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bcholmesalt.poly has been a-buzz with a discussion about whether or not men can be feminists. It's been an interesting discussion to watch: I find myself able to agree with stuff in all sides of the arguments.
Surprisingly, one of the statements that repeatedly rang hollow to me was an oft-repeated statement that feminism should be about eradicating sexism in any form. In this view, feminism should be a superset of what is traditionally thought of as men's studies (of the sort that Warren Farrell would write about). I say, "surprisingly", because that's a position that I long advocated, and in a big way, I believe that gender is something that is restrictive for both "men" and "women" (if such identities can be said to exist :-) and I'm all in favour of movements that seek to eradicate gender-based discrimination. (And, at times, eradicate gender as well, but that's a whole 'nuther story).
But there's a hollowness to that claim, too, I think. I'm starting to think that feminism cannot and should not include men's issues. And I probably can't adequately put this into words, but I think that there's a gulf of experience that cripples women fighting for men's rights and vice-versa.
I'm reminded of a sequence from one of my favourite films, Sans Soleil, in which Krasna, the fictional filmmaker whose words form the narration of the story, thinks about making a science fiction movie after filming fascinating landscapes:
Or rather no, let it be the landscape of our own planet for someone who comes from elsewhere, from very far away. I imagine him moving slowly, heavily, about the volcanic soil that sticks to the soles. All of a sudden he stumbles, and the next step it's a year later. He's walking on a small path near the Dutch border along a sea bird sanctuary.
That's for a start. Now why this cut in time, this connection of memories? That's just it, he can't understand. He hasn't come from another planet he comes from our future, four thousand and one: the time when the human brain has reached the era of full employment. Everything works to perfection, all that we allow to slumber, including memory. Logical consequence: total recall is memory anesthetized. After so many stories of men who had lost their memory, here is the story of one who has lost forgetting, and who -— through some peculiarity of his nature —- instead of drawing pride from the fact and scorning mankind of the past and its shadows, turned to it first with curiosity and then with compassion. In the world he comes from, to call forth a vision, to be moved by a portrait, to tremble at the sound of music, can only be signs of a long and painful pre-history. He wants to understand. He feels these infirmities of time like an injustice, and he reacts to that injustice like Ché Guevara, like the youth of the sixties, with indignation. He is a Third Worlder of time. The idea that unhappiness had existed in his planet's past is as unbearable to him as to them the existence of poverty in their present.
Naturally he'll fail. The unhappiness he discovers is as inaccessible to him as the poverty of a poor country is unimaginable to the children of a rich one. He has chosen to give up his privileges, but he can do nothing about the privilege that has allowed him to choose.
I am, by inclination, a person who abstracts. I take my personal experience and try to abstract it to a point at which it bears some relationship to people who are very different from me. I've been listening to GenderTalk this weekend, hearing more than once the likening of trans body issues with the experiences of people with disabilities. And part of me says, "yeah, okay, I can see the commonality." And another part of me has to acknowledge the reductions -- the elisions -- that happen in that abstraction.
And I'm sitting here, writing from a position where my claim to understanding "women's experience" is weighted by the momentum of twenty-five years of "men's experience" (with, admittedly, a lifetime of "trans experience" thrown in). And I understand enough about the dangers of essentializing common experience or the great "Homogenizing Past". But I'm also aware of the dramatic depths that characterize my lack of firsthand awareness of the issues that feminism combats.
There's another part of Sans Soleil that's poignant, here:
What Narita brought back to me, like a shattered hologram, was an intact fragment of the generation of the sixties. If to love without illusions is still to love, I can say that I loved it. It was a generation that often exasperated me, for I didn't share its utopia of uniting in a common struggle those who revolt against poverty and those who revolt against wealth. But it screamed out that gut reaction that better adjusted voices no longer knew how, or no longer dared to utter.
I think I know that voice, too, and I share the implied admiration for it.
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my only problem
Date: 2003-02-23 12:35 pm (UTC)Same argument could be said for people who bad mouth men and are negative and destructive and then turn around and define them selves by the views of the men in their lives. I'm sure we all know some female who goes on and on about how loathsome the men in their lives are and how men are evil and then in turn justifies actions by stating they are "trying to find a man." I think consistency is important. Don't call your self a "feminist" and spout some dogmatic paradigm unless you are willing to live by it. But that's just me.
In the end, I think people are equal, that feminisim and it's male counterpart (which interestingly doesn't seem to have any positive way of saying it, much like you can't be trying to study and preserve "white history and heritage" without sounding like a racist which I find curiously interesting in and of its self) are really a legacy of a heritage that we are (or should and hopefuly are) moving away from, but we need to stop people defining them selves by the people they place them selves in relationships with and start them defining them selves by who and what they are.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-02-23 12:57 pm (UTC)The first is that the term itself, feminism, is inherently gender-tied, and so excludes its use as a blanket term for egalitarianism. Of course, that doesn't mean that men can't be feminist, but it does mean that for men who choose to be feminist, it can't ever really be the kind of all-encompassing endeavour which you allude to early in the post. Many people will say that it's nitpicking, that it's just a term and we can choose its meaning as we wish, that it does in fact mean egalitarianism, that there's no point coming up with a whole new movement because of the name, etc. However, that goes counter to all of the work on the impact of language which formed such a basis for early feminism, it seems.
My other problem is that be splitting up the concept of empowerment into women's issues and men's issues as if that were the natural ordering of things, we create a dichotomy that guarantees a certain degree of strife and friction -- an "us" and a "them". As long as we say, "We must guarantee that women and men have the same rights and priviledges," we create this tightrope we have to walk, this balance we have to maintain, and we set ourselves up to fall. What would seem a more viable approach would be to say, "We must regard people as people, not as members of two discrete and unrelated subsocieties," and as much as they may pay lip service to eliminating discrimination, any movement like feminism or any corresponding men's rights movement which might crop up undermines that goal and serves to distance people from each other.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-02-23 01:22 pm (UTC)[...] the term itself, feminism, is inherently gender-tied, and so excludes its use as a blanket term for egalitarianism. [...] Many people will say that it's nitpicking, that it's just a term and we can choose its meaning as we wish, that it does in fact mean egalitarianism, that there's no point coming up with a whole new movement because of the name, etc. However, that goes counter to all of the work on the impact of language which formed such a basis for early feminism, it seems.
<nod> I grok that entirely. I guess I've grown a lot more comfortable with the idea that both feminism and egalitarianism can be two completely separate movements and that it's not such a bad thing if their actions/interests/etc. sometimes come into conflict.
Bhabha, one of my hero-theorists, wrote "Must we always polarize in order to polemicize?" Must the existence of feminism stand in opposition to egalitarianism?
What would seem a more viable approach would be to say, "We must regard people as people, not as members of two discrete and unrelated subsocieties," and as much as they may pay lip service to eliminating discrimination, any movement like feminism or any corresponding men's rights movement which might crop up undermines that goal and serves to distance people from each other.
And, wow, do I ever identify with what you're saying. But. The "but" is the hollowness that I was trying to demarcate.
On alt.poly, there's a phrase that metaphor that people sometimes use: the "stepping on my tomatoes" metaphor. It's a useful metaphor for getting out of the "you did something objectively, clearly wrong"-type discussions. People can say, "you're stepping on my tomatoes" and someone else can say, "I'm sorry, I didn't see your tomatoes there".
I think I'm starting to feel like there's a big push among good, liberal-intelligentsia types to "trade up" issues all the time. It doesn't suffice to scream about the stepping-on of tomatoes. One must additionally see how the stepping-on of tomatoes relates to the lack of sidewalks and fences and education about proper gardening techniques. And I think that something is lost there, in the move from saying "here is my pain" to "here is a neat, consistent theory about how the world should be and we need to move in that direction together." There's some fundamentally primal, immediate and passionate energy that gets difused in that translation, even though I think that the abolition of gender is a more radical move. And yeah, one could argue that sometimes that immediate "let's do something now!" energy leads to other types of problems.
I'm against gender. I'm against all the stuff that reinforces the central role that gender plays in our society. And I think that women need a political movement called feminism. And yes, that's contradictory. I'm Walt Whitman; I contain multitudes.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-02-23 01:34 pm (UTC)As for polarization, I do think that in some of their aspects egalitarianism and feminism need to be polarized, but only in some aspects. It's true that we tend to polarize everything. Given any two items we will put them on either end of the spectrum and seek to find ways in which they differ maximally. It's not comfortable for us to partition things otherwise. Sometimes it's also entertaining to do so, but mischievously so and it can be taken too far.
I was going somewhere with all of that, but I got into rambling mode there for a bit. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2003-02-23 02:32 pm (UTC)<smile>
"The test of a first-fate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
(no subject)
Date: 2003-02-23 03:33 pm (UTC)But there's a hollowness to that claim, too, I think. I'm starting to think that feminism cannot and should not include men's issues. And I probably can't adequately put this into words, but I think that there's a gulf of experience that cripples women fighting for men's rights and vice-versa.
I totally disagree! I think that if you just say "there's a gulf of experience" and shrug your shoulders, then that's just giving up! From personal experience I know zerothhand that there are some things about women that are just really difficult for men to understand. I know this because I used to not understand them and now I do. But I don't think that it's _impossible_ to understand.
And I understand enough about the dangers of essentializing common experience or the great "Homogenizing Past". But I'm also aware of the dramatic depths that characterize my lack of firsthand awareness of the issues that feminism combats.
Right, all these factors can make it harder to relate across that gulf, but it seems to me that if there is a male who considers himself a feminist, then sure, that male might be a somewhat less effective feminist for those reasons, but why exclude him? Why play the old "separate the boys and the girls" game? It seems to me that acknowledging the gulf of experience is wise, but fearing it is not. If gender is to be overcome as a stifling force, then people of all genders are going to have to reach out across that gulf to try to understand each other, and not be crippled by that gulf, but to be enlightened by the process of trying to cross it.
(:,
Pace
(no subject)
Date: 2003-02-23 09:29 pm (UTC)For many years, even back when I was male, I considered myself a feminist. I sometimes encountered these kinds of arguments as well, that my feminist beliefs somehow didn't matter because of sex or my gender. It was really frustrating!
To be clear, I certainly don't believe in "doesn't matter". I don't agree with the assertion that "men can't be feminists". I think I agree with a sentiment that permeated the discussion: the sentiment that the "gulf of experience" matters a lot more than many want to acknowledge.
I totally disagree! I think that if you just say "there's a gulf of experience" and shrug your shoulders, then that's just giving up!
I guess the question that I think is relevent is: "what does it mean to give up?" For my part, I'm not arguing that men shouldn't be involved in feminist actions or organizations. And I'm certainly not advocating that men and women can't work together toward common "egalitarian" goals as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
epi_lj talks about, above. But I think that the vast number of feminist organizations, mostly headed by women, cannot get adequately address men's issues because they're not men (and vice versa). I additionally think that eliminating feminist groups and replacing them with egalitarian groups will result in a loss of something valuable.
I do think that it's viable to have a feminist movement and a men's movement and an egalitarian movement all working in parallel. And sometimes colliding.