I have been reading through The Takeback and really liking a lot of what I read. In response to Iris Llevar’s post, Editing Out Violent Masculinity, Jim made a comment that I think is worth discussing, both because of his resistance to the word “feminism”–which I don’t really agree with, but which is a lot more nuanced than much of the resistance to the term I have heard from other men–and because of what he says about framing men’s confrontation with our own privilege. I am quoting the comment in full, but it’s also worth going to read Llevar’s post.
As a guy, I try to appreciate it when someone points out my “male blindness,” even if it’s sometimes hard to hear. Although I used to identify as a feminist, I’ve started to feel like there’s some problems with that label. I think a lot of issues, like domestic violence, are both women’s and men’s issues, and “feminism” kind of makes it seem like it’s about the women alone. Part of the reason it’s hard to hear about “male blindness,” as a man is because it can force one to accept that a) they have been living a privileged life, b) they may no longer be able to enjoy those privileges guilt-free, and c) they have to figure out a new way to be. That all can be tough. I don’t want to equate that effort with the struggle of women in abusive relationships in any way, but I think that there needs to be a way to frame and reinforce the journey from misogynist to better male. If a woman leaves an abusive relationship, she’s a hero. If a guy stops being abusive, it’s good, but there’s no neat cultural narrative to describe that and normalize that. This is a problem I think, and it’s a problem among men, and there’s a part of this that’s an issue among men only. I just feel like the term “feminist” has a lot of baggage associated with it, and while I admire and respect many feminist thinkers, I don’t know if that label really captures the collaboration between men and women on making work and love the way I want it to be.
“. . . but I think that there needs to be a way to frame and reinforce the journey from misogynist to better male. If a woman leaves an abusive relationship, she’s a hero. If a guy stops being abusive, it’s good, but there’s no neat cultural narrative to describe that and normalize that.”
I’m trying, and failing, to see how that’s anything more than Jim wanting a cookie for guys that meet the minimum standard of decent human:
http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2009/04/29/heres-your-damn-cookie/
I’m not sure what Jim is asking for, in concrete terms, but it sounds suspiciously like wanting to be thought of as a hero while retaining male privilege.
Rain, I actually said while reading this “Well, SOMEbody wants a cookie.”
Yes, exactly what rain said. Also:
“and while I admire and respect many feminist thinkers, I don’t know if that label really captures the collaboration between men and women on making work and love the way I want it to be.”
Because of course it’s the duty of feminist thinkers to consult Jim and be sure that they’re embracing his views. How about you pay attention and try to understand what feminism means to different people and why before deciding that you’re too good for the label? If you think feminism is only about women, you need to do some more reading about feminism.
While it’s true that men are domestic abuse victims and can be raped, the vast majority of people who survive (or not) these assaults are women. I think centering women in discussions of rape and domestic violence is therefore pretty damn important. This doesn’t exclude men in any way. Just decenters them.
Note to Jim: Your penis is not the axis on which the earth turns.
There is certainly something important in becoming a person who does not commit evil acts. Is there really no narrative for this? I would think it would be about rebirth, or repentance. Perhaps there is no secular narrative for it.
I think we have a lot of narratives for giving up alcohol and cigarettes and to a lesser extent, other drugs.
I can’t see a problem with having narratives for giving up violence– I’m sure it’s hard work, and the world would be a better place if people knew more about how it’s done.
I would think that the secular narrative would be something along the lines of rehabilitation.
“If a woman leaves an abusive relationship, she’s a hero. If a guy stops being abusive, it’s good, but there’s no neat cultural narrative to describe that and normalize that. This is a problem I think, and it’s a problem among men, and there’s a part of this that’s an issue among men only.”
The woman that leaves becomes a hero because it takes courage to do so, something society still does not tend to attribute as a feminine trait. It takes courage because the abuser becomes more dangerous when the victim attempts to leave. What should be normalized is that the woman shouldn’t have had to deal with that behavior to begin with (nor her children, as is many times the case.)
Saying that there should be a cultural narrative to praise or normalize a batterer for reforming is like saying that we should reward or normalize a serial killer every time he decides not to kill someone. Or it’s a bit like saying that an addict needs to be rewarded for becoming clean and sober. The addict (if they are serious about their sobriety) will tell you they are always in recovery. The process doesn’t end. Their life becomes normalized, but the process by which they live that life is not to those of us who have not chosen to engage in addictive behavior. The sobriety for them, is it’s own reward, the ability to relate on better terms with others and enjoy the positive outcomes that result from that choice.
There isn’t much in the way of laud or praise for changing your way of thinking about a group of human beings, because we expect in this day and age that most human beings have already made that leap, and that a change shouldn’t be necessary, even though obviously in many cases it is. Most of us would say that a person who does not batter should be the norm, and those who are batterers are responsible for their own recovery, and that choosing to engage in normal behavior vs. abnormal behavior is it’s own reward.
The part of Jim’s comment that I responded to and that provided for me a context in which to read his other statements was this:
I think his choice of example in the sentences that follow–women who leaves abusive relationship is a hero; we need a narrative to normalize the move from batterer to non-batterer–are unfortunate in that they obscure rather than focus the point he makes, or at least that I think he was trying to make, in the sentence I quoted above, i.e. that there is not a normalized cultural narrative for making that journey; and I like very much the way he situates the problem of creating that framing narrative as a problem that men need to grapple with, not women.
I am also hoping that some of you might be willing to share your comments on The Takeback, especially those of you who think Jim is looking for cookies, because that is precisely the kind of pushback and discussion they are looking for.
Yeah, rehabilitation.
I deal with this a lot in my fiction, or try to. I think it’s a common theme, really. What is the Angel plotline, or the Dexter plotline, except for struggling with these issues? I don’t see them as out of the norm.
One of my earliest written published pieces, “A Letter Never Sent,” was an attempt to tackle this, in re: social treatment of stranger pedophiles (one reason why I always find it funny when MRAs say that feminists are “co-opting” men’s issues when they care about disentangling the fear of stranger pedophiles, or opposing male circumcision, or whatever, both issues I came to through feminist education, and both of which I cared about a lot before even beginning to read the feminist blogosphere).
I don’t know if I feel comfortable going over to the other space. I don’t really think I want to take on the responsibility. I agree with you, RJN, that the comment is interesting, and that the comment has more substance than most objections I’ve read to feminism, but it still makes me wary. I don’t want to get sucked into an argument where my basic humanity isn’t respected. It makes me sad. And maybe–hopefully? probably?–that space isn’t like that. But the comment you quoted leaves it open that it might be. Maybe if I had more time right now I’d be willing to take more risk. But you know, I think it’s okay for them to be aware that speech defines a space, and outlines who is and isn’t welcome, and to what degree.
Mandolin:
I understand that entirely, and I’ve just gone over to read some of the comments subsequent to Jim’s and several of them lead me to believe you might indeed have to deal with that kind of argument–though I am not sure, since the space is so new and there hasn’t been time for the people who comment to develop their identities, so to speak. The intent of the blog, however, is precisely the opposite of “asking for cookies,” etc. It is telling and wonderfully so that all the editors to whom those of us who post have to submit before our posts go up are explicitly feminist-identified women. I have no idea, though, who will be handling comment moderation and how that moderation will be done.
Frankly, I think the reading of Jim’s comment that he is asking for a cookie is a poor reading (who is he asking for a cookie from? who is he asking for a cookie for? should attempts at theory discussions be dismissed as asking for a cookie in any case?). And Whit, your postscript note to Jim sinks to the level of merely asinine.
I think that Storm Dweller’s analogy to alcoholism is apt, but I think that while being a recovered alcoholic is supposed to be its own reward, that doesn’t mean that “Oh, I guess you want a cookie for not drinking. Con-fucking-gratulations!” is an acceptable refrain in AA meetings. My impression (admittedly purely from fictional depictions) is that AA meetings involve a huge amount of validation and praise for small steps towards acting like a decent human being, with a lot of acceptance of the fact that doing so is a struggle. I think this connects to Jim’s point in relation to working on raising awareness among men about the need to stop being misogynists being something that probably should be predominantly men’s work. AA meetings aren’t attended by non-alcoholics who have had their lives trashed by alcoholics (or there would be a hell of a lot more, “Oh you want a cookie?”), they are attended by alcoholics and recovering alcoholics. Much of the work of getting men to stop being misogynists (and yes, to validate them in making those changes, which are not necessarily easy or pleasant to make) needs to be done by men who are themselves working on stopping being misogynists. That it currently is more likely to be done by women is a problem (not on the part of women who are willing to do this sort of CR, but on the part of men who aren’t).
Jim raises the issue of lack of cultural narratives of stopping being an abuser/misogynist and becoming a decent human being/feminist. I agree with all of the folks who point to the general category of narratives of rehabilitation, but I think Jim’s point is that, unlike becoming a recovered alcoholic, or even having an “Aha” moment of becoming aware of racism/realizing that people of color are actually people, both of which have specific cultural narratives (e.g. there are a number of movies that portray these specific processes of rehabilitation (many more for recovering alcoholics than for recovering racists)), the process of men rejecting their own misogyny and rising above it is not an established category of rehabilitation narrative (I can’t think of any movie examples off the top of my head). I think that is the absence to which Jim is pointing.
I won’t offer any defense of Jim’s discomfort with the label feminist. I think that the sort of misogynist rehabilitation narrative that I think Jim is pointing to needs to be specifically feminist, as the closest dominant narrative related to the needed narrative is probably the narrative of becoming a real, mature man, who no longer engages in the immature forms of misogyny, and that narrative is pretty strongly anti-feminist and not meaningfully anti-misogynist.
RJN,
I think the comment moderation process will really be a critical issue for that site.
Charles S wrote:
I want to push back at this a little bit–and this is a question I am asking everyone, not specifically a challenge to Charles S. What precisely would this kind of feminist narrative look like? Because if we’re talking about rehabilitation, then we are talking about putting misogynist men and misogyny at the center of the process and I don’t see how that will not have the effect, overall, of decentering women, not just the specific women any given might have hurt (not necessarily physically), but women in general as the category of people who are the object of misogyny. In other words, rehabilitating a male misogynist will of necessity make his experience of misogyny the ultimate point–because otherwise how will he “overcome” it–not the experience of the women who are the object/target of his hatred. Can something which centers men’s experience of male power and privilege in this way be properly called feminist? Can the term feminism be stretched far enough to include it? (This also makes me think of Mandolin’s responses to some of my “Fragments of Evolving Manhood” pieces, in which she points out the ways in which the experiences of the women in the stories I tell are decentered in ways that make her uncomfortable. Sorry, I don’t have the time to look up the links.)
I sign on to Charles’s comment which I think is really insightful.
I don’t really mind giving out cookies to people who are doing the work of bettering themselves. It’s hard work. I *do* get irritated when it seems like the entire point of the work is to receive the cookie, or the person is threatening to stop the work for lack of cookies, which turns the work into… a way of manipulating me, instead of a process of working on oneself. I’m not referring to comments like “This is hard and sometimes I feel like I can’t get through it,” but I am referring to comments like “I do all this stuff and no one even APPRECIATES it!” I’m not sure how this relates to Jim’s post, except I think that different people endowed a slightly ambiguous statement with different relationships to that dynamic.
I would also guess the uncharitable readings are due to discomfort with his comments on feminism.
OK. I’m not necessarily opposed to the idea of a movement (in my head, it would be a subcategory of feminism) that concentrates on men’s rights, and the male experience of moving away from misogyny. I’ve said so on this blog several times.
I get uncomfortable about where some of the theory takes us from there.
In the framework I use, men are sometimes disadvantaged by a system that privileges them in an interaction of oppositional and top-down sexism. In the framework that Barry has mentioned he uses (and I’m paraphrasing, or my understanding may be partial, in which case I apologize), women by historical happenstance suffer the primary disadvantages from a sexist system which oppresses both sexes, but which is not inherently aimed at privileging men (using the same terminology as above, I think–and could be wrong?–that this theory emphasizes oppositional over top-down sexism).
I suspect that what one believes about this topic is going to strongly influence how one imagines a productive men’s rights movement and its relationship to feminism.
RJN, I thought about my comments on your fragments of evolving masculinity pieces too… ultimately, I *do* think there are ways to write about being in the privileged position, and centering that experience, in a way that is compatible with feminism. I’m not sure it would be a good idea for your piece to move in that direction, because its aims seem to me to be complex, and because I think provoking discomfort is part of how it works on an artistic level. But could an expositional paper be written on the same subject, without the concerns of art, and rest more easily within the theoretical framework I espouse? Yes, I think so.
RJN,
I snipped out of my previous post a response to Whit’s substantive comment along similar lines to your comment: the process of rehabilitating misogynist men must necessarily be male centered, and therefore is likely to be somewhat decentering to women. While I can see an argument that it is therefore no longer feminist (along the lines of BAdu’s suggestion that male feminists aren’t really dealing with their own issues by being feminists), I feel that feminism should be (and for me it is) a larger project than that, and certainly encompasses all of the damage done by the existing gender system.
Additionally, the point Storm Dweller raises about existing rehab programs for DV abusers functioning in part as instruction in how to hide abusive behavior for me points to why the rehabilitation narratives and structures need to be specifically feminist, although I actually don’t know enough about DV abuser rehab to justify that claim.
I think the largest problem with trying to treat misogyny rehab like AA is that the degree of alcoholism that leads people to join AA is the degree of alcoholism that is substantially destructive to the alcoholic. I think the destructiveness of alcoholism to the people around the alcoholic is usually a secondary issue, not the core issue for the alcoholic choosing to go into rehab. On the other hand, while misogyny harms misogynist men, that is really a secondary issue, as it is far from clear that misogyny harms most misogynist men enough for that harm to be a sufficient reason to quit being misogynist. This means that a rehab solidly grounded in the experience of being a misogynist is likely to have a hard time being effective, but a rehab not solidly grounded in the experience of [needing to be in rehab] is also not likely to be effective. I don’t know what the solution to that is.
B.Adu… I just don’t even know how to go there with you. Do you feel the same about anti-racist white people? Fighting against my internalized white supremacy, as well as the way it exists externally, *is* my issue.
Charles, you raise very valid points about the rehabilitative environment provided in AA and NA for addicts and Alcoholics. By the same token the addicts and alcoholics that I know of in my life do not look to the people whose lives they’ve affected for affirmation, but rather they look to them to make amends. They look to other people who understand the nature of the “illness” if you will for support in their work to make a change, because other recovering alcoholics have a frame of reference from which to understand the challenges and how to overcome them. There is also a group called Al-Anon that is for those folks living with an alchlic/addict, or dealing with the after affects of living with addicts and alcoholics, as it is noted you can’t live in a sick environment without becoming sick yourself. The same goes for survivors of domestic abuse. Without an examination of self by the victim, to know why the victim made the choices they did to be and stay in that situation, they run the risk of simply making the same choices that landed them in the abusive situation to begin with. It takes an active decision on the victim’s part that they too want to change their life for the better, and that they also need to heal their attitudes and patterns of thinking, more generally about themselves than the world at large. Leaving the abuser is only the first step in that process, and it is unfortunate that many victims stop the process there.
There are also rehabilitative programs for abusers, at least in the area in which I live. A rehabilitative program is far from a cultural narrative though, and my understanding is that statistically speaking rehabilitation has limited sucess and often is utilized more as an instructional on better hiding abusive behaviors than correcting them. I bring that point unarmed with those statistics to substantiate, so take that last or leave it as you prefer.
I must admit I’ve never quite got male feminist. I get a deep connection and understanding of feminism from a man, wonderful. But I always expected men to take the opportunity presented by feminism to deal with some of their own issues.
I don’t mean to disrespect feminist men but I cannot help feeling that it can be a bit of an avoidance strategy.
Posts seem to be appearing in this thread out of order. My comment timestamped 5:11 am came after Storm Dweller’s comment at 9:03 am, and Mandolin’s comment at (also at 5:11 am) I think was not there when I started writing my comment.
Thinking about a narrative for someone who stops being an abuser and comparing it to narratives for someone who stops drinking might be better informed if you consider how someone becomes an abuser. It’s my (admittedly limited) understanding that someone who is an abuser was likely raised up in an environment of abuse and may well have been abused themselves. Someone who is viewed as a victimizer is very likely to have started life as a victim. This should not be viewed as justifying victimizing others. But it gives insight as to what the abuser has to overcome in order to stop abusing, and what in turn the narrative describing that journey should be.
but…. that’s why people GIVE cookies. The whole concept of it is reward-as-behavior-mod.
Some few people are capable of great personal growth and sacrifice with nary a feedback or cookie from the group(s) that they are being asked to benefit. But frankly, it’s not very common. Even the parent relationship (which involves “do good things without a cookie” to perhaps the largest extent of all, if you’re a parent) can be hard to maintain absent feedback.*
If you want someone to do something, and if they won’t act on their own, then you need to persuade them, force them, or bribe them. It’s a personal choice; if you don’t want to give cookies that’s your call. But if you limit cookies to people who really don’t “need” a cookie to act good, then you’re sort of in “preach to the choir” mode.
*As an example, my friends with autistic kids say that it’s not necessarily the management of the autism that is so hard for them, but rather that they rarely if ever get a “cookie” in the form of a smile, laugh, hug, or “I love you Mom.” And it’s a running joke among parents I know that babies learn to smile and laugh just in time, because otherwise who could take it?
Charles wrote:
Which I suppose is one reason you end up with books like John Stoltenberg’s Refusing to Be A Man and The End of Manhood (the latter of which is, aptly enough in terms of this conversation, modeled on a self-help book). In other words, for some people anyway, the only feminist way out of the paradox/contradiction you describe is to stop being a man, at least as “man” is defined by the manhood that feminism critiques.
And Stoltenberg’s books–has anyone else on here read them?–also makes me wonder if that’s what’s going on in the kind of expository prose that Mandolin mentions in her comment, i.e., that any man who successfully negotiates the centering of his experience while remaining within the bounds of feminism has ceased to be a man in the sense of someone whose allegiance is to his power and privilege within the gender binary that feminism aims to end.
For some reason, this makes me think of the distinction between masculinity and manhood that Stoltenberg, I think, makes in the introduction to the second edition of The End of Manhood, that while masculinity may be something that one can perform, in the sense of being like a costume one puts on, manhood is a system of ethics to which one must swear allegiance, which one must not only follow in his own life but help to enforce in the lives of other men, in order to be admitted to the power and privilege, etc. that comes with being a man as manhood defines it.
FWIW, as someone who has been an abuser in the past and is trying to deal with the multitude of ways that it shapes your life, an AA meeting sounds pretty close to what should occur if we really want to stop abuse. At some point, there does need to be a narrative to teach better behavior if the abuser can’t come up with one themselves.
In the end, if praising contributes to the goal of less abused people, I’m okay with that. Sometimes, people need praise for normal things because they have come from somewhere not so normal, somewhere hellish, somewhere dark and smouldering and wrong. It’s easy to paint violence as something that only harms the other person, and it is very important to protect those people who are in danger. It’s also important to address the self-hatred behind violence, IMHO, so that it can have a lasting end rather than a pause.
You know, I experience plenty of people who look to me for reassurance and say “what I am doing is hard.” And then I give them “a cookie.” And we talk, and whatever. Of course getting me to give a sympathetic response was part of the reason they told me they were having a hard time. They need bolstering and reassurance. Fine.
This is different from, if perhaps on a spectrum with, behaviors done specifically to manipulate someone.
I’m gonna just go ahead and say that I’m not sure “ceasing to be a man” is a particularly, um, useful kind of construct to bring into conversation. I mean, I don’t want to say it’s an invalid phrase in all contexts, because I guess it might have some bearing on trans issues, but even then, kind of only a little bit, and it seems like it would be more like “cease to be a man as others interpret me.” I mean, I thought part of the point of questioning the binary gender system was to indicate that there are, in fact, a lot of ways of being a man, or of practicing masculinity, and that they don’t require the markers typically associated with these things. One can be a man with a vagina, and that doesn’t make one cease to be a man. One can be a man who hates sports and likes to dress up and shrinks away from conflict and that man can still be my husband. One can be a man and wear purple scarves and have powder puff girl sheets and run a feminist blog for years and years and that man can still be my best friend. And they can talk about their experiences and center their experiences, and perhaps add an expositional disclaimer that wouldn’t flow well in fiction, and decenter women’s experiences, and still be men.
There’s some stronger rhetoric there than I’d usually use replying to you, RJN, so I don’t know, maybe I’ve just badly misinterpreted something.
[Double post deleted]
Mandolin, I’m laughing here, because this reminds me of my ex, who would do something nice for me, or give me a nice gift, and before I could even get the words, “Thank you,” out of my mouth would be demanding recognition of this nice thing he had done. After a while it dawned on me that he wasn’t necessarily doing those things to be nice to me, or particularly to make me feel good, as much as he wanted the praise for being nice. It was is cookie, and man would he pout if he thought that cookie wasn’t big enough or fast enough in coming.
Whereas when I give someone something, or do something for them, I simply do it and hope I can get away before they do make a big deal out of it, because the praise and thanks was not the reason I wanted to do it. I don’t know if that’s a helpful analogy or not, but it’s what my brain recalled, and I have to thank you for giving me a good laugh about it.
*Ahem* I am incredibly sorry, and thoroughly embarassed over the double post. I hit the post button a little too quickly before editing, and I thought hitting stop would keep it from posting. To the owner of the blog, I will not at all be offended if you remove the unedited post.
Mandolin:
Of course. Which is why I tried, though apparently not entirely successfully, to qualify what I meant by “ceasing to be a man” with phrases like “at least as ‘man’ is defined by the manhood that feminism critiques.” In fact, rereading my comment, I realize that I probably should have put the stuff I talked about in the third paragraph first so that it foregrounded Stoltenberg’s distinction between masculinity/gender-as-performance and patriarchal manhood. The former, precisely because it is a performance, is mutable, improvisable, stretchable in all the ways you describe and more, but it is only mutable–or one of the prime reasons it is mutable–to the extent that it has been divorced from patriarchal manhood, which, because it has a very narrow, fundamentally unmutable definition of masculinity, would recognize none of the men you describe as, for want of a better term, “real” men; and I think that one of the things that profeminist men/feminist men/pick your term do when they successfully negotiate privilege, etc. is to assert that they will not be “real men” as defined by patriarchal manhood. Doesn’t mean they aren’t being men, in the sense of performing masculinity, in other ways; doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of ways of being men that they might still come up with that have yet to be imagined; but to the degree that they live those ways of being men as feminists, they will absolutely not be “real men”–they are very consciously not being “real men”–according to the standards of patriarchal manhood.
I don’t really want to say much more than this because I need to move on to other work for the evening, but I hope it at least explains where I was coming from.
I’ve read a bunch of Stoltenberg, including both books you mention, RJN. I always figured his one title should actually be “Refusing to ‘Be a Man'” but I guess that takes some of the fun punch out of it. I thought your third paragraph @23 summarized him fairly well (well, the bits of him that aren’t “all porn is bad and demeans women and makes men complicit in demeaning women,” though I’ll ever be grateful for him adding the phrase “mindless fuck tube” to my vocabulary for talking about stereotyped male views of women in a sexual context).
He may have been partnered with Andrea Dworkin but he owes a lot more to Judith Butler than she ever did.
Do you feel the same about anti-racist white people?
What that black civil rights, anti colonialist etc., movements are an opportunity for white people (and others) to free themselves from the baggage of playing superior?
Yes I feel the same. We are all intertwined our consciousnesses often overlap in ways that are often hard to see, how can freedom come only from one part of the equation without fundamental change for others?
You say you are ‘fighting against internalized white supremacy’ you surely don’t see that merely as a favour to others? Do you not see at least in part personal liberation for yourself?
The fulfilment of the desire for self definition without having to be pressganged into playing something or someone by virtue of birth.
Frankly, I don’t see the nuance of Jim’s post. It reads as the all too familiar “feminism has gone too far” take of a guy that finds the idea of feminism attractive until it costs him. “(T)hey may no longer be able to enjoy those privileges guilt-free”. May?!
There is an attempt to separate Jim’s views on feminism with his cultural narrative comments, the OP and #12 for examples. But his problems with feminism, along with making up the bulk of his response to Llevar’s post which, incidently, was not about the problem with feminism, are what I see motivating his suggestion to develop a cultural narrative. If that conversation develops, I think we’ll see a replay of the Clarisse Thorn’s pathologizing male desire/ creepy discussions. Here’s Richard’s comment at Hugo Schwyzer :
“In part, if I remember your piece correctly–and I read kind of quickly it a day or so ago, so I may not remember accurately–you are asking a question, broadly speaking, about why it is so hard to make a space for men to talk about our desires without immediately arousing suspicions. Well, a lot of the male commenters here understood “talk about” to mean only or primarily express desire to someone for whom you feel it, not a lot of the men commenting here have talked about, simply, talking about–or being able to talk about or finding it hard to talk about, or whatever–what it feels like to be a heterosexual man and have desire, how those desires are structured and why, etc. and so on. Rather, the discussion seemed to, rather quickly, focus on–and I know I am being a little flip here, but it’s shorthand–”how to ask a woman out without seeming like a perv.”
I’d go further, and say that the focus turned to women’s behavior, how they react to male expressions of desire, and how they should not find behavior X creepy, Schrodinger’s rapist be damned. If Jim’s post is what sets the tone and direction of the conversation, then the conversation is not about cultural narratives on misogyny. It’s about positioning feminism as extremist, intractable, and divisive, and Jim’s position on the misogynist feminist spectrum as the reasonable one (“the collaboration between men and women . . . the way I want it to be). The “cultural narrative” is just a springboard, hardly an original strategy. See intelligent design, whose proponents pushed as something between creationism and evolution, that they were compromising. Or the more recent “common ground” on abortion (William Saletan at Slate), rebranding anti-choice as the middle ground. There was a Canadian version a couple of years ago, where the Green Party leader, while insisting that she was pro-choice, said, among other things, “I don’t think a woman has a frivolous right to choose.” And then she called her stance “nuanced”.
I’m not saying that there can’t be a discussion on narratives about moving from abuser to non-abuser, I’m saying it’s not going to happen with Jim because he’s not sincere about wanting to have an honest discussion.
Also, I’d like to add a comment about this @12:
“Jim raises the issue of lack of cultural narratives of stopping being an abuser/misogynist and becoming a decent human being/feminist.”
Jim is not on board with “becoming a . . . feminist.” Is this just a slip? Or is it an attempt to paint Jim as someone who is feminist but just doesn’t like the label?
Rain:
I fixed the link in the first comment, which required a slight edit in the text around the link. If I got something wrong, let me know and I will correct it.
ETA: It’s not that I think your critique of Jim’s comment is wrong, but that I think there’s enough substance in there–his acknowledging of male privilege, for example, and his recognition that the problem of narrative that he raises is primarily and, in part, exclusively an issue for men–that might make it worthwhile to engage him on precisely the kinds of questions you raise, which I will do back over at The Takeback when I get the chance.
There was a comment at my “cookie” link that I’d like to point out, from Bakka @37:
“I have been a feminist for a long time, and I have to say, the cookie stuff does make me a little uncomfortable. It is understandable that people should not be rewarded for meeting minimum standards, but should instead be rewarded for actually doing good. However, given how pervasively unjust and screwed-up the world is, I think that sometimes men who do just meet the minimum standards of what feminists would believe is decent might be worth rewarding. . .
(Examples follow.)
That said, . . . I think that one of the problems with this has to do with “the economy of gratitude” which some feminists have discussed. There is marked inequality in who has to feel grateful to whom and for what. So many feminists are reluctant to hand out cookies for things that should be standards of behaviour for everyone. For one thing, asking feminists to do so makes us complicit in our own oppression. (If you are interested in learning more about economies of gratitude, Arlie Russell Hochschild has a book called The Second Shift, where she talks about how this plays out in families. . . Part of women’s unrecognized emotional labour also includes the requirement to be grateful for what we should be able to expect.
So, to tie this all back to the original comment I made about heroism being dependent on circumstances, it might be alright to seek confirmation and congratulations, but this should be sought from other feminist men rather than from women. Part of being an ally involves changing the way men and women relate. Part of the way men and women relate under patriarchy involves women being grateful to men for all kinds of things that are inappropriate. If one perpetuates this relation then one is not really ending women’s oppression, but rather continuing it (thereby nullifying the original reason one may deserve a cookie). ”
An example of economies of gratitude here:
“In the past, Nancy compared her responsibilities, her identity, and her life to Evan’s. Now, to avoid resentment, she compared herself to other working mothers and by this standard she was doing great. She also compared herself to single women who she thought of as a completely different category than married women. She compared Evan to other married men. Was he more or less helpful than other husbands? Evan argued that, compared to most men, he did more housework. Most men being his old friends who had traditional marriages. He was given credit for doing more than other men rather than doing the same as Nancy. The economy of gratitude fits in here. By comparing Evan to more traditional men, Nancy felt a lot of gratitude towards Evan because his support was so rare in the world. Evan, on the other hand, did not feel that grateful to Nancy for her work around the house. In fact, he thought she wasn’t doing enough. ”
Applying this to Jim’s post, and what becomes a danger in the narrative about abusers, is what mk mentions @21 in the cookie link, a “guy wanting a pat on the head and stopping the work there.” Given the context in which Jim wants to develop the narrative, ie surrounded by his dissatisfaction with feminism, I think there’s a good chance that the work will stop there, that the narrative will function as a comparative tool for Jim. It will serve to reassure Jim that he’s feminist enough because he doesn’t beat women like all those other guys.
Of course ridding myself of internalized white supremacy is a favor to myself. Why would ridding oneself of misogyny be different?
rain,
“becoming a . . . feminist,” isn’t a slip, so much as a disagreement with Jim. Merely because Jim feels that the term feminist is freighted with too much baggage does not mean that I am willing to not use it. And yes, I am painting Jim as someone who is a feminist and just doesn’t like the label: “Although I used to identify as a feminist, I’ve started to feel like there’s some problems with that label.”
I don’t see Jim’s comment as containing any substantive disagreement with feminism, only a concern that word itself is not effective for describing the (feminist) work of (feminist) men working with non-feminist men in validating and supporting the process of stopping being misogynists or abusers and becoming (feminists). I can imagine that there may be contexts where the label is not beneficial to doing that work, but this isn’t those contexts, so I will continue to use the label to refer to the thing.
It is quite possible that my reading is over generous, I’d point out that it is the label he refers to repeatedly, not the movement or the body of work and theory that he refers to, both in the quote I gave above and in his final (and otherwise damning) statement “I don’t know if that label really captures the collaboration between men and women on making work and love the way I want it to be.” If he referred to the movement or the body of theory there, then I’d agree with your interpretation of Jim’s meaning and intent.
The quote that you give from RJN on Hugo’s blog is interesting and relevant, and I agree that an equivalent problem is present in discussions of how men go about becoming non-misogynists. For me, the issue of developing a (feminist) cultural narrative of awakening/rehabilitation of misogynists/abusers is related to dealing with that problem, with having a commonly understood model of what it means to change, as opposed to what Storm Dweller describes of abuser rehab being a place for abusers to teach each other how to get away with abuse.
I do agree that Jim’s emphasis on the problems with the label ‘feminism’ greatly diminishes his comment, and renders everything he writes suspect. We’ve all seen the game you describe play out before, and certainly his problems with the label are at least a yellow flag. I just don’t agree they are a red flag.
Finally, about Storm Dweller’s comment @ 18:
Not having much familiarity with DV issues, I’m going to ask this with hesitation. Is it possible that we don’t have a “neat cultural narrative” to describe a guy moving from abuser to non-abuser because it’s something that doesn’t really happen? The examples used as points of comparison, women leaving abusive relationships or alcoholics getting their addiction under control, do happen, and so these narratives came into being without anyone saying, “Hey, we need a narrative to describe and normalize women leaving abusive relationships.” And so wouldn’t a similar narrative about reformed abusers also occur as a natural consequence of abusers being reformed? Or are the stories about reformed abusers being suppressed in some way?
So it seems that what’s being proposed is artificial, and unearned, because the narrative is sort of a badge of recognition or marker that real change has taken place. The (unintended?) consequence of forcing this process of creating a narrative will, I think, not be to encourage other men to follow suit, but to overstate the degree to which we’re tackling the problem of violence against women. For an example, I’ll put up men’s participation in housework and childcare, where much is made in media reports of the tiniest increases in men’s participation, and where the narrative is that things are changing, but where the core belief, that of female responsibility for this work, remains virtually unchanged. So much so that an essay from 1920, Eastman’s Now We Can Begin , with a little tweaking for language and cultural references, would fit right in a contemporary discussion.
Thank you for fixing my link, Richard.
Charles S,
Funny you should mention red flags, as I was thinking of that monster thread at pandagon on red flags when I was writing my posts, because I was wondering if I was reading too much into Jim’s comments. It’s possible, but I think Jim’s dwelling on the label when Llevar moved pretty quickly onto the “sentiment of non-violence and respect” etc., which is pretty much saying the label isn’t the important thing here, is a red flag. Or, in other words, dwelling on the label means he’s not talking about the label.
As a person with parents and grandparents who have dealt with alcoholism and abuse, and as someone whose longest relationship was with an alcoholic abuser, I am not going to give cookies to domestic abusers, reformed or not. Ever. As a POC, I don’t give cookies to white people who make mistakes and say or do things that reinforce white supremacy. Sorry, but meeting the minimum requirements of being a decent perwson isn’t enough to warrant a cookie.
Other than that, pretty much everything rain said, I second.
Additionally, rain, I am not sure how old this narrative of abuse victim leaving is a hero can be. In the 50s and 60s, women were encouraged to forgive and forget abuse in order to preserve the marriage and keep the man. It’s only with the rise of feminism that shelters became available, then the understanding of the psychology that drives batterers and their victims. And it seems to me that now there’s been pushback to expand the narrative of who victims are – transgendered, gay, lesbian, poly, heterosexual men abused by het. women. That sort of thing. Of course, shelters that catered to the “traditional” 70s housewife without resources escaping monstrous husband with the kids narrative aren’t equipped to handle the reality of abuse crossing all race, gender, class, and orientation lines. And they’re resistant to the idea of expanding that definition, in general.
Also, I stand by my snide comment about Jim’s motivations.
When he said that DV is both a men’s and women’s issue, he is correct. In much the same way racism is both a problem that white and minority people deal with. Not acknowledging who receives the most harm in these arrangements seems to me to try to re-frame the situation as that of equals. E.g. men suffer as much from the problem of DV – as abusers, victims, or both – as women do. This rubs me the wrong way, not least of all because it erases transgender and queer people, but because it’s also patently false. It screams “cookie. I want a cookie! Or else I’m going to “transcend” your petty issues!” to me.
Jim also said “I think that there needs to be a way to frame and reinforce the journey from misogynist to better male.”
Ok, in order to not be a misogynist, you have to understand the machinations of sexism. That’s what feminism is for, right? And sure, wanting to work on your own issues, or not wanting to decenter women from feminism, great. But rejecting feminism because it’s too laden with baggage seems, I dunno, cowardly. And sexist.
I took him to mean that it is a men’s issue in the sense that it is predominantly men who abuse (or at least engage in the worst abuse), thus his then setting up a rough parallel between women leaving abusive relationships and men stopping being abusers. I’m not clear if that is what you took him to mean. If I’d taken him to mean that that both men and women get abused, I would have had about your original response, as that would have been overt derailment in the context of the OP.
I think that we have the basic problem that we are attempting to interpret a relative short and contextless comment by someone none of have any history with or knowledge of. I have taken a strongly positive reading of the comment basically because RJN pointed at it and said it was interesting, so I went and read it for what it contained that might be interesting, and where it was vague, I read interestingness into it. I can see that anyone who went and read it without that particular frame, or who was kicked out of that frame by the various warning signs would then read it very differently.
Why would ridding oneself of misogyny be different?
It wouldn’t; both require looking inside and dealing with yourself which cannot all be done by focusing solely on those on the receiving end of supremacy.
An over reliance on this focus can sometimes become-either deliberately or unwittingly-a way of not facing those often difficult internal issues (which can feel very personal and raw), is my point.
Charles, I also don’t agree that men are the worst abusers. I have a friend who is a straight man, white, upper middle class. Placed in the world series of poker in 2008. His ex wife (also white and upper middle class) sliced his arm open with a large kitchen knife while their children were in the house, before guests were coming over. He’s written about it online, I can link if necessary.
Anyone is capable of abuse. Yes, men are more likely to abuse, and more likely to kill their partners, who are more likely to be women. However, abuse cuts across all demographics. No one is exempt.
In other words, the worst abuse is committed “predominately” by men. Which is exactly what Charles said.
The way it was explained to me is that domestic violence is an idea that was created by feminists who were worried about women being beaten by their partners, and wanted a phrase to use as a shorthand.
Now you could reason: if a wife slaps her husband this is violence and this is in a domestic setting – so this is domestic violence. But that’s wrong. It’s like saying that we use huge amounts of copper in our electronics, so aren’t we in the Copper Age? Well we’re not, that’s not what the phrase was created to mean. In the same way domestic violence wasn’t meant to mean men being slapped by their wives.
Now I appreciate the idea is progressively being expanded to include men and this is now pretty much routine, but I’m not sure co-opting the phrase does anyone any favours. Why shouldn’t the orginal intentions of the term’s creators be respected?
It’s not as if anyone uses the phrase literally. That would include everything from infanticide to elder abuse, which may ‘technically’ be DV, but have nothing in common. Mostly people use DV to mean violence between partners. That’s how you can say ‘the worst abuse is committed “predominately” by men’ – you’ve expanded DV to include men, but not children (who aren’t yet normally included). I just can’t see the rhetorical point in arbitrarily walling off an expanding subset of violence, and then having to keep on arguing that women have it worst. I think the originators had the right idea in sticking to just being worried about women being beaten by their partners.
James, the source of your knowledge is mysterious to me. Who were these “originators”? Where is it documented what they said and what they meant? Can you provide any links to actual supporting documentation?
“Who were these “originators”? Where is it documented what they said and what they meant? Can you provide any links to actual supporting documentation?”
http://www.jstor.org/action/doBasicResults?la=&wc=on&acc=off&gw=jtx&Query=%22domestic+violence%22&sbq=%22domestic+violence%22&si=1&jtxsi=1&jcpsi=1&artsi=1&so=old&hp=100&Go.x=20&Go.y=13
This is a chronological list of all uses of ‘domestc violence’ in an academic archive. For the first 500 references (1814 to 1977) it’s a military/international relations term – domestic violence as opposed to foreign violence. It starts being used by feminists about 1978. Let me list some of the first articles:
510. Battered wives who kill.
512. Incest or rape.
519. Establishing a task force for battered women.
520. The battered wife.
532. A women’s right to choose.
They’re not using it to refer to men being attacked. It’s being used in the context of ‘battered women’ (a term that dropped out of use more recently).
It chills me to my core that one could construe abuse to mean only domestic violence, and then at that, only “serious” acts of violence that don’t involve slapping.
Abuse, and the corresponding violence, is not about the act. It’s about making a person live in fear, the power differential between someone who is overly aggressive and someone else who isn’t. It’s the unhealthy dynamic – unhealthy for anyone involved – that so easily becomes a cycle due to the way that children imprint behavior from parents and elders. It can just as easily be horrible abuse without so much as a bruise on the person receiving it.
You cannot separate the two parties into victims and monsters. It decreases any ability to help either side. Instead, both are people with corrupted ideas of relationships, and both need help. Very obviously, if someone’s life is in danger, then that should be addressed first. But, without teaching them the skills to avoid those types of relationships, they tend to go back to the narrative they know, just with a different party. Same for the abuser.
Does anyone here have a psychology background? I have a BA in Psychology as part of a Social Sciences degree, but nothing further. It might be interesting to see what someone who deals with this type of issue professionally has to say.
Simple truth, you put it so much more eloquently than I ever could have.
Simple Truth, what is it you’re wanting a comment on? I have a doctorate in Marriage and Family Therapy, but I’m unclear what you think needs some kind of “expert’s” input.
For anyone who’s interested, Jim–with whose comment on The Takeback I started this discussion–has responded to the conversation we had here.
ETA: Check out the feminist cookies on Act 41, and definitely click through to see the whole batch.
I wrote a longer response to some of the discussion here over at The Takeback, but I wanted to say that I really enjoyed reading what everyone had to say here. I wanted to specifically respond to two criticisms of what I said here.
I tried to address this point in my original comment when I said, “I don’t want to equate that effort with the struggle of women in abusive relationships in any way, but I think that there needs to be a way to frame and reinforce the journey from misogynist to better male.” I don’t in anyway want to reframe the situation as that of equals, although I can see why offering support to men who have been abusive could be potentially seen in this way. I don’t really know if all men in abusive relationships suffer as a consequence of being abusive, I personally think that being abusive has consequences for one’s conscience, well-being, and soul, but even if that’s the case, it in no way is comparable to what the victim goes through. I do think that a lot of men suffer in trying to overcome their abusive behavior, and that’s where I think there could be some support. In short, it’s hard to admit one has done wrong, and in other cases, we have established cultural narratives about the path to forgiveness. My thinking is that if we want people to change, we should try to make it easier for them to do so. I wrote more about what I think at The Takeback.
I also wanted to respond to something Rain wrote,
I can certainly see this as a fair point, and I probably should have left my problems with the feminist label for another post because as you say, if the conversation about cultural narratives occurs in this context then it could serve as a springboard. I want to have an honest discussion. I didn’t really have a “middle ground” in mind, but rather some sort of identification for men that would be largely consistent with feminism while perhaps allowing men and men changing to be the primary focus. I think you have a good point though, and perhaps some sort of alternate label would just serve to fracture people who agree or serve as a springboard for others.
I also think you had a good point here,
I think this is a good point, even if I don’t think I’m as dissatisfied with feminism as I may have mistakenly communicated. I think this is a danger with giving any sort of support to abusers. Should men feel good about taking the first steps in ending violent behavior? I would say yes, and I think part of feeling good is that they should have a story to tell themselves about changing themselves that normalizes that change and helps them to reject violent masculinity while still feeling like a man.
I wrote a longer response to some of the discussion here over at The Takeback, but I wanted to say that I really enjoyed reading what everyone had to say here. I wanted to specifically respond to two criticisms of what I said here.
I tried to address this point in my original comment when I said, “I don’t want to equate that effort with the struggle of women in abusive relationships in any way, but I think that there needs to be a way to frame and reinforce the journey from misogynist to better male.” I don’t in anyway want to reframe the situation as that of equals, although I can see why offering support to men who have been abusive could be potentially seen in this way. I don’t really know if all men in abusive relationships suffer as a consequence of being abusive, I personally think that being abusive has consequences for one’s conscience, well-being, and soul, but even if that’s the case, it in no way is comparable to what the victim goes through. I do think that a lot of men suffer in trying to overcome their abusive behavior, and that’s where I think there could be some support. In short, it’s hard to admit one has done wrong, and in other cases, we have established cultural narratives about the path to forgiveness. My thinking is that if we want people to change, we should try to make it easier for them to do so. I wrote more about what I think at The Takeback.
I also wanted to respond to something Rain wrote,
I can certainly see this as a fair point, and I probably should have left my problems with the feminist label for another post because as you say, if the conversation about cultural narratives occurs in this context then it could serve as a springboard. I want to have an honest discussion. I didn’t really have a “middle ground” in mind, but rather some sort of identification for men that would be largely consistent with feminism while perhaps allowing men and men changing to be the primary focus. I think you have a good point though, and perhaps some sort of alternate label would just serve to fracture people who agree or serve as a springboard for others.
I also think you had a good point here,
I think this is a good point, even if I don’t think I’m as dissatisfied with feminism as I may have mistakenly communicated. I think this is a danger with giving any sort of support to abusers. Should men feel good about taking the first steps in ending violent behavior? I would say yes, and I think part of feeling good is that they should have a story to tell themselves about changing themselves that normalizes that change and helps them to reject violent masculinity while still feeling like a man.
The comment author seems to have tried to comment (see above). I found it in the trash. I’m assuming it was trashed accidentally so I’ve restored the comment, but if someone did this deliberately, then I apologize for my misstep.
Hi, Jim. I just read your response here and the one over at The Takeback. I’m going to let it marinate a bit, but would like to say in response to this:
Yeah, that was a bit of a pile-on. And a bit unfair; I usually give more leeway with interpreting remarks, since I myself lack a writer’s apparent ease in putting down what’s in my head.
Probably just talking into the internet ether at this point, but . . .
Jim wrote:
Who does? I’m seeing a problem here. Going from the claim that it’s just the label to an admission that it’s some (still unarticulated) principle or idea held by someone who calls themselves a feminist, or maybe is recognized as a feminist.
I think it’s the discussion we’ve been having, and this was Jim’s opportunity to clarify his initial post. I don’t think that’s happened. I realize that I don’t know what the “baggage” associated with feminism even is.
Why “many” of the goals and ideas from feminism? Why doesn’t that sentence end, “that supports the goals and ideas from feminism”? It may seem like a quibble over one word, but this side discussion is all about the insistence that it’s just the feminism label, not the goals and ideas. And yet here we have, in one paragraph, two instances that say that it’s something more than the label that Jim is uncomfortable with.
So I have to say that I’m pretty much in the same place as before I read the latest comments.
There’s an assumption here, which I discussed in #38, that we first develop a narrative, and that encourages change. I suggested that it happens the other way, you get people changing, and the narrative is the result. Is there any reason to believe that creating a narrative will prompt changes, rather than, as in the housework example I gave, simply give the appearance of change?
“Why “many” of the goals and ideas from feminism? Why doesn’t that sentence end, “that supports the goals and ideas from feminism”?”
Just throwing out an alternate possibility to the one you suggest: perhaps it supports many because those are the ones that overlap with the new movement’s focus, which would be a sort of venn diagram over feminism. It’s not that it wouldn’t be in accord in a general way with the other principles, perhaps, just that they would be orthogonal to the specific new movement.
One could argue that kiriarchical entanglements make such a venn diagram impossible (where does the divide between environmentalism and feminism begin? when exactly are women unaffected by the environment? etc), but I think that the concept of movements as separable is common enough that what I’m suggesting might have been his intent.
Or not. The word baggage is still hanging in an unpleasant way.