Masculinity and Feminism (con't)

(I’m %100 confident that much of this has been said before in various ways)

Michael Kimmel is one of the writers I’ve found so far on the issue of men and masculinity. I haven’t read very much of his stuff, but it mostly seems pretty good. There is one major flaw that I noticed which might serve to clarify what I think is missing from feminist theories of masculinity.

There’s a moment where Kimmel recounts a story in which he realizes that his gender is invisible in the same way as his race. Because being a man is the norm, he looked into the mirror and saw a person rather than seeing a man in the same way that he saw a person rather than a white person. To put this in SAT terms: Man is to Woman as White is to Non-White.

It’s not surprising that this theory has gained such prominence in discussions about gender. The academic environment in which feminist theory developed had a penchant for solidarity and totalizing explanations of things. It was desirable for a theory to explain the root cause of all oppression because that helped to maintain a political coalition and fit with the general style of the time. Additionally, from the perspective of the disadvantaged group, the two types of oppression might look similar when in fact the motivation and mechanics are entirely different. I think this view of gender is badly wrong.

Motivation

The difference between racial and gender oppression is that genocide is a coherent idea and gendercide is not. The core racist goal is to eliminate a racial group from your society whether it’s through eugenics, ghettoization or genocide. The ideal world for the racist is one where a particular racial group does not exist. There are certainly other racists motivations, for instance that of the antebellum South, but at the very least the genocidal impulse is coherent and widely prevalent in all the racist societies that I can think of. This is where the true invisibility of whiteness comes from. We structure our society to one degree or another to eliminate other races. We move people physically away from core areas, socially and economically into different strata in society, or in some cases (Jews, Italians, Irish) expand the definition of whiteness to include them.

This view is not coherent when it comes to gender. The fundamental mysogenic goal is more like complete possession and control of women, rather than extermination. Nobody envisions a mysogenic utopia which contains no women; it doesn’t make sense. This is a difference in kind between the two types of oppression. One is based on pushing a group away, the other based on trying to possess and control them. This difference is important because it dramatically changes how you view the mechanism of gender.

Mechanism

Gender is bidirectionally relational, while race is not. When straight men and women are constructing themselves, they are both trying to be what they think the other gender wants. Masculinity is defined and taught in relation to femininity and femininity is defined and taught in relation to masculinity. Whiteness on the other hand, is much more a norm. Lots of things are defined and taught in relation to whiteness, but whiteness isn’t really defined in terms of nanything else, and it’s unclear whether it’s taught at all. Again, that’s true invisibility, if you’re white you can kind of ignore the whole issue of race. Masculinity isn’t like that. I think even men who really don’t think or care about gender could tell you how they learned to be a man, and how their identity as a man is important.

The other basic feature of the gender relationship is that women affect and determine the content of masculinity. I’m a straight white man taller than 6’ 2”, but I never think about what short, gay, or non-white people want me to be. Like most men, however, I’ve spent most of my life worrying about what women want me to be. In North America at least, this is the basic mechanism by which masculinity is taught. We're taught that if we speak with authority, or go to war, or earn enough money, or burn our draft card we’ll be successful in love. Even when we're learning about masculinity from other men, our fathers or friends, the reason to adopt a particular trait is often "girls will like you better." While the content of masculinity changes (think eyebrow plucking) this mechanism of gender remains the same.

This is the bidirectional relationship. Men adopt a certain role because that’s what they think women want from them, and of course women do the same thing. Where it gets tricky is that a key component of masculinity is wanting particular kinds of things from women, and a key component of femininity is wanting particular kinds of things from men. When you adopt a gender you also adopt certain sets of desires and expectations about the other gender. It’s a chicken and an egg thing, I try to become what you want, which includes wanting something from you, and you do the same. This is the reason why you can’t focus on just one side of this relationship: the process of gender itself is bidirectional and genuine change can only take place if you relate to the whole process.

Feminist theory has only really related with one direction of this process, and in so doing has reinforced the basic character of masculinity. I think at this point men generally do have an understanding that what they want from women, and how they behave towards women can hurt them. Women and feminists generally do not have this understanding. In feminist environments and in the society at large, men are taught that we are ungendered, untouched by what the world wants from us. Women don’t understand themselves as having the power to hurt men, and men don’t have the tools to object to this process.

Practically speaking

I wanted to give a few examples of how this relates to a couple of traditional feminist projects:

1) Differential salaries: at least part of the picture of the gender salary gap has to do with the fact that men feel they are failures and will be unattractive if they don’t make a lot of money. This study isn’t perfect, but it’s at least some data. Obviously if making lots of money is a foundational part of group A’s identity, but not group B’s, you’d expect group A to earn more than group B even in the absence of hard discrimination. Women do generally, prefer richer men to poorer men.

2) Date rape: Straight people generally operate with a “Tell me when to stop” method of sexual communication and if nobody happens to say “stop” this turns into date rape. Women are involved in creating and furthering this communication standard.

3) Pick up artists: I don't know if you've all seen these people but they're maybe the clearest example of this kind of gender structuring among men. From a feminist perspective, the whole thing is very problematic, but it's only a degree difference from the way that straight people relate to eachother normally. A lot of the features that these guys are trying to cultivate (control, dominance etc) are the same traits that women (feminists included) often say they want in the men in their lives. Again, men didn't just invent this system on their own.

To reiterate something I started with last week: I am not trying to particularly blame women or let men off the hook. I think gender is a relational quality, which means everyone's a part of its creation.

Go Long

Masculinity and Feminism

I keep having roughly the same conversations with various people about masculinity and feminism, and so I thought that I’d try to lay out my position clearly so that some of these conversations could build upon rather than repeat each other. This all seems obvious and trivial to me, so maybe I just haven’t been expressing things clearly to this point.

A couple of initial wards:

First, when I talk about masculinity here I’m talking about mostly about straight, white masculinity, I’m going to use those terms interchangeably for brevity and apologize for any offense this might cause (if you want you can do a find a replace of “masculinity for “straight white masculinity”. If these points apply more broadly, I’m out of my depth discussing them.

Second, while I am claiming that men are harmed by their gender, I am not saying these harms are better or worse than other harms. I’m not sure that the harms which befall various genders can be compared very well, nor am I sure that this comparison is important or useful.

Third, I’m not intending to point fingers at anyone in particular for these kinds of harm. Nor do I seek to let anyone off the hook.

Finally, I don’t have a great grasp of the literature in this area; I took maybe five feminist theory courses in undergrad, and have read the one anthology I could find by men on masculinity. It could be that this is all very well discussed by wiser folks, in which case I’d like to read them.

On to the potatoes:

Sub Heading 1: Epistemic Fairness

This is my second favourite cognitive tool. What it mans is that you should decide on what it is to know a thing before you get attached to your knowledge of that thing. So if you’re determining whether vitamin D prevents cancer, you make some judgement about what it is to know if vitamin D prevents cancer before you start the investigation. If you don’t do this then you might use the results of the investigation to justify an epistemic standpoint, which is circular. The basis for knowing something should be external to the thing that you’re trying to know.

The important implication of this is that once you’ve decided upon an epistemic threshold, the same threshold should be used for the various possibilities regardless whether you believe them or not. You should use the same knowledge threshold for “Vitamin D prevents cancer” as “Vitamin D doesn’t prevent cancer”. You shouldn’t require different levels of proof for a sentence and its negation.

This is a fantastic cognitive tool because we constantly ask for higher standards of proof for things which we don’t happen to believe. You might love health-care reform and use a set of empirical studies to support your position, but unleash a wave of criticism against the alternative study just because you don’t believe it. Very tricksy the mind.

I’m not sure if we have agreed on an epistemic threshold for an understanding of gender. But at the very least an individual’s experience of their own gender is a tremendously important part of the picture. It’s ridiculous to try to understand femininity without taking the experience of individual women seriously, and the same is true about most other groups whose gender is analyzed. You wouldn’t talk about transexuality without talking to some trans people, and you wouldn't talk about black feminism without referring to the experience of black women. Part of this is because you want the methods of criticism to not be oppressive themselves, but just as important is that you’ll tend to get the wrong answer if you don’t tie things back to experience.

I think (and this is not necessarily implied by the above) we should be epistemically fair about masculinity. If we’ve agreed that discussion about a given gender need to be rooted in the experience of that gender, then discussions of masculinity need to take seriously the experience of men. Why should feminists care about understanding masculinity?

Sub Heading 2: The Relational Quality of Gender

Gender is a relational quality, like being to the left of something, or being white or non-white. The only meaning the terms have is relative to one another, and this implies that you can’t understand one without the other. Since feminists are interested in understanding femininity, they need to understand masculinity as well, and you can't do that without taking the experience of men seriously.

On a practical level this relational character is important because almosy every woman finds herself in an important relationship with a man, be that a brother, romantic partner or father, and to some degree wants to help this other person to flourish. The same thing is true of men of course, but the relationship is often a kind of one-sided nurturing. What men want and need to flourish will affect the lives of women even in the absence of hard gender oppression. We don’t want to strip this kind of nurturing from human relationships, and so what one person genuinely wants and needs to be happy will inevitably affect all the other people around them. To change the character of a relationship of care, you need a change in consciousness on the part of both parties.

Typically when I talk about this, I’m talking to feminists, and so I seem to automatically express this project in terms that I think they care about (the oppression of women). It’s worth remembering though, that the harms done to men by their gender are very real. For example:

- Currently we subject large numbers of unwilling baby boys to unanaesthetized cosmetic surgery to make their genitals conform to religious or social norms.

- Masculinity plays a huge role in criminal activity, conviction and sentencing. Men are not, by nature, cruel and violent beings anymore than women are by nature kind and caring. The fact that men are sent to prisons to be tortured, raped and killed in huge numbers because they are men should concern people worried about gender violence.

- Men spend most of their lives being trained not to feel things. We learn not to feel things for other people, for ourselves, for our friends, partners and families.

- In general, I don’t think anyone really wants to be an oppressive force in society, which men undeniably are. Again, the fact that we are this thing is not some artefact of nature; it goes with the gender and is itself a kind of harm.

Before leveling criticism against the above list, do two things: first, remember that I am not attempting to weigh these harms against any other harm. The fact that these harms exist should be enough to make them worth considering. Second, imagine if the subject of the above harms were a woman. Would you call it harm? Would it be due to gender? How would you respond to someone saying “that’s just because they have more testosterone in their blood”?

Sub Heading 3: So what’s the problem?

The problem is that we lack the tools to understand these harms. When a man is date-raped, he thinks that arousal implies consent. When somebody tells him that to succeed in love and life he needs to more perfectly embody his gender norms, he lacks the framework to object. The chief content of masculinity is the idea that we haven’t been and can’t really be harmed. We’re kind of trapped between two areas of criticism. On the one side you have the idiocy of Maxim magazine, and on the other you have the feminist establishment. I hope that everyone reading this understands on an intuitive level why lad mags aren’t a good forum for analyzing gender, so I’ll only discuss the latter.

The basic problem with feminist theories of masculinity as I understand it is that it doesn’t take straight masculinity as a real object of study. Most of the writing on the subject is done by and for other groups. The simple test of this is epistemic fairness. Are feminists learning about masculinity in ways which they would find appropriate if they were trying to learn about some other group? If not, what’s the good reason? Why do men in feminist theory classes typically adopt a stance of antagonism or relentless apology?

It’s important that this discussion and deconstruction take place in a feminist context for two reasons. First, that’s where all the knowledge is. While the content of masculinity may be extremely different from the content of other genders, the methods by which it’s learned and enforced are quite similar. Boys learn about their gender through the same media, and often in the same manner as girls and trans people. Feminists have done a huge amount of work figuring out these processes, and it would be a shame to re-invent the wheel. Second, and more importantly, gender is relational; you can’t understand masculinity without looking at how it relates to the rest of the world. A huge part of being a straight white man in our society is oppressing everyone else and we need to look at that. We won’t, any of us, be able to figure it out alone.