Feminist Fred

In my last post a Patriarchy-Blamer from the great feminist blog I Blame The Patriarchy thanked me for coddling the dudes so that Twisty doesn’t have to. I got a laugh out of that, since no feminist hates dudes as much as I do. Well, probably they do, but still, I hate them dudes to death. Well, maybe not death. But I still think it needless for them to continue to sport penises, which they only use to abuse themselves and women; since the subtraction of a sex organ is a minor affair to someone who thinks of them as marginal bodily ornaments when not being used to continue the species, in which case they actually have some objective use, even if overpopulation happens to be rendering our planet toxic.

As a person burdened with male parts, I have read enough radical feminist theory to understand that sex roles are not essential to my personality, but are these cultural obligations that I have learned to think of as me. I dimly grasped that women who see themselves as sovereign human beings with agency can come to reject the very ideas of femininity. While I have been well trained by our patriarchal culture to respond to feminine beauty tropes, I understand that inhabiting those costumes and living up to those standards can be not only demeaning but completely untenable over the course of a lifetime.

So it was with considerable relief that I came across John Stoltenberg’s essay “Refusing to be a Man“. If the women I most respected could reject being a female, then I could reject being a dude. It’s not that this wasn’t a big step for me. For my whole life I had been struggling to define and live up to what it is to be a good man, and this was, on the surface, a rejection of that. But it was actually sidestepping the entire confusing issue with the plain and universal idea of trying to become a good human being.

Interestingly, the one thing that stopped me from taking the obvious step of rejecting masculinity, even after I had already realized it was merely a cultural construct, was the age-old fear of femininity that men have internalized so deeply that they barely even acknowledge it. Luckily for me, I came to the idea after being taught by all my radical feminist teachers around the internet and in the few books I’ve read that femininity is not the point or the object of rejecting masculinity. They taught me, over and over, that many of the traits I associated with masculinity weren’t masculine, but simply human, and belong as much to women who reject femininity as they do to men. It’s just that men tend to assign any good human qualities to men specifically and woman only conditionally.

So I don’t think of myself as a dude coddler. But I do think that I, unlike Twisty, have a certain responsibility to answer to the needs of men who might want to seek a solution to their own gender confusion via feminism. Women have quite enough to deal with just trying to shake their own patriarchal programming without dealing with clueless dudes who deny even their own supremacy in an obviously male supremacist world.

The delightful commenter belenen has written to offer a carefully-considered explanation of how men are also oppressed by their own supremacy. 

Well, men don’t suffer in an oppressed way, true, but they do suffer from sexism. I don’t think that they actually feel the sting of it until after becoming aware of how much women suffer and are oppressed, which is an odd irony. There’s the fake ’suffering’ where women supposedly have ‘power of the pussy’ as you pointed out, and then there is the suffering an aware, compassionate human being feels when ze realizes ze has hurt / is hurting others. And I know some of this is just me imagining how I would feel, but some of it is what I have heard/felt from feminist males that I know, such as my partner and another close friend of mine. So yeah, that’s a rambling way of saying “men are not oppressed, but are yet harmed by sexism.”

I think it is just as damaging for a child to learn that ze is better than others by simple fact of body shape/skin/size as it is for a child to learn that ze is lesser. Do you know what I mean? obviously the oppressor has all the material perks, but they aren’t really positive when you consider the price of harming others. Hm. I feel like I am not explaining this very well. I suppose it comes down to a philosophy of mine — that by harming others you yourself are harmed, and that one cannot gain any true joy by harming others. The ‘joy’ some get from harming others I would call false, like the ‘joy’ that comes from intoxication. Oppressors like Hugh Hefner are constantly drugged with lust and power but they are not happy. Not that we should allow them to continue harming others! But just to realize that they are not to be envied.

I have been accustomed to avoiding discussions of how the poor men suffer so from having to oppress everyone without really wanting to oppress anyone. Generally, such discussions are started by Men’s Rights Advocates (MRAs) who are actually suffering the unendurable pangs of privilege thwarted. Such whines and snivels are all along the lines of “As long as there exists anywhere a female who refuses to open her legs, I suffer and women have all the real power” and “Complaining about and pointing out the obvious truth that men are bossy, aggressive, hostile and needy makes me feel bad about myself and makes me want to punch someone, preferably someone female who won’t hurt much if she punches back” and suchlike absurdities.

But belenen points out how men who are aware of and critical of male supremacy - we call them feminists because there really isn’t a better term for it, since humanist is taken and means something quite different - can become and may have always been acutely aware of the social burdens of living up to the male stereotype. She seems to be pointing out that everyone who grows up in a patriarchal world is damaged. 

As someone who has enjoyed both drugs and booze with a certain amount of caution that has only increased with exposure to the double-edged sword of intoxication, I have to agree that male supremacy is a kind of drug, as is sexual stimulation. Like any drug, it will make you sick if you look up and notice the damage it can do to your body and the lives of those around you. If you deny or refuse to acknowledge these bitter effects, real sickness sets in, along with addiction and traumatic violence to anyone around you. 

My bottom line is that I benefit from opting out as far as I can from the trap of male identity and sexism. It’s not the point, this benefit. It’s rather a feeling that, once I believe that women are not different, don’t enjoy being oppressed, hate being the constant targets of male sexual aggression, from catcalls, to rape, to murder; once I get that simple idea in mind, it’s rather hard to live with myself knowing that I enjoy the same supremacy in any way, whether I ask for it or not.