with gender, not as fast as you might like, but it’s happening. 100 years ago, you couldn’t vote. 3 years from now, you might have a woman President.
4 March 2006, 4:08 amElaina:
GAHHHHH!!!!! *bangs head on desk 6 times*
Ed. Ed, Ed.
I think I made a comment once that sometimes I feel like I write in fractals on this blog. Now’s one of those times.
You know, the thing about a stone monolith is it don’t matter how often you dust it, pressure-wash it, care for it, or beat your head against it it’s still a stone monolith. You can’t change it without dynamite or a wrecking ball. Jackhammers work nice, too, but they’re slow. I’ve begun to think the same way about “masculinity”.
People wonder how come radical feminists are so “angry.” They wonder why we pick apart and analyze everything, why we stop being able, a lot of the time, to enjoy any sort of popular media, TV, books. Why can’t we just shake that chip off our shoulder, and live?
Ed, the thing that I’m trying to tell you is that for me and many of my sisters in struggle, a new-and-improved version of the old, fucked-up order ain’t gonna cut it. It just AIN’T.
And just to clear things up a bit, because I HAVE been very nice here and maybe it’s not clear to you how I feel about politics, etc, if you haven’t read any of my other posts; a woman president won’t mean SHIT, not if it’s Hillary fuckin’ Clinton, or Condoleeza Rice, not if she’s just gonna pay heed to the god of capital and fuckin’ let the war machine roll on, and attempt to preserve this illusion of “democracy,” which in this country is democracy of the rich for the rich by the rich (and I’ll add WHITE and MALE to that,) not if she’s gonna just do what she can and dance for an audience, which IMO is the main function of presidential job-description; not if she’s just gonna keep on keepin’ on with a system that systematically destroys and dehumanizes women. In this country, she’d have to be committed to that to win. Because those are the people who would put her into power, not the rest of us.
I’d like to talk about WOMEN’s liberation and WOMEN’s empowerment, not shaping males to use their culturally endowed abusive tendencies to act like our benevolent big brothers. If you look at the “brass tacks” of the way that the world works, you’ll see that the world wouldn’t go on without the grunt-work that women do everywhere. We do so much and work so hard, often for little or nothing in return, and the answer is supposed to be “do a better job raising men????” My ass.
I’m tired of helping “raise” the men in my life. I know some very, very good men, and I try to keep them aware of their oppressive behavior; ask any radical woman, you catch a lot of shit for being honest with men about the fucked-up ways they act and the fucked-up shit that they do. You get called a “prude,” a “stick in the mud,” and a “feminazi.” And what we’re asking for is respect, dignity, and acknowledgement that NO, we’re not just you’re cute, smart kid-sister; we’re worthy of autonomy and self-sovereignty. And I’m willing to work with men, in order to bring them closer to this. But it’s hard, and it’s tiring, especially when I’ve got lots of other shit to do just to survive. That’s why I’m angry about it. That’s why I’m frustrated. That’s why I cuss and yell sometimes.
Let me give you an example. I work at a group home. One of our former residents was placed in a nursing home because he kept falling down and was too big to be lifted on a repetitive basis. One Sunday a few years ago I was working and he was sick and took a dive in the hallway in front of his bedroom. He couldn’t get back up, his legs were super-weak. The dude weighed between 230-240 lbs. I was working there with two male staff, and one of the other residents came running when he fell, and got me. I called for the other guys who were working to come and help get him up out of the floor and into bed. We’re standing around, and these two guys are talking about how to get him off the floor. I’m like, we’re just gonna have to pick him up. These guys just looked at me like I was stupid. Neither of them moved to do SHIT.
So I repositioned the guy’s legs on the floor, I squatted down behind him and gave him a bear hug, and stood up. At that point my coworkers assisted me with balancing him and he was fine, he shuffled into his room and I got him back into bed. My back hurt for a couple of days.
These coworkers, they ain’t bad men. They’re good folks, fun to talk to, they’re nice and normally “gentlemen.” They’ll gladly take the guys to football and baseball games, or fishing, or help them shave, that sort of stuff. That don’t stop them from being offended when a woman tells them what to do, it doesn’t stop them from running through hoops of fire to get out of “women’s work” in the house, circumventing me (who, as a full-time employee is the active “boss” when my actual manager ain’t around) to even call my boss at home to get out of said “women’s work” when they’re told they HAVE to do it.
This is just a little flash-foto, it’s just one tiny example of how the world works; the guys have less work and actually have less hard labor to do but the fucking TV and society and our politicians, teachers, preachers, our military, our friggin’ cultural icons teach us that men are “inherently” stronger, better composed to handle tough jobs, all of which are LIES designed to keep women under the jackboot, as Andrea Dworkin would say. These are LIES. I’ve seen proof, and not just at work. Women don’t just have the capability to do tough shit, they do it every day, all the time and they do it extremely well. Your average fuckin’ masculine world-view wouldn’t have a world to manifest itself in without women there to bear the burden on their backs.
Here’s the problem with the man-as-protector approach, in case you didn’t notice when I’ve said it before: It assumes women are powerless, and it WILL NOT WORK to promote a world where women no longer have to feel afraid of their fathers, husbands, brothers, grandfathers, and uncles. (Fractal time, huh?)
Maybe if my standpoint were different I would be able to see some of the “logic” that you assume is there in what you say, Ed. But as it is, I’ve worked shoulder-to-shoulder with men in a field where physical strength and cast-iron-guts are pretty damn important, and I SEE that women are not “powerless.” We are not “weak.” Hell, we MAKE UP most of this field. We can think on our feet, don’t get all “emotional” when a crisis is happening (and a lot of the time panic WAY less than the dudes in the room), we remember every little detail we’re supposed to remember and we do it all while we are busy with a million other chores at the same damn time.
This is what I see with the women in my family, too. Hardship’s nothin’. Working two or three jobs to keep a family together and still managing to be a parent, staying strong in the face of abuse, withstanding beatings and emotional manipulation from the men in our lives without throwing in the towel and committing suicide, those are all signs of strength. We have strength and we have power.
The trap is not in being women who posess strength, as though strength is some male-exclusive quality. That’s a fucking lie. It’s no less than a lie. Where women are trapped is in their own internalized commitment to this lie; we are trapped in this lie economically and in the case of “family values” and religion, ideologically.
It’s got nothing to do with how much weight you can lift or how many burly lumberjacks you can beat arm wrestling. And I’m sticking by my original idea that women can be and are just as aggressive as men. Not one person’s even commented on that. This refusal to acknowledge the “aggressiveness” that women exhibit, refusal to look at the living world around you and see just how aggressive, in one form or another, women have to be to simply SURVIVE, whether or not they choose to use this built-in mechanism that ALL HUMANS have in order to hurt others, well, to put it bluntly it’s a fucking INSULT.
And Ed, while I can see that you honestly care about women, and while I can see that you’re probably not a bad person and so on, this view that you have of a “better world” scares the beejeeezus out of me. It’s not anything like the world I’d (ideally) like to live in. And I don’t think it’s some sort of inevitable answer. It honestly scares me when well-meaning men take this position, because it’s just a watered-down version of what the supposed “bad guys” in the world want. And what I’m saying, from my standpoint and looking for both concrete AND philosophical liberation from a totally masculine-construct of a world order, I’m saying that it just ain’t worth wanting.
I want y’all to fight WITH us, not FOR us. We are fighting and struggling everyday. For us to exist with any sort of autonomy, we rely on our ability to fight, with our minds AND our backs. I’ll repeat, life is ALREADY a fight for us. By internalizing this masculine ideal, we use our strength and power to keep each other down. Men couldn’t do it alone. They need our hard work and our strong backs and our will, they need all that to make this shitty world turn in their favor. I’m going to repeat that, one more time, because it feels good to write it where people can see it. Men NEED our strength to get by, just as much as we do. We’ve been cultivated to hate ourselves and one another, to compete for economic security in a world where men make all the rules. I don’t WANT to have to be mean about it, but y’all have made your own bed, as far as I’m concerned; I don’t like having to take a stance of “you’re with us or you’re against us,” but the more I argue with men, the more I see what this world is doing to the women that I love dearly and the women who live a whole world away from me, in the sex-houses of southeast asia, or even the simpering, sex-doll images of women in Gringo media, the more I FEEL that way, that you’re with us or you’re against us. My plea is that you’ll get with us, quick. But I don’t see it happening. I see “women’s issues” tossed on a cultural back-burner, I see it put off and put off and put off again so that even men with good intentions can keep that little bit of power in their personal and public lives, I see it in men who agree with me on issues of class and race even as I see it in men with totally opposing political opinions. I see it everywhere, and you ain’t gonna convince me that I’m being crazy because I don’t need a college education or a special certificate in anything to sit in my own damn home and see it in front of my face, happening; hurting and damaging and spirit-killing, even as I type right now.
From my standpoint, Ed, it’s time to throw that fucking polishing-cloth in the trash and bring out the jackhammers and dynamite.
So don’t protect me, kind Sir. I don’t need a fucking body-guard, I can hold down my own shit. I need comrades who’ll stand beside me and who’ll charge, who won’t block my fire and who’ll not waste their time wondering whether or not I’ll pull through, who won’t kow-tow uselessly to an enemy who’s victory means death for them as well as for me. The costume that death parades around and rapes and destroys in is irrelevant. It’s still death, it’s still destruction, it’s still not OUR OWN victory, it doesn’t lead to a better world.
A better world, one where women don’t have to fight and struggle and live in poverty and physical and moral degredation and predation just to survive, where we can finally rest and “just live”, where we can be happy without our thoughts tempered with “what-ifs” and stupid, fucked-up role-playing, where we can walk free in the open air and sunshine and look at men and not have that little catch in our throats, that pinch in our guts, that automatic sense of duty to deference- a world where there’s still a world left for us to enjoy- that’s the world I’M fighting for.
That, to me, is victory, and I’m not going to put down my jackhammer until either I die or it fucking happens.
4 March 2006, 3:43 pmConsumer:
This is just ridiculous. If Ed acts the way he says he does, and I think he does, then why beat him with this stoopid “yer the White male” hammer? Really fncking ridiculous you guys. He’s the white male when it comes to GI Joe bullshit. But not on this issue.
What he said about Sally blacking Joey’s eye and him breaking her jaw, he’s right. If my girlfriend and I got in a ring for the real thing, I’d kick the fnck out of her. It’s just fact. Granted, a girl who trained to fight would prolly kick the tar out of me.
Elaina, there are plenty of guys fighting with you. Don’t be blind to that. Accept a guy like Ed protecting you if he can. And protect Ed when you can.
Christ, I really don’t get everyone’s thread on this.
5 March 2006, 12:40 pmStan:
I get it.
Men are overwhelmingly more violent than women. Men rape women. Men use their strength to dominate women. Men kill women who refuse to bend to their will. Men verbally and physically abuse their partners. The majority of women who are rendered homeless in the US are trying to escape abusive men… which tells us something about gendered economic dependency… like a colonial situation right in the household.
This violence — not strength — is socially constructed and reinforced… masculinity constructed as violence or potential violence… violence as self-defense or defense of others still constructed as a male prerogative.
Women fear rape from men, then are pressured by this circumstance to rely on men for protection from other men, placing women in a subordinate role as either victim or dependent protectee.
It is a psychosexual protection racket.
This is only difficult because we don’t grow up thinking critically about it… but only as the natural order of things.
What you and your girlfriend might do “in a ring” is a very male abstraction that takes for granted that this masculine frame of reference stands for something fetishized as “natural.”
5 March 2006, 1:31 pmElaina:
I think I made it clear that I’m cognizant as to Ed’s caring, Mr. Consumer. As I said a few points up, that’s a start. These are MY opinions on things, particularly my opinion stated as a response to his, and they’re different.
But, to be honest, I don’t really think anybody should get a blue ribbon for general disagreement with abuse and refusal to participate in it as an aggressor. Just like I don’t think that men at political meetings who keep their cool and don’t interrupt everybody and don’t get into dick-wagging contests don’t deserve pats on the heads or cookies for good behavior.
Let me assure you that I’m not at all “blind” to the fact that there are “plenty of guys fighting with” me, and with women as a whole. Why in the hell do you think I’m so adamant about this stuff? If you think that most women are blind to this threat, that they haven’t confronted male aggression in one form or another, physically, then I’d say that you’re the one with blinders on.
And while I’m here I’ll say that I got anyone’s back who’s got mine. It’s a good attitude to have.
So is what you’re saying that, in essence, “boys will be boys,” ALWAYS, regardless of what they’re taught, regardless as to how young girls are brought up to interact with them? ‘Cause I think I made it clear, especially towards the end, that what I’ve been talking about is a world that I would LIKE to see.
THAT would be real progress, IMO.
But if all that y’all can argue is that NO MATTER the social change, NO MATTER the differences in prevention strategies that might arise and take hold in young minds, that “male” behavior will always consist of abusing those that are weaker and that the ONLY other option is that we accept your magnanimous “protection”, then I have to ask, sincerely, why the fuck did people say that Valerie Solanas was “crazy?”
I mean, following this logic, there should be marauding bands of armed women, patrolling our alleyways and parking lots and neighborhoods, shooting offenders on-site.
I mean, is that what Y’ALL want?
Stan said, Re: Man-as-protector “theory”: It is a psychosexual protection racket.
Stan, my friend, you are exactly fucking right on that (and I really appreciate the handy-dandy terminology, it shall go forthwith into my daily vocab, I’m sure.)
The forcefulness and supposed “hormonal quirks” of the men-folk are not intangibles that I’m just waxing about, theoretical-wise. I wouldn’t take the time to get the soapbox out, most likely, if I wasn’t at least a little bit personally familiar with it.
And I’ll save y’all my dive into the emotional Pandora’s Box that has been my childhood, adolescence, early adulthood, etc. But suffice it to say that when you get beat on from the time you can remember by people, male and/or female, who are bigger than you are, it can certainly shape your perspective on things. People deal with those experiences differently, granted. Some folks emerge from these situations intensely afraid, crippled for life, and will settle for safety at any cost. There are other folks who learn to strike out to ensure their safety, who become violent themselves.
When we end up in therapy, later in life, if we’re privileged enough to do so, we’re taught that we have to “let go” of our anger and “forgive,” that we’ve got to learn to just live in a world where this can happen to us, that we are looking at everything through the lens of the life and the bad experiences we’ve had in the past, and that this worldview is not correct, or that the connections between our past and present are non-existent.
I think that if people who’ve been abused and hurt by “masculinity” are expected to learn to “let go” of their anger, then men should just be expected to “let go” of their privilege. Till that happens, I’ll reserve my right to articulate my anger, and I’m not going to try and handle the other commentary on this blog with kid-gloves.
I think it’s foolish to expect women to “just accept” a very male-ego-centric answer to an end to masculine oppression.
And I’m just gonna say that I disregard just about all the “hey quit attacking the white guy” arguments. I’m not “attacking” anybody, I’m arguing my point.
I’ve not had any “good white-male” angels looking over my shoulder, and I’m still around. I don’t want to feel like a consumer in the Psychosexual Protection Racket. I can appreciate good intentions. But I also don’t hesitate to point out where good intentions are flawed, as they often are.
So, I’ll continue to walk around in public without an escort, I’ll continue to promote women’s autonomy and self-empowerment as a means of moving forward, and I’ll keep on with my mental vision of a world where women are not the private, protected property of men, economically or symbolically. With or without the philosophical support of my brothers.
I ain’t NO man’s burden.
5 March 2006, 3:10 pmElaina:
I just wanted to add, to Ed: I sincerely appreciate your laying out your opinion here, even though I disagree with it.
And I managed to argue without calling anybody a douchebag!!! I’m so proud of myself.
*pats self on head, gives self a cookie, pins blue ribbon on shirt, buys self a drink for bein a “good sport”*
5 March 2006, 3:16 pmEd:
Elaina:
You asked what I thought was a direct question about how to deal with the immediate problem of male violence against women. I tried to answer that question. I started by agreeing with the implied premise that men are wholly to blame for male violence against women, and considered how to change men.
Beyond that, you put an awful lot of words in my mouth, and erected a few strawmen. Stan, as usual, projected a lot of thoughts into my head (gonna nicname him Carnac). I take no responsibility for any of that.
I only take responsibility for the way I live my life, and the way I impact those around me: my wife, my kids, my friends, my family, my neighbors.
I’m so sorry you’ve been mistreated in your life. I don’t agree with those who tell you to forgive and forget. “Expose and Punish” is a much better philosophy.
The notion of a jackhammer is an illusion; the “revolution” is nothing more than an internet vanity you indulge yourselves in. Real change comes a little at a time. Wind and water erode the strongest rock. If you want to destroy the democratic system because it’s not fast enough for you, I’m definitely not with you. In fact, I’ll be on the other side of the ramparts.
But in the meantime, it’s worthwhile to exchange dialog. I’m certainly learning from it.
I appreciate the support Consumer, but don’t worry, if I was thin skinned I’d have left this blog long ago.
Stan, you haven’t answered my question about who you read to question your assumptions.
Ed
5 March 2006, 6:37 pmConsumer:
Regarding the “psychosexual protection racket”, I think I see what you’re saying but I want to confirm because its an important topic. This is in reference to participating in a male-created fantasy where a woman has to choose a man to protect her from other men, right? And you’re saying that’s screwed up and not as inherent to nature as we may have been led to believe?
How would one go about thinking (even more) critically about this system? Besides knowing and accepting fully that women can protect themselves without my maleness? While also knowing that as a general rule, men tend to be stronger than women and in violent confrontation, strength of this type often matters.
You take issue with Ed thinking about how to raise his boys to be good men. In your mind, should he be thinking about raising them to be equally open-hearted and non-violent to all people, regardless of gender?
That’s cool and something worth striving for. But it seems to me that his thought process regarding shaping their attitudes is important and not to be taken for granted. I’m not really understanding what more you would have him do. Men tend to be physically stronger than women, and more violent. He’s talking about not wanting them to abuse that strength.
You said: “What you and your girlfriend might do “in a ring†is a very male abstraction that takes for granted that this masculine frame of reference stands for something fetishized as “natural.†”
I’m sorry, I’m pretty sure I don’t get “male abstraction” and “fetishized as natural.” This is probably in reference to the content addressed in my first paragraph. But I’d appreciate more dumbing down of the language.
I don’t get off on the fact that if my girlfriend and I had a physical confrontation, I’d likely win. But it is a fact that, in all likelihood, I would. I’m not swinging my dick around here.
There was an older woman who lived next to me. She lived with her 30-something son and there were alcohol and employment issues. He beat her and I intervened, physically once and then with other measures (including calling the police, talking with the landlord, going to a DV center for advice, etc. It was a long year…) Had the victim been the man’s father as opposed to her mother, I’d do the same thing.
So what, right? Yeah. I don’t know. Like I said, I’m not really getting what you’re saying.
5 March 2006, 8:02 pmStan:
Ed: I had never read Marx or Fanon or MacKinnon until I was in my mid-forties. Do you assume I’d not read anything at all until then? Virtually everything I read until then — with the possible exception of a handful of mid-20th C existentialists — were filled with the predominant assumptions on the other side of these radicals. You can’t confront me with the establishment as some hiden force to which I haven’t been exposed. I WAS the establishment, as you well remember.
I was raised in white society, with a southern mother from Arkansas. I had read everything from Adam Smith to Ayn Rand, and lived in a Republican household. I made a career out of the military, and even of the most hyper-masculinized versions of it — in all-male units that put a great premium on practical machismo.
What counter-narratives do you think I’ve missed out on?
Consumer: My point about a male frame of reference is that using violent confronatation to stand for life-in-general is decidedly male. Masculinity is constructed from the assumption of difference equalling opposition… what Nancy Hartsock called an “agonal universe.” Life fundamentally understood as confronting enemies, instead of violent confrontation with enemies having a specific context that is avoidable. Our cultural products reinforce ths all the time until it “feels” natural… until violent conflict seems to “have appeared out of the mist,” without any real concrete history… which is what fetishized means.
But every single instance of actual violent conflict HAS a real and UNIQUE history, and socially constructed power is always implicated.
Strength is NOT the most basic HUMAN attribute. As a species, we are actually pretty feeble for our size. I watched March of the Penguins here a while back, and it showed that those cute little birds may in fact the the toughest animals on the planet. For strength, I’ll bet on ants. Our actual advantages are a well-developed prefontal cortex, an opposable thumb, and a versatile larynx… which combine to allow us to pass along socially-acquired skills and knowledges in a cumulative way from generation to generation.
Our most successful activities are not conflictual but cooperative. There is nothing purely “natural” in one sense about what we are doing right now… communicating through shared symbols and meanings across time and space through microwaves and microcircuits about highly complex issues… and on the other hand, it is completely natural, but only in the sense that anything that exists, exists as a consequence of “natural laws.” Quite an accomplishment, and the only strength I am deploying right now are the burning of some glucose in my brain and the light muscular contractions in my fingers as I type.
My point about strength is that using it to explain or justify male political and social power is wholly inadequate… and even a bit sly. When a woman is raped or beaten, there is a LOT more going on than a mere exercise of strength. There is an objectification and devaluation of the woman that says she deserves it; and this is FAR more important than the question of strength.
Using (upper-body, musculoskeletal) strength as a single index to study gender as a system of power is selecting the ONE generality that in fact might SUGGEST that men ARE superior to women… which is a set-up.
5 March 2006, 8:54 pmConsumer:
Sorry, my previous posts are badly worded and I sound like an idiot. I’m trying to engage here and I appreciate this opportunity.
To Ed, glad to hear you’re not thin-skinned. I was getting ready to get my shining armor and gallop to your rescue (grin) JK, I just agree with you is all. And I was unsure as to how my agreement with you rendered me in disagreement with others.
To Mr. Goff, I think I see what you’re saying. I need to digest it. Again, thanks for this opportunity.
5 March 2006, 9:39 pmR.S. Morris:
It seems we often end up discussing the “strength issue” using some image of the prototypical musclebound caveman grabbing the super-model frail cavewoman by the hair and having his way with her. Bullshit. Physical disparity was probably never what we have made it out to be, but it is definitely not the deciding factor in male vs. female power today.
One small thing that people seem to miss when discussing the “single-issue” of physical strength as the font out of which all societal power flows is that, when you take away social and cultural conditioning, weapon technology has almost completely equalized men’s potential force leverage over women.
But that’s not what determines the outcome in our fucked-up paradigm. In our “world” very few women ARE trained to fight back, with guns or otherwise. Women are culturally brainwashed to think of self-empowerment of this kind (or most other kinds) to be the realm of MEN. Men are raised to be fascinated with violence, women are raised to be fascinated by babies (whether in their infant form, or in the form of an adult male). And the circle goes round and round…
I’m not advocating a “Carry-guns for All!” philosophy here, but think about it: any woman with the same firearms training as any man–or even knife or hatchet–is NOT in any more danger than any other male in the vicinity. I would argue that any woman trained to use her particular physical traits to her advantage in a fistfight would easily convince ANY man not to bother trying to impose his will. It remains CULTURE, not CAPABILITY, that ensures the survival of this inane theory of “Male Strength equals Male Superiority.”
What is truly sad is that I even feel the need to sit here expounding about how women can defend themselves from men. I know that this is “reality†in this country right now, but I certainly didn’t feel genetically impelled to beat the shit out of my ex-partner if she didn’t cater to my every need. I may feel like running into the corner and beating my head against the wall, or getting drunk, or driving into town and sleeping on a couch at work…but those are things I am fighting with because I grew-up under the thumb of the Patriarchy, not because I’m physically stronger and I deserve to be catered to. I’m learning to not be a whiny-baby guy anymore, but I never felt any urge to rape, beat, kill or otherwise enforce my will on my partner.
Society taught me to expect certain things from women—sex, housework, unconditional nurturing, blah, blah, etc.– and I’m just now learning what bullshit we’ve been living with all these years. Men are not inherently abusive to women (even if we might be inherently more aggressive—I’m still not convinced); however, our society IS inherently abusive to women, and it uses many men to express that fact.
5 March 2006, 11:22 pmEd:
Let me ask you all a simple question: why are men on average larger, stronger, and faster than women?
6 March 2006, 11:20 amConsumer:
There’s a book by Kenneth C. Davis called “Don’t Know Much About Geography”. In it, he explains the origin of the name of the Amazon River. I don’t have it on me so I can’t quote from it, but there are graphic accounts from the first European explorers that entered the river. Their ships were routinely attacked by fleets of war canoes led by ferocious spear-wielding women, fearless even in the face of firearms being discharged at them. In fact, there were accounts where the native MEN would attempt to flee only to be slaughtered for doing so by these WOMEN. The Europeans thus concluded that these ferocious women were the fearless Amazons from old Greek mythology.
OK, so one can argue convincingly that violent tendencies and strength in battle are not naturally inherent only to human males (despite testosterone etc.), and that even if it were, it should not be used as a determining factor in deciding social roles. And one could also argue that physical brute strength isn’t everything in determing who can and can’t do “man’s” work, as exhibited by, e.g., female fire fighters that pass the physical exams by lifting the huge hoses using leg power with straight back, etc. Just like Elaina lifting the 240-lb. patient.
But in THIS time period, with THIS socioeconomic framework (let’s just look at the U.S.) the male/female roles have been set by “patriarchs” (despite accounts of women exhibiting “male-like” qualities, like Harriet Tubman forcing men who got the jitters to proceed at gunpoint). In the U.S. today, men tend to be more violent than women, and their average greater strength tends to matter in this regard. To say it doesn’t seems foolish. Humans may be relatively weak, as Mr. Goff suggests, but some humans are stronger than others, just like some ants are stronger than other ants.
Mr. Morris talks about the equalizing effect of weapons “when you take away social and cultural conditioning”. We can’t take away, jackhammer, or blow up that social conditioning here. We might be triggering it with these discussions but it isn’t going to go away here. It’s going to start going away when “traditional” guys like Ed think about raising their children to be non-abusive. To ALL people. Dissing his views in this regard is not only pointless but counterproductive as well.
The current “man as abuser and/or protector” thing is socially constructed. It should probably be dismantled post-haste, depending on what we want to achieve and how.
Is effective hand-to-hand combat training for U.S. women one answer? It might be. Is increasing the number of women in “male” jobs another or supplementary answer? It could be. I’m not 100% sure though. Look how fncked up everything’s been since Condoleeza Rice took her current post. I’d take a moral white guy over that nutjob anyday.
Anyway, I think the priority above all is to dismantle the current consumer-based capitalist system. This is above and beyond the most important thing, because one of its many damaging effects is the destruction of our planet and ultimately of the human species. In the process of organizing and unifying and changing this dehumanizing system, our solidarity will create more humane conditions for all of us. That’s just my opinion.
So it seems many of the posters here are preaching to the choir. We know it’s a socially constructed fncked up paradigm. How do you plan to change it?
By berating someone for correctly pointing out that (in THIS current system) men tend to be able to punch harder than women? Or by fostering an understanding that the violence that is inherent to the current U.S. system is destructive to all humans? I go with the latter.
6 March 2006, 2:06 pmStan:
I don’t know why men are on average bigger than women. That’s a speculative question that no one can definitively answer… which makes it an excellent diversion.
Why do you think they are? Because God placed HIMself as the head of man, and Man as the head of Woman?
Dick Cheney is one of the most powerful men in the world. And old and feeble as I am, I think I could beat him up (unless I was hunting with him, in which case I’d have to go to the hospital). Sherry might be able to beat him up, if she punched him in the heart. Does his power come from physical strength? How about Bill Gates? Tony Blair? Paul Wolfowitz? Trent Lott? George Soros?
Do you see how silly this argument is?
As to how to change a system, the answer remains the same. Educate, organize, and go after political power.
6 March 2006, 2:42 pmConsumer:
Mr. Goff, I don’t know why men are, on average, larger than women. I certainly don’t subscribe to Judeo-Christian-based patriarchal assumptions on the matter, i.e., God made us that way.
I also don’t think that human women don’t possess physical strength and even the capacity to commit violent acts. I’m sure there are many women, even women his age or older, that could beat the crap out of Cheney, no doubt. Hence my references to the “Amazons”, female firefighters, Elaina lifting big guys, etc.
And no, of course I’m not arguing that Cheney’s power (different from the physical “power” involved in hitting someone) is linked to his ability to, well, hit someone. He can’t even use his macho props with minimum skill. His power comes from the current capitalist system that has its roots in way olden times, as pointed out in your exterminism series.
In other words, I’m not arguing that all the powerful men you listed are powerful because, on average, they might be able to do more pushups than the average woman of the same age. That is, of course, silly. They’re powerful because of the system white patriarchs created for them (a system that dominates and suppresses women).
I AM arguing, however, that in the CURRENT paradigm, men are (made to be) more abusive and violent. When it comes to violent confrontations (e.g., husband punching wife) this strength does matter. That translates to power on the microcosmic level, where the woman is severely hurt by this physical strength. Rendered, in some ways, powerless by the physical power. That’s not a silly argument.
Would things be different if girl gym class were designed to enhance punching ability while boy gym class were designed to enhance, say, flexibility? Probably. But that’s not the point. In the CURRENT paradigm, men tend to exhibit more violent strength. And more violence.
That’s what I meant about preaching to the choir.
6 March 2006, 3:52 pmR.S. Morris:
Great conversation, as always…
Consumer:
You’re right. I agree with you. My point about technology equalizing power was meant to show what you just stated, I think. You just said it better. We can’t remove socialization and inculturation from the equation…my point was that exactly: the fact that there is still a perceived/enforced power differential despite women and men being TECHNICALLY power equivalent helps show the true source of the difference. Tell me if you think I’m going in the wrong direction.
While Ed and Stan seem to have a history that makes their particular exchanges a touch less diplomatic than the rest of us, I think the overall tone has been very productive. Even Elaina’s last post didn’t really attack Ed, so much as make the strength of her stance VERY clear. Eds an adult–I’m sure he can take hearing a strong opposing view. Ed is also in the strange and uncomfortable position of being a tool of the system (no offense intended–it’s the role of the military to be a tool for policy-makers) arguing with people who would like nothing more than to see the system he is supporting broken down and replaced. I respect his persistence.
Regarding “preaching to the choir”: don’t disregard the value of these kinds of discussions among theoretical allies. It is often more useful to challenge the assumptions of your own group than try to convince someone who may never change their paradigm. I have two kids who I want to raise to be honest, good, anti-Patriarchy adults, and reading and participating in these discussions helps me in ways I’m just now beginning to appreciate. There are nuances being fought over in these forums that I NEVER encounter in my day-to-day life, nuances that I think are extremely important. We may end the day feeling like we are beating our heads against the wall in futility, but these discussions–no matter how heated they end up getting–ARE having an impact on a wider community.
Thank you all for your time and energy.
6 March 2006, 3:58 pmEd:
Baloney. You know better. But you feel compelled to politicize even basic science.
wiki Selection
wiki Natural Selection
wiki Artificial Selection
Obviously you have mistaken me for someone else. Not a singe word I have ever written in this blog has suggested anything remotely like that viewpoint.
Yes, the strawman you just erected is rather silly. Unfortunately, that is not the argument that I am going to make.
6 March 2006, 5:39 pmConsumer:
Oh sorry, I see that the question re: men being bigger was posted by Ed.
Testosterone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testosterone
6 March 2006, 5:57 pmDeAnander:
Thanks for making the Cheney point, Stan. I was going to, and you spared me the trouble
Sexual dimorphism is overrated, imho. It has partial but not complete explanatory power. For one thing, some of the most vicious men I’ve ever known have been the smaller ones (no generalisation implied, I merely mean that danger doesn’t always go with size) and weapons are used in many assaults on women, so the fist-fightin’ skills of the assailant aren’t as relevant as they might be…
I used to teach self defence for women, a couple of decades ago. We (the teaching collective, mostly martial artists of various schools) recognised that many/most men have greater upper-body strength than many/most women. However, all human beings have certain more vulnerable points on their bodies which can be effective targets even for moderate force. Even a teenage girl can break a guy’s pinkie finger or go for the eyes or the nads — tactics which are strictly forbidden in all male blood sports as “unfair” precisely because they remove the “contest of strength” aspect from the sport. We used to focus on such tactics. Women can also make use of our leg muscles which are often far more comparable than the upper body stuff — kicking is often more effective than punching, for women.
We used to teach with the basic idea that women are in fact likely to face a disadvantage of strength and size, and that therefore we should approach the possibility of physical conflict with three goals: 1) to break contact and escape if possible, 2) to attract as much attention as possible, make a loud scene, and prevent the assailant from removing the woman to a private place, 3) if all else fails, to inflict the maximum pain or damage in the minimum time and with the maximum surprise factor, thus shortening the struggle (essential if facing a stronger opponent with possibly more stamina).
I think this was a teaching philosophy that trod the fine line between two useless dead ends: a) trying to deny that many men have the edge over women in weight, upper-body development, reach, and carefully cultivated aggression, and thus promoting a false optimism about women’s chances in physical conflict, and b) accepting the “men are bigger and stronger so there’s no point in resisting, he’ll only hurt you worse” line of defeatism which, needless to say, is often pushed by men who like to strut their egos and intimidate women. Statistically speaking, our research at the time suggested that women who fought back loudly and fiercely (despite the physical odds) in general had a better chance of escaping. So we worked with the DoJ stats and survivor testimony, and did our best.
One factor in our calculations was that men who attack women usually are not expecting to get hurt. A lot of rapists are casual or opportunistic, not cool-headed professionals prepared to do GBH or murder to get what they want. Many rapists are looking for “free sex,” and if they have to pay for it with physical pain then it isn’t worth the price. There is that hard core of psychos who really want to kill or maim a woman, who are willing to break bones, use weapons, etc. — but as far as I could tell in years of listening to rape survivors talk about their ordeals, they are a small minority. Most women described being paralysed by fear and unable to speak or shout, suffocated by the conditioned understanding that men are invincible and resistance is futile (in other words, that we have to raise Better Men and there is no other way to stop them).
To Ed’s argument (a reprise of The Hand That Rocks The Cradle?) I’d say only that a dedicated monarchist might argue similarly: there is absolutely nothing wrong with monarchic feudalism, it’s natural (just look at its long historical track record). We just have to Raise Better Kings. Dictatorship by the most clever and persuasive alpha male with guns is pretty “natural” too, so all we need to do is Raise Better Dictators
I’m all for raising Better Men, but in the meantime there are more direct actions that can be taken, socially and individually, to undermine the “naturalness” and make men feel the weight of (and question) that heavy ol’ crown.
I find the whole “sure I reflexively use antiSemitic (or misogynist) language but that doesn’t make me an antiSemite (misogynist)” argument rather naif. It mistakes, I think, the nature of the critique. As long as we define antiSemitism or racism or misogyny as a pathology of the individual — a character flaw, a mania that fills the sufferer with a compulsion to spray paint swastikas or burn crosses or commit serial rape — we conveniently project social structures of power, taint, and blame onto individuals who can be “punished” or “cured” (thus exonerating the rest of us and restoring social purity).
A more radical critique, which imho is generally what’s being shared here, starts from the position that racism or antisemitism or misogyny is structurally useful to the society, an essential component of the way things work to the benefit of the elite. While a pathological individual might latch onto it as a banner under which to act out his personal daemons, none of us can stand aside and say with Puritan disdain that we “are not like that.” The very language we speak encodes our complicity; the subconscious as well as the conscious can be the master’s tool.
Phatic utterance is like the Freudian slippage of a whole culture coming out of our collective mouth. To say that Guy X’s language usage is misogynist is not to say “and that means that he probably beats his wife,” but that, to some extent, Guy X buys into the patriarchy’s advertising campaign against women — that he acts voluntarily as a viral marketer for misogyny, peppering his speech with little unregarded slurs and insults against women, helping to build the seamless walls that constrain women’s lives and salaries and freedoms. The “but some of my best friends are” argument is imho as old as denial.
We buy into the controlling metaphors of the culture on a daily basis in our conscious and unconscious choices of language, viral-marketing memes to each other in an endless churning of competing ideas. Every time we use “cocksucker” as an epithet we cast a small vote for our culture’s disdain for male homosexuality; every time we say “bent over and took it” as a metaphor for defeat, capitulation, humiliation we cast a small vote for the meme of sex-as-domination, penis-as-weapon, and insertee-as-loser. And so on and so on, all the way down to “cheap as a Jew” or “sweated like a N*gg*r” or “he’s my slide bitch”. We vote with our words as well as our dollars and our ballots. Or so I see it.
And as with dollars and ballots, changing the way we vote with our words is not adequate to transform the system (despite brief reformist enthusiasms for this kind of verbal homeopathy or hermeneutics); but it seems to me a worthy concomitant to more practical efforts. We can at least think seriously about the metaphors with which we think, from “throws like a girl” to “corporate whore”, and what those metaphors say about what we collectively think, under the surface, about women and women’s nature and place.
6 March 2006, 7:44 pmStan:
Nothing in the wiki selections (pun intended) refutes what I said.
We do not know why men are bigger than women. We can only speculate. Saying that it is a result of natural selection does not answer your own question… it only begs another.
Natural selection is not solely a genetic phenomenon, but an interaction of genetic mutation with changing environmental circumstances. A forest burns, and within a relatively short period, the grasshoopers get darker. The darker ones blend into the charred landscape and are harder for predators to see. Then the place greens up again and the darker ones eventually “fade away.”
We do not and can not specifically know why men are – on average – bigger than women, any more than we can definitively know why Central Africans are – on average – bigger than Vietnamese. We can only speculate… because we were not there over the periods of time which produced these phenotypes.
What does any of this tell us about men’s socio-political opression of women? You’re still attempting to naturalize it… or you wouldn’t be invoking (fallaciously) Darwin.
Niche expansion by most species is a relation between genetics and physical environment without a great deal of intentionality. Niche expansion by humans, the most dramatic of which has happened in the last century, is far more related to fossil fuel exploitation in combination with the self-expansion of capital… a pretty thoroughly socially-constructed activity.
6 March 2006, 9:38 pmEd:
I’m getting tired of people putting words in my mouth, or trying to predict my arguments. To clarify my viewpoints:
I have NEVER argued that physical, natural, or biological processes completely explain gender differences.
I have NEVER argued that biological differences in any way force us to accept current gender roles.
I have NEVER argued that women must accept male domination, physical or otherwise.
I HAVE argued and will continue to argue the following:
1. Men think, act, and feel differently from women.
2. Those differences are not completely explained by social systems and environment. Some of the difference is due to brain chemistry and other biologically programmed traits.
3. Male on Female violence is not completely explained by social systems. It is often enabled by raw disparity in physical power and capability to inflict harm. (As De points out, male rapists don’t expect to get hurt doing it.)
4. Any analysis which ignores these differences or denies their existence is inadequate.
Stan, you appear to accept the premise that genetic selection is the mechanism by which males have become physically larger and stronger than females. I concede that we don’t know whether that selection is natural or artificial, or what specific environmental factors led to that selection. But selection did occur, and led to obvious physical differences. Are we in agreement on that point?
7 March 2006, 4:42 amConsumer:
Mr. Morris, regarding the “true source of the difference”, yes, I think that’s what we’re all talking about. The true source being the current paradigm with roots going way back in male patriarchy. Everything else, rape, violence, abuse, greed, ecocide, racism, etc. these are all symptoms of the disease.
And your response to my “preaching to the choir” comment is thoughtful and true. I stand corrected. Preach away, all!
DeAnander, spot-on comments re: language use. I’ve been conscious of that, too. I’ve switched my vocabulary a bit in recent years, from use of “cocksucker” to “asshole” and “pussy” to “spineless asshole”. Sometimes I still slip, tho’. Baby steps…
But with regard to other actions that can be taken rather than attempting to “raise better men”, we all do the best we can with the resources we have, at this point in time. Not unlike your teaching women to go for the eyes and nads of a larger stronger assailant.
7 March 2006, 9:37 amStan:
No one arguing from my side of the fence here has EVER ignored physiological differences between men and women. In fact, the radical feminists confront certain post-modernisms (strict social constructionism, eg) on exactly this point; and I myself have argued on this blog about the inhering flaws in much of that tendency’s anti-essentialism.
The whole point of this and other posts regarding gender has been that gender (which is only initially constituted as biological sex) is a system of social power that privileges men and oppresses women; that this system is encoded very early on — as it currently exists — as what Adrienne Rich called “compulsory heterosexuality,” which has far less to do with how people fuck (tho that matters too) than it does with defining male and female social roles in a fused, complimentary-yet-unequal way; that the behavioral expectations associated with these roles are lingusitically marked as “masculinity” and “femininity”; that these gendered constellations of behavorial expectations are socialized from birth and therefore deeply embedded in each individual, both affectively and cognitively; that this socialization is powerfully and incessantly reinforced by cultural productions that reflect gender as a system of power AND and its reinforcing ideology; and that an ideology is an internally cohering set of symbols, meanings, and ideas that (1) is so widely accepted as to be considered axiomatic and beyond the scope of criticism, (2) and therefore is given the appearance of being “natural” (as in God-given or existing almost as a law of nature), and that (3) therefore both conceals and justifies existing social arrangements of power.
So no one has put forward an “analysis which ignores these differences or denies their existence…” No one here, at any rate.
ED: “Stan, you appear to accept the premise that genetic selection is the mechanism by which males have become physically larger and stronger than females. I concede that we don’t know whether that selection is natural or artificial, or what specific environmental factors led to that selection. But selection did occur, and led to obvious physical differences. Are we in agreement on that point?”
STAN: No, I do not. Natural selection in not merely “genetic” selection. This is such an important point that it was at the center of the titanic debate between Darwinists Gould and Dawkins for decades.
Do I accept that natural selection is a factor in how we currently exist? Sort of, and the qaulification is the nub of my argument here.
Our anscestors were certainly formed by some evolutionary process, as we are, which was not a consequence of so-called “intelligent design”, but a biological process conditioned by shfiting environmental circumstances.
But the attempt to DISAGGREGATE the biological from the environmental is an attempt to assert a kind of biological determinism that is an abstraction… and therefore false. This disaggregation is a mental trick that NEVER happens in the real universe… just as attempting to say that there are two processes at work in determining human existence and behavior — biological and social. There are not. There is only one real process and that is what IS… which is a synthesis of biological, environemntal, social, et al. Pulling them apart conceptually is an epistemological convention.. NOT the reality. The attempt to deploy them seperately is ideological, whether that is understood and intentional or not. That is why much of radical feminism begins with epistemology; because this is where de-naturalization begins, by challenging the WAY we think about things.
The point of the long forgotten commentary at the top of this post, and of much gender commentary here and elsewhere, is to lay the counter-ideological groundwork for a political struggle AGAINST the existing system, which is deeply male-supremacist. For that, we have already acknowledged that there are biological men and women, and that they are morphologically different. But political struggle is a struggle for equal social power, and so the social bases for existing systems of power — AND THEIR IDEOLOGICAL NATURALIZATION — is what we are confronting. So we will not accept ANY biological justification for male political power over women, and we will continue to deconstruct the SOCIAL and POLITICAL bases of that power. That is NOT ignoring or denying biology, but de-privileging it as a hegemonic ideology (using the definition of ideology above).
7 March 2006, 11:49 amElaina:
I really appreciate everybody’s commentary here.
But De. I have to give you special thanks and kudos. Your perspective here’s like a friggin’ ray of light or something. What you were saying about sexual dimorphism as only a partial answer, that’s really a one-line-zinger version of what I’ve been trying to say.
Ed. Bless yer heart. Now. You talk a lot about people “reading your mind” and “putting words into your mouth.” I ain’t trying to do any of that. The answer “we have to raise better men” to the question “how do we work to cultivate a society where women are no longer brought up to fear men” was very simply put, inadequate. Why? Well, just scanning the sentence, I see that you have left women out of the equation, EXCEPT in their presumed roles as caregivers for these men. We already do that. Unless your counting your “avoid strange men and parking lots” comment. And I know, I know, I shouldn’t get stuck on those little details but little details can be stand-ins for big ideas. Restrictions on women’s mobility have always been masked by the notion that “men should protect women.” If men can’t be around protecting women, then they restrict their mobility, so as to assure their “protection.” It’s like a two for one deal. Men get to feel good about themselves in their roles and “protectors” even as they deny women the ability to be as fully human and mobile as they themselves are. Works out real nice, at least for the men.
I hope that you realize that, as far as me and my standpoint are concerned, this system we live under is by no means “the democratic system.” Not for me and not for most of the people that I know, anyways.
So no, “the democratic system” is not under attack by me and my ilk, because it ain’t there to begin with. Talk about your straw men and yer circular arguments. Jeepers.
I will once again acknowledge that you have expressed caring and concern re: violence against women, and express a desire to find solutions aimed towards ending it. I can appreciate that. What I’m sayin’ in response is, if you aren’t going to aknowledge patriarchy and male supremacism, then your response is incomplete. Democracy, in a real sense that is beneficial for everyone, can’t happen within a patriarchy.
And what I said about “jackhammers and dynamite” are analogies. I ain’t the first person to stick ‘em in a critique. Deal. I’m referring to thinking up and maybe implementing ways of knowing that don’t propagate patriarchy.
You also said: “But you feel compelled to politicize even basic science,” to Stan.
I have NEWS for you, Ed. “Basic science” is already politicized. Part of my questioning my faith as a Christian came from realizing the implications, clearly, of staking all my faith in a text that was written by men and for men. I question my faith in science in much the same way. Like I said before, I don’t flush it down some theoretical commode but I don’t swallow all of it’s answers automatically. I think it might be closer to answering a lot of questions I have about life and living than the Bible ever did. But that doesn’t make it infallible and, to me, there is no assumption that it isn’t manipulated for political purposes. It has been and it still is. And as far as women have come in involvement with it, it is still a male-dominated field. And while I can’t afford to throw all that science tells me out as mythological, it is not at all a fool-proof thing.
When I say that I don’t think anybody’s ignoring male biology, I’m not talking just about this conversation. I’m talking about the medical field, I’m talking about anthropology, I’m talking about all fields based in a SUPPOSEDLY completely objective (which it really isn’t) science. Even here, in this talk of biological “reasons” for patriarchy, I don’t see anybody digging deep to find research on WOMEN’S aggression, or other scientific “evidence” that has some sort of insight that is female-, not male-, centric. A lot of that research hasn’t been done. I wonder if that has anything to do with what groups fund scientific research, I wonder if it’s harder to get a grant if your project might question this current paradigm. Who knows? It’s something to think about.
I’ll come back to De here: De, something that I really appreciate is your bringing memes to the conversational table. It speaks to what Stan is saying about the dangers of trying to separate “culture” from “nature,” even while they cannot exist in a mutually exclusive way. We walk through the world surrounded and encompassed by these “memes” (variable ideational units) as though we are walking within giant gnat-clouds, these particular gnats having the ability to fly up into our eyes and ears and mouths and lay eggs in our brains. They serve as an invisible insulating force that *falsely* gives us a sense of separation from our surroundings. It’s led, thus far, to a male-dominant attempt to wrangle “nature” into the hands of men, and has “evolved” (or “devolved,” however you want to look at it) into forcing the dominant ideology that certain groups of men are better than others and have some sort of right, promoted by this supposedly “scientific” notion that males in general have a biological “upper-hand” because they are supposed to be stronger and meaner.
These notions do not serve to bring the species forward in any way that is beneficial to the species as a whole. So, creating a science in which only men have the capacity for power, is incredibly maladaptive, in evolutionary terms, and thrusting forward into oblivion with it is also maladaptive; and since we have the capacity to know that I don’t think it’s ok to say that we should just accept it and deal with it.
I’d like to live in a world where I could tell a man who thinks that his “highest duty” is to “protect” me that he’s really being patronizing, and not have people tell me that I’m “attacking” him. That would be real nice.
You know, De and Ed, I took a Linguistic Anthropology class, one in which I embarked on a research project on gender-specific language in the U.S. constitution. Basically, what I did was look at all the places where “humanity” supposedly could be implied by the uses of the word “Man” and/or “Mankind.”
This was, I think, my political point of departure- it’s where I came up, with the help of some feminist analysis and a really patient professor, with my own inner struggle against a Patriarchy running around in a Democracy costume. Sifting through those documents that everybody holds in such high esteem without even bothering to look at them with scrutiny has HELPED me, Ed. My own inquisition of our founding “fathers” and what they said, it gives me a reason to get up every day and keep on going. “Manly firmness,” my ass. This showed me that I live in a place where I might as well be invisible; that I’m not included in the contract and so my “rights” are completely in the hands of a government that’s pretty much totally choked by patriarchy. See, Ed, it’s not ONLY male violence that I’m fighting against. Patriarchy exists in our lives not ONLY in extreme ways. I’m so glad for R.S. Morris’s commentary- He took some time and highlighted some areas where male privilege is not only illustrated in it’s extreme forms. It is in all places. If you’re saying stupid, misogynistic shit, i.e. calling your pal your “powerpoint slide-bitch” and “not even thinking about it,” at least not ’till now, then that’s evidence to me that indeed, patriarchy is more pervasive than what you are saying. You wouldn’t be prone to slips like this and you really wouldn’t use them over and over, if it wasn’t such a “natural” part of the environment that you are working in. It would be an odd thing, it would be something with some obvious questionability to it, and the person at the end of the appellation would question it, they wouldn’t just accept it and chuckle about it.
And while I’m here, going off all over the place against patriarchy, I’d like to take just a second or two to point, northwards, and stand up in my chair, and say:
FUCK MIKE ROUNDS.
Back to work!! Y’all have a great day.
7 March 2006, 3:23 pmDeAnander:
Hey Elaina, really nice stuff about memes like gnats — or what in the North they call no-see-ums [itself probably one of those racist pseudo-Indian words that white people think are so funny, but we could spend all day on culture theft...] … prescriptive memes really are no-see-ums, ‘cos we are not allowed to see them. They are Muscaridae — well more like Simulidae — Laingiensis, “R D Laing Flies”. Their bites don’t itch, because they don’t exist even when they are biting us. You can’t scratch that itch, because there is no fly.
A snarky thought I had this morning: if anatomy were really destiny, men would wear skirts. So much more comfy to unconstrain those nads, and less expensive in tailoring too. If we want to get a grip on how deep the gender memes are wired into our brains, laying their wee eggs and reproducing madly, just think about the mental strain we westerners feel when we see a man in a skirt. Cognitive Diss City. Anatomically a guy in a skirt makes perfect sense, especially in hot weather. Socially he ties our brain in knot. Even more so if he doesn’t look like a drag queen.
Another concept to mull over: we hear repeatedly that men’s violence and misbehaviour are biologically conditioned, i.e. it’s all a hormonal problem. Well *if* we as a society admit that these predatory behaviours are a problem, and *if* we believe they are biological in origin, then why the Phriggin’ Pharmacorps hasn’t GlaxoSmithKlineBeechaMerckPfizer released a series of designer pills to fix the problem? I mean, they’ve got pills to give old guys boners and pills to make uppity women docile and pills to make menopausal women fuckable — they think they can fix anything about us poor flawed humans — so where’s the tasteful pale green Nonviolax tab that makes men stop raping and battering by interfering with whatever endorphin deficiency or what-have-you that is tampering with their impulse control?
And the answer to that is social, not biological.
Sociology is how we deal with our biology.
Maleness is born, but masculinity is learned:
Remember the hokey old B’way song, “You Have to be Carefully Taught”?
7 March 2006, 4:31 pmEd:
Your dogma is unshakeable. Good luck with your revolution; don’t leave the lights on. I’m gonna go ask my wife if I can have some money to spend. She’s a lawyer, so she’s got more than me. Bye all.
7 March 2006, 4:48 pmR.S. Morris:
Unless he’s playing bagpipes.
7 March 2006, 7:11 pmDeAnander:
Or wearing a dogcollar and a cross
btw speaking of men in skirts, bagpipes, and gender anxiety:
http://www.kiltmen.com/
Yup, if it’s a kilt and not a skirt then it can be spun as Authentically Masculine. Every now and then I reference this site because of the feverish anxiety that glows through its text, the desperate need to convince the reader that these kilted fellows are indeed Real Men and not, you know, That Way.
truly Manners Makyth Man…
7 March 2006, 7:30 pmElaina:
De: I sooooo played Bloody Mary in my high school’s production of “South Pacific.” SO not only am I familiar with the song, I’ll now be going to sleep with it in my head. Over and over. In a squeaky, not-quite-hitting-that-high-note adolescent, almost-masculinized voice.
8 March 2006, 2:53 amEd: Yo! I scrolled around and took another gander at the posts here, and realize it’s you who suggested the “Marxist Peasant” monty python skit. Weeelll. I was once quite the Python-freak, to be sure. I’ve got one for you: why don’t you check out “Upper Class Twit of the Year.” Sounds like it’s right up yer alley.
R.S. Morris:
OMG…but, but..they’re TOUCHING each other!!!
8 March 2006, 4:36 amDeAnander:
I’m not sure that Ed’s a paradigmatic upper class twit, despite the whole noblesse oblige shtick.
My take — at risk of being hotly accused of armchair psychologising should Ed return — is that he’s trying to Do The Right Thing. The closest analogy I can come up with is… how about the suburban affluent consumer who recycles his cans and has just bought a new Prius, and thinks that therefore he’s the shining green knight of environmental correctness… only to run into a team of deep ecologists who start telling him about his global footprint, factory farming and water resources, overpaving, GMO, longhaul cash cropping, and the environmental price tag of manufacturing and shipping that shiny new “green” toy in his driveway. He really thought he was doing good — and by contrast to millions of SUV-driving asshats out there, he was. But then along come these “unreasonable” radicals with their “utopian” notions telling him that all his effort is just a bandaid over a festering sore, and we need to dig waaaay deeper if we’re going to fix anything for the longer term. And needless to say, he gets cranky. Where’s the appreciation? where’s the props? and what the hell does it take to make these crazy people happy?
He has to, what, become a vegan and live in a tipi? Ah the hell with it, he snarls, and drives away in his Prius dismissing them as a bunch of anarcho-loonies.
This kind of confrontation goes on all the time between radicals and bandaiders. It’s just how things work, aI guess. Some folks think you can make slight adjustments to The System and it will slowly get better. Not surprisingly they tend to be folks who are more or less winning under the present scheme, and postponing the day of reckoning sounds pretty good to them.
Then there are people who either have nowt to lose, or have cast their lot with those who have nowt to lose — the poor of the earth, the prostituted girls, the raped women, the child soldiers, the illiterate, the dispossessed, those who die daily as the result of the logic that culminates in shiny new Priuses on our driveways — and to those people, there is no excuse for postponing that day of reckoning; on the contrary they want to Bring It On, settle the account, start shovelling the shit and clean the stables NOW before it gets any worse.
And they want to clean it but good, and make sure it won’t need doing again any time soon — fix it right. And that’s what I’d call the radical urge, a mania for deep and lasting housecleaning and account-settling, not just a swipe with a duster and juggling the books to keep things stumbling on a few years longer.
Between the gradualists and the radicals there is a world of difference, each group has its own optimism and its own pessimism. Mostly I guess we shuffle about uneasily between the two camps, trapped into doing daily what we know in our hearts is indefensible (buying goods of dubious provenance, squandering fossil energy, paying taxes to vile regimes, failing to “give all you have to the poor and follow me,” failing to throw our bodies onto the gears to stop the machine), but hoping that a better world really is possible.
And now I’m running out of steam…
8 March 2006, 4:27 pmConsumer:
The post is dead. Long live the post.
8 March 2006, 5:09 pmJulian Real:
Hi Y’all.
I’m not sure I’ll be here for long, on this thread, as discussions about current CRAPheads-in-charge are useful, but not my focus, personally-politically. I’m working on a new thread/entry, if Stan’ll have it, on the politics of (unnatural) sexuality, and the politics of what is popularly assumed to be a natural “orientation” called heterosexuality. There ain’t nothin’ natural about it. But more on that elsewhere.
My focus is on ending rape and racism, to put it simply. This requires deeply analysing what is currently called “sexuality” and “gender” and “race”, and de-naturalising these categories, exposing the raw and bloody politics beneath each. White supremacy, male supremacy, patriarchy, and CRAP, are the terms I find useful, as they are not terms that allow us to so easily extract behaviour from identities, nor institutions and ideologies of real suffering and harm.
People are their actions, among other aspects of their beings and doings. Good people doing bad things is a nice idea. My grandfather was a wonderful, beloved man who was also an incest perpetrator. The reality is we are all complex beings, capable of most things, good and bad, however we understand such terms. At issue is how each of us, and how we collectively, challenge and radically transform ourselves/our societies into beings and cultures which make rape and racism (and heterosexism and classism, of course, and ableism and ageism too) something contained solely in dusty books about past atrocities, or in outdated Wikipedia entries. The task, it seems to me, is to compost CRAP, sooner than later.
To Richard Leader: I was intrigued with some of your comments, and hope you do read Sex and War by Stan, as well as the text he recommended.
To Stan and Richard:
You may wish to see the good work of James W. Messerschmidt, two books of his in particular: Nine Lives, and Flesh & Blood. From the first book, see pages 10-12, in a section of that chapter called “Hegemonic, Subordinated, and Oppositional Masculinities.” I’ve only perused his books, but he certainly works hard to focus on how class, race, and gender create crime, including rape, and racist and anti-gay violence. His analysis is largely structural, his background is in criminology. See:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-url/102-4337204-6722534?url=index%3Dstripbooks%3Arelevance-above&field-keywords=james+messerschmidt&Go.x=19&Go.y=10&Go=Go
Stan, I noticed that R. Connell does the forward to Flesh and Blood.
I don’t tend to discuss “masculinities” much, as it has become “the” Men’s Studies word that seeks to make room for positive masculinities, as I think you note above, Richard. Notions of masculinity and femininity, however modified, still participate in (maintain) male supremacist heterosexism. Gender and race must end, period.
But we all must use the terms that most work for us, in respectful disagreement and in honest struggle, as we find our way out of this hell on Earth… and not by waiting to get out of this life and into some other, however it is imagined or understood (or known) by some religions. I am a radical Jew. I am alive now, more or less. I am not living to get to heaven. I am working to get heaven to Earth, as I work, each day, to first get out of bed. Depression disables me.
The world is wondrous but far too dreadful, far too systematically harmful, far too callous and cruel. Thanks to so many of you here, for giving hope: we cannot know when things will change, but here we know, at least, we are not alone in these struggles and perspectives–these efforts to end systematic harm.
Peace to all beings.
8 March 2006, 6:19 pmCharles Brown:
-clip_
The whole point of this and other posts regarding gender has been that gender (which is only initially constituted as biological sex) is a system of social power that privileges men and oppresses women; that this system is encoded very early on — as it currently exists — as what Adrienne Rich called “compulsory heterosexuality,†which has far less to do with how people fuck (tho that matters too)
^^^
CB: Then it seems to me that the term should be “compulsory hetero_gender_” , not “heter_sexuality_”.
A major meaning of “sex” refers to biology, the complementary biological classes of a species that are capable of biological reproduction through sexual actions.
“Gender” refers to the cultural/power/political categories masculine/feminine.
^^^^^
than it does with defining male and female social roles in a fused, complimentary-yet-unequal way; that the behavioral expectations associated with these roles are lingusitically marked as “masculinity†and “femininityâ€; that these gendered constellations of behavorial expectations are socialized from birth and therefore deeply embedded in each individual, both affectively and cognitively; that this socialization is powerfully and incessantly reinforced by cultural productions that reflect gender as a system of power AND and its reinforcing ideology; and that an ideology is an internally cohering set of symbols, meanings, and ideas that (1) is so widely accepted as to be considered axiomatic and beyond the scope of criticism, (2) and therefore is given the appearance of being “natural†(as in God-given or existing almost as a law of nature), and that (3) therefore both conceals and justifies existing social arrangements of power.
16 March 2006, 2:51 pmCharles Brown:
Hence you get dictators for life like Castro (and soon Chavez), or omnipotent party committees. Both of these forms of “leadership†hide behind their “advanced understanding†and couldn’t possibly subordinate themselves to a democratic system of choosing leaders.
Ed
^^^^^^^
Chavez was elected several times. Bush stole two elections.
CB
21 March 2006, 3:32 pmCharles Brown:
Now Ed is somebody who could use a read of Engels, Stan, (smile)
Charles
You’re funny, Ed.
We are not most animals. We are Homo sapiens sapiens (a name selected out of deep hubris). In fact, your account of the fighting-fucking caveman is a total myth and refuted by archeologcial and anthropological evidence. Fighting only became ubiquitous with the introduction of territorial disputes and class society, and then more often as a totally unbalanced form of plunder and bullying. This happened well AFTER we inherited our current genetic map.
This is a classic case of “naturalization,†the claim that a socially-constructed reality is “natural†(and therefore beyond our capacity to intervene, alas).
If someone broke into my home, and Sherry ran them back out the door with a chef’s knife, would she be displaying her “masculinity� Please!
Evolutionary “breeding�!?!
Thanks for the chuckle. Gotta go out to beat up the neighbors and kill a mastadon before I “mate†with the little lady.
Aaaaaarrrrgh!
Comment by Stan — 2/22/2006 @ 7:25 am
21 March 2006, 3:51 pmCharles Brown:
Elaina:
I mean, seriously, what of the lioness who goes out and kills to feed her cubs, or kills to protect them from predators (or male lions)? I’m just sayin’, since we’re talking lions and all.
Charles: And the female praying mantises who bite the heads off of the males right after they have sex ?
21 March 2006, 4:01 pmCharles Brown:
Yes of course, Stan. We were all kind, gentle vegetarians living in our little grass huts, sharing everything and loving our neighbors in a lovely world of primitive communism. Then the mean ol’ Republicans and Businessmen came along and taught us to kill animals and hurt each other.
Thanks for the counter-chuckle! Nothing like Marxist prattle for a good laugh.
Comment by Ed — 2/22/2006 @ 4:20 pm
^^^^^
Don’t laugh Ed. That’s fairly close to the truth except the vegetarian part. We were _hunters_ and gatherers. Surely, you have heard that term. Hunting means meat eating.
Peace _within_ the species was very adaptive for the species. Doing a lot of killing and fighting within your own species is not very adaptive _for_ your species. That’s true of any species , and it held for humans for 200,000 years. See the inherent logic in that ? The original humans societies were too fragile to support wars between humans.
What the mean original businessmen did was introduce slavery, and the exploitation of other people – women at first – while they lived off the surpluses. Sad , not funny, but true.
Charles
21 March 2006, 4:11 pmCharles Brown:
Elaina: And there’s oodles of literature out there that suggests that while our endocrine system might facilitate certain behaviors, it can’t PRODUCE them. Mitigating factors (like masculinist cultures that promote rape and violence against women in all of their media outlets/art/history books at the same time that they promote women’s subservience and submission) are necessary. (It seems like my Google-gland has pooped out for the evening. But just go and google ESTROGEN TESTOSTERONE AGGRESSION and I’d bet five bucks that there’s documentation for what I just said. I’m too tired to look it up right now for reference. I’m working off of old memories from developmental psych class at this point.)
Charles: I think you start to make the refutation of Ed’s claim here, when you distinguish between facilitating and producing aggression. High testosterone levels do not produce aggression. They make higher levels of physical activity, more forceful and vigorous bodily actions possible. But a more forceful or vigorous physical action could be used to runaway faster, or climb a tree in escape faster. Testosterone’s action on a human is not to make them angry with a person; it does not make them form the goal of doing harm to a person. That has not been proven nor demonstrated by experiments.
The mindset to fight another _person_ does not come from testosterone. That comes from culture, especially class society culture. The mindset to hit a woman comes from male supremacist culture.
The original greater testosterone levels in human males were directed at fighting predators or hunting prey, that is other species, not members of our own species. Testosterone just provides more vigorous physical potential ; it does not designate what this vigorous activity is to be used in relation to.
What more testosterone does is facilitate fighting more fearcely , once the cultural mindset has been formed to fight someone at all.
Greater levels of testosterone are like bigger muscles. The bigger muscles don’t cause men to hit women. It is male supremacist ideology that causes men to take advantage of the bigger muscles or the greater levels of testosterone.
21 March 2006, 4:34 pm