Sorry folks, this is gonna be another very long post.
Over at Alas, A Blog, Amp has a good discussion up on the old question: Are Men Oppressed as Men? Amp cites a very interesting article by Caroline New, but warning, the article is tediously jargon-laden.
One strand of feminist thinking about male oppression is that men are rarely oppressed as men. Those who advocate this stance argue that black men are oppressed for their blackness, not their maleness; Muslim men for their faith, not their sex; inmates for ther status as prisoners, not their biological equipment. They also argue that authentic oppression requires a dominant oppressing caste whose identity is distinct from those whom they are oppressing: in other words, whites can oppress blacks, but blacks can’t oppress whites because of an unequal power differential. And blacks can’t oppress blacks because the dynamics of oppression are always the dynamics of oppressing what is Different, what is Other.
New, happily enough, is smarter than that simplistic reading. Most importantly, she notes that in certain instances, the oppressed can be complicit with their own oppression. A valuable and interesting discussion follows in the comments at Alas.
I am not a theorist. I’m not an intellectual at all, really, though I’ve played the part of one for a couple of decades. (I sometimes describe myself, self-deprecatingly, as the least intellectually curious Ph.D I know.) But I do think that feminists and male feminist allies need to have these sorts of thoughtful discussions, and I’m glad that folks like Amp host and provoke them.
On a less theoretical level, I am intensely interested in the ways in which men position themselves as victims. I spend a lot of time reading the literature of many “men’s rights” and “fathers’ rights” groups. I spend a lot of time in conversation with men who are going through divorce (I am, if nothing else, an expert on starting over.) And I mentor a lot of young male students and boys from my youth group at church. And in conversations with many of these boys and men, I hear “narratives of helplessness” emerging.
From the older, angrier voices of the so-called MRAs, the narrative describes a world in which women (and their male “collaborators”) have usurped traditional male privileges for themselves. Men are at a disadvantage in the courts, in the business world, in academia. The MRAs see public space in the Western world as increasingly feminized, and they fancy “real men” (in whose ranks they invariably include themselves) to be under attack from a dark coalition of feminist activists, cowardly politicians cravenly surrendering to the cultural left, and a media that never misses an opportunity to demean and belittle traditional men. It all provides a satisfying sense of being “under attack”, which is why many — not all — men’s rights activists use, absurdly enough, the language of oppression and resistance to describe their movement.
There’s not much point in telling these men, “you know, you’re an oppressor more than you are oppressed”. The “you’ve sinned more than you’ve been sinned against” trope doesn’t go over well!. These men feel victimized, they feel exploited, they feel ignored, they feel – often — impotent. And too often, our feelings become facts. Too often, we conveniently ignore the ways in which we played the part of volunteers, not victims. Too often, we deny our own complicity in our own misery.
Many men make the mistake of equating the role of the oppressor with a sense of personal fulfillment. If they really were oppressing women, they assume, if they really were part of a dominant class, they’d experience a greater degree of happiness and satisfaction. After all, if there really was a patriarchy, isn’t it supposed to benefit men? If men really did systematically take part in the dehumanization and degradation of women, wouldn’t more men feel the tangible benefits of that oppression for themselves? In other words, they ask the plaintive question over and over again: “How can I be an oppressor when I feel unhappy and powerless?” If most men are leading lives of “quiet desperation”, then surely those same men cannot also be agents of injustice. Right? So goes this line of thinking, or more accurately, this line of emotional reactivity.
Ten years ago, I began three interrelated journeys: I committed my life to Jesus Christ. I drank my last drop of alcohol, and turned to a Twelve Step program for recovery from my various forms of acting out. And I began to work to do more than espouse a superficial egalitarian philosophy — I began to make the effort to match my language and my life, to live a life of radical justice. Now it’s true that alcohol hasn’t passed my lips in nearly a decade, but I’ve had plenty of slips and falls on my walk with Christ. I’ve had quite a few struggles as I’ve sought to live in to an authentic pro-feminism. Growing up and taking responsibility isn’t easy.
One thing my faith, my feminism, and my recovery program all taught me: I was the architect of my own adversity. I couldn’t blame God. I couldn’t blame my parents’ divorce. I couldn’t blame my genetic inheritance for my predisposition to become an addict, and I couldn’t blame my hormones for my chronic infidelities. I certainly couldn’t blame the women I’d married. My misery was a result of a series of choices I made. Hormones and family history helped shape those choices, but the final decisions were always mine. I came to realize that my sense of my own helplessness was an illusion, one I used to justify my bad behavior and one I used to justify a chronic refusal to change.
It’s true that men are frequently oppressed by other men. When a group of older boys or male coaches ridicule a young man for crying or showing fear, that’s a way in which men are complicit in their own oppression. The older lads who torment a younger were themselves tormented when they were his age. The “be a sturdy oak” rule, a rule that teaches men to be alienated from their own inner emotional terrain, is one that is almost entirely enforced by other males. The little boy who is beaten for showing fear or for weeping is not responsible for the beating he endures. But when he grows older, and belittles other men for showing those same emotions, he is making a choice. He has transitioned from victim to volunteer. The fact that he is too frightened or too ignorant to make a different choice doesn’t change his responsibility to make a better decision, and it doesn’t mitigate his own complicity in the perpetuation of a very Great Crime.
The first task of authentic men’s work is helping boys and men get in touch with their own ancient wounds. Men need to re-feel the old injuries inflicted upon them. They need to rediscover the tears they suppressed. They need to go beneath the anger (most men have a considerable amount of anger not too far from the surface) to the root cause of their pain. And once they’ve dragged all that garbage out, then they need to be encouraged to understand themselves as active agents with a choice:
“So your father never showed you how to be there for his family? That’s terribly painful. But your father’s script isn’t yours. If you follow his example, it is not because it is your ‘destiny’: it’s because you are consciously ignoring alternatives. If you do to others what was done to you, you have become not only an oppressor, but a victimizer who has made a decision to be one.”
This is true in the big things and in the little things. The fact that we don’t raise men to be as in tune with their own emotions, to be as perceptive and intuitive as their sisters, doesn’t mean that men are destined to be shallow and obtuse. It’s appropriate for a grown man to express frustration when his own vocabulary for his feelings isn’t as deep and broad as his female partner’s; it’s not acceptable for him to shrug and say “Well, it’s the way I was raised” or “Well, that’s just the way my brain is wired.” To say those things is to be complicit; to insist on one’s own inability to transform because of one’s biology or one’s childhood is to buy into the seductive lie of our own helplessness.
I’m not big on self-acceptance. Really, I’m not. What I’m big on is self-love. Too much self-acceptance leaves me believing the idea that I’m okay as I am, even when I’m not particularly happy and I’m not making the world a better place. Self-love reminds me I’m a precious child of God. Heck, I’m God’s favorite! (And so are you, you, you, and you.) Self-love reminds me I’m worthy of joy, but that the world doesn’t owe me happiness. Self-love reminds me I am called to share with others, to live in community with others, to work to change and transform and heal the world and myself. My Jewish friends call this mandate tikkun olam. The Christians I worship with call it building the Kingdom.
But we can only heal the world and build the Kingdom when we know we have been given the power to do it. And if we buy into the lie of our helplessness, our oppression, our victim status, the world doesn’t change. We stay miserable, or maybe just vaguely dissatisfied. Our relationships are, at best, just okay. And we settle for so much less than we could have.
Anyone who has ever read me at any length will know that my first and second divorces went by entirely different scripts. In my first divorce, I expected the classic things most men expect: Fair play, a fair hearing, etc. I got - to put it mildly - fornicated.
Second divorce - and in my subsequent battles for custody of my children, I won. How? I threw out the notion of the court as an arbiter of some Solomon-like fairness, and instead focused that it decided two things - A winner …
…and a loser.
I decided to be the winner. And I played the game - well - like a girl. I went for the throat. I found a bulldog attorney with the legal morals of a starving barracuda, someone from out of town who was wholly unconcerned with “having to practice again in this town” and who was willing to not only destroy their ability to fight me, but their will to do so.
And before you deride me for it - my very feminist first wife got all sorts of “You go, Girl!” support from her very feminist friends. Suddenly when I turned the tables on her, and leapt for the jugular - JUST LIKE SHE DID - I was a mean ol’ S.O.B. who was picking on a girl and not playing nice. When she was trying to keep my son from me - at all - well, it’s what you got coming, Gonz. When I went for custody, though, it was “How can you do this kind of thing to her?”
It wasn’t the men around me saying this - it was the women. Then men were, “Dude, good luck, but…”
The lesson of “female oppression of the male” you have there, Hugo, is the expectation that the man will play by strict, gentlemanly, Marquis of Queensbury rules of conduct no matter how much of a hellcat she behaves like. Or else he’s no gentleman, and thus, no man at all.
I work at a company that makes women’s products, almost uniquely employs women. Until I made partner, the company was owned only by women.
Needless to say, I do not accept much of the MRA narrative.
On Monday I sat as an additional witness, to a firing. The woman we were terminating had been discovered stealing from the company(she was tampering with payroll if you must ask, it was in felonious amounts). It is almost humorous how people only feel bad about their poor choices when they have been discovered, when those choices have cost them. That remorse seems in proportion to their loss, and not as in this case, crime.
The lack of professionalism on her part continues to be shocking. She cried for about a half hour. Then she asked what our stance would be on the unemployment claim. The emotional turmoil that type of outburst had an unsettling effect on every one in attendance. It had the effect, that the other partners began to second guess their decision while we were debriefing. I would be lying if I said it did not effect me similarly.
To me, that particular case demonstrates that women’s greater emotional sensitivity, is not always strength. Sometimes, it is weakness. Personally, I think strong emotions can be a liability. I find it very nearly dishonest for feminists to describe women’s emotional state as an advantage. I have a very hard time seeing how that proposition can survive real life experience.
Certain posters will claim this is an anecdote and somehow not relevant by arguing semantics. However, everyone who has ever worn a human resources hat will know the truth I speak.
Hugo, I think you mistake the aggression that lies just below the male psyche for anger. They are very similar emotions (I experience them very similarly anyhow), but they have distinct biological purposes. In reading you over the last several years, I have noted, you have come to terms with this aggression, and you seem to channel it into your athleticism, spirituality and profession. I would equate “growing up” with becoming old. In stead, I suggest you have become a Man, the master of the beast within.
If no one has said it yet, welcome to a very exclusive club.
I have spoken with people whose “ancient” and terrible wounds came at the hands of confident teachers who believed they knew what the people they taught “needed” to know and do next. Knowing how easily what looks like an innocent and wholly reasonable set of beliefs about human development can turn into a procrustean bed, I find the confident assertion about what men and boys (all three billion plus of us) “need” to do unconvincing, and (given the history I know) somewhat alarming.
Perhaps a truly radical approach to these issue, which I have honestly not seen much of here, would start with a radical uncertainty. If you say you know what you need to do, I can only take that at face value. When you say you know what I need to do, however, my own experience and knowledge contradicts you, and even more, leads me to distrust the very certainty this post expresses.
Peace and blessings…
John, I understand that any life philosophy can be abused (or at least applied abusively).
You know, I’m a great believer in starting, as you say, with radical uncertainty. But that’s only a start. Certainty is always the end goal. As Francis Bacon (the philosopher, not the modern artist) said:
If we begin with certainties, we shall end in doubts; but if we begin with doubts, and are patient in them, we shall end in certainties.
I have lived with doubt for many years. A healthy doubt is essential as a starting point for any spiritual journey, just as skepticism is a fine tool to commend to the novice, to the freshman. But rejecting received wisdom and being uncertain is a developmental stage through which we are to progress; it is not an end, ever.
My goal is to patiently, lovingly, humbly (and humility is hard for me) steer young men and women towards certainties.
Hi Hugo,
De-lurking to recommend an excellent book that I just finished: The Macho Paradox by Jackson Katz–it’s a fascinating work that talks about a lot of what you’ve brought up in this post.
Not sure how much I can personally contribute to this discussion, however, as I am not a man.
Keep up the fabulous blogging work, by the way! I am linking to your blog from mine–I hope that’s okay.
Yes, it’s more than okay. Jackson Katz is linked on my sidebar. He and I hold very similar views; I sometimes call myself the ” explicitly Christian Jackson Katz.”
I disagree with the thrust of this post on several levels.
First, I disagree with the implied construct — which is very prevalent in industrialized culture and not unique to you, Hugo — that human beings are ‘choice-making entities’ which happen to have ‘emotional machinery’ attached. I think it’s the opposite: people are emotional beings with an ‘attached’ choice-making capacity. That ‘choice-making’ capacity is important and vital but it is not unlimited. The overemphasis on ‘individual choice’ is a malignant aspect of unbridled capitalism and is taken to truly toxic levels in the U.S. Though parts of your post are doubtless well-meaning, I think they reinforce this dynamic.
A full explanation of this goes well beyond a single comment or even a post, but it’s important here because it’s at the crux of the issue: namely, a very significant component of the oppression of men lies in the greater detachment from their emotions which society demands and the greater disruption in their emotional development they experience growing up. Or, to put it another way, the greater emotional integration which most women are able to experience is an important example of feminine privilege.
The second disagreement I have is this: you start out raising the subject of how men are oppressed, and boys are bullied, and you end up with: ‘boys who are bullied have to make different choices.’ Wha?? What happened to: ‘we as a society need to take steps to prevent the bullying of boys?’ Or ‘we as a society need to remove the connection we now make between respecting a male and that male’s capacity for violence’?
um, Hugo, if I’m not persona non grata here…
I do believe we left the Scottish Common-Sense School behind a long way back - I mean, Bacon (yeah, he’s not of the school, but he is foundational to it)? Certainty is overrated. *All knowledge is contingent.
Patriarchy *is a* “recieved wisdom.” Yet we have all - including all MRA’s I’ve ever read who could write the word without scare-quotes - seen through the pretense of the complex system we call by that name. I went through my “men are sooo opressed” phase not so long ago. (Obtw, my divorce was amicable, no kids, lesbian ex, still good friends, I’d die for her tomorrow if she asked me, she likewise, maybe ) I got over it, for the most part. Work in progress.
Certainty is not a useful goal; maturity is. Maturity consists, in part, in the ability to hold contradictory ideas in tension while treating people with absolute respect.
The only really important part of my last (I accept justly deleted) post was the crack about not mistaking the map for the terrain. It is a crude metaphor, I’ll grant you, but nonetheless apt, I hope. I think we’re both of an age which can remember running cross-country/orienteering with a topo map and a compass.
The map was true and accurate - often remarkably so - but it was no substitute for being able to read the terrain in front of you. If the map lied and said there was no road where you’d just crossed one, it didn’t mean there wasn’t a ridge line up to the North of you, and a spring where you could get a drink before going on to the next objective.
Similarly, just because Patriarchy is real, and men are, as a class, privileged in our society (albeit somewhat less now, and ultimately declining), it doesn’t mean that Gonzman (sorry, Gonz, you presented yourself as an example) wasn’t rogered right completely by our patriarchal court system in his first divorce, and that with a you-go-girl chorus of latter-day Bacchae to rub it in (A feminist man might ask what the Patriarchy might gain by punishing men as-a-rule in divorces… or not) and that that was not terribly unjust.
I’ve read a few places where women have explored their own complicity in oppressing other women (I have known *one man who used the terms “bitch” “whore” “skank” and “slut” as often as the women I know, and he was *deeply disturbed) and in enforcing gender-stereotyped roles on men, so I know this is not a new subject. I only know that men who are just beginning to explore this (usually *just after the “contemplating suicide” stage) need to hear it *just after they hear of *their complicity in their own (and their loves’) misery.
OK, this has been a long ramble, but what you refer to is a long journey. (It is also one which women are on, collectively and as individuals.) Hugo, do be careful you don’t present your present stage on the journey as anyone else’s finish line. ‘k? You *know you aren’t there yet.
hpb
Austin, TX
ballgame:
Yes, there’s a large amount of demand for men to emotionally detach. The reason I disagree that this is ‘female privilege’ is that the demand for emotional detachment is also placed on women, provided they wish to participate in civil society. Emotional detachment is rewarded, except in spheres which support women’s restriction to the home/nurturing professions. Yes, women are less thwarted in their emotional development, because it’s assumed that women are ‘naturally’ more emotional, and thus less fit for the public sphere. GregA’s comment above is a clear example of that. However, if we wish to participate in the public sphere, we’re taught to view our emotional capacity as something to be repressed.
Can you see why I’m skeptical of the idea that our ability to develop a capacity seen as a)natural for us and b)considered a liability if we wish to participate in civil society?
Of course, the upshot of that is that I agree that the demand for boys to emotionally detach as part of their development is a sad state of affairs, and damages boys, because it justifies their perceived incapacity to participate in areas like childrearing and nurturing professions.
In an earlier post, you referred to “over-medicated hyperactives” as opposed to “well-behaved boys”. I objected. Your certainty about what “well-behaved” means still troubles me, since I had a bad experience in a youth program where (at the time I served in it) young people with learning disabilities entered with high hopes, only to find their progress through the program blocked by people who apparently had no doubts about the rightness of their judgments of what constituted “good” or “bad” behavior.
But my experiences seem to me truly, even annoyingly, trivial beside the horrors inflicted on First Nations people I know, by teachers who seem to have had, or at least admitted to, no doubts about how the children in their charge should turn out. The stories people have trusted me with leave me crying, may God forgive our certainty!
An earlier generation of teachers believed in the importance of English and “western” culture with such certainty that they proceeded to literally beat their own language and culture out of a generation of First Nations kids. I have to wonder what future generations will make of the certainty that describes men who do not give a high priority to their emotions as “obtuse” or “insensitive”, or ignores the impressive body of evidence that many men (and women) who have a great deal to give do have “wiring” which makes them less attuned to emotions than others.
I am quite confident that we can achieve progress, John, without resorting to beating energetic young boys.
Ariella, you’re right: both sexes should act “professional” at work, and not rely on emotions when logic is required. And yes, it’s a problem for men and women alike that sometimes we can’t turn that off when we’re not at work. I spent years learning not to cry in front of the guys. Or show that I liked someone, for that matter. Any perceived weakness was a threat. Now that I’m married, I’m slowly learning that it’s ok to show emotion at home; I can let my guard down and not have to be strong about everything all the time. What was really surprising was to hear a retired colonel tell me essentially the same thing: that one of the hardest things for him has been learning how to open gates in the emotional walls he had built, so he could let his wife and kids into his heart.
So, I agree with Hugo: men need to learn to relax their defenses instead of “becoming” those defenses, but sometimes so do women. I suspect everyone has defenses, it’s just that they are different in nature. Mine match guys’ defenses, because I’m in a profession where I deal with guys as an equal, on equal ground. Other women have other defenses, which I mischaracterize as “fluff” or “airheadedness”. Those are still defense behaviors, I just don’t initially see them that way, but those are what other women use because they operate in a different environment.
“a world in which women (and their male “collaborators”) have usurped traditional male privileges for themselves”
That, right there, is the problem. There shouldn’t BE traditional male privileges, and the fact that some people are unhappy that certain privileges are no longer available to them, or off-limits to others, is just too bad. I’m just as uneasy with the idea of traditional female privileges (like, “just cry at them and they’ll let you off easier…”).
thanks everybody for a diverse and reasoned discussion. it’s such a relief to find people with somewhat disparate views on such a highly charged topic actually communicating instead of flaming out. you have all made me think a great deal harder about these things, and as someone who’s spent most of his life thinking about them nearly every day, that’s saying something.
The little boy who is beaten for showing fear or for weeping is not responsible for the beating he endures. But when he grows older, and belittles other men for showing those same emotions, he is making a choice. He has transitioned from victim to volunteer. The fact that he is too frightened or too ignorant to make a different choice doesn’t change his responsibility to make a better decision, and it doesn’t mitigate his own complicity in the perpetuation of a very Great Crime.–Hugo
Responsibility is a slippery little beast, sometimes. I think it’s important to recognize that boys and men are also susceptible to the larger institutional frameworks as well, just as everybody is. So, if a particular boy-who-grows-older doesn’t make the choices that you would encourage him to make, there is an important sense in which is he responsible, but there is also an important sense in which we are all responsible for our complicity in creating/continuing traditional institutions. I try to remember this when interacting with, say, angry-had-a-bad-divorce-MRA’s, because, while I think that they ought to make different choices, it’s helpful to understand and keep in mind that patriarchy has hurt them too–and influences them probably as much as a kid is influenced by getting beat up on the playground or some such.
That’s a good insight, Jeff, and you’re right. As long as we’re not using the PHMT (for newbies, that’s “patriarchy hurts men too”) to rationalize poor choices, I’m prepared to admit that even adult men can feel trapped and overwhelmed; there’s no question many men feel absolutely incapacitated and “choiceless”.
I haven’t any concern you will literally beat anyone. I suspect that your certainty about what men and boys “have” to do will (if it hasn’t already) lead some of those who hear or read you to place themselves on the “other” side of a destructive divide, the one between people who value (or claim to value) emotions, sensitivity, and the arts, and those who value (or claim to value) practicality, efficiency, and results. We already have few enough artists who bridge this divide (Saint-Exupéry comes to mind), and I would prefer not to see it widened.
Hugo said:
It’s true that men are frequently oppressed by other men. When a group of older boys or male coaches ridicule a young man for crying or showing fear, that’s a way in which men are complicit in their own oppression.
Huh? This is not “men complicit in their own oppression,” because the males oppressing and the males being oppressed are not the same males. Let me apply this kind of collectivist analysis to another characteristic, like race:
It’s true that blacks are frequently oppressed by other blacks. When the Hutus slaughtered the Tutsis in Rwanda, that’s a way in which blacks were complicit in their own oppression.
HughRistik-> I think you’ve misunderstood. When a group of boys ridicules another boy for crying, not only are they attacking him as an individual, they are also policing the social norm that “boys don’t cry”, and reinforcing it. This is a collectivist analysis, but I don’t see how the Rwandan Genocided created or reinforced any norms about colour in Rwanda.
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hi all.