Every oppression, like an unhappy family, is oppressive in its own way. Each is a unique snowflake of kyriarchal crap.
One of the ways that gender is unique, as an axis of oppression, is that it is one of the few forms that totally sucks for everyone. As a white person, I can inform you that I have never actually had a disadvantage noticeably related to the color of my skin. As an upper-middle-class person, neither having health insurance nor my parents being able to retire sometime this century have left me in a particularly marginalized position.
But gender roles just fuck it up for everyone.
Shown: gender roles fucking it up for everyone.
That’s why I believe we have to have feminism and masculism.
Feminism is the movement for gender liberation primarily focused on women. Feminism’s focus on women is a good thing. For one thing, a lot of the most pressing issues during the second wave in America were primarily women’s issues: sex-segregated Help Wanted ads, company policies that kept women out of top-paying jobs by forbidding them to lift more than 35 pounds, facilities that refused admittance or service to women, rules that forbid women from getting credit cards in their own name. Prioritizing those issues was a smart move, politically, and often benefited men as a side effect– say hi, paternity leave and stricter rape laws!
Fortunately, a lot of the glaring inequalities between men and women have been corrected. (Not all of them, but a lot.) We still have the gender liberation movement primarily focused on women, though, which is excellent. Because we still have way too few movies that pass the Bechdel Test, and the idea that a woman’s worth is defined by her hotness, and that damn Mississippi Personhood amendment, and so it’s nice to have a movement that’s focused on ending that shit.
On the other hand, we also have problems for men: they’re far more likely to die on the job than women, and are the vast majority of deaths in the military, and often have their rapes or abuse downplayed, and have their roles as fathers to their children devalued, and are less likely to get custody of their children, and so on and so forth. However, there is only a very small movement for gender equality focused on men, and quite a lot of it is under the impression that Amanda Marcotte is the single worst enemy, bar none, that men face today.
We need masculism.
I also like the term “gender egalitarian”, as an overarching umbrella term for feminists, masculists and other people concerned with gender. For the purposes of this blog, I’m defining gender egalitarian as a person who believes that the genders are more far similar than they are different, that gender roles should be eliminated and that such ideas as killing off 80% of men or replacing all women with sexbots are both stupid and evil. Gender egalitarianism, as a term, is cool for a couple of reasons:
First, it reminds us that we’re all far more similar than we are different. Whatever my political differences with Feminist Critics or Sady Doyle, we are all generally on the same side. Feminism, masculism and related movements (such as “hey, how about we not discriminate against trans people for employment?” or “for Christ’s sake, can we queers just get married already?”) have intertwined goals. Even if we have different foci, victory conditions look the same for all of us. You can’t liberate women without liberating men; you can’t liberate men without liberating women. If you try, you’ll only end up with a bunch of women coming home from work to a second shift taking care of children and doing household chores, because the men still won’t fucking do them if it makes you a sissy to pick up a dishrag.
Also, the concept of gender egalitarianism allows us to simultaneously condemn and recognize the importance of certain people in the beginnings of our movements. For instance, consider Mary Daly. Her work was of tremendous importance to feminist theology: she also compared trans people to Frankenstein’s monsters, suggested that the male population ought to be reduced to 10% and was called out by no less a light than Audre Lorde for her racism. It’s dishonest in the extreme to kick Mary Daly out of feminism: she identified and was identified as a feminist and concepts she came up with are still used in feminist theology. More importantly, just saying she’s not a feminist because she’s a racist, transphobic, misandric asshat means that we won’t face up with and engage with the racism, transphobia and misandry in the feminist movement even today.
Fortunately, there is a solution here! Mary Daly was a feminist, yes, but she was not a gender egalitarian feminist. She was part of feminism-the-political-movement, sure, but she was sadly mistaken, blinded by her prejudices, about its overall and eventual goals.
(Digression: yes, trans rights are an integral part of gender egalitarianism. If you deny someone the right to be taken as the gender they identify as, you are saying they cannot do particular actions (be referred to by certain pronouns, have certain surgeries), simply because of the bits they were born with. That’s… not very gender-egalitarian.)
A similar process can be used about many masculist (defined broadly, as “the movement for gender liberation focused on men”) people. The Spearhead is certainly masculist, but it’s not gender egalitarian masculist, and therefore its commenters should not be held against people who do not actually hate women.
I think gender egalitarianism is, ultimately, an aspirational thing. We all have bits of sexist shit floating around in our subconsciouses, courtesy of the society we grew up in; anyone who says they treat the genders perfectly equally all the time is lying. But as the wise man once said, “try again, fail again, fail better.” Right now, our society is in the “fail better” stage of fighting sexism, and that’s really, really good.
SOOOO GOOOOD. Thank you, really. I translated this to Spanish and put it in my blog. I hope you don’t mind… 😀 😀
Based on my own experience, I think there’s a roughly equal (and admittedly large) fraction of non-egalitarian masculists and non-egalitarian feminists. However, overall, there are much, MUCH more feminists than masculists. That means men’s rights issues will always be at a numerical disadvantage. Besides, the non-egalitarian feminists will, more often than not, belittle and ridicule male issues instead of simply ignoring them. In extreme cases they might even exacerbate those issues for a few males (genital mutilation comes to mind). So you will have to understand the general distrust towards feminism. Plain gender egalitarianism without feminist or masculist labels does… Read more »
I disagree with dungone saying “We know that the most violent men in a particular community are more likely to have female companions and father children,” but violent men being successful occurs in some societies. And I would like to defer to you on that. I would have liked to have said what you did about it, but I don’t have the same depth of knowledge to recognize that as needing to be pointed out. What I should have said was “poor” or “under-privileged.” As a survival mechanism, it makes sense. When you are going to go hungry unless you… Read more »
Ballgame — I pretty much agree with that theory, although I’d really like to see some clever social scientists study those specific connections empirically.
I’m pretty positive that the vast, overwhelming number of men with children aren’t particularly violent; violence is pretty obviously not the sole or the dominant strategy for mating in our society. I’m not so sure, Barry, but I would phrase things very differently. I believe that the overwhelming majority of males are compelled to participate in the male dominance hierarchy while growing up. This hierarchy is often violently enforced. Boys who fail to establish a perception that they are capable of violence (whether or not they ever actually ‘behave violently’) run much higher risks of being bullied and suffering lifelong… Read more »
@barry warkentin, I really dislike this sort of rhetorical attack, where you imply that I’m being callous to the suffering of Stalin’s victims because I disagree with you about the meaning of the word “oppression.” Barry, I don’t believe that you are being callous to the suffering of Stalin’s victims. I was being flippant because you seemed to be painting them as an anomaly: I don’t think we should count classes of people whose “oppression” doesn’t include everyday oppression, and only consists of events that happen extremely rarely, as “oppressed.” The landowning, business, aristocrat, and “bourgeois” classes did receive oppression… Read more »
@barry warkentin, Let’s move on and talk more about gender. Of course, I agree with you, that out of the thousands of thugs during the peak of gangsterism, no doubt there were some individuals knowingly pressured into being thugs by their girlfriends or wives. That’s true, but this is probably just a minority case. I’m talking about a bunch of different scenarios (using gang activity as an example): – Women pressuring men into gangsterism – Women being more attracted to gangsters than to non-gangsters – Women who actively assist their men in gang activity – Women knowing that their boyfriends… Read more »
Duggone quoted from me, selecting his quote to cut out my very next sentence, in which I wrote: I’m open to the idea that there can be particular times and places where being in the upper class means being oppressed… After selectively cutting out that sentence, Duggone wrote: But moreover, I think it’s an intellectual failure to conclude that any one particular group is simply incapable of being oppressed. The dishonesty is really pretty impressive. Like you yourself claimed later, women were hugely involved in the push for prohibition. I don’t think either Hugh or Daran or any “PUA-view” individual… Read more »
@barry warkentin, I think it makes a lot more sense to talk about things like prohibition and the attitudes that led to prohibition, not to mention the Great Depression, than it does to talk about poor gangster guys who just had NO CHOICE but to shoot people because they wanted to get laid and some women find violence hot, so really isn’t it the woman’s fault? This is really dishonest. Like you yourself claimed later, women were hugely involved in the push for prohibition. I don’t think either Hugh or Daran or any “PUA-view” individual has ever claimed otherwise, in… Read more »
But “oppression” is not a synonym for “suffering,” nor is it it a synonym for “injustice”; I am not callous to the injustice and suffering caused by Stalinism just because I doubt that it makes sense to call rich people an oppressed class. I actually disagree with Hugh for another reason, mainly because I view the Bolsheviks as replacing one privileged class with another, namely themselves, and because for years the way Communism in the USSR ran the show was broken down across ethnic lines, with the “proper” Russians around the Moscow region presiding over all the lesser ethnicities that… Read more »
Hugh, thanks for your various clarifications. (I don’t know if you’re still reading this, but maybe you’ve subscribed by email. Sorry it took me so long to respond — I was busy, then I was sick, then I was sick and busy.) I’m sure it would comfort all the middle/upper class people, intellectuals, land-owners, or businessmen who died during Stalin’s Purges and the Maoist Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries to know that their deaths were a fluke. If you’d lived in Russia or China during the last century, then what I’m talking about would certainly have been an everyday oppression. Holy… Read more »
@Daisy, Oh, also, I’m sorry for not fitting into your “they’re just a bunch of whiny men complaining because they can’t get laid” narrative. I realize that this might cause some level of grief, but I can’t help it if I’m not the sore loser that you would like me to be.
Actually I never replied because the question was downright stupid personal attack. So right, I didn’t realize one had to be a miserable failure at life, jobless, penniless, and possibly an uncultured redneck, in order to participate in a little social activism. Good catch, Daisy. Way to go on the “white man who overcame adversity shouldn’t be given a voice” front.
@BlackHumor, I said: In this case, no, because Hinckley was very far from reality, and he was wrong about Foster’s preferences. Yet in other parts of world, women do date violent or criminal men, and men know it. That makes those women participants in violent culture systems. You replied: Uh, women date all kinds of men. There exist women who prefer violent men, but there also exist women who prefer cat lovers. “Women”, as a class, do not prefer any kind of men; they only even prefer men at all on average. Of course they don’t. I’ve already stipulated that… Read more »
Hugh Ristk:
Because you are problemising female behavior without attributing said behaviour to women’s circumstances or to men, and are therefore violating one of the unstated rules of gynocentric feminism, namely that you just don’t do this.
The first quoted paragraph in the above was intended to be double quoted. Could a mod please fix.
BlackHumor (quoting Hugh Ristik): In this case, no, because Hinckley was very far from reality, and he was wrong about Foster’s preferences. Yet in other parts of world, women do date violent or criminal men, and men know it. That makes those women participants in violent culture systems. Uh, women date all kinds of men. There exist women who prefer violent men, but there also exist women who prefer cat lovers. “Women”, as a class, do not prefer any kind of men; they only even prefer men at all on average. Hugh Ristik did not make a statement about women… Read more »
Hugh: While I agree with Daisy that gender of soldiers and leaders are important, I think you would agree that they aren’t the only important measuring sticks.
And I hope you read my lengthy post above, about colonialism and imperialism? This comment sounds like you didn’t.
I certainly don’t think they are the only important measuring sticks either.
Just popping in here a moment to argue with a few things Hugh just said (other than that Amp is saying pretty much everything I’d like to say): In this case, no, because Hinckley was very far from reality, and he was wrong about Foster’s preferences. Yet in other parts of world, women do date violent or criminal men, and men know it. That makes those women participants in violent culture systems. Uh, women date all kinds of men. There exist women who prefer violent men, but there also exist women who prefer cat lovers. “Women”, as a class, do… Read more »
Barry, Let’s talk about class. “Often”? I don’t think so. Revolutions in which the upper class in general are targeted are extremely rare. I don’t know that any such thing has happened in my lifetime. As Colette pointed out, there was the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, which I suspect was during your lifetime. How rare class revolutions are depends on what period of history you are looking at. During the 20th century, there was the Russian Revolution, Maoism, Saur Revolution in Afghanistan, and the Khmer Rouge. In Soviet Russia and Maoist China, struggle sessions (i.e. “class struggle”) were held, where… Read more »
@barry warkentin,
Women aren’t infants. A wife can say to a husband “tell those gun runners trying to hire you to fuck off, and get a real job… I don’t care if we are poorer.” A child can’t.
@barry warkentin, I’m not sure I’ve done a good job of explaining what I’m responding to. I’m objecting to a particular sort of feminist view of men as oppressors (or an “oppressor class”), and women as oppressed (an “oppressed class”). You can see an example of this view in Daisy’s response to your initial comment about measuring sticks: The measuring stick is who is doing it. Are the men in the village gathered up and executed by women or men? On the orders of women or men? Sent by male or female politicians, from cultures/countries dominated by—? Are the religions/… Read more »
“If you adjust for job title, hours worked, time taken off and everything else, it shrinks to about 95 cents on the dollar.”
Phew!
@pocketjacks, But who’s the oppressor? “Themselves”? White people? Well, perhaps in a broader, historical sense, but no white person pulled the trigger, now they did they… Exactly. It’s not a “class” that’s the oppressor, it’s the system. The system then makes use of whoever it can as agents of oppression through incentives or threats. @Daran, I think Hugh takes the possition that social systems are the aggregate behaviour of people, men and women together. If he wishes to emphasise those aspects of women’s behviour which have harmful to men, I suggest it is a reaction to the common feminist practice… Read more »
@The_L, I’ve been ninja’d a couple times on this, but since you were addressing I feel I have to repeat it: you’re wrong on the wage gap. Specifically, when it comes to the famous “77 centers on the dollar figure”, what they are measuring is pretty much “the average of all men earns more than the average of all women”. Now, they take the median, not the average, so the issue you see with CEOs/homemakers/unemployed is mitigated. Still, the literal formula for the wage gap that produces the numbers you’re most used to seeing and repeating is dividing the median… Read more »