[cw: descriptions of abuse, slurs]
There is a bad article on Everyday Feminism about masculinity again, and I’m complaining about it.
First: in my opinion, it is incredibly dangerous to talk about abuse as a normal thing that people typically do. Most people have never abused a partner. This is important because normalization of abuse is a common abusive tactic. One of the reasons people stay in abusive relationships is that they think “oh, well, all men are abusive. If I leave this guy who hits me, I’ll just find another guy who hits me– and I already know what sets this one off. There’s no point in leaving.” Normalization of abuse is also a tactic abusers use to justify abuse to themselves: they think “oh, everyone mouths those platitudes about respect in public, but in private every woman calls her husband a cunt and backhands him when he does something wrong– you have to keep men in line.” To counter this, we need to point out that while a lot of relationships are unhealthy and a lot of people deal with their feelings in suboptimal ways, most people are not abusive. Abuse is not the same thing as being a douchebag!
Second: I dislike Everyday Feminism’s conflation of masculinity and manhood. Not all men are masculine! Actually, I think the use of the word ‘masculine’ tends to conflate a whole bunch of different categories into one, and ought to be replaced with terms like “gender-conforming”, “male-socialized”, “identifying strongly with being a man”, or whatever else you would like to talk about. We can keep ‘masculine’ as a word for the burdensome social role.
It also seems unreasonable to me to discuss masculinity without talking about the work that has been done in men’s studies about the different kinds of masculinity. The masculinity of a poor black kid from the ghetto is different from the masculinity of an upper-middle-class white jock from suburbia, which in turn is different from the masculinity of a gay autistic man. All of these have very different relationships to violence, emotions, and destructiveness. The author specifies “cis masculinity”, but ignores other dimensions on which masculinity can differ.
That’s particularly important when you talk– as this article does– about masculinity as fundamentally oppressive and violent. Depending on what you mean by ‘masculinity’ and on how radical feminist I’m feeling today, I probably agree with you! Masculinity, cross-culturally, does have a current of violence: sometimes overt, sometimes hidden, but always present. And the male gender role and the behavior it leads to causes tremendous harm to men, women, and nonbinary people. But it is extremely important whenever you talk about the oppressiveness of masculinity to be completely clear that you are not calling all gender-conforming men oppressive and violent. Most gender-conforming men are not violent. And gender-conforming men are victims of sexism as well: the limiting nature of the male gender role affects them. By conflating manhood and masculinity, this author insults the very people he is trying to reach out to.
Third: I do support the project of men figuring out the ways in which they are complicit in the harm caused by patriarchy. I also support the project of women and nonbinary people figuring out the ways in which they are complicit in the harm caused by patriarchy. As it turns out, women and nonbinary people are sexist too. Just because you are harmed by a system does not mean you play no role in upholding it.
But this article adopts entirely the wrong approach. I want men to become less sexist because I think it will help other people, yes. But I also want them to become less sexist because I think it will help them. It hurts people to have to repress their emotions. It hurts people to feel like their sexuality is innately violent, innately predatory, and that they must repress it to keep from harming others. It hurts people to not have any close, intimate friendships outside of their romantic relationship. It hurts people– most of all– to wind up in situations where they must either be violent or become a victim of violence, a situation all-too-common among marginalized men.
I want male feminists to be selfish. An unselfish male feminist is likely to stop once he’s done enough that he can salve his ego, or become burned out because of how much patriarchy there is to fight, or seek his rewards in being the Good Man, the man who Gets It, the ones who gets adulations from all the cool feminists and is free to mock any woman who disagrees. A male feminist who sees that feminism is benefiting him personally will actually do the work. He has motivation.
Fourth: I disagree that much of this allegedly common behavior is common. I have a firm policy of not spending time with people who lie to me repeatedly, or call me names, or treat me poorly in order to keep me wrapped around their finger, or who yell at me, or who refuse to listen to my ‘no’, or who violate my privacy, or who limit my interaction with other friends, or who refuse to take my viewpoints and needs into account. So far, this does not seem to have resulted in me joining a lesbian feminist commune. In fact, most of my community is male!
Now, it is possible that my friends are this odd little corner of perfectly nice men and all the other men are running around lying to their partners, violating their privacy and boundaries, and calling them nasty names. Certainly there is a significant subset of the population that is doing so. But at least from my perspective the men who are that cruel to their partners are a minority.
Saying “all men struggle with urges to be abusive” is bad in a couple different ways. For one thing, it’s extraordinarily insulting to men who aren’t abusive and who have no desire to be abusive. Some men who are particularly prone to guilt issues may wind up hating themselves for being abusive, even though they have never done anything abusive. Other men may have a difficult time setting boundaries or standing up to their controlling partners because they’re afraid that that makes them abusive; after all, abuse happens to people of all genders, and “I’m not abusive! You’re the real abuser!” is a common abusive tactic.
Even if you don’t care about hurting men, this discourse lets abusers off the hook. If not abusing people is a difficult process of unlearning that all cis men struggle with and very few have completed, then it’s not that blameworthy to call your wife a cunt. After all, all cis men want to do it! It’s certainly not good, but it’s understandable giving in to temptation. On the other hand, if not abusing people is a basic expectation that the vast majority of people are fully capable of achieving, then when you call your wife a cunt, you are doing something exceptionally bad, something most men do not do and are not tempted to do.
Fifth: because this is an Everyday Feminism article, the first suggestion on how one can become less of an abuser is ‘eliminate violent and oppressive language,’ a section in which the word ‘bitch’ is called ‘the b word’, as if we are all five years old and afraid of having our mouths washed out with soap. Look, guys, I occasionally use the word ‘bitch.’ It’s a satisfying word. Has a good mouthfeel. It turns out there is nothing about the word ‘bitch’ that means you have to abuse anyone.
Of course, it is a bad idea to call your partner a stupid bitch. (Unless you happen to enjoy insulting each other, and this is a mutually agreed upon flirting or conflict resolution strategy that improves both of your lives.) But switching to saying “you foolish asshole!” doesn’t actually improve the situation. The problem is not the language you use while insulting your partner. The problem is that you’re insulting your partner.
Finally: I don’t know what it means to say that a lot of male friendships, instead of being transgressive, “reify patriarchy.” To reify means to treat an abstract concept as if it is a concrete thing. I have no idea how a friendship could do that. Do you, perhaps, mean “is patriarchal”?
Autolykos said:
I have a firm policy of not spending time with people who lie to me repeatedly, or call me names, or treat me poorly in order to keep me wrapped around their finger, or who yell at me, or who refuse to listen to my ‘no’, or who violate my privacy, or who limit my interaction with other friends, or who refuse to take my viewpoints and needs into account.
I wish more people would do this, and do it consequently. If everyone in a community refuses to deal with jackasses, the community will become a jackass-free zone surprisingly quickly. It does of course leave the problem that everyone has slightly different standards on what defines a jackass, and smart jackasses are only mean to some people when they feel like they can get away with it. But there are still some basic standards everyone can agree on, and most people have a fairly decent radar for abusive assholes, even if they have not (yet) become a target.
In practice, this policy leads me to discard about half of the people I meet almost immediately, and puts about half of the rest on probation (I keep my distance and only rehabilitate after careful inspection). But that still leaves more than enough people with potential for becoming friends. Plus, the actual distribution varies a lot depending on the community – so the more willing/able you are to leave toxic communities, the better your quota (sadly, not an option if you are still forced to attend school – those are probably the most toxic and dysfunctional communities I ever had the misfortune of being put into).
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Autolykos said:
Dammit, mixed up quote and blockquote. The first paragraph is a quote…
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Mise Feargach said:
It’s not a completely horrible article if you mentally discard the jargon (“situate myself within my positionality”?) There’s a good point about if you have a mental model of This Is An Abuser and This Is What An Abuser does, it permits you to go “Well, I don’t beat women, so I’m not abusive!” and ignore the ways in which you might be emotionally abusive or controlling or manipulative.
And I get that he’s saying “I’m only speaking for white cis het men here”.
But women do this crap, too. Women can be physically violent to their partners. Women can be emotionally controlling, manipulative, and abusive. Breast-beating over “the patriarchy” is not really helpful, because if The Patriarchy is the all-purpose bogeyman, it lets us all off the hook of considering are what the human problems all humans share, and how do we fix them?
I’m also as amused as you are about the return of the bashful 18th century practice of the dash or asterisk to shield the delicate-minded reader from coarse and vulgar expressions, or too-familiar use of sacred terms that should be treated with respect.
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Treblato said:
Thanks for this!
What bothers me the most about that site is how a lot of the articles are so fangless. No structural organizing, just superficial self-help woo, combined with a bootstrap approach to masculinity (“you are under constant pressure to be abusive, but we trust you to take care of the deprogramming yourself”).
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dtys-n said:
Absolutely. I can’t remember who, but someone on tumblr who wrote a set of rules for disengaging with scrupulosity, and one of them was ‘be skeptical when you are begged to so the right thing, if ‘the right thing’ is vaguely defined and/or has no endpoint.’
EF.com seems to do that three quarters of the time. It’s always “This social construction is doing immense harm to this group, you must personally fight it by *mumblemumble*”.
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liskantope said:
Really great post, and I agree with all of it with some reservations about the fifth point concerning language.
I have very mixed feelings concerning the use of words like “bitch”. Here is a steelmanned version of the Everyday-Feminism-esque argument against it, as I understand it. Women are an overall oppressed group in our society. Words like “bitch” (and worse, “c*nt”) have been used to hurt them in a way that is directly related to sexism. Therefore, by the same argument used against the use of the N-word towards black people, it is wrong (at least for men) to call a woman a “bitch”.
I vaguely sympathize with this argument. I’m not really sure exactly to what extent “bitch” has historically been used to hurt women (it’s much more obvious with the N-word), but if enough women say that it does have a strongly negative association with sexism for them, then I’m willing to comply with not using it. In fact, I never use it anyway, in part because I don’t like swearing in general.
On the other hand, I can see why people might feel frustrated by being told they can’t say “bitch”. The fact is that sometimes in conversation it’s natural to want to call a woman one dislikes some kind of name indicating this dislike. And there are plenty of such terms for men, including “douche”, “prick”, and “asshole”, which are all fair game. (I occasionally hear “asshole” used to refer to a woman, but have only ever heard this from very few people. And yes, I’m aware that “douche” was used in a gender-neutral way in the essay above, but that may be the first time I’ve seen that.) When I want to call a woman something to express my scathing opinion of her (or preferably say, “She’s being a [??]” to indicate my scathing opinion of her behavior), then I’m sort of at a loss. I suppose could call her a “jerk”, which makes me sound like my parents and feels kind of weak given that “jerk” isn’t used all that much amongst the people my age that I’m used to being around. So I have to say that from time to time I do struggle with avoiding “bitch”.
Interestingly, I’ve noticed that many of even the most outspokenly feminist (straight) male friends I’ve had do use “bitch” to refer to women they’re angry at, but only if no woman is in the room. Less surprisingly, a lot of the women in my life, regardless of feminist sensibilities, feel free to call other women “bitches”. And of course most of the gay men I’ve hung around are perfectly free to use “bitch” all the time, sometimes in the typical sense of the word, but also sometimes referring to men or as a compliment.
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Nita said:
Actually, I feel like “bitch”, used as an insult*, has several different meanings:
(1) (directed at a woman) a jerk/asshole/bully who happens to be a woman
(2) (directed at a woman) a ‘female’ with no special redeeming features, and therefore an inferior being
(3) (directed at a man) a man who fails to properly perform masculinity, and therefore deserves to be downgraded to the level of (2)
I don’t have a problem with (1) (other than my general distaste for gendered language), but I do think (2) and (3) pretty much have sexism/misogyny baked in. And, as far as I can tell, the “bitch” in “stupid bitch” refers to (2), not (1).
Obviously, insulting a partner or a friend is a problem in itself, but if you’re using outright slurs to do it, there’s an additional problem.
Bob: I don’t want to go in there. It’s a scary place.
Alice: Ugh, Bob! You’re such a coward.
Carol: Yeah, Bob’s a total pussy with no balls.
Both Alice and Carol are doing the wrong thing, but Carol is taking it to a whole new level of wrongness.
* There’s also a non-insult variant related to (1), something like “a woman who conspicuously rejects the proper feminine attitudes of niceness and selflessness”, and the slang word for women in general, with no specific intent to insult, related to (2). And, of course, “female dog”.
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liskantope said:
Yeah, I agree with that analysis. I guess then it follows that it should be considered okay to use “bitch” in sense (1), but not in the other senses. Of course, there is the problem of listeners not always being able to know in which sense it is being used.
Really, the ideal solution would be to throw out all obviously gendered terms, and keep a few terms (maybe “jerk”, “ass”, etc.) that we use gender-neutrally.
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jsalvatier said:
Nice breakdown. I like that.
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Sniffnoy said:
Finally: I don’t know what it means to say that a lot of male friendships, instead of being transgressive, “reify patriarchy.” To reify means to treat an abstract concept as if it is a concrete thing. I have no idea how a friendship could do that. Do you, perhaps, mean “is patriarchal”?
Perhaps they meant “instantiate”?
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Mr. Eldritch said:
“Reinforce”, perhaps?
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Orphan said:
So a significant part of this reads, to me, like you’d read a long rant about how destructive and evil trans-ness is. Because you’re maligning as evil and destructive something that, it may surprise you to find out, most people have absolutely zero control over.
Because the most traumatic thing puberty did to me was overwrite huge chunks of my brain with new drives, including one for violence. Having been raised in a culture which is fundamentally and significantly anti-masculine, those drives are severely socially maligned.
I’m not a violent person; I’ve hit exactly one person in my life, and they hit me first, and also I was nine years old. But, within three steps into a room full of strangers, I probably have a plan to take down every person in the room.
It’s as natural to me as breathing, and about as possible to stop. Or perhaps a more apt analogy for some of the people here might be sexual desire.
And coming to terms with the set of drives that you describe here as destructive and without redeeming value was the first major step in overcoming a depression which had settled on me as a teenager and never lifted. Those were the emotions that led me to chose a Spock-rationality life over feeling things, because they left me feeling like an evil person, and I felt constant guilt.
That shit’s not a gender role, it’s not patriarchy, it’s not socialization. It’s a giant chunk of puberty-induced trauma a significant chunk of the population is trying to deal with, some more successfully than others, and demonizing it does not actually help us deal with it. At best it leads to repression and then depression, and at worst, it leads to people who conclude they’re evil and therefore what they do doesn’t actually morally matter since they’re morally fucked anyways. Neither is healthy.
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