Archive for the 'Chivalry and performing gender roles' Category

The old “male responsibility requires female vulnerability” lie, take 197: a response to Kay Hymowitz

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 20, 2008
in Chivalry and performing gender roles, Feminism, Men and Masculinity, Men's Movement and Relationships
. 16 Comments

I wish I had more time to respond to this Kay Hymowitz piece: Love in the Time of Darwinism. (Cap tap to Rudy.)

Hymowitz is best known as author of Marriage and Caste in America, one of the less-unfortunate texts in the cottage industry of publications devoted to the notion that lifelong heterosexual union is all that stands between us and the apocalypse. Those who want government to abjure responsibility for providing protections for the vulnerable are always quick to see marriage as the panacea for a host of problems. In some sense, arguments about what marriage ought to be are indeed very close to the core of some of our biggest contemporary cultural debates. Four times married — and in this last one, happily so — count me in the corner of those who argue against the over-promotion of the institution!

In any case, in this article Hymowitz takes on the modern dating scene, which offers any commenter of any political persuasion much opportunity for lamentation. But Hymowitz is primarily worried about the impact on we men-folk, who are apparently overwhelmed and bewildered:

Today, though, there is no standard scenario for meeting and mating, or even relating. For one thing, men face a situation—and I’m not exaggerating here—new to human history. Never before have men wooed women who are, at least theoretically, their equals—socially, professionally, and sexually.

By the time men reach their twenties, they have years of experience with women as equal competitors in school, on soccer fields, and even in bed. Small wonder if they initially assume that the women they meet are after the same things they are: financial independence, career success, toned triceps, and sex.

Oy. All of those women going to college and playing sports? They want husbands and babies and little fluffy puppies. But not money, independence, strong bodies, or that nasty sex stuff. And if they pretend they want money or orgasms, they are poor deluded dears who have bought into the lies promoted by… by… by women’s studies professors, of course.

In any event, Hymowitz catalogs the bad behavior of SYMs (single young men) and — this is strikingly original — lays the blame squarely on women.

Adding to the bitterness of many SYMs is the feeling that the entire culture is a you-go-girl cheering section. When our guy was a boy, the media prattled on about “girl power,” parents took their daughters to work, and a mysterious plague seemed to have killed off boys, at least white ones, from school textbooks. To this day, male-bashing is the lingua franca of situation comedies and advertising: take the dimwitted television dads from Homer Simpson to Ray Romano to Tim Allen, or the guy who starts a cooking fire to be put out by his multitasking wife, who is already ordering takeout. Further, it’s hard to overstate the distrust of young men who witnessed divorce up close and personal as they were growing up. Not only have they become understandably wary of till-death-do-us-part promises; they frequently suspect that women are highway robbers out to relieve men of their earnings, children, and deepest affections.

Bold emphasis mine. My head is starting to hurt. It’s Ray Romano’s fault? No, it’s all down to divorce — the kind where hard-working and reliable men get abandoned by flighty women who, with the help of a unjust legal system designed by the pantsuited and the predatory, steal everything from their husbands, who are (like all men, really) naive babes-in-the-woods. Wise young lads, these, to learn such important lessons! As the kids said in my day, gag me with a spoon. Continue reading ‘The old “male responsibility requires female vulnerability” lie, take 197: a response to Kay Hymowitz’

“Chivalry is deeply feminist”: butch-femme culture and a rethink on gender roles

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 26, 2008
in Chivalry and performing gender roles, Clothing and Fashion, GLBTQ and Relationships
. 25 Comments

Brownfemipower gets the hat tip and the curtsey for linking to this fascinating post at Sugarbutch Chronicles: Bringing Butch Back. It’s a succinct corrective to many of the received assumptions of Second-Wave feminism’s response to gender roles and chivalry:

Chivalry is deeply feminist to me. When in femmes, I expect femininity to be deliberate, done with the whole knowledge of the compulsory heteronormative restrictions which dictate that women must be and do certain things, particular that we must wear high heels, delicate cloth, restrictive clothing. Femininity is not made for comfort or movement, it is made to accentuate the sexualization of a woman’s body - and that’s why things like holding her doors open (so she doesn’t dirty her white gloves or expensive manicure), pulling her chair out (so she doesn’t have to awkwardly move a bulky piece of furniture, and risk getting it caught on her skirt or stockings and ripping something) or holding her coat (so she doesn’t have to reach around and risk ripping the tight seams in her shoulders or upper back) are necessary to me, as an acknowledgement of how restrictive femininity can be, and of how difficult it is to walk around the world in these clothes, as a celebration of the beauty of femininity on the body, and with deep respect for the courage to costume and perform femme to begin with.

Bold mine.

Most of the discussions about “chivalry” and “courtesy” in the feminist blogosphere are rooted in heterosexist assumptions. Virtually every feminist, early in his or her public “career” as a warrior for gender equality, gets involved in the “opening doors” and “paying for dinner” discussion. It’s remarkable how many young women, convinced that a fondness for playing traditional gender roles is at odds with egalitarian ideology, cite a fondness for “common courtesy” and “being treated like a lady” (or a “girl”, or a “woman”) as a primary reason for rejecting the feminist label. While few feminists claim that a straight woman’s conscious enjoyment of traditional gender roles automatically vitiates her feminism, most feel that it goes too far to claim the enthusiastic participation in “chivalry” as a genuinely “feminist choice.” Continue reading ‘“Chivalry is deeply feminist”: butch-femme culture and a rethink on gender roles’

“Find out what it means to me”: some thoughts on respect, chivalry, and campaigns against sexual violence

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 17, 2007
in Aggression and violence, Chivalry and performing gender roles, Feminism, Male feminists, Men and Masculinity, Music, Sexual harassment and Youth ministry
. 29 Comments

Vanessa posted last week about the Coaching Boys into Men program, a product of the New York Family Violence Prevention Fund. Vanessa posts one of the flyers produced by the program; it features a boy in an orange hoodie with the words “Awaiting Instructions” emblazoned across the front. And the instructions the boy receives:

1. Eat your vegetables
2. Don’t play with matches
3. Finish your homework
4. Respect women

And in the comments section at Feministing, there’s a mix of praise and criticism for the campaign, mostly revolving around the “problematic” meaning of “respect” for women. ProFeministMale writes:

…often times, when I hear the general, non-feminist public teach young boys to “respect” women, I get the impression that a lot of what they’re teaching also involves “chivalry,” to to see women as somehow being “different,” that they’re nimble and weak and need to young boys and men to serve as the “protectors.”

This is a good idea - but I can’t help but think these boys are also being indoctrinated into gender roles that so much of the world is buying into.

In the various workshops I’ve put on for young men (and not so-young-men) in church and school settings, I’ve talked a lot about the real meaning of one of my favorite words, “respect.” (And if you’re thinking of the Aretha Franklin song now, hold on, I’ll get to it.)

I often start by writing the word “respect” on a flip chart or chalkboard, and then ask the folks I’m working with to play the word association game with me. Everyone gets to throw out the first thing that comes into their head when they hear or see the word. As you might expect, I get a lot of different definitions. Some people do think of chivalry; almost always, someone will say that “opening the door for a woman” is the first thing that he thinks of when he hear the word. Others will offer a negative definition, suggesting that “respect” is more about what you don’t do than what you do: “It’s like watching your language around a girl”; “It’s about not grabbing her just ’cause you want to”; (I remember that definition vividly from one high school group), “It’s treating her as a girl and not like a guy.” I write as many of the definitions and word associations on the board as I can. Continue reading ‘“Find out what it means to me”: some thoughts on respect, chivalry, and campaigns against sexual violence’

Saturday reprint: Courtly Love and Double Standards

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on November 10, 2007
in Chivalry and performing gender roles, Christianity, Feminism, Porn and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 9 Comments

It’s a long holiday weekend, and I won’t be back to regular posting until Tuesday morning. In the interim, here’s a repost of something I wrote back in March 2005:

The comments on this post from last week about accountability have shifted to the topic of bad male behavior, particularly the sort that takes place when no other fellow is around. Mythago recently wrote:

Chivalry has always been about good manners towards ‘ladies,’ not to women, period. It’s as true in the modern day as it was when The Art of Courtly Love was written.

She’s right about the Art of Courtly Love. Andreas Capellanus, who wrote that famous medieval tract, argued for immense patience in pursuing women of gentle birth. As for peasants:

“If you love a peasant woman, praise her and force her–peasants don’t respond to gentle wooing.”

So much for seeing all women as one’s sisters in Christ! Capellanus makes it clear that the pursuit of courtly love is likely to be immensely frustrating for a man — which is why peasant women make such a convenient outlet for pent-up sexual desire.

Mythago is right when she suggests that nine centuries after Capellanus wrote his tract, the attitudes within it survive. Many of the male commenters on my recent posts about responsibility and propriety have implied that good manners are essentially reciprocal. Their thesis? If a woman dresses appropriately, she is deserving of respect in return. If she doesn’t respect herself or her community, then she forfeits her right to be respected. In other words, “nice” girls, “demure” girls, have the right not to be objectified and openly lusted for; “bad” women (you know, the bra-less ones, the ones in short skirts), deserve the wolfish stares from their brothers and resentment from their sisters. Continue reading ‘Saturday reprint: Courtly Love and Double Standards’

A reflection on chivalry, female vulnerability, and male decency

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 10, 2006
in Chivalry and performing gender roles, Feminism, Men and Masculinity, Race and Sexuality
. 50 Comments

I may be among the last of the feminist bloggers to take on the now-infamous Duke Lacrosse Team Rape Case.  If you’ve managed to avoid hearing about it, start here and then make your way through the femosphere.  There’s lots of good commentary out there.   What is not in dispute is that an African-American exotic dancer was hired by members of Duke’s lacrosse team to perform at a party.  What is in dispute is whether or not she was raped.

It’s not available for free, but both Amanda and Jill have excerpted extensive sections from a David Brooks column in the New York Times on the subject of the Duke lads and the notion of chivalry.  Brooks is apparently worried that a focus on "identity politics" (discussing the privileged white members of the lacrosse team and the fact that the dancer is an African-American single mom) is obscuring what he sees as the real issue: the loss of manners, chivalry, and self-restraint.  Brooks writes:

The educators who used this vocabulary several decades ago understood that when you concentrate young men, they have a tropism toward barbarism. That’s why these educators cared less about academics than about instilling a formula for character building. The formula, then called chivalry, consisted first of manners, habits and self-imposed restraints to prevent the downward slide.

Furthermore, it was believed that each of us had a godlike and a demonic side, and that decent people perpetually strengthened the muscles of their virtuous side in order to restrain the deathless sinner within. If you read commencement addresses from, say, the 1920’s, you can actually see college presidents exhorting their students to battle the beast within — a sentiment that if uttered by a contemporary administrator would cause the audience to gape and the earth to fall off its axis

Today that old code of obsolete chivalry is gone, as is a whole vocabulary on how young people should think about character.

Jill and Amanda do an excellent job of taking the Brooks piece apart, and I suggest reading both posts in their entirety.

I want to focus on another aspect of the whole discussion, one that Brooks raises indirectly but which continues to come up in contemporary laments about poor male behavior: the notion that feminism is directly responsible for the loutish, irresponsible, and often violent behavior of today’s young men.

According to this thesis (supported by romantic illusions about the past), women’s vulnerability is inextricably linked to male responsibility.  In the "good old days" (whenever they were), women had fewer rights, opportunities, and protections.  Economically, physically, and sexually, women relied more on the protection of men.  This vulnerability forced men to "step up"  and act as courtly protectors of their wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters.   Chivalry was a necessary construct to protect fragile women and girls from violent and predatory men.  The thesis has all the usual attractions of the complementarian lie: that women and men are created for radically different purposes, and society functions best when each sex stays within the strictly defined boxes that God and nature have prescribed for them.

Of course, feminism made the fatal mistake of empowering women.  In the last forty or fifty years, women have gained a plethora of rights; women have access to birth control, to education, to economic opportunity.  As women have become more powerful and independent, the thesis goes, men began to question not only old chivalric codes, but the whole need for self-restraint.  Why should men continue to protect women when women insist on being able to take care of themselves?   The greatest benefit of the "old ways" was that a man could have his ego and his self-esteem boosted by knowing that he was needed by the fragile, delicate, vulnerable women in his life who relied absolutely on his strength and self-control.  But the more freedom and autonomy that women gain, the less men feel needed and the less compunction they feel to control the "tropism towards barbarism" that Brooks refers to.  Thus when women are raped by individuals or groups of men who care nothing for their dignity and their humanity, the feminist movement is only reaping what it sowed.

First of all, this myth is based on a historical lie. There was never a time when "chivalrous" gentlemen treated all women equally.  From the era of courtly love in the middle ages to the antebellum South, gentlemen had very different codes of conduct with women of lower classes than they did with their own.  In other words, there never was a time when a working class woman of color would have been well-treated by a large group of privileged young white men.

But from the standpoint of those of us who love and care about men, there’s another equally insidious lie in this theory that male responsibility is contingent upon female vulnerability.  It is deeply, profoundly and tragically cynical about men and the ways in which we become full and complete human beings.  Now, I’m not denying that men have violent and lustful impulses (though the extraordinary number of women who report similar desires suggests more and more that this sort of behavior is not only linked to male biology).  And I’m not denying that in the not-so-distant past, men were encouraged to exercise self-control in order to protect vulnerable and fragile women.  What I am denying is what Brooks seems to be implying: that if we want better behaved men, women will need to surrender some of their hard-won rights and freedoms.

A pro-feminist strategy for male accountability cannot be based on appealing to men to return to some sort of ancient code of chivalric conduct.  It can’t be based on tired Jungian narratives in which every man gets to think of himself as a "knight in shining armor" protecting "damsels in distress."  Mind you, I think there’s a lot of value in reclaiming old stories and myths; obviously, they speak powerfully to young people. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with challenging young men to be brave, even "heroic"; as is clear from my earlier posts, I think there’s a lot of good in teaching self-restraint and consideration for others.  But those laudable lessons of self-restraint must be separated from disastrous messages about female vulnerability.  Women of all occupations and ethnic backgrounds deserve respect, not because they are fragile women but because they are human beings made in the image of God. Indeed, other men deserve that same degree of courtesy and compassion, not because of or in spite of their sex, but because of their inherent value and worth as human beings.

I’m absolutely with David Brooks that we should be teaching character everywhere.  In the schools, in the churches, on the playgrounds, in the media.  By character, I mean integrity and compassion: the integrity to match one’s private behavior behind closed doors with one’s public pronouncements; the compassion to see all living things as valuable and deserving of care, not of exploitation.   That’s not a message for men only, or for women, but one we all need to hear over and over and over again.

Pro-feminism and Christianity stand together on this.  We both reject the notion that "boys will be boys", and we reject the notion that violent/lustful/destructive behavior is women’s job to control or redirect.  Though Scripture is filled with stories of men who struggled with their nature (David chief among them), it is also filled with stories of men who are powerful role models for kindness, generosity, self-restraint and selflessness.  This Passover and Easter week, I think particularly of the "two Josephs" I love so well: the Old Testament Joseph, who in the story of Potiphar’s wife shows us that a man can exercise sexual self-control, and the New Testament Joseph, who faithfully and lovingly marries a woman pregnant with a child that he knows is not his own.  Neither man bases his behavior on the actions of the women in his life; both live lives of love and self-restraint based on fidelity to God and their commitment to other human beings.  Joseph and Joseph are reminders of what all men are called to, and they are reminders of what it is that we can lovingly but firmly demand from our fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons.

I am an imperfect human being. But my duty to love my wife more than I love myself, and my duty to all of my brothers and sisters in the human family, is not based on my perception that they all need my masculine protection.  It is based on a fundamental understanding of the dignity and worth of creation.   That understanding, not some tired old class-based chivalric code,  is what the lads at Duke apparently lacked.