My friend Karl wrote me on Facebook:
I know the work of pro-feminist men can be a lonely one, and one that makes you the target of a lot of attacks from MRAs.
While I’ve been within the feminist movement for about five or six years now, and while I’ve established myself well with fellow feminists, being able to build trust and relationships at conferences, through activism and such, I am feeling extremely uncomfortable with attacks from the anti-feminist groups.
It’s one of those silly things that I actually care about and worry, because quotes will be taken out of context, accusations of trying to bed all feminist women would start, and character assassination would exist. I am not sure how to deal with it.
I know you’re quite a big target for the MRA community, and I am writing simply to ask how you dealt with it when you first came on their radar. Is this an issue that pro-feminist men need to even worry about?
Certainly if you wade through the comments below my Tuesday column on MRAs at the Good Men Project, you’ll see lots of invective and ad hominem. If you visited this blog during the week I was trying out the Disqus commenting system, you probably saw a lot of hateful remarks that bore the hallmark of some of the more extreme members of the men’s rights movement.
As I’ve said before, we throw three basic charges at male feminists:
1. they’re gay
2. they’re “wolves in sheep’s clothing”, using feminism as a seduction tactic to get women into bed
3. they are filled with self-loathing, and feminism is a kind of ritualized penance or self-abuse.
Since I started taking women’s studies courses a quarter century ago, I’ve been on the receiving end of all three of those accusations countless times. Most of the men I know who do this work have heard the same thing over and over again. We know why we get the first two: in our culture, we don’t believe men can ever do anything in the absence of a sexual agenda. So we preach the lie that only gay men can truly care about women, because heterosexual male lust and empathy are fundamentally incompatible with each other. We preach the lie that in the end, regardless of pretty words, men are dogs and only want “one thing”, and are quite willing to use feminism as a façade to get it. And when those two charges fail, we resort to the third, convinced that only a man who genuinely hated his maleness could possibly hold these views.
I write and teach with the privilege of tenure. My job is not in jeopardy because of my feminist activism, and that inoculates me against a lot of mischief that MRAs and others might do. (Not that they don’t try; my division dean and the vice-president for instruction tell me they get letters and phone calls from time to time from folks complaining about what I’ve said on my blog or in an article somewhere. The administration has my back, and I’m lucky in that.)
I have worried a few times about physical threats. I didn’t worry before I became a father, but as a Dad feel the obvious need to be a little more careful with my person. Three or four times, I’ve gotten emails or phone calls that have threatened harm — and I’ve learned to report those to the campus police. I think most MRAs would repudiate those sorts of threats, and I also think most of those threats are empty talk. But one never knows, and there’s no shame in reporting intimations of personal violence.
In the end, I need to remember that it is so much worse for the women around me who do this work. My female colleagues have been threatened with rape, called “bitches” and “cunts” in postings on their office doors. Look at the racist slut-shaming that’s directed daily at the amazingly brave young feminist writer and sex columnist, Lena Chen; look at the comments that show up even here directed at my old friend and brilliant comrade-in-arms, Amanda Marcotte. No matter how often I get called “mangina”, it doesn’t add up to what folks like Amanda and Lena and countless other female bloggers, scholars and activists deal with every damn day.
I don’t worry about being sexually assaulted in a parking lot after a feminist event. That’s not masculine bravado on my part, it’s statistical probability. Embittered men’s rights activists can call me a “self-loathing faggot” or a “predatory perv prof” until the proverbial cows come home, but those are just words. Like watercolors, they wash off. Continue reading →