One of my most frequently-trotted-out attacks against conservatives is that they rarely understand their own history. They rarely understand that what they are arguing for today is the ideological legacy of maniacs who have come before them, the same maniacs who argued for things that no rational conservative would try to argue today for fear of appearing too much of a maniac. Thank God we have the distinctly irrational Tea Party to be used as an example.
For example, the early anti-abortion movement never had anything to do with protecting babies. Children and women were still frequently seen as, more or less, the property of the husband who could do with them as he pleased. You can still see this logic in much modern religious thought where the man is the absolute head of the household. The classic anti-abortion movement thus avoided the sticky problems that crusaders today have, such as all of the hilarious ramifications that come from declaring that the "person" is created at the point of insemination.
Back then, stopping abortions was all about stopping women from having control. The crusaders then didn't hide this. They wrote about it. They didn't rail against the immorality of killing babies. They railed against the immorality of women freely having sex without the "punishment" of children.
The anti-abortion movement is, and always has been, about misogyny.
But what about the large, modern anti-abortion movement? Where did it come from, and how did it achieve a position on the national stage?
Politico has an excellent article showing how, much like many social problems we face, the modern anti-abortion movement was rooted in something totally different: racism.
As the author, historian Randall Ballmer, says:
[T]he abortion myth quickly collapses under historical scrutiny. In fact, it wasn’t until 1979—a full six years after Roe—that evangelical leaders, at the behest of conservative activist Paul Weyrich, seized on abortion not for moral reasons, but as a rallying-cry to deny President Jimmy Carter a second term. Why? Because the anti-abortion crusade was more palatable than the religious right’s real motive: protecting segregated schools. So much for the new abolitionism.
Also of interest is a good example of how fanaticism can propagate and transmogrify, having gravely deleterious effects on society, all the while trying to claim no connection to its past. It also just gives us another reason to hate Reagan.
The Bob Jones University case merits a postscript. When the school’s appeal finally reached the Supreme Court in 1982, the Reagan administration announced that it planned to argue in defense of Bob Jones University and its racial policies. A public outcry forced the administration to reconsider; Reagan backpedaled by saying that the legislature should determine such matters, not the courts. The Supreme Court’s decision in the case, handed down on May 24, 1983, ruled against Bob Jones University in an 8-to-1 decision. Three years later Reagan elevated the sole dissenter, William Rehnquist, to chief justice of the Supreme Court.
Sheryl Sandberg has been making noise ever since the release of her book Lean In which encourages women to be more aggressive in their social attainment. I have nothing against Sandberg and think that her heart was in the right place, but her Lean In movement is total horseshit and it has long since worn out its welcome.
First, let's ignore the white, hetero-normative, cis-gendered focus of her book. This is a problem that could fill a book and others have come close to doing so. I actually think that this criticism effectively negates Sandberg's arguments entirely, but it's not the biggest problem that I have with her work.
I also want to point out that while the core argument she is making is nonsense, she makes tons of great points about equality and sexism that are worthy points. If these were novel points or analyses, it would be a bigger deal, but they aren't. These are data points that have been known for a long time.
The biggest problem that I have is that Sandberg further reinforces socio and econo-normative behaviors and values. For Sandberg, success in life is found in a nuclear family, money, and property. Again, this is utterly without merit. Research has shown that economic stability is critical to happiness, but economic stability is relative, and that once stability has been reached, property and money do not correlate with happiness.
If the world were different, she would just be another author saying less-than-correct things, but the world is not different; the world is the world. And the world is one which is filled with damaging and counterproductive value programming that encourages people to try to find happiness in money and status. As such, her message is actually dangerous.
There is no inherent value to climbing the proverbial ladder (or jungle gym as Sandberg rephrases it). As far as I know, she never once addresses the underlying assumptions of value that undergird her thought. For her, they are taken for granted.
Well I don't take them for granted. Money is not inherently valuable. Success is not inherently valuable. Our national discussion rarely focuses on these subjects because it is the last thing anyone wants. Our economy is based on people not believing these things. Businesses are based on people not believing these things. Governmental power is based on people not believing these things.
People who addresses these underlying issues and try to discuss them and not simply the icing on the capitalist cake are labeled as fringe or fanatics — people with their heads in the clouds. By belittling these people, we can avoid discussing things that are, on a societal scale, very scary.
Sandberg would have been much more groundbreaking if she had used her privilege and position, the bully pulpit, to discuss our underlying values. Because it is these values that are the wellspring from which our prejudice flows. The patriarchy and all its concomitant misogyny and sexism are products of these very basic values.
(There is actually a term for this, mores: folkways of central importance accepted without question and embodying the fundamental moral views of a group. These are deep-rooted assumptions. They are like the id and ego of a society — the reptilian hindbrain of a nation.)
Sandberg didn't do that. She produced a digestible little nugget of fluff. And funny enough, this perfectly embodies her underlying values. Her fluff sold hundreds of thousands of copies and earned her spots on talk shows. If she had written a truly trenchant and piercing analysis of society, no one would have bought it.
She did precisely what she said we should all do: she leaned in... straight into the top of the best sellers list.
The recent video, uploaded by Anonymous, of the Steubenville "Rape Crew" is suitably mind-numbing. It shows a human being, seemingly too young to even be coherently using the words he is speaking, display a lack of empathy and consideration that would make a psychopath blush.
It is coincidental that I was reading an article about The Angel of Life, Gisella Perl, who described her treatment in the death camps. Men would gleefully kill babies, throw women alive into furnaces, and beat starving, helpless human beings to death.
After the war, psychologists took up the task of studying the behavior of the Nazis. How could humans possibly become so depraved, and do so in such large numbers? Even those who were involved would look back with shock at their own actions.
The core of that depravity is on display today in Steubenville. While the holocaust and the behavior of a small town's stupid population are in different leagues, what allows the two to exist is the same. In a different environment, the boy in that video would have been a Nazi, or a mercenary, or a murderer. That behavior is simply the manifestation of an internal characteristic that I don't think I need to even bother trying to explicate. It is apparent.
What we saw, for a brief moment, is the rotten core that can take hold that is held in check by society. Yes, we do not have bands of mercenaries rampaging around the countryside like it was 1300's Europe. But just because the behavior doesn't manifest in the ways that they previously did does not mean that the Freudian motivation is gone.
What society has done, and especially what the progressive movement of the past one hundred years has done, is make the display of this behavior incredibly unacceptable. It is the genesis of the term "politically correct" in the pejorative sense. People who use the word "PC Police" or something equally negative are essentially saying that they are angry that they are not allowed to be aggressive, violent, or bigoted in public.
But what every oppressed group in the country knows full well is that this rot, this toxin, is in full effect behind closed doors. This monster, this animalistic man-child, would have never dreamed of saying these words in public, but he did so in private. He even defended himself to those in the room who made wan efforts at arguing with him.
This is only the most recent case of the festering underbelly of our society bursting out into the daylight like some pus-filled boil. Apologists for this sort of behavior love to point to the very consequences of their loathed politically correct movement -- the lack of public behavior of this sort -- as proof that it doesn't exist. They claim that those who pull the racism, sexism, or classism "card" are simply paranoid and themselves bigoted.
No. This rot exists, and pretending that it doesn't because we have brow-beaten those that would act this way into some semblance of submission fails to address the wellspring of the poison. We must chase bigotry and anti-social behavior wherever it hides. There can be no apologies. There can be no toleration. We must go after it with a righteous fire and the profound desire to see justice done, no matter how painful. Because until we do, we will continue breeding those who would be well at home stoking the fires of Auschwitz.
There's a good article up over at Shameless Magazine that explores misogyny in geek culture. The basic thesis is that geeks feel that women and pop culture are taking away geek culture. It's summed up in a later adumbration.
1. Straight White Dudes, we are not here to steal geek culture away from you - we’re here to help make it MORE AWESOME.
2. Excluding people just because they’re not geeky enough, or bullying them because they’re female is just as bad as the isolation and bullying you may have experienced while growing up. If, as a geeky teenager, you hated and resented the kids who picked on you, why the hell would you turn around and do it to someone else?
I think that the author is missing the wellspring of the behavior and the reason why her arguments will fall upon deaf ears. Namely, geek culture has never been about acceptance, and it is not surprising that geeks have turned around and behaved identically to ways in which they themselves were treated. It's like the Pilgrims coming to America to escape religious persecution, when in fact they were coming to America so they could be free to be the ones doing the persecuting.
While geek culture has many elements, one of its unifiers was exclusion from popular culture. They were rejected, so they created a culture that was purposely separate. It was not a culture that was defined internally, but also externally. Geek culture requires something separate from it for it to be geek culture. If it becomes integrated into the wider culture, it loses one of its original bricks and is thus no longer geeky. This connotation is built into the very history of the word.
Similarly, geek culture was defined by rejection by women. The point of it was to happily accept that rejection and create a society where part of its very make-up was a lack of women. Geeks have been resistant to accepting pop culture and women because part of geek culture is not having these things.
Let's face it. Many of the people in geek culture are not attractive and have few social graces. It hurts to be that way. It hurts to be rejected sexually. When one's life is heavily influenced by sexual rejection, a safe haven will be sought. And once found, that safe haven only remains safe when the object of rejection, be it pop culture or sexuality, is specifically left out.
It doesn't matter if women entering geek culture are as "geeky" as the men already there. Their not being there is the point. They could never make the culture "more awesome." And when one considers the perspective of those within the sub-culture, this makes sense.
While this is a sympathetic viewpoint, it does not absolve them. Perhaps my own experience with the sting of rejection makes me appreciate their views more than some others. I have never been an object of desire and that sucks. Losing myself in a fantasy world always felt great.
Moreover, this doesn't absolve the community of its racism and homophobia, although I think that these elements are something much more easily expunged. I think that it has more to do with the fact that middle-to-upper class culture in America is dominated by white, cis-gendered people. the biases of that socio-economic group will obviously rub off on any fantasy worlds created by it. Since geek culture was not created by people who had previously been rejected by homosexuals and people of other races, accepting these people will be something that will happen quickly. Accepting them will not undermine a tenet of geekdom.
Does that mean that traditional geekdom will not transform? Of course not. Traditional geek areas like science fiction, fantasy, and games will expand into the general culture, and the language is what will fade. Just as art and filmmaking are no longer the domain of those who lived on the outskirts of polite society, we will stop calling fantasy, science, and games "geeky." The label will die.
Perhaps that's the ultimate point that people should be making: geek culture as it was once known is dying. Science fiction, Dungeons & Dragons, comic books, video games, and fantasy are in the mainstream. I don't begrudge these men for wanting to have something into which they can escape, and specifically something that is theirs, separate from the broader culture. But they must realize that the world of traditional sci-fi, fantasy, and games is no longer that world.
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.
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.
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.
Along with Frontline, Dan Rather Reports is the best news show in TV. You should watch it.
The most recent Dan Rather Reports that's been posted to YouTube is included. It covers further updates on India's "Untouchables," the Dalit Women. Also covered is forced marriage in the United Kingdom and the United States.
I understand that certain societal tropes still hold. I understand that sometimes sexism still exists. I understand that most stores only run an ad if they have data to indicate that the ad will work. But still. WTF?
We haven't gotten past this? We're still selling vacuum cleaners to moms? Don't mothers want something, I dunno', fun on what is ostensibly their day? What would the male equivalent of this even be?
Here, dad! We bought you a premium Monster.com membership so you can earn more money! Because that's all you do!
I ripped this bad boy from Amazon's website, and again, I understand that if there is a company out there that backs their ads with good data, it's Amazon. As such, I'm sure that there are in fact a significant number of mothers out there that would like a new vacuum cleaner. Hell. I'd like a new vacuum cleaner (Dyson, please).
But that doesn't eliminate the inherent ridiculousness and sexism in this ad. I can almost guarantee that most mothers would rather have new clothes, a new television, computer, iPhone, shoes, or perhaps the Nikon listed above the vacuum cleaners. But no. The images for Amazons Mother's day section is nothing but cleaning supplies. Because that's all women do.
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?
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.
I hate when people say that. I really do. “Motherhood is the hardest job in the world.” Because the person who says it is usually someone who couldn’t have any idea whether that was true or not...painting us all as selfless saints is a ridiculous generalization that allows public figures to pay lip service to motherhood without standing behind it.
- Amy Wilson
She is correct to paint this not as an issue specific to mothers, or women, or any group in general. It is a lesson learned at the expense of oppressed masses over the past two millenia. Because, as leaders throughout history have discovered, there is no easier to way to imprison someone, than restrain them with the chains of adulation.
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.
I have been only somewhat following the Personhood spat going on down in ol' Mississip. In general, I don't worry much about them seeing as they are the fattest, dumbest, most religious area in the whole of the Western World, so I come very close to seeing it as worrying about what a bunch of crazy homeless people choose to do.
What I have noticed online, though, is a large contingent of commenters who try lines similar to this:
"While I agree that a person begins at conception, I do not agree with Prop 26. I think that there are grey areas to this debate and it cannot be black & white."
Perhaps. I will give, at least for now, that the concept of "person" has some grey areas, but what people like this are oh-so-politely advocating is not just a definition, but oppression. They are arguing that women should be forced to give birth because the fertilized egg is just as good as a person. They believe this to be righteous, and for the sake of this post, it doesn't matter.
Regardless of the moral rectitude of the oppression, it is still oppression. These people, with their milquetoasty language, try to butter over the fact that they seek, or believe it is right to seek, control over a woman's body. That is black and white.
Ignoring that calling an embryo a person reduces the term "person" to uselessness, I will not abide this. You seek the oppression of certified people for the sake of potential or hypothetical people. That is stupid. And even if it wasn't stupid, do not be surprised when those same people you seek to oppress rip back control of their bodies either through illegal birth control, back-alley abortions, leaving, or all-out violence. Because, then, it doesn't matter how righteous you are.
UPDATE: I feel better, especially considering the hate that I have received from the "Men's Rights" movement, that the Southern Poverty Law Center has published a report on the hateful misogyny contained therein. When I wrote and posted this, all I was responding to was The Amazing Atheist. I wasn't even aware that this "movement" existed. Well, I'm sure as hell aware of it now, seeing as the group took a movement all over the comments section of my video. When something like the SPLC is on your side, you feel vindicated. /UPDATE
The amazing atheist recently posted a video attacking the CBS show The Talk, where they laugh over a man getting his penis cut off and thrown into a garbage disposal. First off, let's address the fact that their laughing about it is rather disturbing, especially being a man who is more that slightly attached to his penis.
That said, his response is wrong on one level, and at best misdirected on others.
First, he is flat-out wrong in his association of feminism with this. Men and women, who more than smack of misogyny, equate misandry, of which there is plenty in our society, with feminism. This is resolutely not the case.
I read Jezebel a lot. I also read lots of other blogs written by level-headed, intelligent people. Feministe, Feministing, and a variety of other sites that deal with gender and society. If these are representative of feminism in the world today, then he is wrong, and if he can't take feminism seriously, if he can't take the drive for absolute equality of women seriously, then he is nothing more than another stupid white guy who can't look past his own perspective.
Is there misandry? Of course. There's tons of it. Cosmo magazine is a great example, with its subtly misandristic portrayal of men as only animals in need of sexual placating. But all of the misandry in the world pales, PALES, in comparison to the amount of misogyny out there, especially in regards to the violent nature of the misogyny. If you feel that I need to make a list of examples of misogyny, you need to read more news.
For example, JUST as I was writing this, Kotaku, the gaming blog that is actually the sister website of Jezebel, wrote of a large LAN party celebrating the release of Battlefield 3, a video game. They banned women because their presence causes the men to act up. Put yourself in the shoes of the female gamers who wanted to attend, or those who attended the previous year, thus motivating this absurd regulation. You can appreciate the urge to portray men as chimpanzees.
He uses an example from Forensic Files where a woman killed her husband, but doesn't give us all of the details. The woman shot her husband in the head with a shotgun while he slept, and claimed that he had been beating her. Has he never seen Burning Bed? It's a viable defense. And it's not a viable defense for emotional reasons, there are reams of psychological research data describing the state of mind people can come to be in when living in an abusive household. He uses this as a counter example, but it fails.
He fails to take his OWN words into consideration when saying that women are treated differently. He talks about how every show is the husband killing the wife, and I watch the same shows, it's true, and then a episode is of the wife killing the husband. Doesn't that make any intelligent person think that, if all other cases are one way, and this one is another way, that there might be something different about it?
Especially considering that the episodes of that very show that involve women, which I've seen and I'm sure so as he, where the women's motivations are black as pitch, the women never do what he described. They poison, which is very popular, or they hire someone else.
Women do not physically abuse men. Even with recent research showing that female on male abuse is higher than originally thought, it is still a tiny fraction of the abuse of male on female.
He also mentions a case in Russia that may or may not be true of a woman who beat up a man who was trying to rob her store, cuffed him, and kept him as a sex slave for three days. He talks about the reaction to her behavior, with people creating her a Facebook fan page. Well, I have another case that is definitely true. The Russian “Black Widow.” A woman who was charged with drugging and raping ten men in 2009. I find the reaction of the men interesting. If this had been a man, the response from women would have been universal, “That is horrible. I can't imagine being in her shoes.”
But instead, the response from men was frequently “Why can't I find women like that?!” One of the men even refused to press charges because he liked it and only wished he hadn't been drugged. But even here, there were many obviously misadristic women nearly calling for the beatification of the Black Widow. Their words dripped with hatred. This is not feminism. Not in the very slightest. You would never hear these words from actual feminists like those on Jezebel. But EVEN THEN, the situation is not equal.
Misandry and misogyny are different. Absolutely. They are not different because one is right and the other wrong. They are both equally wrong. But they are different in the behaviors caused by them. The Amazing Atheist fails to notice that men raping women happens all of the time, but women raping men makes international news because it is so very rare.
That is not to say that female-male rape doesn't exist. Truly, women can be sexually aggressive as is found in statistics of sexual coercion between lesbians. But my likelihood of being raped by a woman, in ANY setting, is about as low as winning the lottery. My chances of being raped by another man, on the other hand, are much higher. This is probably the root of misandristic threads in gay culture and the fact that in your average gay club, every man in the building is watching their drink like a hawk.
The Amazing Atheist and the women on The Talk talk about cutting off the penis as identical to the breasts and clitoris. No. Wrong again. As my partner Danielle pointed out very succinctly, the penis can be a weapon, and it is a weapon that is widely used by millions of men every year when they rape. Women simply do not have a counterpart to the penis.
Even the very video to which the Amazing Atheist linked stands as a testament to misogyny, and this is again something that he doesn't discuss. It was posted by some absurd “Manhood Academy,” which references “getting your balls back.” Because in this blatantly, horribly sexist and misogynistic world, masculinity is something that women can take away, because masculinity exists only vis a vis women.
If a man is attacking you for being a bad person, even if you aren't, you call that person an asshole. Nothing else. He's just an asshole. But if women do it, you're being stripped of your masculinity. Because here, masculinity is a reciprocal construct that exists to put women in their place. If women are not in their place, masculinity has been “stripped.” Masculinity is directly associated with sex.
That “Manhood Academy's” website lists this, and I quote”Manhood Academy is the first worldwide male educational center specifically designed to train men like you in social competence. And best of all—our content is ABSOLUTELY FREE. Whether it's going on your first date, saving a troubled relationship, addressing your wife's 'bitch' behavior, making new friends, or standing up for yourself in this emasculating feminist environment, our goal is to teach you how to conduct satisfying social interactions.”
Notice how in their list of things that they can help you do, of the five items that emasculate you, four are directly associated with women. Funny how that is. That is because in this view, women are not people. They are “women.” Something that is somehow fundamentally different and separate from men.
The content of the video is just that, but you cannot avoid recognizing that the people who saw fit to post this video online are just as bad as those they attack.
So why are people not getting up in arms, like the Amazing Atheist demands? Because women doing this is so damned rare. Rape of men is not a pestilence on society. Men might fear mugging, but women on the street fear abduction, rape, murder, AND mugging. It is a predatory world out there, and it is just plain stupid to argue otherwise. How many serial killers killed men? How often do women form gun-toting gangs? How often do women form small armies that are paid with the rape and pillage of wherever their leader sends them? Do you have any examples? I do not. I do have examples of the men doing it, like when the Red Army raped every German woman they came across during the fall of Berlin. Again, you can appreciate the urge to portray men as chimpanzees.
If I met any misandristic women, I would just as soon run for the hills from their toxic nonsense as I would from misogynistic men. They are equally large assholes in a purely intellectual sense. But something tells me that those same women would not go off and rape, beat, and molest. The men do. I do not feel threatened by misandry, but women do and should feel threatened by misogyny.
It's not that men don't have the right to get up in arms, it's that they have no reason. Sexism doesn't affect them systemically. Men, for all intents and purposes, rule the world. As women reach higher positions of power in the future, this will likely need addressing, and I may become to feel threatened by misandry, but it doesn't today.
Women and those damned angry feminists get up in arms precisely because the pissed off men who follow stupid shit like Manhood Academy are so ready to put women back into their “place.” The definition of manhood for these people is having women under control. Religion wants them back in the kitchen. Society wants them sexualized and put up for decoration.
Angry men the world over want those bitches down. Look at the scummy social underbelly of France that has been revealed with the Strauss-Kahn case in New York. Or the governmental representatives in Australia who keep meowing at female representatives. This is a seething, toxic undercurrent to our social zeitgeist. And because of that, misogyny and misandry are, and will remain for the perceivable future, different. Logically identical, but practically very, very, terribly, violently different.
UPDATE: Because of the direction that the comments on this site and YouTube have taken, I want to focus on a good example of what shows up on real feminist websites. Misandry is not feminism. Real, level-headed feminists write about gender in general, and freedom, and apple pie, and the American way, and all that good stuff!
The Hooker Teacher has written an article for Salon. In it, Melissa Petro describes how she, holder of dual Masters degrees, was revealed to have a past as a stripper and prostitute. Since her past has been revealed, and after being fired, she is entirely unable to get a job.
The degree of the online shaming, and even some of the comments on Salon, reveal in stark contrast what's wrong with America. We are sexist. We are sex-obsessed. And we are disgustingly moralistic.
Prostitution remains a heartbreaking problem not only because it is illegal when it shouldn't be, but because even if it was legal, our culture still shames it. We still look down upon it. People doing it want to keep it secret for fear of events like this. That might not be legal ostracizing, but it is cultural. And that cultural bias will find its way into police work, and prostitutes won't get the protection that they deserve, thus furthering pimps and sex worker violence.
And don't think for a second that this sort of reaction would happen to men who were revealed to be porn stars or prostitutes. For them, culture might see it as a bit seedy, but still well within the boundaries of male behavior. No. Only women are sluts. Men are studs.
This illustration of our sex obsession is also infuriating. Look at religion, look at television, movies, and schools. We are FIXATED on sex. It's everywhere, and nowhere is it more explicitly obsessed over than in the moralistic halls of religion. We can't get enough of it and yet we hate it, and we really hate anyone who doesn't engage in the same self-loathing as us. As such, prostitutes, who, being women, should be especially self-loathing, are looked at as literal pariahs.
This reminds me of the secretary who was recently outed as an ex porn star by a student. The fact that the student tried to blackmail her and demanded sexual favors (this kid was fourteen, mind you) was seemingly missed in the media's focus on her being a porn star. The secretary was fired, because obviously enjoying sex in the past makes you evil.
The root of this problem is male dominated religion, of course. Men are obsessed with porn stars and prostitutes because of the sexual aura around them. I obviously have no support for this theory, but I suspect that religion's obsession with sex is because western religions were started by ugly men who couldn't get laid. Thus, they hated what they couldn't get. That's pretty basic psychology, and I'm simply projecting on those in the past. In fact, the only major religious figure of whom I can think that apparently could get laid was Augustine.
I can also point to current-day cults and micro-religions. Ever notice how they all have a serious focus on sex, and the leader is always a guy, and that guy seems to frequently get in trouble for weird sexual behavior? Yeah.
Where is Ai Weiwei, and why is the United States pathetically silent on his disappearance? How can armies for the past 2,000 years all have been retarded? And are video games from 15 years ago better than those today?
Huffington Post has a short article about a bunch of high school girls rallying against a website that apparently rates the girls of that school in rather nasty terms. Sexist words are as one would expect, but racist words also permeate the website.
It got me thinking about men and our psychology. For example, I don't think that rape evolved, I suspect that it's a side-effect of males being prone to violence and being frustrated by something that they want, as such, they lash out in the form of rape. With this, we're talking about high-school boys. They can't be much older than seventeen, with the youngest clocking in at thirteen. Why on God's green Earth would they, at an age where they can barely poop correctly, feel the need to create a website to not only objectify girls, but to positively degrade them.
I suspect it's, again, because they want them, and they're too much a bunch of pussies to do anything about it, so they lash out. They want them, but they fear them. Mature, guys. Real mature.
I've said it before, but we need to legalize prostitution. Not only do we need to legalize it, we need to have a large, social push to legitimize it. To make people stop seeing it as the exclusive domain of seedy people that we shouldn't give a rat's ass about. Only then, ONLY THEN, will we have any chance to stop sex trafficking. We have to draw the world out of the shadows. If we keep moralizing about it and charging around with our Bibles out, we only succeed in driving it underground, where it's going to happen anyhow!
Stop persecuting these women! If they choose to sell sex, it's their choice. We have no right to judge them or any other aspect of the situation. We can't assume that they'd rather be doing something else. We can't feel sorry for them. It's a job for which they get paid. That is the only thing that we can safely assume.
