We Are All The Same

Whither The Male Feminist

Earlier this year, there was something of a blow-up involving Hugo Schwyzer, a well known male feminist writer and professor. Essentially, he did a lot of really nasty stuff in his past. He directly covered up some of it and chose to cast other parts of it in edifying terms. This information was revealed late in 2011.

Apparently, many a writer and thinker in the feminist and gender community have had mixed feelings on Schwyzer for some time, and for them, this was the straw that broke the feminist's back. Websites that had previously been running his work pulled it, and he was largely cut out from the larger feminist conversation.

I don't want to talk too much about Schwyzer here. In fact, while I've felt that his voice wasn't necessarily a bad voice, his strong religiousness hinted at deeper personality layers that I suspected I would find distasteful if found out. Indeed, I have no idea how someone can call themselves a feminist and a Christian.

Instead, the point that came out of this that I found most interesting, and the one that I want to discuss, was the question of how men can be involved with feminism. There is a boat-load of complex variables hidden in this question, each one of which would take an entire book to adumbrate, and all of them have bearing. Obviously, I could never do them all justice in a blog post.

I shall thus put it in its coarsest formulation: can the person who is the beneficiary of an unequal society be a voice for those oppressed within that society? Can a straight, white, well-bred male talk with any meaningfulness about feminism (or any 'ism for that matter)? There were many women, and some men, who said "no." For them, the ideal scenario is a feminist movement essentially devoid of men. Most of them didn't frame this in misandristic terminology. They basically said that the purpose of feminism is to give a voice to the oppressed, not to give yet another stage for those who are not oppressed. This is the more extreme of the arguments.

The milder, and I think better, argument in favor of "excluding" men was to say that men should not be wholly excluded, but instead just not be given the spotlight. Men should never be the focus of feminism, and the superstars should always be women, since only women can fully understand other women.¹

I think that both of these arguments are incorrect. That doesn't mean that I cannot appreciate the perspective, though. I am a straight, tall, white, man living in America. I live a life of, sometimes, invisible privilege. I truly have little idea of what it is like to be oppressed and victimized by prejudice and bigotry. But I can grow to understand it, and it is important to recognize this ability and not denigrate the human potential to understand a great deal without needing direct experience. As a man, I can grow to understand things by reading accounts of women and the sexism they must endure. I can learn to identify it. I can experience it empathetically. That is real, profound, and useful.

Moreover, even if we were more limited in this regard, even if I didn't have mirror neurons churning away to help me feel other people's pain, it would be important to have men in the discussion (sympathetic, well-meaning men, of course. Not trolls.). I have never been oppressed, but I have fallen victim² to gender normative behavior and felt the drive of bias and sexism. I've been in groups of men expressing all kinds of sexist ideas and been made to feel profoundly uncomfortable about my behavior and thoughts. If I and others like me are not given the stage now and then, these valuable experiences will go unspoken. That would be a terrible thing.

The argument for male exclusion may have held more water if we were talking exclusively about sexism against women, but it's much more than that. The problem is not just female oppression, it's sexism and gender norms in general. All men are not the beneficiary of an unfair society. The patriarchy sucks for everyone except those on top. Being a white male may be easier than a black female, but that doesn't mean that my life can't suck in unique ways, and these are issues that need discussing.

As I mentioned earlier, there is a large complex of psychosocial variables hidden in this noise. If we focus on one thing, we miss the various ways these other variables can manifest. For example, homophobia is essentially misogyny in a different guise. Men are never penetrated. Men are the penetrator.  To be penetrated is to be a woman, which as we all know is the worst thing ever. And any man who is willing to be penetrated is not only broken and corrupt, but also dangerous since he may, like some kind of zombie, try to turn others into women.

The whitest, straightest, most cis-gendered man in the world can fall victim to this prejudice. He can be suddenly declared a persona non grata by his peers and ostracized. Or if the man is gay, and is afraid of this reprisal, he must remain hidden and fearful. Or a family that is "shamed" by the "abnormal" behavior of a child or parent that feels trapped in their neighborhood. All of this has its root in sexism and misogyny. All of this needs to be analyzed within the larger discussion.

To try and categorize that as gender studies and not feminism is to, I think, understate the breadth of feminism. We discuss racism through the lens of minority groups. We should discuss sexism through the lens of those most oppressed and analyze all of the ways that this prejudice infects other areas of life. I don't think we should look at this as a zero-sum game of superstars and celebrities. We should look at it as a network of people, all of whom have had different experiences, colored and affected by the same thing. These people all deserve an equal voice. To say that feminism is only about women is to deny this complexity.

I am a feminist. I seek no stage. My voice is only one of many, and many have suffered far worse than myself. But I am still a feminist, and I want to be a part of the discussion.

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1: That latter assertion may seem a bit sweeping of a statement, but I completely agree. When the lives of men and women are so demonstrably different, unless a man pretends to be a woman for a couple of years, or is transgender, he will never be able to fully understand the gestalt of being female. It requires a woman. Although even then, not every woman gets it. We only need look at Michelle Bachman or other such wackados for examples.

2: I don't think that victim is too strong a word. I feel like a victim because I feel that society essentially poisoned me with deeply emotional programming that has taken years to untangle. It undoubtedly colored my interactions with people from a very young age, and lord knows what kind of damage it caused in friendships and family relationships. That said, I don't mean to take away from the significance that the word implies in many areas of sexism. I do not feel victimized in the same way that someone who has ever been assaulted, raped, or vilified would feel victimized.

Women Smarter Than Men? That's Unpossible!

A recent study by James Flynn, a researcher who focuses on intelligence, has shown that for the first time in, well, ever, woman are smarter than men according to IQ tests. This doesn't surprise me at all.

He says that women are being forced to stretch their brains more as they attempt to juggle all of the things that society expects of them: home, children, work, etc. He also speculates that women may simply be intellectually better than men on some biological level. Even though he admits that more research is obviously needed, I think that he's missing the most obvious answer: society asks very little of men.

While extreme societal demands on women undoubtedly have a part to play in all of this, I think that the primary reason for the failing of men is that they are not asked to work. Recently, colleges were caught letting in men who performed only slightly better than average, because if they let in those who truly excelled, they would be letting in almost nothing but women. They tried to explain this by saying that any smart university doesn't accept all qualified people since some set percentage of them will invariably choose to go to another school, but this was a nonsensical excuse for a number of reasons.

Their reasons were, almost humorously, more practical than that. Basically, schools don't want a student body that is overrun with women, because that may drive students away. Top-performing female students don't want to go a school that's filled with other women. They want a mixed crowd. If they don't want a mixed crowd, that's what the Seven Sisters are for.

Think about that. Men are performing so far below women of the same age that men who even slightly stand out are being given acceptance. It's not that society's expectations on women are too high, it's that their expectations on men are too low.

Think about all of the nearly pre-verbal people that you have met in your life. How many of them are men? I'd wager over 90%. That's my number, certainly. There is no reason why 90% of pre-verbal human chimps should be men. But it makes perfect sense when you think about the system of entitlement and absolution provided to men. Boys will be boys is heard when boys do almost anything undesirable. This is ridiculous and is a massive disservice to every male that we raise in this society.

If males fail in school, it's funny. If males act up, it's just what they do. If males reject the system, they're seen as rebels. When we give boys a pass for this sort of behavior, we fail them. In decades past, this worked fine. In decades past, the system was geared toward men, so even if a boy was an idiot, the system would simply grab him and place him somewhere. It was the very root of the factory job. Drop out of high school? No worries! Get a job at the local plants. None of these opportunities existed for women, and were, in fact, actively taken away from women after World War II to be given back to men.

Unfortunately, those systems are starting to fail under the immense weight of increasingly equal women — women who were forced to work so hard to overcome systemic sexism that they now wildly exceed the men that are being raised. My alma mater, Rhode Island College, is nearly 70% female. That is an untenable system. It cannot be maintained. It also completely explains why women exceed men on IQ tests. Because we're raising them to.

From Whence Misogyny?

I've been thinking, as I do, about gender hatred a great deal recently, and specifically about the different nature of misogyny and misandry. They are startlingly different. Two great examples of misandry that stick in memory are Cosmopolitan magazine and the Kieu-Becker case from late 2011.

The Kieu-Becker case elicited a response on the penis-chopping incident on the television show The Talk, which NPR hilariously described as "an angry man's vision of what groups of women friends are like." They laughed and generally mocked the incident of a man, who has been proven to be guilty of nothing more than fooling around with other women, who had his penis violently removed and thrown into a garbage disposal. They laughed and giggled and seemed to find it a jolly old time.

An example that sticks in my mind is Cosmopolitan. My mother read the magazine for years, meaning that it was frequently, along with BMW Club Magazine, National Geographic, and Consumer Reports, my primary reading material in the house.

Cosmo has a very defined and twisted perspective on what makes a male, and it is predicated almost entirely on sex. Men are sex-crazed animals that only need placating, after which you can finally be left alone to your painting and novel writing, or whatever other weird things Cosmo seems to think that their readers do. This sentiment is found in every issue, going back decades.

Understandably, issues from the 50's, 60's, and 70's were very much rooted in the society of post-war America, where looking pretty and satisfying the man were the only concerns of women. But we've been living in the Feminist era for a while, now, and Cosmo, instead of evolving, has instead doubled down on its antiquated sexual philosophy. Their perspective on women has changed, but men remain unchanged from the 1950's. In fact, men are even worse. They want sex. They want it wild. They want it constantly. And that's it.

These two examples are only nationally salient instances of misandry, though. There are many smaller examples littered throughout society. For example, male elementary school teachers frequently have tales of administrators and female teachers all but accusing them of being perverted child molesters. Men receiving harassment and stares if they are near a playground or park.

The takeway, though, is the nature of the misandry; it is almost entirely about sex. Men are animals. It's all that they want. Other elements come into play, but these aren't really misandristic and more just generally sexist. Beliefs that all men are controlling, or all men like sports. These are gender-normative constructs that don't come anywhere close to describing all men.

But that basically goes without saying. Gender-normative concepts fail to describe the majority of society, much less just men. That's why I'm interested in specifically misogyny and misandry. They are very different. All one has to do to see the difference is peruse Men's Rights message boards online and then read similar message boards aimed at women. The language difference is bone-jarring. There's no need to completely detail the many subtle differences, all you have to know is that only one of these communities calls for the raping of those with whom they disagree. I'll give you two guesses as to which one.

And that is the difference. Misogyny is problematic because of its violent nature. Misandry is not violent. It is judgmental, certainly, but a belief in the disgusting sexuality of men does not cause widespread violence like the Kieu-Becker case. Likewise, those aforementioned misandristic message boards are filled with women complaining about men, but the vitriol never turns to violent hatred demanding that men be raped or beaten. Why?

I don't think that it's entirely the framing, context, or the social lens through which we read and interpret events. I think that it's the wellspring of the emotions. For men, sex is difficult to come by. All you have to do is look at the Pick Up Artist community. They are generally unattractive men who are desperately trying to get laid. This causes literal frustration.

Psychological frustration is the physiological agitation one feels when being blocked or prevented from something desired. Many men look out over the population and see multitudes of women with whom they would like to have sex, but cannot. This causes anger. Thus, frustration.

For most women, finding sex is easier. Not easy, certainly, just easier. Their problem is finding someone with whom they want to have sex. So women look out over a social landscape and see few that are acceptable. This results in judgment and sadness, but not frustration. For example, if I want food, but there is only haggis in the room, I am sad. And probably hungry. But if I want food, there is apple pie on a table but someone keeps pushing me away from it, I'm going to get angry. Misogyny is caused by frustration, misandry, by sadness.

Ironically, the very environment that has been built to cater to these men is likely angering them even further. Our media world is filled to overflowing with hyper-sexualized portrayals of women. Half-naked female forms can be found on highway billboards and on bus stops. Magazines for anything even remotely male-focused are filled with attractive, seductive women. The world has turned women into beings of pure sex and made them impossibly attractive.

This only infuriates the sexless men even more. They do not have interaction with real women, so their conception of women is defined entirely by this twisted media landscape. They see women everywhere as throwing in their face the sex that the women will not give. Women become a unified entity of a cruel temptress, mocking men. And when you are a perpetually frustrated man, this is the lens through which you will see the world.

Perhaps even worse is the flip-side of the behavioral coin. Men become frustrated because they can't get the desired sex with super-attractive women, and thus become openly hostile to women who are unattractive because they feel that these are the only women with whom they can get sex. Their frustration lashes out at the related subject of their desires. They feel that other men, be they rich, handsome, or whatnot, are the ones having sex with the attractive women seen in media, and thus the only ones left for these ordinary men are ugly women.

I think that much of this is because of the male focus on sex. It is hard for them to get it, thus, they focus on it. I think that there is a long, complex history that has built our society in such a way as to make sex hard for men to get, even though it doesn't need to be that way. Men and women want the same things! Truly, I feel confident that the vast majority of the differences between the genders are the result of social programming. Ditch the programming, ditch the problem.

The very same sexism that imprisons women to this very day is producing a group of men who feel rejected by the sexist system that was ostensibly created for them. The differences between misogyny and misandry stand as a testament to our need for freedom from sexism in all forms. It hurts us all, and we must grow past it. Men are not animals. We want a lot more than sex. But when society fails to teach us what true happiness is, we fall back on, and thus interpret the world through the lens of, primal drives. We need to teach our boys that sex is only the beginning.

A recent study showed that teenage boys are talking about romance, love, and relationships more than at any other point in history. I can happily say that the cultural shift is happening now. One can only hope that, as being emotional is more acceptable for men, and being sexual is more acceptable for women, this wall of dislike between the genders will fall. Maybe, someday in the future, men will take to message boards to complain that all women ever want is sex. Now wouldn't that be something?

Are You A Creep? (UPDATED)

Jezebel has a great article by Hugo Schwyzer about "creep-shaming." This is only one part of an expanding online discussion on the subject and is fantastically enlightening.

First, before going any further, let it be said that creep-shaming is total nonsense. It's yet another game for men's-righters to play, and as we all know, they are essentially a hate group. I will admit, though, that it would sting much more if someone called me a creep than any other particular name. Why that is is worth addressing.

If I call a black man an asshole, that's behavioral. But if I call him a "nigger," that is qualitative. Ignoring the fact that racial epithets have buckets more emotional baggage than simply a qualitative insult, and as such add to sting, there is nothing that a black man can do about being black, and I am insinuating that this fact makes him less-than.


I think that creep is the same thing. It's not just that "creep" communicates the mental state of a woman, but that it qualitatively jabs the man. A man who is an "asshole" simply knows to stop acting like an asshole, because the statement is generally about behavior. But "creep" is not something where a man can simply stop acting in a particular way. He is a creep.

They hit on something very important in the other articles, and that is the reason why the word "creep" is qualitative. It's because unlike "asshole," which has pretty well-defined behavioral patterns attached to it, "creep" does not. As such, the men who are called creeps may not even fully understand why, and thus, it becomes something they are as opposed to something that they do. In an absence of understanding, it's not surprising that many men become angry.

That doesn't mean that quantifying the behavior is entirely impossible. I think it can be done (I think it has to do with those who copy the gross aspects of confident behavior and those who behave in a certain way because they are confident), but for the sake of this article, we won't try to do that.

Moreover, men who are "creeps" are setting off warning bells with women. People are good at detecting micro-behaviors as a way to interpret someone else's mindset. Facial expression, body positioning, hand movements, eye contact: all of these things come into play in interactions not just for women, but for all of us. These are not things that are easily controlled, which is why when people go into an interaction with someone and try to be a particular way, it seems off. The gross behavior does not line up with the micro-behavior, and thus, we have a creep.

For men who don't want to be creeps, it requires more than behavioral changes, it requires a deep analysis of one's mindset at the beginning of an interaction. This is not easy, but the ease with which it can be done has nothing to do with men's anger. It is the fact that many of them aren't even aware that this is the case.

UPDATE:

A study has been released essentially confirming this. "Creeps" elicit a physiological response that literally gives people shivers.

Southern Poverty Law Center Addresses Men's Rights

The Southern Poverty Law Center, famous for studying and keeping tabs on hate groups, has published a detailed analysis of the garbage being spewed by the "Men's Rights" movement, such as it is. Almost needless to say, their thoughts are not kind.

I feel vindicated by this after my first experiences with the men's rights movement from my first videos and posts about the subject. I was subjected to the most awful comments of my online writing career. Nothing I have written has elicited a response of such a nature. Not even close.

These men, and a few women, are angry. And for someone who is used to listening to generally level-headed people make attempts at cogent conversation, the vitriol that I received was jarring. It hurt. For a long time, I tried to change minds. I cared what these people thought of me.

I began to stop caring about their comments after it hit me that they are, by and large, no better than racists. While I will not tolerate a white supremacist, I don't pay them much emotional mind. I don't care what they think, I only care insofar as those thoughts may trigger behavior.

In a not-too-distant past, I would have loathed these people. Now, I feel simply sad. What strange precedent caused them to become this way? How terrible the world that they inhabit must be. I don't mean to try and reduce their awfulness. They should be attacked (not physically, obviously), argued with, belittled, and otherwise reduced. Their hate cannot be allowed to perpetuate. But at the same time, responding with hate does little to help us. It doesn't help us advance our own perspective on the human condition, which needs to be regarded dispassionately, even when it turns so dark.

Men Are Retarded