Tag Archives: Male feminists

The pro-feminist pick-up artist: rethinking a blind spot

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Clarisse Thorn, the noted sex-positive writer and blogger, came to speak to my women’s history class today. Clarisse was in Los Angeles on another engagement, and was kind enough to come and talk to my students about sex-positive feminist masculinity. We had a short and very amiable debate, as I challenged some of her positions. (More on that in a future post.) I look forward to getting some good feedback from more of my students, but have already had a few enthusiastic emails and Facebook messages.

UPDATE: Clarisse notes her visit here. Her post lists some links from each of our archives that cover some of the areas where we disagree.

Clarisse’s article on the pathologizing of male desire got a great deal of attention in the blogosphere last month, and there were over 100 comments in the debate about it here on this blog. A follow-up post has a still-active comment thread. Those two posts received more comments than any others I wrote in October. Clarisse is clearly an instigator of good discussion.

I took Clarisse to lunch to thank her, and in our discussion over various vegetarian goodnesses, we returned to this challenging theme of constructive sex-positive feminist masculinity. I talked about how frustrated I’ve been in my exchanges on the topic with many men, who — as my comment threads indicate — find my writing on the topic to be shaming, or unhelpful, or privileged. I’ve been asked before for “pick-up tips for feminist men”, a request I’ve resisted for both ideological and experiential reasons. I haven’t spent much time around the “pick-up artist” (PUA) and “seduction” communities, largely because I find their views to be deeply demeaning to women (as well as men). Clarisse has a more nuanced view, as one of her many interests is focused on “bridging the gap” between the PUA and feminist worlds. I’m leery that that gap can be bridged at all, but I’m open to discussion.

But in talking with Clarisse, I realized how often I’ve been unnecessarily contemptuous of those men who have sought out techniques and strategies for approaching women. I’m married, of course, and devotedly so. I’m obviously not looking for sexual or romantic partners. But even when I was single, I never had trouble “meeting” women, finding sexual partners, or getting into relationships. (I had tremendous problems making relationships work, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.) Writing those words makes me uncomfortable; they seem filled with macho swagger. I’m not boasting of my sexual prowess, or at least, I’m trying not to. But though I have had myriad challenges in my life (particularly around drug and alcohol addiction), one problem I haven’t had since I hit college was finding sexual partners. Learning to be celibate was hard; learning how to be monogamous in thought and word as well as in body was hard. Unlearning flirting was hard. Getting laid — and every few years, getting married — was easy. Continue reading →

Of the validation of desire and the graceful acceptance of rejection: on male wanting

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A young man whom I’ve mentored was in my office this week, and asked me a question based on what had come up in one of my old Men and Masculinity lectures. I’m paraphrasing, but here’s more or less what he said:

I appreciate what you often say about the importance of being a “safe older man.” You are, and that’s great. But one reason you’re safe is that you’re married. You aren’t single and looking. It seems like that makes it easier for you to be a full-fledged feminist male, because you can afford to have all of your relationships with women other than your wife be completely asexual. So don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re not always that helpful as a feminist male role model because you can’t demonstrate how someone can be single, straight, looking for a girlfriend and be feminist. I don’t want to be seen as a creep, but I certainly don’t want to be seen as asexual either.

This goes back to some of the recent discussion around Clarisse Thorn’s piece at Alternet about demonizing men who are honest about their sexual desires.

It’s something I touched on in my write-up of my meeting with young men at Brown University last year. As I wrote then: “for men who long to be feminist allies, finding a way to affirm their own wanting (without an assumption that they are entitled to have those wants satisfied by women) is vital.”

So my student (who had read Clarisse’s controversial article as well as my post about the lads at Brown) was essentially asking me to explain the how of affirming male heterosexual desire while reconciling it with a commitment to gender justice and feminism. He wanted to move past the rhetoric that intimates that from a feminist standpoint, “the only good penis is a soft one.” But how can a man show sexual and romantic interest in a woman without being potentially creepy? That’s where my student — and many other well-intentioned young men – need help.

First off, being a straight male feminist ally is not code for “walking on eggshells” all the time. It does not demand that young men run about taking the emotional temperature of their female peers. There’s no better example of a false dichotomy than the suggestion that all men must be either painfully earnest nice guys or predatory, swaggering bad-boy assholes. The alternative to those unhappy models is one of compassionate confidence (or, if you prefer, confident compassion.)

What does compassionate confidence look like in interpersonal relationships? It starts with the recognition of the difference between one’s own right to want and one’s right to expect others to respond to those wants. In a culture where we raise women to be people-pleasers, generations of men have grown up assuming that their desires are women’s responsibility to solve. Whether it’s a husband who expects dinner to appear magically as soon as he’s hungry, or a boy who insists that his girlfriend owes him a blowjob because “she got him horny”, far too many of us are conditioned to believe that men’s desires are women’s problems to solve. So many men confuse wanting with the entitlement to have their wants met that it’s little wonder that a great many women are mistrustful of expressions of male desire.

A good guy knows that he has the right to want. His horniness and his fantasies are not sinful or wicked. But he’s very clear that his attraction to a woman (say a classmate with whom he strikes up a conversation) isn’t a compliment to her for which she is required to be grateful. He has the right to have a crush, he has the right to lust. He doesn’t have the right to have his wants reciprocated. He needs to do two things at once: affirm the essential goodness of his own desire, and affirm that the woman he’s attracted to has every right not to share his interest.

As I’ve written before, one of the greatest benefits of feminism to men is a greater authenticity and honesty in heterosexual relationships. Women who don’t feel pressured or coerced or “guilted” into a “yes” are going to be much more comfortable saying “no.” And a woman who feels safe to say “no” to the men to whom she is closest will also be someone who will be better equipped to speak an enthusiastic, honest “yes!” when she’s presented with someone she actually wants.

We live in a culture where women have good reason to fear the consequences of rejecting men. Making it clear that one doesn’t expect one’s wants to be met by others is a key part of putting other folks at ease. Dealing with rejection without sulking or shaming the one who has rejected you sends a signal about your safety and your essential decency. (For a marvelous example of why women have good reason to fear the consequences of rejecting men, see the opening scene of the hit movie “The Social Network”, in which it seems as if the very inspiration for the creation of Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg’s toxic rage at being rejected by a woman he’s already treated very shabbily.)

Because many women have little experience with men who take rejection easily and with equanimity, it’s little wonder that some women’s fear of male rage turns into a fear of male desire itself. “If he wants me, then I have to face the problem of rejecting him — and if I reject him, he may do something really dangerous or humiliating. Therefore, it would be better if he didn’t want me at all.” But the problem isn’t the wanting: it’s both the vulgar and crude ways in which some men make that wanting known, and more importantly, the outraged indignation so many men express when they are in fact rejected.

Learning to articulate one’s wants needs to go hand in hand with the graceful acceptance of the rejection that occasionally follows; that is the stuff of which “confident compassion” is made. And in the end, women’s acceptance of the reality (and goodness) of men’s desires is contingent on men’s acceptance of women’s (absolute and never forfeited) right to reject them.

Step Up and Step Back: more on the role of men in feminist spaces

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The discussion of men in the feminist movement heats up in the comments below this post by Amelia at Feministe: The Masquerade: I call myself a feminist, therefore I am a feminist. She tells a story that is all-too-familiar to campus activists. A male student at Amelia’s university attempts to hijack a feminist student organization while claiming, with ever-increasing vehemence, to be a feminist. When his aims are thwarted, the male “feminist” insinuates he’s more committed to feminism than the women who lead the organization. The disruption he causes is more than exasperating, and raises serious questions about the role of men in the feminist movement.

There are many ways in which men who claim to be feminists can do tremendous harm. Two summers ago, we dealt with the infuriating and depressing story of Kyle Payne, an anti-violence campus activist, dorm adviser, and self-described feminist who ended up sexually assaulting a woman in his residence hall. But the problem isn’t limited to rapists who are “wolves in sheep’s clothing.” Indeed, there’s a range of problematic male feminist behavior, with outright sexual assault at one extreme and well-meaning but utterly clueless insistence on taking on a leadership role in the anti-sexist movement at the other. Spend enough time doing anti-violence or other sorts of feminist work on campus, and you’ll meet young men very similar to the sort Amelia describes.

One commenter at Feministe suggests that the problem lies in having men take on any role in feminist organizations:

sorry, but you are going to have this problem constantly, and consistently be wasting your time with aggressive, entitled men and mansplanations, as long as you let men into womens and feminist spaces. full stop. there is no remedy for this problem, except to not allow them access. and unfortunately, theres really no way to limit membership and privatize groups when you are in a public school setting, even when its to deny men access to womens spaces DUE TO WOMEN NEEDING PRIVATE WOMEN-ONLY SPACE, DUE TO AGGRESSIVE, ENTITLED MEN.

I sympathize. But as a man who is committed to doing feminist work, I respectfully reject the commenter’s suggestion.

I’m a man who has spent close to 25 years working in feminist spaces, since I took my first undergraduate course in Women’s Studies at Berkeley in the mid-’80s. I was a member of a variety of feminist organizations when I was at university. I’ve taught women’s studies at the community college since the mid-’90s, and have been an adviser to campus feminist clubs throughout that time. And I’m particularly interested in this topic now as I’m working on the nascent Feminist Masculinities project within the National Women’s Studies Association. With colleagues from Harvard, Penn State, and USC, I’ll be part of a panel discussion on Men and Anti-Sexist Activism at this November’s NWSA conference in Denver. This will be a follow-up discussion to our very successful dialogue at last autumn’s NWSA conference in Atlanta, about which I blogged here.

As I commented at Feministe, I have a simple formula I’ve developed over the years to describe my thinking about men in feminist spaces. (I am perplexed as to why I’ve never blogged about it before.) Four words:

1. Step up.
2. Step back.

“Step up” means that men who choose to identify as feminists (or, if you prefer, as “feminist allies” or “pro-feminists”) are called to take an active role in the anti-sexist movement. Building a genuinely egalitarian and non-violent society requires everyone’s involvement. Empowering women to defend themselves from rapists and harassers is important; raising a generation of young men to whom the idea of rape or harassment is anathema is also vital. We need men of all ages in the feminist movement to “step up” and commit themselves to embodying egalitarian principles in their private and public lives.

Stepping up means being willing to listen to women’s righteous anger. That doesn’t mean groveling on the ground in abject apology merely for having a penis — contrary to stereotype, that’s not what feminists (at least not any I’ve ever met) want. That means really hearing women, without giving into the temptation to become petulant, defensive, or hurt. It means realizing that each and every one of us is tangled in the Gordian knot of sexism, but that men and women are entangled in different ways that almost invariably cause greater suffering to the latter. Stepping up doesn’t mean denying that, as the old saying goes, The Patriarchy Hurts Men Too (TPHMT). It means understanding that in feminist spaces, to focus on male suffering both suggests a false equivalence and derails the most vital anti-sexist work.

Stepping up means, of course, being willing to confront other men. I’ve said over and over again that the acid test of a man’s commitment to feminism often comes not only in terms of how he treats women, but also how he speaks about women when he’s in all-male spaces. Many young men are earnest about living out feminist principles when around women (of course, some like Amelia’s troll and the lamentable Kyle Payne obviously aren’t.) But get them around their “bros” and their words change. Or, as is more often the case, they may not join in on sexist banter — but they fail to raise vocal objection to it. Stepping up means challenging the jokes and complaints and objectifying remarks that are so much a part of the conversation in all-male spaces. This is, as far as I’m concerned, a sine qua non of being a feminist ally.

Stepping back means acknowledging that in almost every instance, feminist organizations ought to be led by women. It means that men in feminist spaces need to check themselves before they pursue leadership roles. While that might seem unfair, arguing that biological sex should have no bearing on who wields authority in a feminist organization fails to take into account the myriad ways in which the wider world discriminates against women. Even now, we still socialize young men to be assertive and young women to be deferential. (Yes, there are plenty of exceptions, but not enough to disprove that rule.) Part of undoing that socialization for women means pushing themselves to take on leadership positions even if they feel awkward about doing so; part of undoing that socialization for young men means holding themselves back from those same offices.

Stepping back doesn’t mean men should never speak up in feminist spaces. Stepping back is not about silently serving in the background. Stepping back is about the willingness to engage in self-reflection, to defer, and remembering that the most important job feminist men have within the movement is not to lead women but to serve as role models to other men. Stepping back is a way of renouncing the “knight in shining armor” tendency that afflicts many young men who first come to anti-sexist work. Women need colleagues and partners on this journey, not rescuers or substitute father figures.

As a male instructor who teaches women’s history, I’ve always made sure that female colleagues feel free to critique my syllabus and teaching methods. As adviser to the campus feminist club, I’ve done everything I can to make sure not to assert any more authority than necessary, and I defer as often as possible (without shirking work) to my two feminist colleagues who co-advise with me. I recognize that “stepping back” can turn into a convenient excuse for not doing some of the more tedious work of feminist activism (like paperwork), and I do my best to make sure that I’m both “pulling my weight” and “hanging back” as needed.

I am keenly aware that a great many women are deeply cynical about men who claim to be feminists. This mistrust is rooted in real experience. The consequent desire to exclude men from feminist spaces is understandable. But I’m also convinced that men do have a vital role to play in transforming the culture and building a truly egalitarian society. Imperfectly, I’ve been doing this work for over half my life, mentoring as I was once mentored. I believe in engaging men in the struggle to end violence; to create new models for sexual relationship; to build a world in which one’s biology is not the primary determinant of one’s destiny. Women in the feminist movement have brothers and fathers and boyfriends and buddies and sons and husbands and nephews whom they love. Most women I’ve worked with very much want men in the movement, but are often understandably wary about what role we will play. And as we acknowledge both that need and that wariness, I think it’s a good time to reiterate the importance of stepping up… and stepping back.

UPDATE: Wanted to link to this post of mine from 2008, written from the WAM (Women, Action and Media) conference in Massachusetts: Some Thoughts on Changing Attitudes towards Male Feminists. I see a major generational divide in terms of receptivity towards men in the feminist movement, and I’m old enough to have seen a significant shift towards “inclusionary” views of men in feminist spaces.

Can Feminism Liberate Men?

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Ned Resnikoff briefly addresses the familiar question in this week’s Ms. Magazine blog: Can Feminism Liberate Men? His answer, of course, is yes:

I am a feminist man. While I can argue for that position on the grounds of moral responsibility and basic human empathy, I would be lying if I painted my position as some kind of noble sacrifice. It is in my own self-interest to be a feminist, because I know that I will never be a Real Man and that many of my own goals and priorities are decidedly un-Manly.

So rather than wander around in a state of perpetual self-loathing, I try to come to some other understanding of what it means to be a man. This is, I think, one of the great challenges for American men born in the wake of second-wave feminism. It’s a daunting project, because there are so few guideposts, but for the very same reason it is also a liberating one.

Amen, brother Ned. There are many other excellent reasons for men to consider feminism, places where self-interest and justice intersect in some surprising ways. (I’m enough of an Aristotelian to think that in the end, virtue and happiness are inextricable. Feminist men may know this better than most).

The male feminists category contains a number of posts on the topic. See these:

Tired of being coddled and feared: standing up to the myth of male weakness

Refusing membership in the Boys’ Club: an answer to Derek about what feminist men can do

What’s in it for men?

The Male Transformation Series

Fighting from the uncorrupted self: more on conflict in feminist heterosexual relationships

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I’m writing a lot about men this week.

Below yesterday’s reprint about men being unable to articulate their deep emotions, Brian writes:

Reconciling some kind of commitment to egalitarianism with the conflict between how it plays out in practice with how people say it ought to isn’t very obvious, or straightforward… how can you reconcile “Figure out what you want, and require it” with “renounce male privilege”? Doesn’t sit right in the gut, you know?

I appreciate the question, and I see the concern.

In any healthy relationship, we don’t get to confuse our “wants” with what we “require” from our partners. The oldest truism in the book is that relationships require compromise. But compromise in heterosexual egalitarian relationships does involve several key things that aren’t always fully understood.

First of all, as I’ve written before, we (all of us, men and women alike) need to work on fighting fair. Part of that involves the recognition that it is very unlikely that in any given argument, all the truth is found on just one side. People tend to end up in relationships with partners who are more or less at their own level of spiritual and emotional health, which means that the propensity to be wrong is likely to be evenly distributed. (This doesn’t mean, of course, that the batterer and the batterree are equally at fault for the violence that happens in the relationship, but they may be equally at fault for the issues that were being fought over at the time the battering took place.)

Years ago, in my brief incarnation as a hardcore evangelical, I read Intimate Allies: Rediscovering God’s Design for Marriage and Becoming Soul Mates for Life, a book written by two Christian pastors. It has as its chief virtue a belief in mutual submission; the authors reject the “man is head of the household” trope, understanding that when it comes to marriage, Ephesians 5:21 trumps Ephesians 5:22. I remember one line that was very helpful, but since I don’t have the book with me anymore, I’m likely to misquote it. The authors, Allender and Longman, suggested that a marriage couldn’t work unless each party could honestly acknowledge the other’s essential sinfulness. To put it in secular terms, until you can see your spouse’s most serious flaws, and acknowledge they are real, you can’t truly love him or her, chiefly because you’ll be unable to help them do the valuable work of becoming a better person. Allender and Longman suggested that at least some of the time, it is well-meaning men who have the most trouble with this, believing that truly loving their wives means never noticing any flaw. Marriage requires forgiveness, they wrote, but not a refusal to see where someone else is broken. And women, the authors noted, have just as much brokenness as men. The tendency to put women on a pedestal is well-meaning and foolish at best, demeaning and destructive at worst.

For men who are feminist allies (and not evangelical conservatives), is there any usefulness in what Allender and Longman are discussing? Yes. If you’re a feminist man in a heterosexual relationship, you know that both you and your female partner have been impacted by a sexist, often misogynistic culture. You know already how hard it is to root out the inculcated expectations about gender roles. And you may know the important idea we discussed on this blog last fall, that “privilege conceals itself from those who possess it.” But rather than be incapacitated by this awareness, we need to remember that our knowledge of how gender dynamics work is a tool for better understanding ourselves and our relationships. What we get from this knowledge and this work is, one hopes, discernment: the ability to distinguish what about our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (and that of our partner) is sexist role-playing and what are the needs of our own authentic self.

Not to verge dangerously onto philosophical ground, but I think most of us (even if we haven’t read Plato or been washed in the Blood of the Lamb) think we have a “true self” somewhere deep inside, somewhere deeper than the corrupting influences of a sexist patriarchal culture could reach. Overcoming sexism or racism is about overcoming learned lessons, not about changing our very nature. The fact that the lessons began to be taught before our conscious memory doesn’t change the fact that they were learned after birth rather than encoded in our genes or written on our hearts. And the feminist man in an argument with his female partner needs to remember that both he and the woman he loves have had their perspectives warped by society — and that each of them has an uncorrupted self which is no more or less valuable than that of the other. Those born with penises were not maimed from the start, carrying from their mothers’ wombs obtuse and violent hearts. (Sorry, William B.)

Obviously, we can’t unlearn everything. It would be absurd to say that fair fighting requires each person to speak from their “pure, true, untainted selves.” Deprogramming ourselves is always going to remain partly aspirational. As good as we get at purging the effects of the toxic soup in which our younger selves marinated for so long, we’re not going to finish the job in this lifetime. But we do our best. And when I, as a feminist man, fight with my wife (and we do fight), I remember that we both are still struggling to unlearn what we were taught. As I wrote last October:

Sometimes my wife is wrong. (Yes, my love, you are, even if it’s only every fifth Tuesday.) Sometimes I am right. We quarrel like any couple, though our experiences have given us tools like “fair fighting rules” that not everyone, alas, possesses. We know that in our marriage, each of us is equally important, each of us is entitled to his or her opinion, each of us deserves to be heard. But we also know that we didn’t come into this marriage as disembodied souls; we brought in our gender identities, our class backgrounds, our skin tones, our multi-generational family histories. And just as it’s absurd to pretend that we’ve come from equally privileged backgrounds, it is equally absurd to pretend that those backgrounds have not at least in part shaped our worldviews. Again, power obfuscates; oppression clarifies. So when the topic at hand is gender dynamics or race or class, the epistemic privilege is not mine. And thus the burden to reflect just a bit harder, is.

But not every fight is going to be about gender dynamics or race or class. And even when it is, the burden to reflect just a bit harder doesn’t mean the burden of always being in the wrong.

“Male feminists are mostly gay”: more on myths of lust and humanity

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I’ve posted many times before on the stereotypes male feminists (or, if one prefers, male feminist allies) encounter. Nearly a quarter-century after I first took a women’s studies class, and after more than a decade and a half of teaching the subject, I still regularly encounter the following assumptions:

1. I’m gay
2. I’m straight and sexually predatory, a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”, using the class to “pick up chicks”.
3. I’m filled with masculine self-loathing, desperately using feminism to get validation from women.

Most male feminist allies encounter at least one, if not all three, of these fairly often. In this post, I’d like to tackle the first stereotype.

The assumption that men who teach women’s studies (or merely express a strong interest in gender work and activism) are gay is a deeply held and pervasive one. Of course, it’s a different stereotype from the other two on the list. There’s something wrong with a man feigning feminism in order to get access to women; there’s something unhealthy about adopting feminism as a strategy for winning approval. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with being gay, and by constructing this list, I don’t intend to suggest that there is. (There’s an analogous stereotype about female feminists, that they are lesbians and man-haters, but that’s another topic.)

I don’t mind if folks question my sexual identity. I make it clear that I’m married to a woman and that we have a child together, but I don’t go any further to establish heterosexual bona-fides. I call myself Eira-sexual, and explain why here and here. But there is something about the assumption of homosexuality that troubles me deeply, and that’s the implication that men who are sexually drawn to women are incapable of seeing them as true equals.

The notion that gay men and hetero women are natural allies is deeply held — and reinforced by countless films and television shows. These friendships are indeed often very precious and enduring. But the problem with our discourse about these friendships is that they reinforce a number of assumptions, chief among the the idea that sexism is rooted in heterosexual desire. As many women know well, gay men are perfectly capable of the same degree of sexism as their straight brothers. The problem of misogyny is rooted in something that runs deeper than desire. We can, it turns out, despise what we aren’t attracted to as much as what we are. And while I certainly don’t think my gay brothers are especially sexist, I reject the notion that their queerness gives them any particular insight into or empathy with women’s experience. Those who are acculturated as males will have to overcome a hell of a lot of sexist programming, almost entirely irrespective of the direction of their libidos. Continue reading →

“She’s so pretty”: on partners, compliments, and thank-yous

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Those of you who know me well know that I tend to be zealous about guarding my family’s privacy, rarely blogging about my wife and keeping family pictures password-protected. But I wanted to repost this 2007 piece, largely because my lovely Eira has been getting more than her usual share of attention on the street lately, thanks to her resemblance to the Brazilian actress Morena Baccarin, who plays an alien on the TV series “V”. We haven’t watched V, but we’ve seen the promos — and with her short hair, Baccarin does look very much like Eira. My wife has been stopped on the street a couple of times recently by curious folks.

And so this seemed worthy of reposting.

Not unexpectedly, most of the photographs on my desk are of my wife and me, including a formal wedding portrait. Time and again, students and colleagues come in, look at the pictures, and say “Your wife is beautiful” (or something similar). And after a long time, I’ve grown very comfortable saying “thank you.”

Years ago, I was at a wedding (remarkably, it was one of the few in which I wasn’t involved as either groom or minister) with an ex-girlfriend of mine. I introduced my date to some friends, and one of them, an older woman, blurted out, “Hugo, she’s very pretty.” She said this right in front of my date as if she wasn’t there, and I said “thank you.” When my date got me alone, she punched me firmly in the arm and asked “Why did you say ‘thank you’? Are my looks your accomplishment to be praised? Some feminist you are!”

Ouch. There’s no question that within a great many different social circles, it is considered customary to offer praise of a woman’s looks to her husband, boyfriend, or father. It often doesn’t seem to matter whether the praise is entirely justified, either. Ever since I started dating, I noticed that it seemed standard protocol to make a remark about the perceived prettiness of the woman in my life. I note that with my fourth wife, I get the remarks more frequently because she is truly striking, but by now I know enough to know that this particular compliment is almost a cultural universal.

I understand why a visitor to my office might remark that my wife “looks lovely.” They can’t tell from looking at her picture that she’s brilliant, that she’s got an absolutely brutal left hook that can floor most men, that she has hundreds of phone, account and credit card numbers memorized in her head (it’s part of her job). They can’t tell that she’s a great salsa dancer or that she is a marvelous cook or passionate about Gabriel Garcia Marquez. They can tell that she’s lovely, and so that’s what they remark upon.

But saying “thank you” to a compliment paid to your wife or girlfriend about her looks is at least somewhat problematic. The friend at the wedding who praised my date’s prettiness directed that praise at me, and there seemed to be an implication then — as there often is now when folks comment on my wife’s pictures — that I am to be credited with having succeeded at something by “landing” a “hot” woman. One of the things that feminists work very hard to reject is the notion that women’s looks are currency for men to measure their own status. The phrase “trophy wife” or “arm charm” resonates painfully. Ask women whose husbands or boyfriends have dumped them because they couldn’t provide sufficient “hotness” to boost the ego of their male partners. Using women’s attractiveness to measure a man’s status is as disastrous as it is (still, sadly) ubiquitious.

On the other hand, I can’t give everyone who compliments my wife’s looks a lecture. Most of the time these days, especially since she and I have been married, I do say “thank you”. I say it not because I believe that my ego has just been boosted, but because I take very seriously the idea that my wife and I are joined together. We have become a team, a union of flesh and spirit. Her triumphs are my triumphs, my triumphs are hers. A compliment to either of us is a compliment to both, an insult to either is an insult to both. That doesn’t mean I need to fight all of her battles for her. That doesn’t mean that we don’t retain a considerable degree of autonomy even within marriage. It means that in terms of how the outside world perceives us, we are a unified front, standing shoulder to shoulder. (This unity, however, does not impose an obligation on my wife to look a certain way; if she gains a huge amount of weight, for example, I am not entitled to use the “but we’re a team” card to badger her into looking “good” for my benefit.)

On the other hand, I’m very reluctant to praise the looks of a male friend’s wife or girlfriend, at least until after I’ve gotten to know her much better. When shown a photograph that requires a compliment, I usually say something (fashionista that I am) about clothing or accessories. “What a great suit”, somehow, seems far less sexist than “She’s a knock-out.” Perhaps that’s not a distinction everyone sees as meaningful, but it works for me.

Please share your thoughts.

UPDATE: I’m bumping this up from the comments, because when I wrote this post, I gave the impression that I only say “thank you” when someone compliments my wife’s looks. What I almost always add afterwards is “I think so, too.”

And of course, perhaps the most feminist response would be the “I think so, too” without the “thank you.” But sometimes etiquette and ideology conflict and etiquette wins; I was raised to thank everything that moved.

Claiming the name

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I got a message on Facebook from Delia, asking a familiar question:

I’ve got a good friend of mine, a man, who is absolutely supportive of feminist causes. But he really dislikes the word feminist, and prefers to call himself (and me) an “egalitarian”. To him, “feminist” sounds too exclusionary. I’ve tried to give him a good answer as to why focusing on women matters, but am not having much luck. Perhaps you could respond?

First off, let me recommend the indispensable Feminism 101 blog, a wonderful resource for answering all sorts of questions about feminism. Delia’s friend’s problem is addressed in this pithy answer, and it’s well worth the read.

I think it’s vital to “claim the name” of “feminist”. As the Feminism 101 site explains, refusing to use the term in favor of more general words like “egalitarian” obscures the reality of misogyny. While there’s nothing wrong with a commitment to egalitarianism as a principle, to use it to title an ideological perspective implies a false equivalence between the sexism that is directed towards men and that towards women. If someone were to say, “Oh, I believe blacks should be equal to whites, but I don’t feel comfortable calling myself an ‘anti-racist’; I’d rather just be an ‘equalist’”, we’d hear the statement for what it was: a refusal, probably motivated more by ignorance than malice, to accept the reality that black oppression in American history far outpaces that of whites.

As it says at Feminism 101, these are not mutually exclusive terms. One can be a feminist and believe in egalitarian principles. One can be a feminist and a Christian; one can be a feminist and a Republican, or a Democrat, or a defiant independent. To claim the name of feminism doesn’t mean rejecting all other names; it means, simply, that one acknowledges the reality of misogyny and one commits, in whatever way one can, to struggling against that ugly reality.

I call myself a feminist. I was once wont to call myself a “pro-feminist”, largely because in the 1980s, when I first began to do academic feminism, there was considerably more skepticism about men doing this work than there is today. As I’ve written before, younger feminists are much more willing to accept — and demand — men’s full participation in anti-sexist activism. A new generation of men has grown up, sons of mothers (and occasionally, fathers) who were steeped in feminism. The notion that a “man simply can’t get it” seems to be one that divides many feminists generationally, with those under 30 particularly unlikely to believe that essentialist view.

Men don’t get cookies merely for calling themselves feminists. But it is important that we do, at least as long as we are willing to strive to match our life to our language. We send a message that this disease of misogyny has done damage to us all, but especially to mothers and daughters, sisters and wives, partners and pupils and professional acquaintances. When we call ourselves feminists, we remind ourselves and others that the belief in the inferiority of women is the Great Crime. We renounce our complicity with that crime, and pledge — imperfectly — to work to build a world beyond misogyny. But we can’t build that world if we don’t accurately identify that which we fight for, and that which we fight against.

Eloquent in self-deprecation, inarticulate in self-celebration: on masculinity and the male feminist dilemma

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One great disappointment for me this fall was that I wasn’t able to attend the first annual National Conference for Campus-Based Men’s Gender Equality & Anti-Violence Groups, held the weekend of November 6-7 in Collegeville, Minnesota. My commitment to be at the National Women’s Studies Association in Atlanta the following weekend meant that I had to forego the men’s conference, and I regret that. Still, many of those who attended our panel in Atlanta had been present in Minnesota a week earlier, and my co-presenter Tal Peretz was hardy enough to have offered papers at both.

The Men’s Gender Equality conference has received a fair amount of coverage in the feminist blogosphere, particularly thanks to Courtney Martin (author of the indispensable Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters), who attended the conference. Courtney, who has been immensely supportive of men doing feminist work, wrote a provocative piece in American Prospect after her return from Collegeville, noting what she sees as a “dangerous” problem: the absence of a clear explanation of what feminist men do as opposed to what they don’t:

This contemporary movement of gender-conscious young men is largely identifying themselves in terms of what they are against. They’re not rapists. They’re not misogynists.

They’re also not particularly effective in imagining what they do want to be. Case in point: back to (conference facilitator Ethan) Wong at the chalkboard. The negative associations with masculinity poured off the tongues of these feminist-friendly college kids. They’ve taken Women’s Studies 101. When their buddy says, “That’s so gay,” they spit back, “That’s a sexual identity, not a dis.” They let a few tears fall during the Take Back the Night March. They devour Michael Kimmel’s Guyland and proselytize about Byron Hurt’s documentary, Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes. This generation is saying no to toxic masculinity.

But what are these young men saying yes too? We’ve all failed to envision an alternative.

I didn’t read Courtney’s piece when it first came out, but several folks mentioned it to me at the NWSA conference, and I’ve received a couple of email requests to post a response. (I’ve seen at least one so far from a male feminist, AJ’s at Feminists for Choice.)

There’s a lot of debate among feminists of all sexes about whether masculinity, as a construct, can be redeemed and reimagined along feminist lines, or whether it needs to be abandoned all together. Allies are divided on the issue; the lads at Men Can Stop Rape famously created their Men of Strength campaign, seeking to offer young men a masculine counterstory in which something traditionally associated with maleness, physical toughness, becomes something pro-feminist. (Posters for the campaign featured young men of color holding their girlfriends tenderly, with the tag line “My Strength is not for Hurting.”) Robert Jensen, on the other hand, is a celebrated representative of those who regard masculinity itself as irredeemably toxic, a point he drives home vividly in his powerful Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, a book which deeply troubled Courtney Martin.

I don’t know if we can say it’s reached the point of a growing consensus, but there are a great many self-described male feminists who see masculinity (like its feminine counterpart) as something we perform rather than something that we are. Masculinity and femininity aren’t as tied to male and female physiological identity as we once imagined; they occur, as our transgendered friends are particularly good at pointing out, on a spectrum. Both males and females can “do” masculinity and femininity in terms of a kind of performance; both males and females can embody the positive traits traditionally associated with the former (strength and courage) as well as those linked to the latter (tenderness, the capacity to intuit).

The problem that Courtney is getting at is a real one. Most of us who are involved in anti-sexist work already acknowledge the fluidity of gender roles. We honor women’s capacity to adopt traditionally masculine dress and behavior. We celebrate men’s capacity to explore traditionally feminine roles. And though it remains a source of tension within feminist communities (a tension often inter-generational in nature), we are increasingly willing to acknowledge that women can be feminists while still delighting in normative female behavior. In other words, we’re clear that a feminist woman can wear make-up and get bikini waxes without compromising her feminist credentials. But there’s one area where we’re understandably more cautious: can a feminist male, particularly a het man, “perform” traditional masculinity without reinforcing toxic misogyny? Relatively few men who do feminist work are willing to say “of course”. And this creates the problem that Courtney Martin — and a great many other sympathetic observers of anti-sexist men — sees: a movement in danger of being defined by what it isn’t rather than by what it is. Continue reading →

How does a feminist ally fight fair? A follow-up on men and women’s anger

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We’ve had more than 90 comments below this post examining the degree to which women’s wariness of men is justified. It’s a fairly good discussion, for which I am grateful.

I wrote a few years ago a post called Words are not fists: some thoughts on how men work to defuse feminist anger. An excerpt:

Part of being a pro-feminist man, I’ve come to realize in recent years, is being willing to face the real anger of real women. Far too many men spend a great deal of time trying to talk women out of their anger, or by creating social pressures that remind women of the consequences of expressing that anger. Many men, frankly, are profoundly frightened by women who will directly challenge them. In a classroom, they don’t really fear being struck or hit. But by comparing a verbal attack on their own sexist attitudes towards physical violence, they hope to defuse the verbal expression of very real female pain and frustration. I know that it’s hard to be a young man in a feminist setting for the first time, and I know, (oh, how I know) how difficult it is to sit and listen to someone challenge you on your most basic beliefs about your identity, your sexuality, your behavior, and your beliefs about gender. It’s difficult to take the risk to speak up and push back a bit, and it’s scary to realize just how infuriating your views really are to other people, especially women.

The first task of the pro-feminist male in this situation is to accept the reality and the legitimacy of the frustration and disappointment and anger that so many women have with men, and to accept it without making light of it or trying to defuse it or trying to soothe it. Pro-feminist men must work to confront their own fears about being the target of those feelings.

I’d like to say a bit more about how men can do this last bit, as it’s not something I addressed in the original piece. I don’t want to imply that I think that a feminist man simply “stands there and takes it”. One of the ideals of traditional American masculinity is of the man as “sturdy oak”, able to withstand any tempest, even that of a woman’s righteous anger. That comes dangerously close to reinforcing the notion that women are “naturally” more volatile (at least emotionally), perhaps even hysterical (a dangerous word, given its origins) — and that is a “real man’s” job to hold his ground, silently, in the face of what will be a formidable, but (it is to be hoped) brief feminine storm. Though I’d like to believe my readers of the original post didn’t infer that I was reifying this myth, it’s important to clarify how I think we ought to help men respond to women’s anger. Continue reading →